Read Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon for Free Online

curiosity.
    “Ooh, a buch, ja? I have zee reimagining chamber,” he said. “Come to meine shtudio und we can do some experiments.”
    “What sort of experiments?” I asked.
    “Ve re-imagine you,” he said, and then added, “In zee chamber.”
    I was a bit hesitant to subject myself to “zee chamber,” a hesitancy that only re-hesitated when my taxi arrived outside a carpet outlet store in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood.
    There are worse neighborhoods than Hermosa in Chicago, neighborhoods with more violent crimes, but this was the sort of area where some really horrible and weird shit might go down. It was the sort of area where a beloved grandma gets decapitated by a scythe or a city bus making its late-night rounds stops to pick up passengers only to find three skeletons sitting at one of the bus stops. Hermosa is the sort of neighborhood where you’re walking along and you find a baby laying on the sidewalk and you pick it up and it has your face.
    The eerie desolation was nerve-wracking, but it was broad daylight. Anders’s “shtudio” was located adjacent to the carpet outlet, behind an unmarked green security door. There was an intercom next to the door with three buttons. A small placard beside the top button read SCIENC, and the other two placards were scratched out. Someone had hastily scrawled a penis and testicles in black marker across the front of the intercom.
    I pressed the top button. Nothing. I pressed it again and longer.
    “JA! Ja! Okay, vas?” Anders’s voice blasted from the over-amped speaker.
    I leaned down to the speaker and loudly said, “I’m here to see Anders Zimmerman.”
    “Ja! Shit, you don’t have to shout.”
    The door buzzed and I hurried inside. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. The expansive ground floor was dusty and smelled of machine oils. Large presses or lathes of some sort were covered by plastic tarps. The overhead fluorescent lights and most of the windows were high and painted over. Thin beams of light were breaking through the crackling paint and in their shafts I’m pretty sure I could see asbestos particles.
    A heavy door opened and closed somewhere far away inside the building. There was a loud click followed by a buzz as one by one the fluorescent lights switched on.
    “Gutentag, Herr Parsons,” said Anders from very near to me.
    I jumped, realizing the anthropologist had closed to within a few feet of me while I was staring up at the lights like a rube. He was a little shorter than me, a little older, but he had a youthful head of spiked blond hair that was thinning a little bit on top.
    His facial features seemed drawn by gravity to his chin, which left a lot of empty real estate above his gray eyes and horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed like a member of the merchant marine. He was a nightmare vision from a J. Crew catalog in a worn cable-knit turtleneck, ridiculous white canvas pants, and a pair of decaying army boots he had apparently inherited from a combat veteran.
    “Hello,” I said, and shook his hand. “This is an interesting place you’ve got.”
    Anders was given pause by my clicking handshake. He glanced at my gloved hand, a gift from Doctor Lian, before his internal monologue changed the subject. He surveyed the room as if just noticing it.
    “Ooh, ja. This is old machine shop, leased very cheaply as long as I keep the machines. This is okay because zee chamber is in zee basement.”
    Anders directed me toward another security door, this one in better repair and marked with three-dimensional chrome letters that spelled OFFI . I reluctantly followed him to the door, picturing zee basement as a rat’s maze of claustrophobic passages choked with rusty, steaming pipes and pressure gauges with needles vibrating in the red.
    I calmed my nerves by reminding myself that I had braved the Twilight Zone episode that was Hermosa. I didn’t see a stray bunch of red balloons floating purposefully down the street. I