CAMILLA’S CLOSET
By Amnesiac
The following is an account of a tragedy that befell a most unfortunate individual who was chosen by fate or chance (or perhaps no one at all) to a most torturous existence. Although the details of this event may not strike many as unfortunate during the reading, in fact, many a reader might long to fall into the same circumstances under the eccentric delusion of pleasure, it is advisable that one holds such wishes at bay until the full account has been completed. And the gravity of the outcome sufficiently weighed by the reader.
Camilla was the name of a most unfortunate woman. Her last name is of no consequence, as it plays no fundamental part in the recount of her fate. Rather, you should note that she came to be raised and to mature in the house of her parents. It was an unremarkable structure with two-stories and an attic accompanied by a basement; aluminum siding adorned with cerulean blue paint and a gray-shingled roof. The house itself is of no great importance; it is what transpired within that is significant to the story.
Of the three bedrooms in the house (one for her parents, one for the occasional guest and the third for herself), Camilla slept in the one at the northeast corner, whose windows overlooked the street outside. Her single-occupant bed lay across from a closet that peeked at her through the Venetian slits in the wooden door. For most of her childhood, the closet had no menacing properties, but it did possess a certain bizarre quality. It was prone, at night primarily, to produce certain noises without explanation or description; Camilla, the perceptive child that she was, took notice it on the occasions that they occurred. It sounded to her (as it would to anyone upon hearing it) like the whispering of many voices speaking to one another in secret, as if seeking to avoid detection by curious little girls in whose room they congregated.
At first, the prospect of mysterious voices was nothing less than delightful to the child; in her youth, she believed, as so many young children do, in the existence of faeries and elves and other mystical beings of lands both magical and wondrous. Many times, she would creep upon the closet with the stealth of a housecat only to ultimately throw open the door in hopes of catching a glimpse of such creatures before they retreated from the sight of mortal eyes. However, no attempt ever made yielded any results, nor did they allay her curiosity and ponderings on the source of the ever-evasive sounds. Such giddy explorations into the realm of fantasy were not to last indefinitely however; in her increasing age, such naive suppositions were replaced by experience and a learned-ness about the world at large, which dispelled the reality of fantasy realms and the creatures within as mere superstition, leftovers of primitive man‘s imagination. However, the deconstruction of the childhood world had no impact on the nightly “visitors” who occupied the unseen nether regions of her closet, and soon, that which once provided her childhood with wonder became a source of great and unendurable terror. Upon realizing that even her education and developing maturity would not deter the voices from their nightly conventions, Camilla’s fear became all-encompassing, and was quick to purchase a heavy lock for the closet door. Still, this precaution did little to allay her panic, and toiled away many a night in the throws of anxiety and tortured dreams, waking often in sheet soaked with sweat to inspect the lock upon the door; never once did it move an inch. Regardless of the lock’s efficiency, she never passed the opportunity to sleep over at the house of a friend during a soirée or an adolescent “girl’s night out,” for she was naught to sleep so well in her own room.
Despite her nocturnal ordeals, Camilla nevertheless grew into an otherwise healthy young woman. She attended the local high school and managed the many trials and tribulations of contemporary adolescence: a fluctuating circle of friends that underwent an annual filtration ritual; the early forays into the recreational pursuit of marijuana and truancy; the first sexual experiences with men and women alike; and the always expected conflicts with her parents. It was often said by her relatives that her dull auburn hair was an accurate signifier of her assertive nature, for it grew as long as the number of years that passes from her birth. And through all the changes of her body and mind, there was always one factor in her life that remained unchanged since childhood: the closet was never left unlocked at night.
Now it comes to the beginning of what may be referred to as the decline of Camilla’s fortune, although at first glance it may not appear as such. She completed her education shortly after her eighteenth birthday and thereafter departed to attend college on the East Coast, and for the four years of her stay, never once was she plagued by the incessant and unexplainable whispers that tortured her peace of mind since the early days of her youth. There was, however, as there so often is in life, a new torment to replace the old.
She shared her dorm room with three other girls of varying ages and levels of education class. Two of them were hardly discernible from each other as far as lifestyles are concerned, and the third was a lesbian with a wandering eye. Nothing truly lascivious ever transpired within the confines of their room (at least, nothing that would grace the covers of the oversized video boxes found in the back rooms of many a video store), but by the same token, nothing of an entirely wholesome nature transpired exclusively, either. As is to be expected in the course of residing with multiple individuals within the confines of a small room, suppressed feelings of claustrophobia had a tendency to manifest themselves in the form of rather silly antics, and there was much of that to be found in Camilla’s company. But it was quite by happenstance that a common activity came to occur as a ritual between the quartet, and in any other situation, such a ritual would be a rather comical and unimportant one had it not been so potently torturous for an unfortunate individual.
It must be stated now, although perhaps it should have been done earlier, that Camilla was a very ticklish person. This was hardly a revelation for her, as her childhood was filled with occasions where her feet and other nondescript regions of her body were exploited by the playful fingers of relatives and friends; but the later sessions were distinguished from the early ones by the quality of torture, which was an indelible element in the former. Once discovering that their roommate was quite the ticklish personality during a drunken romp, it was a staple of this ritual to gang upon her and tie her to her bunk with sheets and many personal belongings of sexual restraint. Many hours of many nights over many years were spent eliciting shrill screams of laughter and begging from the depths of Camilla’s self with the probing of soft tissue with nailed fingers, brushes and other utensils, many of them often purchased for the very purpose of the ritual than that of their manufacturers intentions.
Upon completing graduation, Camilla returned to the home of her youth and to the welcoming arms of her ecstatic parents. At that time they had intentions of retiring from their long tenure in suburbia for a more open and picturesque land to the West; it came upon them the inclination to leave their home in her care and legal entitlement. After a year of organizing the details of the arrangement, the transaction was completed and the home was finally left in her name; a circle completed, as dramaturgy would define. Unfortunately, as dramaturgy has also defined, a circle can, and most frequently is vicious.
All was well for Camilla, having completed her life’s academic ambitions and acquired a residence of her own; but it was not to remain so. Until the fateful night on which this tale gains its notoriety, Camilla had taken to sleeping in her old room, having long-since forgotten its terrorizing qualities. Perhaps it was the pervasive silence of the house or the unconscious awareness of her parents’ absence, but it came to pass that she was aroused from her sleep by a horrendous awareness of ignorance, much like the sudden recollection of a memory long forgotten. The pantheon of fears and anxiety from her childhood returned to her and at once began to freeze her blood and her muscles to the bone. She immediately left her old bedroom and ventured to that of her parents as quickly as her feet could carry her. Confidence now became her instrument, having finally engineered a plot to escape the shadows of her fears, and to sleep, for once, in her own home in peace. She slid under the blankets of her parents’ large bed and nestled herself quite comfortably into the pillows in preparation of a long and restful slumber. Slowly and heavily, her eyelids slid over the glistening orbs underneath and plunged her into tranquil darkness.
The Whispers.
Quietly. Effortlessly. Almost subliminal. But there they were. Tendrils of fatigue were stripped from their cerebral roots and the peaceful orb of night was lifted from her Camilla’s eyes. Every neuron in her brain began to pulse with sensations of panic and fear: her eyelids peeled back into folds and her pupils instinctively dilated; her heart began to beat faster to accommodate the rising levels of adrenaline; her muscles clenched and tensed, and her fingers clutched the sheets with such force that her knuckles gained a nauseating transparent quality; her nails bore into the palms of her hands, drawing a row of deep and painful impressions; sweat seeped from the thousands of pores of her face forming a lacquer of tension to her skin, and the hair on the back of her neck raised high as their follicles tightened with tension; assailed by erratic impulses, her mandible chattered incessantly, clacking her teeth against each other. With the speed of the most obsessed and tormented mind of Poe’s imagination, she turned her shaking head towards the closet door, to view in the instinctively foolish fashion akin to humans, the source of her now unlikely imagined fear.
Louder the voices grew, a veritable cacophony of hushed voices that were soft in their tone, but malicious in their intensity. The closet remained dark and impenetrable to the naked eye, and not an inch did the door move; little comfort, however, to Camilla, whose own mobility could hardly have been said as any different than that of the wooden barrier between her and whatever lay behind. She fixed her gaze upon the knob of the entrance so that should the slightest gesture of touch should disturb the gold-painted handle, the enchantment of paralysis that bound her to her fetal position should be broken, giving her the strength to fly to freedom; in a singular fashion, an event as equally potent provided the same effect. For in her staring at the door, she came to realize a most horrible oversight that so overwhelmed her that her trembling ceased and her panic gave way to numbing rigidity:
The closet door had no lock.
Camilla bounded from under the sheets and darted to the door, clutching the knob tightly, wrapping her fingers over each other, forming a vise of flesh and bone. She pressed her weight against the slack door and pressed it against the hinges as she could; she cursed herself for a fool for having left the sanctity of her own room to one where she had no installed defense against the whispers of the dark. Silence, suddenly, overtook the room as the voices disappeared. She reluctantly opened her eyes and peered into the gaps of the Venetian slats, but could neither see nor hear anything. With the greatest caution she dared afford, she relaxed her grip on the knob and released her weight.
The door flew open with such force, that it knocked her flat to the carpet onto her left flank. She withdrew her breath from the air and planted her hands on the floor to press herself back to her feet, but to no avail for the force that squeezed her ankles pulled her off her bearings. The rug rubbed her nightshirt up to her breasts as she was dragged backwards towards the closet space, her feet disappearing into the blackness. Her nails dug into the felt instinctively to stop the progress, but it was then that she felt the first sensation: it was a light, soft scrape against the soles of her missing feet, first one then two, followed by four and five. The number of raking sensations grew until there no longer remained the ability to count them. Camilla pursed her lips as the giggling spat its way through her teeth, giving way to a stream of involuntary chuckling and giggling. The raking progressed to cover the arches of her foot and then in between her toes, as though an object smoother than human skin was sliding luxuriously between the gaps and soft crevices of her feet, stroking the nerves to a tingling explosion. Her fingers collapsed with the loss of concentration and she fell on her chest to the floor. The tickling increased and sent her body into a frenzy of gnarled and twisted shapes as she tried to kick free of the vise-like grips that held her tight in place.
Her body flipped over, and her arms came to life, pinning themselves above her head, exposing her armpits and neck. Try as she might have, and try she did, she could not move them nor her feet despite the intensity of her struggle. The sensations crawled the length of her leg and scribbled into the pits of her knees, pressing gently into the base of her cap, then danced upwards to her inner thighs. She was laughing uproariously as the assailed skin folded with dents and impressions as though kneaded by unseen hands that wiggled and tortured her flesh with ticklish sensations. Her shirt flew open, and her belly began to jiggle as the dancing impressions scoured her stomach and ribs, driving the skin on her torso to squirm away from the touch without her control.
Tears began to form in her eyes as the tickling “hands” stroked the underside of her breasts and teased the tips of her nipples. Her navel felt as though worms were writhing and squiring about inside trying to climb out, driven to frenzy by capture. The scribbling feelings goosed her in the sensitive folds of her crotch, and sent Camilla’s voice into a harsh cackling that was broken into long bouts of gasps and hard coughs. The apparition touch finally ascended to her armpits, and dug in ferociously, wiggling the skin and tissue underneath as if it were unmoulded dough. Finally, her laughing tipped into a loud and horrible screech that wore itself into a light wheeze before falling to complete silence as her face contorted into a knotted brow and ear-splitting smile. Tears streamed from her face to the carpet floor, leaving a trail behind as she was dragged cackling and gasping into the void of the closet; the door slammed shut with a resounding CLACK, and with that, the voices vanished with the screams of their victim. All was quiet once again.
Camilla’s disappearance did not go unnoticed, nor did it go uninvestigated. Her prolonged absence instilled within her friends and relations a state of concern that demanded the attention of the proper authorities, or, if you will, the police. And though due attention was paid by the local magistrate, they could determine neither her whereabouts nor the circumstances of her vanishing. Displeased with the results, private investigators were dispatched at the behest of the family, but their endeavors were equally inconclusive and also rather short; the fruitless conclusions of their searches provided little reason to finance their services at length. You need not be told that nothing was ever found, an aspect that both befuddled and dismayed all those who cared for her, but did little to diminish their diligence. Suffice to say, the unfortunate Camilla (an apt title as you may hopefully realize at present) was never seen again.
Interest in the bizarre occurrence eventually waned, and soon became the hidden lore of real estate agents charged with the sale of her former residence. The event was never brought to attention during the exhibitions with the rare exception of a client who delved thoroughly into the history of the house, and even then was not discussed at great length. Such diligence was necessary to procure the confidence necessary to ensure a purchase.
And so it came to pass that the house was indeed bought and sold, by and to a family of three: two parents with a lovely young daughter named Lydia, who at the time of the acquisition was but eight years of age. Neither Lydia nor her parents learned of the strange history of their adopted residence, nor did they ever hear the name nor see the face of the long-unfortunate Camilla. Through a coincidence rarely found outside the great dramatic works, Lydia came to occupy the very same room that once housed Camilla’s belongings, and her bed lay adjacent to the very same closet through which she was taken.
At this point, having fully realized the nature of the unfortunate Camilla’s fate, you may be worried that poor young Lydia was at risk for the same terrible outcome. Fear not, for, unlike the unfortunate Camilla before her, she did not become the unfortunate Lydia. Rather, she grew into a healthy young woman filled with promise and ambition, ultimately becoming a mother of three, and was never once visited in the night by strange unseen apparitions or strange poking through her bed sheets. Nor were her children subjected to such events.
However, it is important to note that Lydia’s childhood was not entirely pleasant. Though she was never subjected to the torments of the unfortunate Camilla, she did on innumerable occasions observe a disturbing reoccurring dream, which provided sensations of excitement and terror in a disquieting equilibrium:
It took place in what Lydia would come to privately call “The Empty Place,” for it was a world as bare as it’s expanse was wide. A young woman with long, scarlet hair floated in space as though she were a marionette hung upon lolling strings; she was stretched far and apart, with not a stitch of clothing to cover her skin; her face glittered with a coat of tears that torrentially poured from her eyes, and her mouth gaping open so widely, that it stood to envelop her entire head if her lips, which were horrendously curled upwards at the ends, would bend to such will. From her throat came the most explosive laughter as ever had been produced by voices human or otherwise, and most certainly more than an ear of either could withstand. But of all these things that Lydia did indeed see and hear in the depths of her slumber, none were more profound or noticeable than the incessant tickling. Though unseen, she could feel the presence of small and malicious hands digging into the woman’s body, curling and wiggling their tips into the soft folds of her skin, driving the woman’s form into outrageous convulsions, yet availing no relief from any position. The hands covered every inch of skin, probing for undiscovered nerves in the most sensitive and ticklish places they could find, including and especially the more intimate areas that a woman usually reserves for a lover. Endlessly did the woman scream the most desperate pleas for mercy, and endlessly was her begging ignored by the sadistic tickling members, which seemed to be encouraged by her plights to intensify their gift of suffering. It was a dream of a woman eternally tickled to tears by merciless forces whose machinations were driven into fervor with the sound of her inhuman screaming and maddening laughter, which shook the foundations of Lydia’s reality.
Lydia was not subjected to the position of witness on a daily basis, however, and once she moved from the house, the dream ceased to manifest at all. But greater than Lydia’s fortune at escaping the fate of the unfortunate Camilla was the ignorance of the woman entirely. She never took the visions as anything more than a bizarre dream, and as it were, had no inclination to investigate the identity of the former resident of her room. It would no doubt have been a truly horrendous experience to discover in a casual fashion that the visage of a naked, scarlet-haired woman who suffered hopelessly in a dream, was indeed a very real person who suffered a very real calamity; a calamity that could perhaps reoccur and label many others with the title of unfortunate.
By Amnesiac
The following is an account of a tragedy that befell a most unfortunate individual who was chosen by fate or chance (or perhaps no one at all) to a most torturous existence. Although the details of this event may not strike many as unfortunate during the reading, in fact, many a reader might long to fall into the same circumstances under the eccentric delusion of pleasure, it is advisable that one holds such wishes at bay until the full account has been completed. And the gravity of the outcome sufficiently weighed by the reader.
Camilla was the name of a most unfortunate woman. Her last name is of no consequence, as it plays no fundamental part in the recount of her fate. Rather, you should note that she came to be raised and to mature in the house of her parents. It was an unremarkable structure with two-stories and an attic accompanied by a basement; aluminum siding adorned with cerulean blue paint and a gray-shingled roof. The house itself is of no great importance; it is what transpired within that is significant to the story.
Of the three bedrooms in the house (one for her parents, one for the occasional guest and the third for herself), Camilla slept in the one at the northeast corner, whose windows overlooked the street outside. Her single-occupant bed lay across from a closet that peeked at her through the Venetian slits in the wooden door. For most of her childhood, the closet had no menacing properties, but it did possess a certain bizarre quality. It was prone, at night primarily, to produce certain noises without explanation or description; Camilla, the perceptive child that she was, took notice it on the occasions that they occurred. It sounded to her (as it would to anyone upon hearing it) like the whispering of many voices speaking to one another in secret, as if seeking to avoid detection by curious little girls in whose room they congregated.
At first, the prospect of mysterious voices was nothing less than delightful to the child; in her youth, she believed, as so many young children do, in the existence of faeries and elves and other mystical beings of lands both magical and wondrous. Many times, she would creep upon the closet with the stealth of a housecat only to ultimately throw open the door in hopes of catching a glimpse of such creatures before they retreated from the sight of mortal eyes. However, no attempt ever made yielded any results, nor did they allay her curiosity and ponderings on the source of the ever-evasive sounds. Such giddy explorations into the realm of fantasy were not to last indefinitely however; in her increasing age, such naive suppositions were replaced by experience and a learned-ness about the world at large, which dispelled the reality of fantasy realms and the creatures within as mere superstition, leftovers of primitive man‘s imagination. However, the deconstruction of the childhood world had no impact on the nightly “visitors” who occupied the unseen nether regions of her closet, and soon, that which once provided her childhood with wonder became a source of great and unendurable terror. Upon realizing that even her education and developing maturity would not deter the voices from their nightly conventions, Camilla’s fear became all-encompassing, and was quick to purchase a heavy lock for the closet door. Still, this precaution did little to allay her panic, and toiled away many a night in the throws of anxiety and tortured dreams, waking often in sheet soaked with sweat to inspect the lock upon the door; never once did it move an inch. Regardless of the lock’s efficiency, she never passed the opportunity to sleep over at the house of a friend during a soirée or an adolescent “girl’s night out,” for she was naught to sleep so well in her own room.
Despite her nocturnal ordeals, Camilla nevertheless grew into an otherwise healthy young woman. She attended the local high school and managed the many trials and tribulations of contemporary adolescence: a fluctuating circle of friends that underwent an annual filtration ritual; the early forays into the recreational pursuit of marijuana and truancy; the first sexual experiences with men and women alike; and the always expected conflicts with her parents. It was often said by her relatives that her dull auburn hair was an accurate signifier of her assertive nature, for it grew as long as the number of years that passes from her birth. And through all the changes of her body and mind, there was always one factor in her life that remained unchanged since childhood: the closet was never left unlocked at night.
Now it comes to the beginning of what may be referred to as the decline of Camilla’s fortune, although at first glance it may not appear as such. She completed her education shortly after her eighteenth birthday and thereafter departed to attend college on the East Coast, and for the four years of her stay, never once was she plagued by the incessant and unexplainable whispers that tortured her peace of mind since the early days of her youth. There was, however, as there so often is in life, a new torment to replace the old.
She shared her dorm room with three other girls of varying ages and levels of education class. Two of them were hardly discernible from each other as far as lifestyles are concerned, and the third was a lesbian with a wandering eye. Nothing truly lascivious ever transpired within the confines of their room (at least, nothing that would grace the covers of the oversized video boxes found in the back rooms of many a video store), but by the same token, nothing of an entirely wholesome nature transpired exclusively, either. As is to be expected in the course of residing with multiple individuals within the confines of a small room, suppressed feelings of claustrophobia had a tendency to manifest themselves in the form of rather silly antics, and there was much of that to be found in Camilla’s company. But it was quite by happenstance that a common activity came to occur as a ritual between the quartet, and in any other situation, such a ritual would be a rather comical and unimportant one had it not been so potently torturous for an unfortunate individual.
It must be stated now, although perhaps it should have been done earlier, that Camilla was a very ticklish person. This was hardly a revelation for her, as her childhood was filled with occasions where her feet and other nondescript regions of her body were exploited by the playful fingers of relatives and friends; but the later sessions were distinguished from the early ones by the quality of torture, which was an indelible element in the former. Once discovering that their roommate was quite the ticklish personality during a drunken romp, it was a staple of this ritual to gang upon her and tie her to her bunk with sheets and many personal belongings of sexual restraint. Many hours of many nights over many years were spent eliciting shrill screams of laughter and begging from the depths of Camilla’s self with the probing of soft tissue with nailed fingers, brushes and other utensils, many of them often purchased for the very purpose of the ritual than that of their manufacturers intentions.
Upon completing graduation, Camilla returned to the home of her youth and to the welcoming arms of her ecstatic parents. At that time they had intentions of retiring from their long tenure in suburbia for a more open and picturesque land to the West; it came upon them the inclination to leave their home in her care and legal entitlement. After a year of organizing the details of the arrangement, the transaction was completed and the home was finally left in her name; a circle completed, as dramaturgy would define. Unfortunately, as dramaturgy has also defined, a circle can, and most frequently is vicious.
All was well for Camilla, having completed her life’s academic ambitions and acquired a residence of her own; but it was not to remain so. Until the fateful night on which this tale gains its notoriety, Camilla had taken to sleeping in her old room, having long-since forgotten its terrorizing qualities. Perhaps it was the pervasive silence of the house or the unconscious awareness of her parents’ absence, but it came to pass that she was aroused from her sleep by a horrendous awareness of ignorance, much like the sudden recollection of a memory long forgotten. The pantheon of fears and anxiety from her childhood returned to her and at once began to freeze her blood and her muscles to the bone. She immediately left her old bedroom and ventured to that of her parents as quickly as her feet could carry her. Confidence now became her instrument, having finally engineered a plot to escape the shadows of her fears, and to sleep, for once, in her own home in peace. She slid under the blankets of her parents’ large bed and nestled herself quite comfortably into the pillows in preparation of a long and restful slumber. Slowly and heavily, her eyelids slid over the glistening orbs underneath and plunged her into tranquil darkness.
The Whispers.
Quietly. Effortlessly. Almost subliminal. But there they were. Tendrils of fatigue were stripped from their cerebral roots and the peaceful orb of night was lifted from her Camilla’s eyes. Every neuron in her brain began to pulse with sensations of panic and fear: her eyelids peeled back into folds and her pupils instinctively dilated; her heart began to beat faster to accommodate the rising levels of adrenaline; her muscles clenched and tensed, and her fingers clutched the sheets with such force that her knuckles gained a nauseating transparent quality; her nails bore into the palms of her hands, drawing a row of deep and painful impressions; sweat seeped from the thousands of pores of her face forming a lacquer of tension to her skin, and the hair on the back of her neck raised high as their follicles tightened with tension; assailed by erratic impulses, her mandible chattered incessantly, clacking her teeth against each other. With the speed of the most obsessed and tormented mind of Poe’s imagination, she turned her shaking head towards the closet door, to view in the instinctively foolish fashion akin to humans, the source of her now unlikely imagined fear.
Louder the voices grew, a veritable cacophony of hushed voices that were soft in their tone, but malicious in their intensity. The closet remained dark and impenetrable to the naked eye, and not an inch did the door move; little comfort, however, to Camilla, whose own mobility could hardly have been said as any different than that of the wooden barrier between her and whatever lay behind. She fixed her gaze upon the knob of the entrance so that should the slightest gesture of touch should disturb the gold-painted handle, the enchantment of paralysis that bound her to her fetal position should be broken, giving her the strength to fly to freedom; in a singular fashion, an event as equally potent provided the same effect. For in her staring at the door, she came to realize a most horrible oversight that so overwhelmed her that her trembling ceased and her panic gave way to numbing rigidity:
The closet door had no lock.
Camilla bounded from under the sheets and darted to the door, clutching the knob tightly, wrapping her fingers over each other, forming a vise of flesh and bone. She pressed her weight against the slack door and pressed it against the hinges as she could; she cursed herself for a fool for having left the sanctity of her own room to one where she had no installed defense against the whispers of the dark. Silence, suddenly, overtook the room as the voices disappeared. She reluctantly opened her eyes and peered into the gaps of the Venetian slats, but could neither see nor hear anything. With the greatest caution she dared afford, she relaxed her grip on the knob and released her weight.
The door flew open with such force, that it knocked her flat to the carpet onto her left flank. She withdrew her breath from the air and planted her hands on the floor to press herself back to her feet, but to no avail for the force that squeezed her ankles pulled her off her bearings. The rug rubbed her nightshirt up to her breasts as she was dragged backwards towards the closet space, her feet disappearing into the blackness. Her nails dug into the felt instinctively to stop the progress, but it was then that she felt the first sensation: it was a light, soft scrape against the soles of her missing feet, first one then two, followed by four and five. The number of raking sensations grew until there no longer remained the ability to count them. Camilla pursed her lips as the giggling spat its way through her teeth, giving way to a stream of involuntary chuckling and giggling. The raking progressed to cover the arches of her foot and then in between her toes, as though an object smoother than human skin was sliding luxuriously between the gaps and soft crevices of her feet, stroking the nerves to a tingling explosion. Her fingers collapsed with the loss of concentration and she fell on her chest to the floor. The tickling increased and sent her body into a frenzy of gnarled and twisted shapes as she tried to kick free of the vise-like grips that held her tight in place.
Her body flipped over, and her arms came to life, pinning themselves above her head, exposing her armpits and neck. Try as she might have, and try she did, she could not move them nor her feet despite the intensity of her struggle. The sensations crawled the length of her leg and scribbled into the pits of her knees, pressing gently into the base of her cap, then danced upwards to her inner thighs. She was laughing uproariously as the assailed skin folded with dents and impressions as though kneaded by unseen hands that wiggled and tortured her flesh with ticklish sensations. Her shirt flew open, and her belly began to jiggle as the dancing impressions scoured her stomach and ribs, driving the skin on her torso to squirm away from the touch without her control.
Tears began to form in her eyes as the tickling “hands” stroked the underside of her breasts and teased the tips of her nipples. Her navel felt as though worms were writhing and squiring about inside trying to climb out, driven to frenzy by capture. The scribbling feelings goosed her in the sensitive folds of her crotch, and sent Camilla’s voice into a harsh cackling that was broken into long bouts of gasps and hard coughs. The apparition touch finally ascended to her armpits, and dug in ferociously, wiggling the skin and tissue underneath as if it were unmoulded dough. Finally, her laughing tipped into a loud and horrible screech that wore itself into a light wheeze before falling to complete silence as her face contorted into a knotted brow and ear-splitting smile. Tears streamed from her face to the carpet floor, leaving a trail behind as she was dragged cackling and gasping into the void of the closet; the door slammed shut with a resounding CLACK, and with that, the voices vanished with the screams of their victim. All was quiet once again.
Camilla’s disappearance did not go unnoticed, nor did it go uninvestigated. Her prolonged absence instilled within her friends and relations a state of concern that demanded the attention of the proper authorities, or, if you will, the police. And though due attention was paid by the local magistrate, they could determine neither her whereabouts nor the circumstances of her vanishing. Displeased with the results, private investigators were dispatched at the behest of the family, but their endeavors were equally inconclusive and also rather short; the fruitless conclusions of their searches provided little reason to finance their services at length. You need not be told that nothing was ever found, an aspect that both befuddled and dismayed all those who cared for her, but did little to diminish their diligence. Suffice to say, the unfortunate Camilla (an apt title as you may hopefully realize at present) was never seen again.
Interest in the bizarre occurrence eventually waned, and soon became the hidden lore of real estate agents charged with the sale of her former residence. The event was never brought to attention during the exhibitions with the rare exception of a client who delved thoroughly into the history of the house, and even then was not discussed at great length. Such diligence was necessary to procure the confidence necessary to ensure a purchase.
And so it came to pass that the house was indeed bought and sold, by and to a family of three: two parents with a lovely young daughter named Lydia, who at the time of the acquisition was but eight years of age. Neither Lydia nor her parents learned of the strange history of their adopted residence, nor did they ever hear the name nor see the face of the long-unfortunate Camilla. Through a coincidence rarely found outside the great dramatic works, Lydia came to occupy the very same room that once housed Camilla’s belongings, and her bed lay adjacent to the very same closet through which she was taken.
At this point, having fully realized the nature of the unfortunate Camilla’s fate, you may be worried that poor young Lydia was at risk for the same terrible outcome. Fear not, for, unlike the unfortunate Camilla before her, she did not become the unfortunate Lydia. Rather, she grew into a healthy young woman filled with promise and ambition, ultimately becoming a mother of three, and was never once visited in the night by strange unseen apparitions or strange poking through her bed sheets. Nor were her children subjected to such events.
However, it is important to note that Lydia’s childhood was not entirely pleasant. Though she was never subjected to the torments of the unfortunate Camilla, she did on innumerable occasions observe a disturbing reoccurring dream, which provided sensations of excitement and terror in a disquieting equilibrium:
It took place in what Lydia would come to privately call “The Empty Place,” for it was a world as bare as it’s expanse was wide. A young woman with long, scarlet hair floated in space as though she were a marionette hung upon lolling strings; she was stretched far and apart, with not a stitch of clothing to cover her skin; her face glittered with a coat of tears that torrentially poured from her eyes, and her mouth gaping open so widely, that it stood to envelop her entire head if her lips, which were horrendously curled upwards at the ends, would bend to such will. From her throat came the most explosive laughter as ever had been produced by voices human or otherwise, and most certainly more than an ear of either could withstand. But of all these things that Lydia did indeed see and hear in the depths of her slumber, none were more profound or noticeable than the incessant tickling. Though unseen, she could feel the presence of small and malicious hands digging into the woman’s body, curling and wiggling their tips into the soft folds of her skin, driving the woman’s form into outrageous convulsions, yet availing no relief from any position. The hands covered every inch of skin, probing for undiscovered nerves in the most sensitive and ticklish places they could find, including and especially the more intimate areas that a woman usually reserves for a lover. Endlessly did the woman scream the most desperate pleas for mercy, and endlessly was her begging ignored by the sadistic tickling members, which seemed to be encouraged by her plights to intensify their gift of suffering. It was a dream of a woman eternally tickled to tears by merciless forces whose machinations were driven into fervor with the sound of her inhuman screaming and maddening laughter, which shook the foundations of Lydia’s reality.
Lydia was not subjected to the position of witness on a daily basis, however, and once she moved from the house, the dream ceased to manifest at all. But greater than Lydia’s fortune at escaping the fate of the unfortunate Camilla was the ignorance of the woman entirely. She never took the visions as anything more than a bizarre dream, and as it were, had no inclination to investigate the identity of the former resident of her room. It would no doubt have been a truly horrendous experience to discover in a casual fashion that the visage of a naked, scarlet-haired woman who suffered hopelessly in a dream, was indeed a very real person who suffered a very real calamity; a calamity that could perhaps reoccur and label many others with the title of unfortunate.
Enjoyable, Amn.
