Summary: Every neighborhood has its legend, Boo Radley, “the town witch”; God knows what the Princeton children all think of House. Neighborhood child Tom has a growing curiosity with his street's "Mad Doctor" the topic of all rumors and tales told on Baker St. Read as Tom explores the life of Gregory House, perhaps learning something along the way.

Disclaimer: Tell me if you think this answer is gonna be any different from what you see on the millions of other fanfictions circling around the internet. Please, use your common sense people.

A.N. I think this came out a lot better than the one before. But of course that’s just me.

Neihborhood Legend
Chapter 2: The Mad Doctor

    
    The first thing Tom noticed was that he was lying down, dressed in only his boxers, on a flat, steel, table in the middle of a dimly lit room. The room is filled with vials of strange chemicals and jars with shriveled body parts and disfigured animals floating in them. He heard tapping of feet and noticed a freakishly tall man, over eight feet, who seemed to be busy with something in the far corner of the room. The man had wild, burnt hair that stuck up in all directions, and was wearing a blood splattered lab coat. The man took a bottle filled with a strange liquid and poured some of the liquid into another bottle. A light hissing could be heard. Then the man put down his experiment and faced the boy.
    “Hello Tom,” he said emotionlessly. Tom couldn’t help but stare dumbfounded at the scars that crisscrossed and overlapped each other on man’s pale, bloody complexion, or the bloodshot, pupil less, blue eyes that illuminated his face. Tom tried to get up off the table but found that he could only struggle against the restraints.
    “Who are you?” he asks shakily. He suddenly starts to hear the faint notes of piano. The man smiles an evil grin and opens a leather case.
    “Who are you?” Tom asks again. The music starts to quicken and was gradually growing louder. The man pulls out a scalpel with a flourish and begins to examine it under a small desk lamp. He takes the scalpel and places the very tip on Tom’s bare chest. The tunes of the piano intensify and are at an incredibly fast pace. It’s only then that Tom realizes that the music must be going to the beat of his heart.
    “Why, I’m the Mad Doctor”
***
    Suddenly, Tom was no longer in the strange laboratory of the Mad Doctor. Instead he found himself in a dark space, but instead of the metal table he was lying down on before; he was in a soft bed, his bed, in his room. The Mad Doctor, the laboratory, the “autopsy”, It was all a dream. Well, of course it was a dream, he thought. No need to act so stunned. And that’s when he heard it. It was the soft notes of the piano again. The same tune that was in the dream, but it was different this time. It was much softer, calmer then in the dream, like the ocean after a heavy storm. The music seemed to be coming from behind him, from another apartment. Tom looked out his window only for his eyes to gaze on the apartment 221B. It was the apartment of Old Man House, the Mad Doctor. Through the window, Tom could see the outline of a man at a piano. Jack never said that the Mad Doctor could play like that. It was beautiful, almost hypnotizing. Tom smiled, rolled back under his covers, and then fell to a calm, dreamless sleep.
                    ****
    “So you do this every day?” Tom asks, slightly amused.
    “Yeah, pretty much,” says fellow thirteen year old, Patrick. “except for the school year, he goes to work after we leave for school. But it’s neater to see him when he’s coming home from work anyway”
    “Isn’t it sort of weird?” He asks again.
    “Yeah, but sometimes it can be a little entertaining; like some days he might have blood on him, or he might bring something home with him, but normally its just to watch him. The guy’s weird, but normally we just do it to know when we can mess around by his apartment and when we have to scram.” Patrick says snickering slightly.
    “Anyway, I thought Jack would show me the guy; what’s he doing that put you in charge?” Tom interrogates.
    “Oh please, Jack has seen the Mad Doctor hundreds of times; he thinks that he has much better things to do than to wake up this early and point him out to us. For the record, he normally eats his breakfast around 1:45.” He says while rolling his eyes. “Besides, you need to make some friends your own age.”
    The two teenagers walk over to an old pickup with a FOR SAIL sign stuck to the windshield. Tom noticed that the truck was parked adjacent to the Mad Doctor’s apartment. Perfect for spying. Patrick steps onto the bumper of the truck and then climbs into the back. Tom soon follows. As he climbs into the back of the truck he notices two other kids in the truck who seemed to be looking fixedly at 221B.
    “Hey Aishan, hey Courtney” Patrick says to an Indian looking boy with curly hair and tall, blond girl with her hair put in a ponytail.
    “Heya” says the girl. She looks over at Tom. “Heard you talking to Jack yesterday, Tim right?”
    “Tom actually,” he corrects.
    “Close enough,” she says with a smirk, “so…you’re getting your first look at Old Man House huh? Well, I aught to brace yourself if I were you; he can be quite a shocker.”
Aishan rolls his eyes.
    “He’s not that bad, it’s not like he’s covered in scars and has blood pouring out of his ears, Courtney.” She just shrugs. Patrick decides to interrupt the small quarrel.
    “Guys, guys, look he’s coming out!” The group ducks underneath the edge of the pickup truck, but not so much that they couldn’t see what was happening on the other side of the street.
    At 221B, the door opens smoothly and outcomes a fairly tall man, not the eight foot character that was in Tom’s dream but instead a man looking about 6’3”, 6’4” perhaps. It was hard to tell seeing as he was hunched over an elegant wooden cane. The man also had graying hair that looked quite unkempt, more like a bed-head rather than the “oops-those-two-chemicals-shouldn’t-have-gone-together” hairdo that was in Tom’s imagination. But like in the dream, the one thing that seemed to stick out were the man’s eyes. They were sky blue and gave you the feeling that they could see right through you. Other than that the man had an unpleasantly gaunt face with wrinkles on his for head, and a depressing frown. Tom didn’t know if it qualified much as the face of a killer compared to the face of an extremely unpleasant person, but he thought again that it could be both. The man limped down the steps and hopped onto a damaged orange motorcycle, and sped off noisily. The show was over, and will be back on some time this afternoon.
    “So then Tom,” Patrick asks, “What do you think?”
    “He’s certainly interesting,” he says watching the motorcycle speed along the road.