The doorbell was a dreary little dead thing – cracked and chipped and worn from too many fingers too long ago – but it might as well have been a venomous snake the way it looked to Janet.
She pushed it anyways. There were some dares you didn’t back down from, even if it was your best friend who’d made them. Especially if it was your best friend that made them.
There was no footsteps, no oncoming shuffle, no creak of the floorboards. First the door was shut and the house was empty and then they weren’t and there he was in front of her, shortish and squatish and with a crease to his brows that made him look like you’d interrupted him at all times from some very important thought. His skin was all over rough and chapped and ridged and his eyes were a murky puddle.
The Lizard Man.
He didn’t say a single thing to her, just waited patiently. Probably had this sort of thing happen to him all the time. If she was lucky he’d just slam the door in her face.
He waited. And just like it had when Yasmine made her dare, Janet’s nerve cracked.
“Can I see your basement?” she asked.
The Lizard Man’s brow furrowed a little more deeply.
“It’s for a dare,” she caved, and then because oh what the hell might as well spill everything: “my friends all think you keep bodies down there.”
A snort came through the Lizard Man’s nose, a distant cousin to a giggle. But he opened the door wider and turned on his heel and damnit there was a dare to live up to.
Hopefully.
***
The Lizard Man’s house was dry and dusty. Everything was in its place, had been put in its place decades ago, and had never been moved again. It made Janet think of her grandmother’s house, especially her grandfather’s room. His shaving razor was still set on the counter where he’d left it, and when she put it back in the wrong place – just to take a look, that was all – the next time they’d visited it’d been right back where it came from.
The Lizard Man wasn’t as old as her grandmother. But his eyes were. Funny, that.
Unsurprisingly, there were lizards – none of them caged, all of them free to do as they pleased, which was mostly sit there and not move, like most lizards and most people. Thin little elegant ones stuck on the walls blinking with reproachful eyes at the noisy new intruder (somehow Janet’s feet weren’t capable of the same noiselessness as the Lizard Man’s). A couple big fat ones on the kitchen table eating carefully from a bowl of chopped plants and plant byproducts. A small bug-eyed one atop the refrigerator, which the Lizard Man gently took down and placed on his head. It seemed satisfied with this, although it kept a wary gaze on Janet with one rotating eyeball. She’d have returned the favour if she could have.
The door to the basement was bigger than she’d have assumed. Most old houses hid them in narrow little doors that looked like they’d open up cupboards or closets; this was nearly a front door itself. But it opened with a special little key in the Lizard Man’s hand and the stairs led down, so she followed.
The door shut itself after her, and it was only when they reached the bottom of the stairs that Janet asked herself why anyone would need a key to their own basement.
***
The basement was less dusty, in defiance of natural law. Soft red light seeped from the lamps overhead, and around them were many more lizards. Some of them hung from the rafters; some of them squatted on the floor. A big pile of them were piled up in a big pile.
A VERY big pile. Some of the lizards were bigger than Janet. As a matter of fact, they looked like something she’d seen at the zoo. Dragons? Komodo Dragons. She wanted to ask, but was worried about the answer, so she didn’t.
The Lizard Man ignored the dragons. The dragons ignored the Lizard Man. They did eye up Janet some, but in a very disinterested way, which suited her fine. Their tour group had come by the dragons enclosure during feeding time, and she knew those shut-tight mouths had awfully big teeth. Was this legal? She was sure this couldn’t be legal. Even if the Lizard Man had a permit somewhere for breeding – Ten? Twenty? More? – Komodo dragons in his house, surely they’d get him for his basement. This had to be bigger than the house.
There was another staircase, which was confusing because Janet’s house only had one basement and it still flooded every spring because the water table was high, or so her mom cursed. The Lizard Man’s staircase was cool and a little damp but not flooded.
The second basement, however, was.
***
Actually, maybe it wasn’t a basement. Janet was pretty sure that even if basements could have cut-stone walls, they didn’t have stalactites. A little line of lights marched away down the center of the ceiling into the far-away night, out of sight.
There was a boat, which the Lizard Man got into. Then he waited.
Yasmine really, really couldn’t claim Janet had chickened out by now. She really couldn’t.
But Janet’s grandmother had told her many times about the importance of not doing things by halves, so she got into the boat too.
There were no oars, which was odd. Then the Lizard Man tugged gently on the anchor, and it tugged back, and a lizard head the size of the boat breached the water and blew gently over them through its nose, washing them both in cold spray and mosasaur snot.
It tasted like salt, and while Janet was spitting and coughing the boat was taken up by the anchor and gently but speedily towed away until the dock at the entrance of the second not-basement was out of sight and mind.
Other mosasaurs followed them alongside, just as big, smaller, bigger than the one hauling their boat. They were green and black and blue and white-bellied and striped and spotted and stippled, all very faint and very soft in the faint brightness from the cavern’s ceiling. Then they grew brilliant and beautiful and gorgeous, and Janet turned her eyes up from the water and saw the city.
***
There was a special dock for the Lizard Man’s boat in the harbour, and an emissary was waiting for him. It consisted of lizard-men.
These ones were a lot more lizard and a lot less men, but they seemed friendly enough – moreso than the Lizard Man, if Janet were being honest and just a little cruel. They bowed to him and shook his hand, and they waited politely to greet her with nods and hisses as the Lizard Man introduced them with his silent manners. Some of them were bigger than her and some of them weren’t, and that and the beautiful shining coats they wore were all that Janet had time to notice before they were off through the city, the beautiful stony city.
It was high and bright and there were lights on every corner, little cages filled with lively-glowing bugs tended to by the careful hands of lizard-men. They shone down upon houses and causeways and aqueducts and halls and wells and even stables where the lizard-men tended and fed giant rainbow-scaled snakes and made bright clothing from their shed skins. Little gliding lizards swooped from tower to tower, filling the giant empty space above their heads where the cavern climbed out of sight, and the torchlight shone off their white bellies. Beautiful and complicated carvings of lizards decorated every surface, doing much the same thing as the living ones around them.
There was a grand hall, but there was no throne, only a wide amphitheatre. Lizard-men of all kinds and sizes and demeanors filled it and Janet and the Lizard Man stood in the center of it and they called and chirruped and croaked their cases one after another, voting and deliberating and making the odd inquiry.
It reminded Janet of the videos they’d seen on parliamentary procedure in civics class, except she was actually interested.
Then the Lizard Man spoke.
***
It was impossible for her to describe the sounds that came out of him. They were big, and he didn’t open his mouth to make them, and they made the floor shiver and her hair stand on end. They filled the air and the stone and the flesh and they coddled and rocked and warmed them safely until everything was right and proper and done and sensible, and by the time they were done Janet was asleep, and who wouldn’t be?
She woke up in her bed. Yasmine insisted she’d made the whole thing up.
Ten years later, the Lizard Man died.
***
His will was a little unusual, but anyone who’d have wanted to make a fuss didn’t dare, cowed by the surprisingly wealthy and intense gazes of his lawyers and their very large and beautifully rainbow-patterned briefcases. And Janet certainly wasn’t about to. Housing was hard to come by these days, and the old building was in good condition.
She did dust, though. Her grandmother had always been very insistent on dusting.