Upon receiving his gift, Toby looked as if he'd almost forgotten that he was supposed to die by midnight, and could've died right then and there. As soon as he could, he bolted upstairs with it and his game. His parents breathed a sigh of relief at his actions, mostly because they seemed so normal, but Sarah had caught the surreptitious look Toby had flashed her, almost pleading, before he'd headed upstairs. He wanted to talk to her, and she didn't know that she could tell him no.

Instead, she chatted with their parents for a few minutes before broaching the topic of going upstairs. "I think I might can get something out of him, if he's a little distracted by his game," she told him nonchalantly. "But you can't go up, because he may clam up as soon as he realizes I'm there working for you, all right? I can get more out of him if he thinks he has my confidence than if he thinks he doesn't."

They agreed, and Sarah mounted the stairs to Toby's room. She knocked before poking her head in and entering, finding him twitching and fussing nervously as he watched the opening movie of the game. He ignored it completely when she closed the door behind her. She looked around at his room briefly as she came inside and then took a seat on his bed, noting his desk with its dragon's head pencil holder, the posters of various beautiful women and cars on his walls interspersed with a strangely old-fashioned wooden clock with Roman numerals, and even a bookshelf full of fantasy and horror novels that he enjoyed reading. A Rubix cube sat near his computer on its own desk, and upon his television, now atop the Playstation that sat there, was a metallic perpetual motion object that had balls to click, and a simple Mobius Strip made of ceramic.

"Sarah," Toby began without preamble, pitching his voice low so that it couldn't be heard outside the door, "you have to help me. I'm not crazy like Mom and Dad think, I swear!"

Sarah very nearly agreed with him, but clenched her teeth against blurting it out and took a deep breath. "Tell me what's wrong, and I'll see what I can do," she said instead, wondering when she got around to growing up enough to sound so adult and calm.

He looked at her dubiously, but obviously caught the flash of agreement from her beforehand. He nodded once and then set into his story. "Look, they don't believe me, but ever since you started telling me the stories in Labyrinth, I felt like I'd gone home. I missed it, like… like this was some weird foster home or something. I knew it wasn't, though. Mom and Dad have pictures of me in the hospital and all that. I just figured it was, you know, me being wishful and wanting to live in a fantasy world away from this one."

"I can understand that," Sarah replied wryly. "Where do you think I escaped to when Dad remarried and had you?"

"Yeah, they've told me about that and how you grew out of it too much to count," Toby said, rolling his eyes. She was struck at how much of her own action it was. "Anyway, I started feeling… weird… about five years ago. I was almost ten. It started around my birthday, no less. I told Mom and Dad about it, and they thought I was coming down with something. It faded, so I didn't think anything of it, though. I had some really funky dreams after that, though, and they reminded me of your stories. It had been a while since I'd heard them, though, so it didn't immediately strike me, you know? Took me a bit. But then when I realized it, it was like the book kept cropping up after I'd have those dreams, begging me to read it."

"Books don't crop up like that, you know," Sarah murmured, but her heart wasn't in it. The sound was so obvious that Toby actually gave her a sharp look, suspicion in his mismatched eyes, and didn't answer right away.

"Right," he finally agreed. "But I'd set it on the shelf, and it'd stay there for months, and then I'd have a nightmare about that world, and it would be on my desk, if I'd fallen asleep there studying, or downstairs on the coffee table if I'd been watching television, or even on my nightstand. At first I just set it aside, but when I finally realized that it wanted me to read it, I started to do so. Not every time, but as the dreams came with more frequency over the years, I did. Reading it seemed to somehow help keep them away from me."

"And to a little kid, that means everything," Sarah said, garnering a venomous look from Toby as a result. She lifted her hands, brows raised, but smiled at him all the same. "Hey, I don't make the rules for pre-adolescent kids. I crawled into bed with my father until the age of twelve when I was terrified of the dark and what monsters I thought were around me. I had a vivid imagination. You sure it doesn't run in the family, Toby?"

He rolled his eyes again. "I wish," he growled. "With the dreams came that… sick feeling. Like something wasn't quite right. The more the dreams came, the worse the feeling got, until this year, when they've come at least once a week, and that book fights them off. This week was the worst, though, because they've come every night, like I can't get away from them no matter how many times I wake up and go back to sleep. But the book's been gone."

"Where'd you leave it, then?" Sarah asked, a frown on her face. "Read it if it makes you feel better." She believed him, but she recognized how easily what he was saying could be waved away as fancy and of his own doing. She wanted to be completely sure, on her conscious level, so that she could do something about it. She had no real idea about what to tell her parents in the meantime, though.

Toby gestured frantically, and the terror returned to him. "I've tried! It was on my shelf the last time I had it, but it's not there! I haven't moved it since the last time I used it with my nightmares, last week. It was like I woke up on Monday of this week and someone had stolen it!"

She sighed a little. "Well, why does it matter if you read it on your birthday, then? Maybe it decided that you didn't need it anymore. Did you ever think of that? Or maybe your parents thought that you shouldn't have it anymore, given it was turning you into a nervous wreck."

He shook his head firmly. "They tried," he says softly. "They threw it out a year ago, and thought I'd brought it back into the house when I hadn't even known they'd thrown it out to begin with. So they tried to shred it, and… and there it was again." He dropped his voice once more, this time in a very childlike fear. "Sarah, I saw them destroy it, got upset, and went to bed. When I woke up in the middle of the night from that nightmare, I saw it sitting right next to me on the nightstand. Mom and Dad thought that I'd gone out and bought another copy!"

Sarah chilled and wasn't sure why. "Toby, I bought that at a little bookstore that closed before you were born," she said after a moment, wondering if his intent scrutiny of her was because of her slowly crumbling hope that the Underground wasn't involved or if he were waiting for her to tell him she didn't believe him after all. "You couldn't have gotten another copy," she continued without stopping herself, "because I haven't ever found another copy no matter where I've looked."

He brightened triumphantly. "Then you DO believe me now!" he crowed softly, turning around to face her and sitting crossed-legged. "What's going on, do you think? Am I really going crazy and taking my parents with me?" He frowned, anxious again, but this time for the well-being of their family.

Sarah shook her head a little. "Toby, why do you think something bad will happen if you don't read the story before your birthday?" she tried again, not giving him anything else to go on for the moment.

He deflated a little at the slight deflection, but looked stubbornly determined nonetheless. "Look," he tried to explain impatiently, "this… feeling… grows in me with my birthdays, these last few years. It's like I'm about to burst from the inside, or that I'm fading from the inside out. It's at its worst when it's my birthday, though I can feel it all year. I ignored it the first time, and got sick, really sick, so that I had to stay home from school. I read the book, because I was tired of being bored in bed, and I was well the next day. Mom and Dad thought I'd been faking it the whole while, but I can't fake what I was feeling. It was like I was being sucked dry. I felt better after reading, though, and every year that feeling has gotten worse. It's like… I don't know. Like the book somehow replenishes me, crazy as it sounds. Like so long as I read it, I can get into that world and touch it somehow, and everything's all right." He paused a moment. "Except…"

"Except the last couple of years," Sarah said very softly, leveling an inscrutable look at him, "reading it hasn't left you feeling as right as before, as if whatever protection the book was giving you is failing."

Toby stared at her for a long moment, half stunned at her words and half bewildered that she had found a definition for what he was feeling when he couldn't. "Yeah," he said at last, nodding once. "And now, the book's gone completely, and I have four and a half hours to find that story before I get sucked dry or get sick beyond belief. Mom and Dad won't think I'm faking them, if I wither away in front of them, will they?"

"No," she agreed solemnly. "They won't think that. They'll probably think you're doing it to yourself, though. They don't think anything's wrong with you other than you're spazzing out, Toby, you have to understand. They've never read the book."

"It's real, though!" he exclaimed desperately, his fear burning in his eyes. "I know it is! I've seen that owl at my window!"

She gritted her teeth against the need to look towards the window at his words, knowing that she'd actually be hopeful that she saw it out there. She then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "What was your nightmare?" she asked at last.

"I'm in the other world," he began instantly, his tone that of someone who's relieved to be able to talk about something that bothers him, and yet also echoing of the tedium of having had to repeat a version of his dream to someone several times before. This time, though, the person may actually believe him, and that hope couldn't be quenched. "But… it's weird. Not like what the book says at all… like it's faded. And everywhere I look, things are dying. Even the labyrinth is dying, Sarah! And… it's like I can feel it in my soul, in me, that I'm dying too, but that I can stop it if I can figure out the way. And there's always the owl in my dreams, watching me, and a voice that comes from it even though it never actually speaks. And it tells me things…." He hesitated. "Like how to play games with people, and I've tried them at school, so I know they work!"

"I've heard," Sarah retorted dryly, quite prim.

Toby barreled on without hearing her. "But the owl keeps saying that I have its eyes, and its kingdom, and I'm letting both of them die, and that I'll die as well. The book is there, but whenever I reach for it, it vanishes, and the world… the Underground… it keeps getting fainter and fainter. Like… all the colors are leeching out of it and running away, and all the goblins in it are fleeing or dying, shriveling up and terrified."

He grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly, looking up at her even as she felt the off-center part of her squeeze her heart and soul at his words. He wasn't dreaming, and she couldn't deny it anymore. But she wanted to deny that he was being affected, and that he might even die. It wasn't what she wanted to think about with her brother. "Please, sis, you have to help me," he told her. "You have to make our parents understand that it's real, or they'll commit me before I even get a chance to go to college! I'm not crazy!"

"Toby, they won't believe it even if you dragged the owl in here, or goblins, and made them all dance in front of them. Even if I told them that it's real--" she tried to explain to him, but a knock came on the door. She glanced towards it, feeling Toby release her hands and turn back to his Playstation, and he said aloud as he began to play it, "Come in!"

Sarah went with the ruse easily. It was yet another game to play, but this one was far more important than the one her father and step-mother wanted her to play. Toby had convinced her that he was, indeed, in trouble. The problem was that she only had a few hours to figure out how to help him before, she feared, the worst would happen.

(To Chapter Four)