It was a warm and seasonable evening, and his parents had gone out to enjoy it and each other. He didn't mind. He supposed it was sweet that some married people could still go out and do that. Either way, their abscence spared him any possible human interaction for the rest of the night, which was truly a blessing. People made him feel like he was standing at a 45 degrees to the ground while everyone else was at proper right angles. Solitude was steadying enough that he typically forgot to be lonely. Being off-kilter in company was far lonlier.
Besides, this night was so sweet and so sultry that he could leave the windows wide, playing synthesised music on his electric guitar or his keyboard about the wakng things in his head, stories and notions just as strange as the things that other people would talk about and call their crazy dreams.
He wrote music more than anything, about the adventures of the Prince of Night Places on the Plane of Unpercieved Reality. He could see it all in his mind when he was fully awake, and only then. A boy in a silk cape slipping through tiny cracks in the universe, fighting off demons and goblins and gods and looking for the Holy Grail, or maybe it was the Glowing Owl, or maybe it was nothing at all, but looking, looking, just the same, because what was the point in going if you weren't looking for something?
He liked being alone, so that he could concentrate on the places his mind took him and the music they together created, but tonight he wanted Sarah to be here.
"Why the hell hasn't she written back?" He growled in wonder and tune as he played. He thought of a princess, far away, trapped, forbidden to call out for help-- that was rediculous, she'd been heard from as recently as yesterday. He thought quite fleetingly of entering her room for comfort, but discarded it quickly. He loved her, dearly, but he hated that place. If it was disconcerting for people to look at one askance, it was pure freakish hell for Things to look at one dead on. To stare and follow one around the room with little beaded, button eyes... her room made him feel as if he might suffocate. Stuffed animals. He'd always been allergic to him, save perhaps for Lancelot, which Sarah had given him, as a baby. But that bear was so abused, the nap so threadbare, there was no dander left to make him sneeze. Becides, unlike the Things in Sarah's room, Lancelot had a complacent, comfortable expression. Those others... they seemed like he was about to do something terrible and sudden. Worse than people, they were. Their quiet menace would push him out of there rather than give him any solace, and he would be comforted just to leave.
He ceased his playing and leaned his head back over the backrest of his chair, his long, dark brown hair weighing him plesantly down. His dad didn't like his hair, but girls did. That was how people knew him, when they had cause to recall him-- Toby, the boy with the goregous long hair, almost black, so dark it was. He'd been fair, as a child, but most hair darkens as one gets older, his mother had said. Never mind that her hair was tow as anything, but he suspected she dyed it. Which was a thought. Dying probably wouldn't hurt anything. Now cutting... the very thought siezed him with terror. He fancied that if he cut his hair ever, he would disappear completely.
But his sister would be able to see him, of course. She always did, no matter what-- went out of her way, in fact, to see him when no one else did. It wasn't like her, not to have returned a letter from him. Maybe it had gotten lost in the mail. Maybe hehad only fancied he'd sent a letter at all. He thought of calling her, if he could find the number. He wished...
"Gods and Goblins," He grunted, the curse springing unbidden to his lips, "but I wish that Sarah was here. Right now."
"That's terribly funny." Said a voice directly behind him, carried in on a suden chill through the open window, "but I might have said exactly the same thing."