42 - Tale of the Sideshow - Trouser Snake

Jason lit another cigarette off the next candle. He took the smoke into his lungs, and let it trail out of his nostrils.

"This story," he said, "is called

TROUSER SNAKE

In the sideshow, there are those who are born odd. And there are the gaffs, the fakes, the beards we glue onto women, the dried glue that cracks to make alligator women, the conjoined twins who are two separate people made up to look like one. Finally, there are the made freaks. Tattooed men and women, body modification, those who pass themselves off as hermaphrodites. Those folks live on the knife's edge, especially these days, when everybody has tattoos. It's not enough to just have a lot of ink or a split tongue; you can find people on the internet who look like that.

We picked up Randall in California. He was a piercing enthusiast. His penis and testes were a mass of metal. Strictly an after-hours show, but that was okay, actually. He had a good act with his penis: lifted weights with his testes, could flip rings to land on bottle tops, hang bells from his various piercings and ring little tunes. Amazing display of muscular control. Boss was happy for the variety.

Then came the incident.

The Magnetic Man was a performance act, a kind of specialized stage magic. Have these big made-up magnets attached to his bare flesh, plant himself so that nobody could lift or move him because he was "magnetized to the ground." Most of it was clever physics. But he had one trick that required an actual electromagnet, and Randall was too fucking close when the juice was turned on.

Most genital piercings are fairly surface-level affairs. Cosmetic. Pierce a few layers of skin, and even if you rip one off, you're left with two ragged bits of skin, not blood. So most of Randall's prick just looked terrible, torn to shit, but the only real problem was all the piercings in his glans. That was just fucking shredded.

It was a bad break, personally and professionally. Randall needed immediate medical care, his career in the sideshow was over. The Boss, however, saw an opportunity. Because we didn't have a trouser snake man.

I should say at this point that the trouser snake is normally a gaff. Shirtless man sits in a chair, unzips his pants. He might pretend to be a swami, play a flute, whatever, but the thing is a snake slides out of his trousers, dances. Animal acts are always a bit iffy, but snakes can be docile if you get the right species, something that isn't poisonous. Sometimes if you want to extend the gaff, you have him stand up and take the pants off, let them fall to the ground. They see him in a loincloth, so that they're not ogling his balls, and then he turns to the side and you see the snake disappear into the root of his dick. That's a special appliance and makeup job. Usually a tattoo on the stomach helps cover it up, makes it look like the snake is emerging right from the tattoo.

In this case, though, we had Dr. Gyges.

The set-up for the surgery took a few days. We were still outside Dagon's Hollow at this point, which was a plus and a minus. Plus, because I had an understanding with Doc Brisby, the local veterinarian. After-hours access to a clean place with good lighting was easy. If you know the right people, finding a few pints of uncontaminated O-positive blood or enough morphine to knock someone out for major surgery isn't hard either. The minus was that there weren't many snakes to be had. Local pet store didn't handle pythons, cobras, or anything impressive like that, and Randall wasn't going to go through this for a simple cornsnake.

So I had to go find a Child of Yig.

It was a bit far west for those snakes. They move through the corn, and the scales seem to change with the seasons; green during spring, gold around harvest time. There's a little white patch on their head, which is supposed to be the Sign of Yig. I don't know much about that, but I know I was out in the green corn, thumping the ground with a stick, a sack in hand. The one I found was perfect for our purposes—about twenty inches long, two inches in diameter at the thickest portion, and best yet—it had two heads. A born oddity.

The surgery was—well, I'd never seen was Dr. Gyges when she worked on Maria, but I saw what happened with Randall. The first incision basically split his cock open, then continued on into Randall's abdomen. Maria had surgical gloves and a mask on, acted as nurse. Gyges cut open the snake and sort of peeled it. Then she was...connecting them together. Arteries to arteries, veins to veins, the snake's stomach to his. She was painting something on the connections, and I didn't know what that was. Stemcells, she said, which meant nothing to me then and not much now.

It wasn't pretty. If anything, I'd say it was kind of gruesome and off-the-cuff. The arteries and veins weren't really the same size, you know, so they had to go about where they could fit. She just worked further in, and I think she kind of bonded the snake's tail to the base of his spine. I saw more of the inside of Randall than I cared to, his whole pelvis opened up like a Thanksgiving turkey, so I could see his hip bones, and even through the morphine I could hear him moan, though my real concern was when the snake tried to move. It never did fully wake up when he was on the table, though.

Complicated. Probably it should have been more than one surgery. I know we started just after sunset and by dawn, doc didn't have time to close up the last wounds with sutures; she used superglue. I had Randall in the bed of the truck, a tarp over him, so we could get him back to his trailer. The stitches went in there.

Well, it was a few weeks before Randall was healed well enough to really get around. There was a little hole right before his balls, and that's where he pissed out of, sitting down. The two-headed snake was alive, but he kept it ****. Didn't have to feed it, because his stomach went to its stomach. I had looked up on the internet and found out that snake blood and human blood were incompatible. Not sure how Gyges fixed that, and I'm not sure she understood either. She was very conscientious about changing Randall's dressings.

The Boss saw it all as an investment. She had me set up his trailer for the act to come. The pants, the chair. No loincloth, though. That was going to be the surprise. When he stood up naked and they saw it was real. That was going to be the real climax.

Randall and the snake came to an uneasy accord. The Boss had been reading him up on how snake-handling worked, but every book on the subject was based on the idea that at some point you'd put the snake down in an enclosure. Not try to get your boxer shorts on over the damn thing, or try to go for a walk with it. The snake had two minds of its own, and once he lightened up the **** a bit, the thing had a fair bit of free movement. The surgery had left about fourteen or fifteen inches of snake free, and it wasn't too hard to get the act going.

He had no direct control of the snake. Timing was important, because the **** had to wear off, but the snakes would often gravitate to the light once the fly was open, and if not, a cricket concealed nearby would often do the trick. How that first crowd wowed when the first head came out, followed swiftly by the second! They couldn't believe their eyes. Could you?

Good money. Randall, however, was a bit miserable. He had lost more than his dick. It was an entirely different lifestyle, now. Baggy trousers, a constant supply of crickets and little pills to keep the snakes happy. There was something else, something in his eyes that troubled me and got worse all season. Like a growing discomfort that wouldn't go away. I didn't learn what it was until we were done with the last show. Randall looked pale as tallow, sweating, greasy. Dark bags around his eyes, and he was clutching his stomach, kind of short of breath.

I had to help him from the chair and toward his trailer. Asked him if he was in pain, and he said no. Just something weird. Uncomfortable. Wrong inside. Those were his words.

We were almost there when he doubled over.

Not all snakes lay eggs. Some bear live young. For a Child of Yig, that might mean 10-20 in a litter, twice a year. I held Randall's hair back as the small green serpents slid out of his gullet, slimy and dripping. They coiled on the grass to wipe it off, dispersing in all directions. Randall just stayed there for a long time, chest heaving, staring at the little things that had emerged from his body.

"Randall was never quite the same after that, although I think once he understood what was happening, he kind of just...got used to it. Maybe that's the real horror of the story, beyond all the mad science. What people can get used to."

So saying, Jason blew out the candle, leaving just his cigarette to glow in its place.