Scribal Terror: Jake meets Toby

This is the first of Jake's Toby series -- from ST 2005. I've been promising to rerun these so everyone knows about Toby [and, eventually, Tina].

Toby and the Death Ray Eyes
by Jake Holmes

You're not going to believe what I woke up to this morning.

Last night I took my handful of pills and went to bed at 9 just as I always do. At 10 I still wasn't feeling sleepy at all so I decided I needed a little more help and I got up and fixed myself a nice fat meatloaf sandwich with swiss and extra mayo on sourdough and a 32 oz Miller Ice. On top of that I dropped a couple more Xanax and a Temazopam just for good measure and went and crawled back in bed.

Well, I guess that did the trick because I don't remember falling asleep. Just a long, weird dream about walking by the Sound and seeing this really bright light in the sky that I took to be military plane or a meteor or something, getting closer, and closer, and..... then I woke up.

What woke me up was alarm going off like a big red flashing warning light in my head.. wahhhh wahhhh wahhhh wahhhh. I rolled out of bed and holding my eyelids open with my fingertips, squirmed on my belly down the hallway toward the smoke detector to find out what was going on. When I got there, there was no fire.. There wasn't even any smoke and siren wasn't coming from the smoke detector, so cupping my hands behind my ears so I could hear directionally like a rabbit I started a systematic search of the house, and this is what I found.

In my living room my boots lay next to the door covered in still damp mud as if I'd gone out and a smell I can only describe as 'poopie' hung heavy in the air. Lying on the couch making the Godawful screeching alarm sound was what I at first took to be my leftover meatloaf all wrapped in tinfoil.. until it moved that is.. It didn't strike me at all unusual that a meatloaf would sound like an alarm but I knew for damn sure that meatloafs for the most part don't move very much on their own. So, using my fireplace tongs to spread the tinfoil , in case it was an opossum or a snake or a Paris Hilton Hydrocephalic Chihuahua or something in there, I peeked inside the bundle from a safe distance. No sooner did I spot a small rubbery looking patch of . . . something. . . than the siren stopped and instead I heard the spinechilling sound of... "Da-da"...

Slowly I spread open the remaining tinfoil, which wasn't actually tinfoil at all but rather a metallic foil with odd glyphs all over it that promptly laid itself out flat without a crease then folded itself in half 7 times and disappeared. Inside was this baby....boy... I'm calling him a boy though he doesn't appear to have either male or female "parts," but he looks like a boy so I'm calling him a boy. I've named him Toby after Toby Tyler the little boy that ran away to join the circus. God must have heard me wishing for another child (though in truth I was kinda looking forward to his coming complete with a mother and some fun in the baby making process.. but God works in mysterious ways.) I'm going to raise him as my own and I've dressed him in an old doll dress my daughter left here years ago.. (its the best I have for the moment..its either that or a dishtowel toga).

So anyway, I'll let you know more about how things are going with Toby soon. I've just noticed that he appears to be able to shoot deathrays out of his eyes (judging by my now smoking and very dead cat, Mr Tibbs.) and he's saying "Bah-Bah".. so I guess I better hop to it and get him something to eat.