Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (14 page)

Roger stalled for time and tried to change the subject. He tried to get me drunk, but I refused his repeated offers of beer and whiskey. As tempting as getting fall-down drunk in a stranger’s house might seem, I was committed to erring on the side of caution. I wanted to be able to exit at a moment’s notice.

Roger’s next tactic was to perform poorly executed stunts. I think he hoped I would be so impressed by one I would declare it to be his power and the demonstration would be considered a success. He prefaced each stunt with, “Watch this.” He never implied they were related in any way to his elven heritage.

His first stunt involved covertly adjusting the gas feed on a disposable lighter to make it shoot long tongues of hissing fire. It ended poorly when the flame refused to extinguish and spread down the length of the lighter. Roger yelped and dropped it on the floor and stomped on it, luckily extinguishing the flame. He was relieved that the carpet was undamaged.

“Too much gas,” he explained. “But watch this.”

His next stunt was a variation on the old “magnetic pen” magic trick using his empty beer bottle. In this trick you hold a pencil in one hand and then grab your wrist with your other hand. You let go of the pencil, yet it stays magically attached to your hand thanks to an extended index finger. When you let go of your wrist the pencil drops.

The beer bottle turned out to be a poor substitute for the pen. Part of the way through his first attempt, he dropped the bottle loudly on the tabletop, summoning his mom from the back.

She stomped around and flared her nostrils, detecting the lingering singed-plastic aroma from the lighter accident.

“You two burning stuff?” she asked suspiciously. “You better not be smoking weed in my house.”

She returned to the back with a bottle of Yoo-hoo from the refrigerator.

“Look,” I said, “I need to get going. If you’ve got some proof you need to show it to me.”

“Okay, okay,” Roger said. “You don’t have to be a dick about it. Come on.”

He was irritated. I was irritated. To him I was pressuring him needlessly to perform a magical act like some sort of trained monkey. The magical sort of trained monkey. To me, Roger was just killing time and hoping I would go away, but he couldn’t acknowledge defeat.

He stomped out of the house onto the Astroturfed porch. Large gnats were swarming by the thousands, concentrating in buzzing clouds around the outdoor lights of the house and the trailers. They didn’t seem to bite, but they landed on our faces and flew into our mouths, so we quickly stepped into the darkness where the cars were parked.

“I can see in the dark,” he said. “Infravision.”

I was familiar with the term from Dungeons & Dragons. It was similar to infrared sight in D&D, but for Roger it meant something a bit different.

“I can sense the energy of things. The radiations of them.”

Night vision was a pretty good power, even if he played with the definitions. It was something I could test.

“Here, write something on this,” Roger said as he handed me a warm square of paper from his pocket.

He also handed over a pen, making me wonder why he used the beer bottle in his earlier magnetic pen trick. I kept the paper hidden from his view and wrote
“I love Danzig”
on it.

“Now walk over there.” He directed me down the trailer park’s asphalt road. “Far enough so I can’t see you.”

That seemed to make the experiment impossible, but he quickly added, “I have to concentrate and focus to use my infravision.”

I nodded and backpedaled down the road. An elderly man on his trailer’s latticed porch stared at me from the comfort of a ragged recliner.

“Are you boys playing football?” he asked in a quivering, singsongy voice.

“No, we’re doing an experiment,” I replied.

“That’s good!” Roger called.

“What?” The elderly man leaned forward on his chair.

“It’s an experiment,” I repeated.

“Hold it up better!” Roger shouted.

“You should play football,” the old man declared, and settled back into his chair.

I held up the piece of paper. Roger squinted his eyes as if he was staring into bright sunlight. He lifted his fingers to his temples and made a grunting sound.

“IIII…LLLLLOOOOOVVVVVE…,” he elongated each word, “DDDDDAAAAAANNNNN…DANZIG! I love Danzig!”

His celebration was short-lived. I was standing almost directly next to the old man’s porch light.

“There’s too much light around here,” I said.

“He can read!” the old man interjected. “God almighty, what a day! The boy can read!”

“Fine,” Roger sulked. “We can go out in the field.”

As luck would have it, the trailer park bordered an undeveloped field of tall grass and a few scraggly trees. Roger’s house actually spilled over into the grassy lot and there was a roughly mowed semicircle that I presumed was his backyard. We waded into the knee-high grass and repeated the experiment, but things weren’t working out so well. Roger was unable to discern
“fuck ducks”
on the sheet of paper I was holding up.

“There’s too much ambient energy,” Roger explained. “It’s overpowering the fine details.”

I didn’t understand.

“Like, the grass is glowing, and so are you and that sheet of paper. But the glow is so bright I can’t see the writing on the paper. It’s like a shadow.”

I tried to picture the world as Roger was seeing it, but the best my mind would conjure was the green code seen by Neo in the Matrix. I suppose it was similar to that, only a little more flamboyant.

“It’s the details I have trouble with,” Roger asserted. “I can navigate just fine.”

Minutes later, I stood in the waist-high grass, my legs already stinging from the scratchy fronds and biting insects. I watched from my vantage point about fifty feet into the field as Roger drove his rusty Cavalier into the tall grass. He drove up next to me and rolled his window down. Bugs leaped from the grass and swarmed his headlights.

“We’re gonna go through the trees once and come back,” Roger explained.

“How fast are you going to go?” I asked, wary of riding with him in pitch black.

“Fast enough, but if we hit something it won’t kill us,” Roger smiled. “But we ain’t going to hit nothing.”

It was a bad time for double negatives. I should have known that, but I foolishly agreed to this new version of the infravision experiment.

I climbed into the passenger seat, my feet disappearing into the pool of fast food wrappers in the foot well. There was something wet against my ankle. I think it was a slug. The other possibility was a loose human eyeball.

“Ready?” Roger asked.

“Ready,” I lied.

It was wide open for as far as the headlights could reach. With a click, Roger shut them off and we were plunged into the velvet black. The night was impenetrable to human eyes, but clear as daylight to those of the drow, duergar, dwarves, gnomes, and Rogers.

The engine rumbled and the car’s tires shredded the prickly grass and spun for purchase in the pulpy remains. The car lurched forward and then we were moving at great speed into the unseen black. Roger held the fingers of one hand to his temple to focus his infravision. Even if he could not see, we had at least a few hundred feet to cover before we would risk hitting a tree.

Bang!

The car stopped in an instant and as it did I could hear the distinct screech of metal bending with terrific violence. The sudden din of impact echoed in our ears. The engine died. The only sound was the distant buzz of insects and something dripping from under the hood of the car.

Roger appeared to be dazed, but unharmed.

For a moment I thought I had lost the use of my right arm, but I gradually realized I was holding the door so firmly that I had locked up my elbow. I let go and shook my hand free. My neck hurt where the seat belt had cinched tight.

“What happened?” I asked.

Roger heaved himself out of the driver’s side without answering and looked at the crumpled hood of his car. I joined him. The bugs had fallen silent around us as though they were as startled as we were by the crash. To my surprise it appeared Roger had hit nothing. The front end just seemed to be bent and crumpled. Steam wafted from beneath the hood.

“Fuck,” Roger said quietly.

He was standing at his crumpled car’s front bumper and looking down at something.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he repeated.

I climbed out of the car and joined him to inspect the damage. I was expecting to find that we had run down a kobold or goblin. Instead, it was a gray gas meter or pump of some sort, about the size of a dog. It had a solid-metal body like a flattened grape and it was topped with a gauge and pipe arrangement.

Thankfully, there was neither the sound of escaping gas nor the aroma of a gas leak. The stout plug was fused to the ground and apparently undamaged by the impact.

A door banged open at the rear of Roger’s house.

“What the fucking Christ is going on out there?” Roger’s mom screamed.

He looked up and I could see his pale face growing whiter. The horror set in for Roger as his flashlight-wielding mother began to cross the backyard. She was coming straight for us and with each step she unleashed another string of weapons-grade obscenities.

Gimli only nodded. For four months now, they had been trying to have a child, without success. They had tried everything anyone suggested: positions, tests, examinations, and most recently, herbal teas. But for some reason, no matter how hard they tried, Legolas had yet to conceive.

 

—From
Fertility
by Cheysuli

 

I
t took five weeks of following leads and rumors and an undercover stint as an author of
Kim Possible
stories to get me close to Janus. He was the mysterious mastermind behind some of the world’s most popular erotic fan fiction.

As I drove to meet him I actually felt nervous. He was one of the kings of the Internet and there I was only minutes away from our arranged meeting at a Home Depot.

Denizens of the Internet called the postmodern mash-up of pop culture and uncensored sexuality “fanfic” for short. The writers were peddling fantasies to an insatiable audience, wantonly infringing on copyrights and damaging trademarks.

Janus was at the top of the game. His stories were highly anticipated must-reads, spanning genres and incorporating some of the most popular characters. Those characters often included Janus himself.

Janus didn’t limit himself to the characters of a given movie, TV show, book, comic, or video game. He wasn’t limited to “slash” and wasn’t just crossing over characters from one movie to another. He practiced literary self-insertion. Proudly.

“After all,” one of his followers argued, “Dante traveled to his own Inferno. Chaucer wrote himself into
The Canterbury Tales.
Why shouldn’t the author include himself as the protagonist when exploring his sexuality within the framework of a
Teen Titans
episode?”

“He’s the best,” that same Janus follower e-mailed me. “You’ve got to talk to Janus for your book.”

I familiarized myself with some of his masterworks. My introduction, on the advice of that fan, was
Henrietta Potter,
a reimagining of Harry Potter in which Harry drinks a potion that turns him into a girl and he must be saved by Janus.

“Why are my tits hurting?” Harry wondered as his tits grew.

Harry looked in the mirror at his growing tits. And then he felt a pop and his dick flipped inside out and started to grow a clit out of a ball. He was so sensitive.

“It hurts!” Harry cried and stumbled back.

Janus leapt forward over a desk as Malfoy laughed and ran out of the room and he caught Harry Potter as he…or was it SHE?!…was falling.

“Janus?” Harry yelled, his voice changing and his face getting girlier. “I am…a girl.”

“It’s okay,” Janus replied “Your safe now.”

Janus’s hand touched Harry’s boob on the side as he set him (HER!?) down on the floor and Janus could see Harry’s nipples getting hard.

“You’re a girl!” Janus said. “Completely.”

“Yes I have a pussy now” harry agreed.

 

Janus captured the pathos as well as the eros of that Kafkaesque metamorphosis. His 35,000-word
Henrietta Potter
catapulted sex-changing Harry Potter to another literary level, easily eclipsing the dozens of pedestrian
Harriet Potter
imitators.

Janus was also responsible for the seminal James Bond self-insertion epic. It was entitled
Married Christmas,
a Christmas-themed James Bond epic spanning eleven chapters that featured Janus taking over as 007 and screwing his way through most of the Bond girls.

James Bond’s death in the first twenty pages was one of the most riveting scenes in fanfic history, but Janus took it to another level with his self-insertion.

“007 is dead!” Shouted Miss Moneypenny as she stood up from the lifesign meter.

“Oh no!” Said M. “Tell Q to activate 001.”

“001?” Miss Moneypenny said with fear. “Are you certain?”

“Yes.” M said and pressed the button to activate the activation sequence.

Slowly Janus Bond, the clone of all the James Bonds DNA and sexual power, began to thaw in the cloning vat. He was more handsome than any other James Bonds by a factor of five and no woman could resist his hypnotic commands.

“Miss Moneypenny.” Janus said looking at the hot blond and her big boobs. “Take off your clothes.”

Miss Moneypenny did and looked down at Janus’s weiner which was 14 inches long.

“Its too big she said,” she said.

“Shaken not stirred,” Janus replied with a smile as he thrust into her howling hooch with a primal force.

“AAAAH!” Monepenny yelled as Janus Bond put his 14-inch dick into her and her boobs vibrated with an orgasm.

 

In the novella-length work the fictional Janus eventually tires of his bachelor lifestyle and marries Christmas Jones, as played by Denise Richards in
The World Is Not Enough.
The wedding takes place on Christmas Eve.

Those two highly regarded pieces were only a tiny fraction of Janus’s body of work. In the realm of fanfic, he represented quality over quantity, but as an outsider the volume of work he had produced was staggering. His portfolio included nearly fifty short stories, seventeen novella-length works or multipart serial stories, and three full-length novels. And those were just the works published on the Internet.

One of my best sources on the subject was a woman named Pivo. She was eager to talk, especially on the phone, and her long career as an author of He-Man and She-Ra homosexual erotica had brought her into contact with Janus.

Pivo was a self-described “huge fan” of Janus. She joked that she used the term literally; a glandular disorder contributed to morbid obesity. She was nearly bedridden and she acted out her fantasies by describing Man-At-Arms tickling He-Man’s “purplish boi nipples” with his mustache.

Pivo believed the rumors about a secret “hard copy” cache of Janus’s writing dating back several years. Some thought this lost folio numbered in the thousands of pages and included rare or forgotten TV shows and movies.

“I’m talking VR 5/Alf crossover slash,” said Pivo. “Supposedly he’s got one where he inherits Airwolf and somehow uses it to blackmail the Nanny into a hardcore bondage session. This is dark stuff from his formative years.”

I was interested in the archival Janus, but I was more interested in Pivo’s claims that she met Janus once.

“He’s not who you think.” She laughed. “Pretty much the opposite of that. You’re going to be really surprised. But yeah, I met him at a regional role-playing con several years ago. When I could still make it to them.”

She sniffled before continuing.

“I can give you his info. At least his personal e-mail. One he’ll answer.”

Janus did not reply to my first three requests for contact, but something in my fourth must have thawed his icy heart. I received a cryptic e-mail with the subject line, “okay.” The body of the message mysteriously read, “godofgates.”

All of my years on the Internet and it still took a night’s sleep before I had my “eureka!” moment and realized what the message meant. I fired up every possible instant messaging client and plugged “godofgates” into as many of them as possible. After several tries, it worked, and I was chatting live with Janus.

“Why do you write?” I asked.

“To tell my story,” Janus replied.

“Can we meet?” I asked.

“No,” Janus replied, and logged off.

This sort of feeble interview process continued for several days. Each time I was able to get off one or two questions, but whenever I veered toward any sort of real life contact Janus logged off.

“Which of the characters you write about do you identify with the most?” I asked on the sixth day.

“All right,” Janus replied.

“All right?”

“I’ll meet,” Janus announced.

He gave me the address of a Home Depot in Columbia, Missouri.

“Not far from my house,” Janus messaged. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot. Park as close to the front of the store as you can and stand outside your car by the trunk.”

It was a creepy suggestion, but I felt like there was no other way I was going to meet the real Janus. I suggested a slight scheduling change, but otherwise I agreed to the meeting. In a little over a week I would finally meet the real Janus.

When the day arrived for the meeting, I was still in St. Louis doing research for the chapter on Otherkin. I checked out of my hotel around noon, killed some time seeing sights in St. Louis, and then drove the two and a half hours to Columbia. There isn’t a whole lot to recommend about Columbia, at least from my admittedly cursory look at the city. Kudos, I suppose, for the very easy to find Home Depot.

It was early evening. I parked the car three rows back from the handicapped space up front, stepped out, and waited by my car’s trunk. I grew nervous and paced. As each car drove up in the parking lot, I wondered if the driver was Janus.

A teenager with a shaved head. A fat old man. A wild-eyed black woman talking on a cell phone.

As the cars passed and the minutes ticked by, I wondered what my meeting with this mysterious figure might produce.

Zack Parsons Meets Janus at the Home Depot by Janus

Zack Parsons was supposed to meet Janus at the Home Depot. He looked at his watch and it said five minutes till. Zack looked up and he didn’t see anyone coming to the Home Depot.

Suddenly a Porsche’s tires peeled out in a cloud of smoke and a Porsche pulled into the Home Depot. It did a ninety-degree turn and slid right at Zack but he was too shocked to move. The car kept sliding closer and closer making a loud shrieking sound and then it stopped and it was an inch away.

Suddenly a man leaped out of the driver’s side of the Porsche and then Halle Berry got out of the passenger side. She was wearing tight khaki hot pants and a white belt and a crop top that was pink and Zack looked at her boobs about to fall out.

“Eyes over here!” shouted Janus, and Zack realized it was Janus.

Janus was as handsome as possible. Halle Berry kissed Janus and felt his ginormous rod like a coiled cobra in his jeans ready to strike.

“Let’s go inside!” Janus declared. “You like my woman?”

“Uh I guess, Mr. Janus,” Zack muttered nervously as he looked around like a punk bitch.

“Call me Janus,” Janus said, and threw his Porsche keys to Halle Berry so she could park the Porsche.

They walked inside Home Depot and they realized suddenly that it was cheerleader night. There was a cheerleader bus parked in the lot and all of the cheerleaders were inside.

“Look at all these cheerleaders,” Zack slobbered, and his mouth fell open because there was all kinds of fine-ass women that he had never seen before.

“Don’t even think about it, scrote!” Janus laughed, and all the women were looking at him anyway.

The cheerleaders were building a new shower with new tiles so they could soap each other up and lez out. They were looking at tiles and getting hot thinking about lezzing out in the shower.

Zack and Janus walked over to the cheerleaders and two of the fine-ass cheerleaders turned around to look at Janus. One of them was tall and had huge titties falling out of her sweater and it was a half-sweater so you could see the bottoms of her boobs and the cleavage at the top. She was a blonde and was also wearing a skirt and her other friend had black hair and looked like Jessica Simpson with black hair and bigger, rounder ass cheeks.

“I’m Trixy,” she said, and held out her hand.

Zack reached for her hand but Janus slapped it away. He took her hand and he kissed it. “And who is your friend here?” he asked.

“That’s Kelly,” said Trixy, and Kelly held her hand out and also Janus kissed that hand.

“Hey what’s goin on here??” shouted the coach, and everybody looked over and saw it was a fine ass older woman with big titties and a track suit.

“Mom!?!?!” Zack shouted.

“Yep, I’m your mom,” agreed the coach. “Bet you didn’t know I ran a cheerleader school…hey, whose your friend?”

Zack tried to answer but he was too stupefied to answer. Zack looked away when Janus kissed his mom’s hand. What a disgrace! This was too embarrassing to endure.

“Oh I am enchanted to be sure,” Mrs. Parsons, Zack’s mom, said. “I see you met Trixy and Kelly. Sometimes we lez out together in the tour bus.”

“Mom, I can’t believe your sayin’ this shit!” Zack yelled.

“Deal with it; I am my own person,” Zack’s mom said, and hugged Janus. “Hahahaha!” Janus laughed loudly. “Maybe I’ll go back on the tour bus and check out the show.”

He gave Zack’s mom a suggested wink. Zack had tears in his eyes and he felt like a bitch. Zack couldn’t say shit because he was an important man; all he could do was look through tears in his eyes when Janus pulled down his mom’s shirt and started kissing all over her giant titties—the same titties Zack used to kiss on when he was a baby.

Well, at least I can have Trixy and Kelly, thought Zack, but he had to think again as those two girls started kissing each other and grabbing on Janus’s unit. They pulled his jeans down and the cobra sprang out like it was one of those draculas on a haunted house ride and you come around the corner and it goes
blah
, only it was a dick.