Night Of The Laughing Dead
I pulled this out of my archive. It is also one of the many stories which is right up my alley.
Night of the Laughing Dead
by TickleExpert
As the storm ravaged the countryside, Alec lounged by the blaze that crackled balefully in the stone hearth, sipping luxuriously on a goblet of the finest cognac. He chuckled softly to himself, content in the realization that by the break of dawn, he would be a very wealthy man... wealthy beyond his fondest dreams, in fact. This was the easiest damn money he'd ever made. Much easier than the ruthless machinations he usually engaged in for a quick buck...like conning senile spinsters out of their social security, or the penny-ante thievery that kept the local fences in operation. No, this was like stealing candy from a baby (something he wouldn't hesitate to do if the price was right), & he settled back into the cushions of the antique armchair secure in the knowledge that very soon, his 2-bit, flim- flam days on the grift would be behind him forever.
One night in this musty, ancient castle in the hills of France... one night, the lawyer had said (bizarre, cold fish that she was). The ironic thing was that he never suspected he had a rich relative in this part of the world (or anywhere for that matter), & when the stern-faced frigidaire of a female attorney had originally contacted him, he actually thought it was a joke... or another moronically planned setup by the imbecilic authorities who had been trying to nab him for years. But this was the Real Deal.
He had been summoned to the reading of the will & had listened with greedy fascination as the lawyer with the school- marm demeanor & stacked body explained the conditions of the inheritance to him. She did in fact have quite a figure under the oppressively frumpy attire, but when he looked at that icy countenance, devoid of makeup or of anything even remotely alluring, & thought of how much time it must have taken her to yank her dirty blond hair into the severe-looking bun that seemed to tug painfully at her scalp. The only words that came to mind were "Cold Bitch". Just as an amusing challenge, he tried his best pickup lines on her, but she responded about as warmly as she would have to a prune-juice colonic. "Must be a lesbian" he thought. After all, what real woman had ever been able to resist his charms. Even after he'd bilked them out of their life's savings?
Wobel was the lawyer's name, he learned. But after 10 minutes of her dreary company, he found that he could care less who she was. The only thing on his mind, the only thing he was interested in knowing anything about, was what he had to do to get his hands on The Money. 10 million dollars to spend one dismal night in a cobweb-infested castle belonging to a long-dead ancestor he never knew he had...God what luck...he could barely contain himself when Wobel started babbling about reputed poltergeists that may haunt him during his stay. That nearly had him cracking up with sardonic amusement. An obvious scare tactic. Alec wondered how many superstitious idiots must have fallen for it.
He harkened back to his college days as a fraternity pledgemaster, when he & the brothers would rig up the old abandoned mansion on the edge of town...fake blood, dummy corpses, sound effects, the works. He would revel in the terrified faces of the tormented pledges as they entered the dreaded "House of Horrors"....ah, memories!
Alec fully expected that an interested party would try the same sorts of tricks to cheat him out of his fortune. But what said party didn't know, was that it would take a lot more than a few flimsy fright-gags to scare him away from his just desserts. So after an endless, grueling plane flight, here he was... stolen passport & all.
He'd made a couple of last-minute stings just to sweeten the pot (hell, the old birds couldn't take it with them, could they?) & he'd left behind his life of chicanery with no regrets (who ever said that crime doesn't pay?). The medieval castle was secluded high on a hill in the middle of nowhere, & he had played hell to get to this place.
Most of the roads in the area were abandoned & washed out by the rainstorm that battered the vicinity. He cursed the craggy mountain trails that nearly overturned his rented sportster, but the twin beacons of infinite wealth & luxury's sweet lap urged him onward.
\There were no creature comforts in the spacious old abode, but 10 million smackers would soon buy plenty of those, he thought. It was initially cold & damp in the ancient parlor, but the fireplace that served as the only source of heat & light in that wing had now made things quite cozy. The expensive cognac he had brought with him for company was like liquid affluence coursing down his throat... a celebratory reminder of finer things to come. Lightning seared open the black sky outside the towering window, & the booming thunder was the only sound save the beating of Alec's arctic, cash-register heart. He had begun to wonder just how long it might be before someone's pathetic idea of a prank would surface. But as the evening wore on drearily, it seemed that he was indeed all alone. Once he thought he heard a skittering noise in the corridor, but after a quick search yielded nothing, he decided it must have been a starved rat searching the dark hallways for a morsel. Of course, if anyone had anything up their sleeve, he was fully prepared.
The loaded 38 rested comfortably in his jacket pocket, & as always, he would gleefully jump at the chance to use it on anyone who got in his way. As midnight approached, Alec began to feel sleepy with the potent cognac, & he started to doze.
Outside the jagged bolts of electricity crashed against the blackness.
He awoke himself with a start, but moments later he drifted again, this time into a deep sleep. Then he heard it. At first it sounded like a woman's shrill shriek of pain, but then he realized... it was Laughter.
Mindless...tortured...hysterical screaming Laughter. It seemed to come from the dark corridor outside the room, & as he listened intently, it rose in pitch & ferocity until it was the sound of a madwoman in hell. The lunatic peals resounded off the walls, a helpless, cackling cacophony that seemed forced, involuntary. The sound of a woman clearly losing the last remnants of her mind. Alec had never heard anything like it in his life... except... Chills ran along the nape of his neck. Whoever was pulling this off really knew their stuff, he had to admit. It just sounded so undeniably real. He patted the gun in his pocket reassuredly, deciding that this was exactly what he'd expected all along... some cheezy scare-ploy to drive him from his just reward.
He rose slowly from the armchair & went to the doorway leading into the hall, peering anxiously into the darkness as the frenzied laughter continued unabated.
Suddenly it was worse. He could hear other disembodied voices now, a man's guttural, obscene chuckle... & now the desperate racket of several women laughing wildly all at once, mingling with the original shrieks in a deafening din of hysterics. The sound pounded Alec' s eardrums in a relentless onslaught of gut-busting guffaws & belly-racking bellows. It became so maddening that Alec slammed his hands over his ears, clutching the gun in his pocket as he cursed into the darkness. "Goddam you, what the hell are you laughing at? What are you LAUGHING AT?"
Then he saw it....a foreboding sliver of reddish light as the panel in the wall slid away to reveal a set of stone steps leading downward into a pitch- black pit of the unknown. The laughter was clearly coming from within. It now was so loud that it drowned out the thunderstorm that blasted the night, & it barraged Alec's sensibilites with an icy dread that turned his blood cold. He felt himself move toward the secret passage almost as if he had no will of his own. Then he began to descend the stairs, his heart pounding through his chest as the myriad howls of frantic female laughter washed over him in a tormented torrent of hysteria. Now he stood before a vast wooden door & the mad laughing had reached such a bawling crescendo that his ears were nearly bleeding from the high-decibel impact. He pushed the door open, the 38 gripped in his trembling hand... & he froze in disbelieving horror.
It was a Torture Chamber. Torches burned in the recesses of the damp walls, & the flickering light revealed a grotesque scene that was stark & fearsome beyond comprehension. There were naked, sweating, disheveled women of all ages scattered about the dungeon, each of them chained or locked in some gruesome device of torture. The smell of fear & impending death blasted out at Alec in a noxious wave, & as he choked back his revulsion, his mind reeled with the images of what was happening to the women....they were being tickled. Tickled to DEATH, it seemed.
There were huge, simian men with barrel-chests & black hoods, & they were wrenching howls of excruciating laughter from their comely victims without a shred of anything resembling mercy.
One pretty, though clearly miserable lass was locked in a set of wooden stocks, her slender bare soles being licked continually by 2 bleating goats tethered to the frame. Her big toes were bound & fastened to eyelets in the wood, pulled back so that her soles were as tight as the skin of a snare drum, & as vulnerable to the lapping tongues of the goats as they could ever be. A hulking torturer stood behind the captive female & fiendishly jostled her delicate, heaving ribcage as she writhed & thrashed her dark hair like a whip, her face contorted with shrill agonized laughter. Tears sprayed from her clenched eyes as she begged for mercy in what Alec's feverish brain determined to be French. Obviously her pitiful pleas fell on deaf ears.
In another corner of the chamber, a matronly woman was encased in a wooden, coffin-like box with only her head & bare feet protruding. There were fiends seated at either side of the box. One of them had used a thick leather strap to lock her head securely in place as he slowly & sadistically tickled her nose & ears with 2 wispy feathers. He ran one feather behind her earlobes & into the openings of her ears with itching intensity, slow maddening circles from which she had no hope of escape. At the same time he stroked the bridge of her twitching nose, & used the tingly edge of the feather to torment the insides of her flaring nostrils with painstaking cruelty. Her eyes bulged from her reddened face as she suffered in trapped, ticklish misery, & as if this wasn't enough for her to endure, the hooded villain at the far end of the box was pinching & tickling her chubby toes while he ground his wiggling fingers deep into her thick, fleshy soles. Wracking inhuman cries of uncontrollable laughter from her as tears dribbled slowly into her tickled ear canals.
Along the far wall there were several young maidens stripped & manacled, their arms chained high above their heads as their hooded captors tickled them savagely...probing their frail ribs, bouncing & jostling their naked breasts, & scooping devilish dancing fingertips into their exposed armpits. They wailed with tearful, blubbering laughter, begging for mercy, but their suffering went on & on & on.
Alec shook his head in shock as the crazed laughing thundered in his head. Every nerve ending in his body tingled numbly with fear, & he found himself riveted to the spot.... completely petrified with terror. & as well he should have been.
Alec had a morbid revulsion of being tickled, & he had avoided it like the proverbial plague since he was a small child. Back then his bullying older sisters would gang up on him & tickle him until he thought he would actually die. Often in fact, they had gotten so carried away that he vomited violently. & once they tickled him to the point of hyper- ventilation so that he lost consciousness. To make matters worse, he would always find himself lapsing into a state of utter paralysis when tickled, a helpless condition where all he could do was lie there & laugh painfully. It was horrible, & probably the only moment in his life when he wasn't in control. That probably terrified him more than anything... that complete loss of power in the hands of a masterful tickler. It wasn't an out-&-out phobia for him, but he had enough of an aversion to it that the very thought of tickling drove gut- wrenching fear into the pit of his belly. & now here he was, witness to a horrific spectacle of ticklish torment far beyond his darkest nightmares.
He was in such a state of nerve-shattering overload that he felt as trapped as the victims themselves, & with mind-numbing despair he realized that he couldn't move a muscle... just as if someone were tickling him. He was immobilized, a prisoner in the grip of some force so malignant that his brain couldn't conceive of it. He tried to turn his head or shut his eyes, but found he couldn't. It was if he had turned to stone. The anguish of the women in the chamber was soul-searing to watch, & in the midst of the madness, Alec heard that vulgar, raspy chuckle again & again. It was a monstrously evil sound that chilled him to the core, but he couldn't turn his head to see where it was coming from.
Then as the eerie torchlight illuminated one dark corner, he saw Him...the Dungeon Master, the Grand Inquisitor, the Unholy Devil himself...a hunched, twisted figure in a black cloak who cheerfully orchestrated the abuse of his ticklish prisoners, taunting & threatening the women as he supervised their grisly ordeals.
As the villain read monotonously from a yellowed parchment, a shackled figure was brought before him, a trembling waif who went to her knees & wept pitifully as she clutched him around the ankles. The Cloaked Man barked an order, & she was dragged to her feet. It was then that Alec had his first real look at her, & his heart nearly stopped cold. She was the most angelically beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. Long tresses of blond hair, captivating green eyes, full, luscious lips, & a perfectly curvaceous figure that filled out her makeshift dress in all the right places.
The hooded men ripped her clothes from her, & Alec was so overwhelmed by the sight of her delicious nude body that his cock twitched & strained through his slacks. In spite of the repulsion & terror that was all over him like a rabid dog. He drank her in...her legs were sleek & toned, & her breasts were tantalizing orbs capped with huge, succulent nipples. He stood by motionlessly as the girl was strapped to a big wooden rack in the center of the room. She kicked & struggled to no avail as her tormentors fastened the thick rawhide cuffs around her wrists & ankles, then she winced with pain as a powerful man began to turn the crank at the top of the rack. 1 notch, then 2, now 3 & 4. Her limbs were stretched to near-breaking as she gasped for breath. Her arms were pinioned over her head, & her legs were yanked toward the foot of the rack. Every muscle, every tendon, every protruberance of her taut body now stood out in relief. Satisfied with their handiwork, the hooded brutes began to go to work on her.
They set on her like animals & kept coming at her in droves. Tickling & tickling the screaming woman into frantic shrieks of anguished laughter that went far beyond any level of human reason. At one point the poor girl had as many as 5 men tickling at her incessantly.
One sadist stood behind the rack & drilled his wriggling thumbs deep into the tightened recesses of her armpits, forcing explosive laughter from her small frame in great gusts of hilarity, while 2 others stood on either side of her & poked her jutting ribcage with such ferocity that their fingertips reddened with the pressure they were exerting. They literally gouged at her ribs, rooting & digging around for the most excruciatingly ticklish spots they could find, rubbing her soft flesh to & fro over the tender bones as she whooped & yelped with maniacal mirth.
Meanwhile her slim, pale feet had been locked into an sinister-looking harness that splayed her toes apart, & stretched her wrinkled soles into smooth, taut expanses of skin that twitched futilely as 2 more fiends tickled her. Inserting feathers between her trembling toes, sawing them back & forth through the sensitive crevices, & running bristly, barbed instruments up & down her captive soles. They dallied in her deep arches, scribbling designs in them with soft oscillating brushes, & they even coated her feet with a solution that appeared to make them itch like a thousand ants were crawling over them.
Alec could surmise from her desperate pleas that she was begging for someone to scratch her itching soles, then begging for the scratching to stop because it tickled so much. Either way she was doomed to a long death by hysteria. Hours went by...maybe days. Time had lost all points of reference for Alec as he stood transfixed by the horrendous events before him. He watched hopelessly as the enchanting vision of a girl was slowly reduced to a guffawing, quivering mass of tortured nerves. As time inched by, it was clear that she had been laughing so hard & so long that her jaws ached from having her mouth stretched open. Her eyes were barely slits & there were thick tears squeezing out the corners & flowing down her flushed cheeks into her gaping mouth. Alec saw that in the midst of her inescapable bondage, she was trying urgently to clench her thighs together & keep from wetting herself. Her efforts were in vain however, as Alec could plainly see the dark stain that soaked the wooden planks beneath her pelvis. A grim testament to her kidney-itching agony. The girl was a howling, disheveled, pleading mess. The men had been pinching, goosing & tickling her so viciously that there were reddened imprints of their hands on her soft tender flesh. They would grant her brief respites to wheeze for breath, not out of mercy, but simply to prolong her misery.
Whenever she would faint from exhaustion, they would hurl buckets of cold water on her to revive her & begin anew. As the hours wore on they began to invade her privates as well, & they squeezed her nipples in iron clamps while they tickled the trapped swollen buds with feathers. Before long they were brutally gang-raping her, each of them climbing onto the rack & taking his turn while the others continued to drive her into ticklish panic.
Her torture grew worse & worse. They began to drown her by pouring liquid into her laughing mouth...& they tickled & tickled & tickled. Kneading, jabbing & worming their powerful fingers into her flesh as they found new spots of torture to toy with. She began to bleed internally, thin rivulets of blood trickling from the corners of her cackling mouth... Alec could see that she was dying... dying horribly right before his eyes. Then it happened. She locked her eyes on his, staring straight into the depths of his soul from the bottomless pit of her torment. He felt the life return to his limbs, & he was again aware of the cold steel gun clenched in his fist. His whirling mind snapped & he began to fire blindly.
Bullets whistling about the chamber & careening off the stone walls. He wanted to kill them all...torturers & victims alike. Anything to erase this demonic vision from his sight. As he spun about, he found himself gazing into the gaunt, craggy face of the Cloaked Man. A face like that of the Grim Reaper himself....& that awful face was laughing... laughing...LAUGHING!
Epilogue:
"...Wake up, Mr. LaSalle...wake up." The hand shook him forcefully, dragging him back into consciousness. He opened his eyes & saw the blurred image of the woman standing over him, & his first reflexive reaction was to breath a tremendous sigh of relief...
"A dream"... he muttered, "...Just a dream. Thank God it was just a dream."
The woman erupted in insidious laughter. 'Oh god!" he thought... "No more laughing... pleeeeez no more laughing.' Then she spoke to him. "That was no dream, Mr. LaSalle. You simply ran into some old....acquaintances."
His head cleared, as did his vision, & he saw the cold face of the iceberg attorney who had contacted him with the news of his inheritance...& of the conditions therein...
"Wobel?" he croaked, thoroughly confused & now very, very frightened.
"The name is actually LeBow... Monique LeBow... a French name. Like yours, Mr. LaSalle." It was then that Alec focused on the room that swam into view around him. It was indeed the torture chamber of his nightmare. Now lit with a single incandescent bulb that gleamed overhead. He & the lawyer were the only ones present, & there was something even more horrifying for him to try & grasp; he was stretched out on that dreaded rack...stark naked & defenseless. His throat sealed itself shut with terror, & the lawyer named LeBow went on....
"The man you met in your 'dream', Mr. LaSalle....the man in the cloak... he was known as Simon DeMontfort, & he was one of the most notorious & despicable witch-hunters of 13th century France. An era where paranoia gave power to the worst among men..."
Alec couldn't speak. His reeling wits wouldn't let him think long enough to form words... "DeMontFort was Evil Personified, Mr. LaSalle. He tortured hundreds of innocent women to death...hundreds...& do you know how the sick, twisted son-of-a-bitch did it? He took a fun, harmless, playful activity. The one we all know as Tickling...& he turned it into the most diabolical, excruciating, prolonged method of torture in history. & once he used it to extract his false confessions, he then used it to execute his innocent victims... sometimes it took days, even weeks for them to die. "
Alec choked out the words... "Who...ARE you?"
The attorney ran her thin feminine fingertips over Alec's naked pinioned thigh, then pulled the long tresses of blond hair from her tight bun, letting them cascade over her shoulders. Her stern face softened to the countenance of an angel, & she unbuttoned her business attire to reveal an exquisite nude body such as Alec had never seen but once. Just once. There was no doubt. She was the girl on the rack. "You see, Alec, Simon didn't count on one thing. Not everyone he persecuted mercilessly was innocent. One prisoner was indeed a witch. With power far beyond the grave. Power enough to curse the vile descendants of a sadistic murdering madman for generations to come...right down to the very last one... right down to YOU, Mr. LaSalle."
Alec's brain was on fire. He began to pray for his sanity, for the salvation of his wretched life. Praying too that this was all a bad dream. But he knew too well that it was real. The straps that bit forcefully into his wrists & ankles were a grim reminder.
Monique went on... "Of course, I know full well how you abhor tickling. What poetic justice that something your ancestor embraced so fervently is like poison to you. But then, evil does work in mysterious ways, doesn't it?"
It was then that Alec heard the laughter again...the screeching wails & hollering hysterics rattling the walls, blasting in his mind.
Meanwhile Monique LeBow was growing horns & a tail, as well as a set of leathery, night-black wings that fluttered bat-like with the sound of dead rustling leaves. Her fingernails began to extend several inches, & pointed fangs were starting to sprout from between her sensuous pouting lips.
Alec's mouth moved stupidly but no sound emerged...just a stifled gasp. & then They came. All of Simon's naked victims, shuffling slowly into the dim chamber with decaying dead flesh dripping from their bones, their rotted faces grinning wildly with the selfsame death-mask of forced mirth that they had worn upon their demise. They were carrying feathers, brushes, all the instruments of tickle-torture they could hold in their putrid skeletal fingers. & they were laughing...& laughing.
Monique threw a switch, & a set of steel spikes protruded from the rack alongside Alec's torso & thighs. If he budged more than an inch, he'd be skewered like a pig. Likewise a razor-sharp pendulum swung scant millimeters from his trapped cock, which the immortal & desirable Monique LeBow had begun to tickle tenderly with the edge of a feather... Alec was whimpering now. "Oh God...Don't do this."
Monique grinned. "Need a good laugh, Alec?" she cooed. "This one'll KILL ya!"
THE END!
