Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick

there, I’m going to take them all away from you.”
    “No!” said the high-pitched voice. “Tuck …”
    Then he heard the slap of her bare feet upon the floor, and the lid of the toy box creaked. It was too late to cry out, and knowing what was coming next, he gritted his teeth as she let it fall shut with a crash that bounced from all the walls of his sparse cell and converged upon his head.
    The fact that she doesn’t know any better doesn’t alter the difficulty, he decided. Three weeks before, he had brought Alice home to the digs—an idiot girl whom the inhabitants of Stuttgart had expelled from their midst. Whether out of sympathy for her condition or the desire for companionship, he could not say. Probably something of both had entered into his choice. He could see now why they had done what they had done. She was impossible—maddening—to live with. As soon as he felt better, he would return her to the place where he had found her, crying beside the river with her dress caught in a thorn bush.
    “Sorry,” he heard her say. “Sorry, Daddy.”
    “I’m not your daddy,” he said. “Eat some chocolate and go to sleep—please….”
    He felt like a glass of ice water. Crazy thought! The perspiration appeared like condensation now, while inside he was cold, cold, cold! He crossed his arms and began shaking. Finally, his fingers picked at the blanket, caught it, drew it over him.
    He heard Alice singing to herself across the room, and for some reason this soothed him slightly.
    Then, and the horrible part was that he knew he was not yet fully delirious, he was back in his office and his secretary had just rushed in with a sheaf of papers like a flower in her pinknailed hand and she was talking and talking and talking, excitedly, and he was answering and nodding, shaking his head and gesturing, pushing Hold buttons on his telephones, stroking his nose, tugging his earlobe, and talking and not hearing or understanding a word that either of them was saying, not even hearing the ringing of the telephones, under whose buttons the little lights kept winking on and off, and there was a sense of urgencyand a strange feeling of separation, removal, futility, while Dolly Reiber—that was her name—talked until suddenly he noted, quite academically, that she had the head of a dog and was beginning to howl (this he was able to hear, though faintly), and he smiled and reached out to stroke her muzzle and she became Alice-at-his-bedside.
    “I told you to go to sleep!” he said.
    “Sorry, Daddy,” she told him.
    “It’s all right! Go to sleep, like I told you.”
    The figure withdrew, and he found the strength to unsnap his ammo belts and tear off his clothing, for he no longer felt like a glass of ice water, and he pushed these items over the edge of the bed.
    He lay there panting, and his head throbbed with each beat of his heart.
    The rats! The rats … They were all around him, moving closer…. He reached for the napalm. But,
Deliver us, deliver us from Your Wrath
, said the rats, and he chuckled and ate their offerings. “For a time,” he told them, and then the sky burst and there were slow-swimming, shapeless forms all about him, mainly red, though some were colorless, and he existed indifferently as they flowed by him, and then—or before or after, he could not be certain, and he knew that it did not matter—he heard and felt, rather than saw, a light within his head, pulsing, and it was a pleasant thing and he let it soak deep into him for a time, for a time that could have been hours or seconds (it did not matter), and while he felt, suddenly, that his lips had been moving, he had heard no words, there where he was, until a voice said, “What’s a D-III, Daddy?”
    “Sleep, damn you! Sleep!” his mouth finally communicated to his ear, and there came the sound of fleeing footsteps. Rats … Deliver us … D-III … Light … Light. Light!
    He was glowing like a neon tube, pulsing like one, too.