This first part is weird. Pretty much unbelievable, I know.

It was just as well that he was born without eyes. Whatever birth defect had accosted him in the womb had granted him a hideous appearance to begin with: patchy translucent skin stretched over tiny spidery limbs, a wrinkled hole where the nose had never formed and a sunken, skull-like appearance to his face. It was perhaps a blessing that the deep sockets were only raw holes that could not perceive the horror with which he was regarded.

His mother descended into such despair after his birth that she was committed, along with her child as no other soul would take it. She became mute, then catatonic. When she finally wasted away, the child was left in the care of the asylum as an afterthought. The staff was so used to taking care of infantile degenerates that one more small citizen was hardly a burden. He became almost like a hideous pet.

Left to his own devices, Erik (as he'd been dubbed for lack of anything better) grew through childhood in a state of near solitude. The staff only bothered about him when needed, taking no special pains beyond his most basic needs. It seemed he would be mute as his mother had become, but no one spoke much to him or in his presence, so none could really say.

Erik literally dragged himself up into adolescence, learning to walk through a slow process of exploring the small room that was his world. He turned next to the laborious exploration of the space outside his door, slowly learning his surroundings by touching every surface. It took years to get down the hallway. No one bothered about him, he had nothing but time.

His slow, wary destination was the parlor at the end of the hall from which issued, periodically, a strange jangly banging that was not furniture smashing into the floor or wall. In this way, Erik discovered the piano whose keys were often assaulted by the deranged patients. It was horribly out of tune and Erik added more abuse to the strings as he thumped the keys in bunches himself.

Then, a piano tuner turned mad-man actually undid the discord of the notes before he was lobotomized and became a vegetable. The next time someone hit the keys, there was a an almost melodic crescendo that brought Erik to instant attention. Having no sight, no smell (there-for, no taste) his hearing had become nearly preternatural and it drove him to inspect the piano again. Each key, each tone brought him something new. With a swiftness that belied the years it had taken him to travel the length of the hallway, he started putting the notes together . The other residents of the ward began to complain, at the same time, of a humming in the night that perfectly matched each sound the piano produced.

And so it went. Erik became a virtuoso and no-one cared. Within the asylum, there were dozens of savants whose talents were useless to the outside world.

After he had grown for ten years in that place, where the horror of his countenance had become commonplace, someone found a use for him. A drunkard who came through the institution as a means of procuring a warm bed for the winter (conniving enough to avoid lobotomy and other treatments) devised a business plan with the boy as the main ingredient.

When spring stole away winter's sting, the man quite easily usurped with Erik and, for the next decade, made him into a livelihood. His scheme involved letting a crowd be drawn to the excellent music, then reveal to them the monstrosity that produced such a siren sound. It all went very well until Erik seemed to realize the atrociousness of such an existence and could not be starved nor beaten into further subjugation. After a week of stolidity, what was thought to be his lifeless body was dumped in the night near a graveyard where several corpses awaited burial.

The resurrectionists were at work in the neighborhood and added his prone form to their store, selling the lot to medics who were interested in such spoils. It only took one incision for Erik's vitality to be detected as it elicited a piercing scream from what anyone looking would have thought to be a cadaver in the ready stages of decay. The medic in question had been brought up in Persia and seen the horrors of the Shah's entertainments. Such a past spoke volumes when he did not instantly give way to insanity inducing horror at the occurrence.

Instead, not knowing what else to do with such a specimen, he bundled Erik out of the venue and to his own lodging. His landlady, made of stalwart stuff after a lifetime of common drudgery, accepted the appearance of the Persian's charge with only raised eyebrows. She suggested the patient be housed either in the basement where the boiler kept the dark closeness warm, or up on the third floor where the apartment had a wide window almost always full of too-warm sun.