oneortheother
TMF Expert
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2008
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Imagine a tickling story based thematically on Scary Movie. That's what this is. Enjoy.
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Morgana's Mansion: A Tickle Horror-Comedy, Part 1
In 1717:
“Morgana Lafey, we sentence you to death for the crime of being a witch,” said Judge Wilcox, who was stern and austere in his powdered wig.
“Oh, come on,” Morgana said, throwing up her hands, “just because I’m not very nice doesn’t mean I deserve to die.”
“Being a witch, not being a bitch,” said Judge Jane, who had her lips pursed in perpetual disapproval, “though if that were a crime, you’d be just as guilty.” She tossed her greying hair back and smiled thinly at Morgana.
The audience chamber ooohed at that.
“That’s not what your husband said to me last night,” Morgana shot back. “Then again, it’s a miracle he hasn’t hanged himself being married to a shrew like you.” With the two women standing so close to each other in the crowded courthouse, there was a rather powerful juxtaposition between the two. Morgana had skin of alabaster, striking green eyes, and long straight brown hair. Her eyes would occasionally glow yellow, but they were lovely most of the time. Judge Jane was an older, chunkier woman with more than a few grey hairs. However, her eyes were brown and rarely looked like the ones Satan might have, so she did have that in her favour.
Judge Jane looked like she wanted to spit at Morgana’s words, but before she could throw an insult back at Morgana, Judge Wilcox banged his gavel down repeatedly to quell the noise.
“Guards, take this woman away.”
“Wait, wait!” Morgana raised up her hands. She had thin arms, with fingers that were long and painted black. “What makes you think I’m a witch? What evidence do you have? Aside from my fact I had a mother who was stupid enough to name me after one of the most famous witches in history.”
“You just badmouthed your mother!” Judge Jane said. “Do you have no respect for your parents? A clear sign of an impure and tainted your soul!”
“You’re joking me. Outside the courthouse, you called me a ‘motherfucking harlot’.”
“A figure of speech. And I don’t doubt the fact you are a lewd and indecent woman.”
“And that’s my crime? Then again, your mother was a whore, so I could see how you could judge me from all the way up there.”
“Slander! People of the court, do we really want such a person in our fine town of Melas?”
There were murmurs of “no!” and “burn the witch!” but many people remained silent, particularly many of the men.
“I don’t really mind,” said the local Blacksmith. “She’s aight.”
“Cheers, darling,” said Morgana, winking at him, “if I get out of this with my head, I’ll pay you a visit.”
“Do you see?” Judge Jane shouted. “Such wanton behaviour!”
“I meant as a customer! He makes the best bondage equipment. He’s hooked me up with chains, stocks, handcuffs… I’m not really helping my case, am I?”
“Alright, enough of this mummer’s farce,” Judge Wilcox said, banging his gavel again. “All those who think she’s innocent of her crimes, raise your hands.”
About half of the court raised their hands.
“You’re joking me!” Judge Jane said. “Is she sleeping with all of you?”
“How would I have time? I’m spending every other night with that husband of yours.”
Judge Wilcox rubbed his eyes. “Good people of the court, could you explain your views to us?”
“She’s quite a good laugh,” said the local gravedigger. “And she’s good for business.”
“She’s great for sales on silver weaponry,” said the local weapons dealer. “And she’s easy on the eyes.”
“Garlic sales have gone up tenfold since she moved in,” said the greengrocer. “And she’s a nice butt.”
“Thanks, guys. Superstitious misconceptions for the win! Fyi, I’m a witch, not a vampire or werewolf.”
“Look at her, speaking freely of such dark knowledge!” Judge Jane pointed out.
“Don’t you start with that,” Morgana said. “Do you have any hard evidence against me? And don’t you dare make an erection joke.”
“I wasn’t going to! We have a witness.” Judge Jane beckoned, and a young, blonde-haired woman stepped forward.
“Oh, hey, wassup girl!” Morgana said. “That was some fun we had, huh?”
“Fun?” the blonde said. “You summoned vines, spirits, and imps, to tickle me!”
“Hey, they were succubi, not imps!” Morgana scratched the back of her head as all the eyes of the court turned to her. “Oh, that doesn’t really help my case, does it?”
“Nope.”
“She’s one eyewitness!” Morgana insisted. “I question her testimony! Objection, objection! Can’t we get 18th century CSI on this or something?”
“Who do you think you are, some kind of Ace Attorney?” Judge Wilcox said, “alright, all those in favour of executing the witch, raise your hands.”
About half the court raised their hands.
“Seems to be a tie,” Morgana said, with a smug smile playing across her full lips.
“That’s fine,” Judge Jane said. “Judge Wilcox likes to get some audience involvement, but this isn’t some kind of poxy democracy. All those whose votes matter, raise their hands.” The two judges raised their hands. “Alright, Morganna, off you go. We sentence you to drowning. This might hurt a bit.”
“That’s what your husband said,” Morganna threw back as the guards hauled her out of the courthouse.
“You always need to get the last word, don’t you?” Judge Jane rolled her eyes. “Don’t you get tired?”
“That’s what he said, too.”
“Bye, Morgana, see you never again.” The guards quickly took her to the nearby river tied rocks around her ankles and tossed her in.
“Well, let’s hope we never see her again,” Judge Jane said.
“Yup,” Judge Wilcox said, “so, drinks and orgies at my place?”
O-O-O
Present day:
For three childhood girls who had looked so similar in their youth, they had turned out to be quite different now. They sat back in the lecture hall while the professor gave out instructions for the final journalism project they would need to do to graduate.
The first girl was Lee, who sat with her back straight as a bow, scribbling furiously down in her leather-bound note pad. She pushed up her horn-rimmed glasses, ignoring the murmurs of conversation going on around her. She wondering with distaste why so many of her classmates were so lazy? Didn’t they realise that a strong final year project could mean working at the New York Times and some local rag?
“Hey, want to work together on this project? You Asians always get A’s, right?” The speaker was a guy with gelled back hair, parental-rebellion hand and arm tattoo, and muscular look of the perennial academic unachiever.
For a moment, Lee wondered what about her appearance would incur such a dose of yellow fever. She had dressed as if she were going to an interview, with a white blouse, a black pencil skirt, black stockings, and brown oxfords.
“Sorry, Chad, she’s mine,” a familiar said from behind. Once she glimpsed the flamboyant blue hair, there was no mistaking who it could be. Janis, the second girl.
“Erm, my name’s not Chad…”
“Begone! Shoo!” Janis said, waving the guy away with blue-painted fingers bedecked with silver rings. With her heavy eyeshadow, dark clothing, black combat boots, and piercings, she was the kind of girl that could come across as intimidating. “Another guy trying to get into your group for the easy A, huh?
“I bet he had a D on his mind, actually…” Lee said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, where’s Taylor?”
Janis waved a hand towards a crowd of ‘cool kids’ across the room. The third girl, Taylor sat with her long, tanned legs crossed, with a pink bejewelled flip flop dangling from the upper foot. Light glistened from her sparkling steely nail polish, her chunky silver toe rings, and her beaded anklet. She wore skinny jeans and a black crop top. It was no surprise that the buxom, blonde cheerleader who was also captain of the university tennis team would be popular. When Taylor caught them looking at her, she gave them a big smile and beckoned them to come over.
They shook their heads and asked her to come over. Taylor said a few more things to the group, giggled, and walked over. “Still too shy, huh? You don’t need to be so scared of them!”
“No, thank you,” Lee said.
“Not really my scene,” Janis said. “A bit too vanilla for me.”
Both girls looked at her.
“What?” Janis said. “You asked.”
“Have you guys given any thought to what topic you want to do for the project?” Lee asked as they sat down in a quieter corner of the room where they could discuss in private.
“Something scandalous and saucy, please,” Taylor said, faking an affected yawn. “If I have to type up another story on a lobster festival or something, I think I’ll go crazy.”
“You know, I’ve got something that might be suitable,” Janis said, “I heard a sort of folk tale, urban legend from my community.”
“Your fetish community?” Lee said with just a hint of disapproval.
“Oh, don’t give me that look.” Janis laughed. “We may all be a bunch of degenerates, but they know stuff.”
“What’s this story?” Taylor said, stroking her chin.
“A tale of witchcraft,” Janis said in a horror story voice, “of the paranormal, of a woman wrongly accused, and a possibly link to a mysterious death and disappearance just twenty years ago. And it’s almost certainly probably definitely a true story. Maybe. Possibly.”
O-O-O
“So, who was Morgana Lafey?” The three girls were chilling at Taylor’s favourite spa before they embarked on the gruelling five-hour road trip to Melas. They planned to spend a week in that small town gathering information on this story for their article.
“Well,” Janis said, zipping off her heavy black boots and pulling off her thick black socks, “she was supposed be some kind of freaky witch person. She apparently had her own cult of brainwashed followers.”
“That sounds cool,” Taylor said, slipping out of her flip flops. “I’m thinking gold today,” she said to the pedicurist. “It’s a rather auspicious colour, no? Symbolising victory, first place, wealth…”
“And vanity,” Lee said, dryly, as she rolled off her black stockings.
“Don’t be jelly because you’re too safe to do anything but red,” Taylor said with a playful smile on her face. She wiggled her long, thin feet that were tanned from her time at the beach. They were pretty well pampered from regular treatments, but coming to this salon had been more about enjoying the sensation of being spoiled for a day than anything more practical.
“Red is a lucky colour in Chinese culture, fyi,” Lee said, while her pedicurist dabbed crimson nail polish across her tiny toes. “Anyway, if this Morgana lady is ancient history, then, isn’t she? If this happened three hundred years ago, she would be.”
“Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Janis said, smiling and biting on her lower lip as her pedicurist’s hand accidentally stroked along her high, pale arch. Her feet were chunkier, a bit wider along the arches, and pale, with bold azure toenails painted in the same flamboyant hue as her hair. “Weird murder disappearance case took place at her old manor a few years ago. That could be an interesting lead for us to follow.”
“How many years ago was this?” Lee asked.
“A couple,” Janis said. “Or maybe it was like twenty. I don’t quite remember.”
“I see,” Taylor said. “How did you find out about this weirdass story?”
“That’s a good question,” Janis said. “Well, I was deviantArt—”
“—just the website for a sexual deviant like you,” Taylor said with a giggle.
“Naturally. And I was reading this erotica about her. The author has a big boner for writing stories about historical figures and their colourful sex lives. You wouldn’t believe the story he wrote about Cleopatra.”
“Tmi, Jan, tmi,” Lee said, shaking her head and chuckling.
“Anyway, that’s how I know about her.”
“So, what’s our plan?” Lee asked.
“Drive there, book a nice hotel, and write the shit out of this article,” Taylor said.
“Yup,” Janis said. “I suggest we split up once we get there. One of us could head to the local library for research, one of us could see if we could speak to the woman involved in the murder case, and the last one could investigate this witch. She sounded pretty famous, so there might be some kind of museum or memorabilia shop about her.”
“Dibs on the libr—”. Lee suddenly wrenched her foot back from the pedicurist’s grasp. “Woah, go easy on the scrubbing! My feet are really ticklish.”
“Good to know,” Janis muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ll speak to the lady,” Taylor said. “No fofence, but I think I’ve got the best interpersonal skills out of us three. She’s the one whose boyfriend was found dead, right?”
“Fiancé, yeah,” Janis said. “Fyi, you might not want to start with ‘did you kill your boyfriend’, Miss Interpersonal Skills.”
“But did she?” Lee asked
“He died in highly mysterious circumstances… so who can say? And she was blathering like a madwoman afterwards. Who knows? She owns a small business, so I bet we’ll find her at her shop.”
“Alright, let’s do it,” Taylor said, she raised a hand as if making an invisible toast. “Here’s to everything going smoothly!”
“What fun would that be?” Janis said, grinning. “Here’s to hoping that many things go wrong, and we have an adventure worth talking about.”
“Are you trying to jinx us, Jan?” Lee said.
“Jinxing us would be saying ‘nothing could possibly go wrong’. Oh, look what you made me say! You cheeky girl!”
All three of them laughed.
“You know, I realised something,” Taylor said. “I’m like super ticklish all over. Wouldn’t it be ironic if this woman turned out to be some kind of tickle witch?”
“That’s not even close to what irony means,” Lee said.
“And what an odd thing to say,” Janis said as Taylor shrugged in response. “It’s almost like blatant foreshadowing, or we’re in some kind of fetish story.”
O-O-O
The Melas Public Library was run by a bulldog of a woman, a large, spectacled librarian who scowled and frowned at every noise. When Lee had make the disrespectful mistake of coughing, the librarian had tutted, shook her head, and pointed to the large sign hanging which read in bold red letters ‘SILENCE IS GOLDEN’.
Lee poured over a stack of newspaper albums that were as tall as she was—sure, she was only a shade over five foot, but it was still a lot of books to go through. She knew the curious case of the dead boyfriend and the traumatized girl had taken place around two years ago, but she couldn’t exactly remember when. To make matters worse, many of the albums had not been indexed properly, so she had to go through them manually, page by page, and book by book, to find what she was looking for.
About half an hour in, she found herself starting to fidget in her stiff wooden chair. It was not like her—before her finals, she had all but lived in libraries, studying for hours and hours at a time. Yet there was something about this dusty old librarian which made her feel restless. She kept reaching down to scratch itches, more than once untying her brown brogue oxford shoes to get at difficult spot. She wondered if she had somehow picked up fleas within her first day here at this small rural town.
A few more tingly minutes later, Lee finally hunted down a newspaper report which pertained to the bizarre homicide. The story talked about how the young couple, Adam Walker, age 23, and Cosette Collins, age 21, had gotten engaged a few weeks before this terrible tragedy.
As Lee flipped past a page showing Collins looking resplendent in the wedding dress she had planned to wear, she felt another tingle, this one bigger, firmer, a bit harder to ignore. She shifted her weight in her chair, chewing on her lower lip. It felt like something light was brushing her butt, almost, almost like a feather. But that was absurd. Had some insect somehow gotten down her skirt? She fidgeted a bit more, her chair creaking and squeaking on the wooden floor, which made the librarian looked up from her book to throw out another disapproving stare at her.
Lee screwed up her face and contemplated patting a hand down there, despite the fact she knew it was terribly uncouth and most certainly an unladylike thing to do. But the sensations were growing stronger now. It definitely felt like a feather, though Lee for the life of her could not have said why she was so sure. She only just barely choked down a chortle as the feather stroked along her butt cheeks, exploring the abundance of sensitive, ticklish skin beneath her panties.
She was imagining this, she must be, Lee told herself. She forced herself to stare down at the preserved newspapers. Collins was a pretty girl—thin with curly brown hair, and her husband was a strongly-built man dirty blonde locks that fell to his shoulders. They looked really happy in the picture. Had she really murdered him?
A snicker passed her lips as her stoic resolve cracked for a moment. That feather was not going away, continuing to stroke up and down her bum, especially in between her cheeks, where she had never imagined she would be so ticklish. She knew her small feet were sensitive, which was precisely why she always wore lace-up shoes to protect them, but her butt had been an area less frequented by cheeky friends. She tensed up her body as she tried to focus on the words, but when she felt a second feather suddenly flick across her inner thighs, she jolted upright and let loose a girly squeak.
“Excuse me, miss,” the librarian said. Lee’s attentions had been so focused on the book and controlling her own reactions that she hadn’t noticed the Librarian looming over her. “This is a library. If you want to giggle like a child and make so much noise, I suggest you leave.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Lee said. She forced herself to keep her face straight, but that was easier said than done when she had two feathers stroking away merrily at such vulnerable spots.
What was going on? Risking everything, she plunged a hand down her skirt, hoping to swat or pat away whatever pest that had gotten inside somehow. But there was nothing there but her own flesh. This didn’t make any sense. Had Janis spiked her lunch with acid for a laugh?
She told herself to keep going, that surely this bad trip would pass before long. She felt the feather at her thigh reach down to the back of her knees, which she had been jiggling to try to take her mind off what was happening. She reached a hand down quickly to slap at where the feather was, as if she were trying to catch a mosquito, but she caught nothing. She stared at the back of her knee incredulously, as she phantom sensations of a feather twirling along them continued unabated.
The next article talked about the strange circumstance of the man’s cause of death and the woman’s disappearance, which was exactly why Lee had come to this place. But her ability to concentrate was seriously starting to wane under the unrelenting assault of these feathers. As if reading her thoughts about how her feet were her bad spot, a new feather had somehow crept into her right shoe. She scrunched up her tiny toes, stomped her foot up and down to try to squash the invader, but it had no effect. Despite her shoes, despite her black nylon stockings, despite her best efforts, the feather had free rein to wander wherever it liked. It currently nestled in the nook between her two smallest toes, spinning away as Lee’s small hands balled up into fists that crinkled up the page she was holding.
“Focus, focus, focus…” Lee repeated under her breath. The engaged couple had decided to wander around the district looking for houses they could move into once they got married. Then, one foggy winter’s night, they had gone house hunting and not returned for two full days, in which the man had died from a heart attack and the woman had rambled incoherencies at the police station when they had picked her up on the curb, half-naked.
Lee felt half-naked to the feathers that were continuing to pester her body, especially as it seemed that her clothing offered her no more protection than bra and panties would. The feather at her bum had blessedly move on, but it was no victory as it had gone up towards her small, firm breasts. It slid across her chest in slow figure eights, circling the sides of her breasts, changing pace after each full ‘8’ to brush across her rapidly stiffening nipples. She didn’t dare look down to see if they were showing through her blouse—had Taylor spiked her with some kind of aphrodisiac? All the while, the feather at her foot continued twirling between each of her toes, one at a time, while the one at her thighs continued to drifting dangerously closer to her womanhood with every circuit across her legs.
Argh, it was just too much, too much, Lee thought with a rising panic as the feathers forced a permeant grimacing smile on her face. She whipped out her smartphone, took a few quick pictures so she could look at them later, then pushed up from her chair. She needed to get back to their hotel, needed to shower, needed to sleep this off.
“Aren’t you going to put those books back, miss?” the librarian called in a hard voice.
For a moment, lee wished she was the kind of person who could have just ignored the old woman and ran, but she had been raised by her family to be meek and respectful, so she ran back to the books on shaking legs, her lower lip trembling with laughter that was barely held in check.
But there were so many books, so many of those heavy albums. And Lee’s resistance was all but extinguished having been teased and tormented by these ghostly feathers for near on an hour. She was so focused on the feathers, especially the one at her soles, that she didn’t see where she was going and tripped. On the floor, the teasing feathers decided to stop being so nice and went full force. When they swept across her body, they multiplied, till it felt like dozens of feathers were tickling her everywhere and anywhere as she squealed and slapped at her body.
And then suddenly, it stopped. Her heart pounded hard in her chest as the frowning librarian looked over her, muttering something about “stoners” and “kids these days”. A small crowd had gathered around her. Blushing, Lee adjusted her glasses, murmured a quick apology, and ran as quickly as she could.
She could only hope those spectral feathers wouldn’t somehow follow her home. What was going on?
O-O-O
Janis wondered what kind of people would open a curio store about a woman like Morgana Lafey. She supposed it was like those shops she knew that existed for Jack the Ripper, Hitler, or other sinister yet fascinating figures of history.
“Howdy!” said the tall, dark-haired man behind the counter as she pushed the door of the shop open, which set a bell to lightly tinkling. He had had the easy smile of a lifelong salesman, and under his bow tie, he wore a name tag which read, 'Gale'. “Here to learn a bit about one of Melas's most infamous figures?”
“You betcha. Mind giving me a tour of your wares?”
“Sure thang. Excuse me while I call for my wife. She's the historian in the family. I just do the grunt work. Lola! Darling?”
“Yeah, hun?” Lola popped her head out of a storeroom. She looked to be about the same age as Gale--late thirties, perhaps. She had sandy hair, freckles, and large glasses with round frames.
“Give this little lady a tour, would ya?”
“Sure thing. You new in town?”
“Yeah, just here to write an article on Miss Lafey, in fact.”
“Righto,” Lola said with a warm smile. “Well, I’m happy to show you what I know. Just give us a shout-out in your article, okay? We’re a mom and pop business, so we’d really appreciate it.”
“No prob.”
“Great! Well, follow me.” Lola led her to a bookshelf with titles like ‘Morgana Lafey: Sorceress or Swindler?’, ‘Real Witches’, and ‘The Great Witch of Melas’. “Morgana Lafey was a strange lady. There’s so many conflicting stories about her that no one is quite sure who she was. But by all accounts, she was one fine-looking lady, and people flocked to her.”
“What do you mean they ‘flocked to her’?” Lanis asked as she picked up a little bobble-head figurine of Morgana.
“Well, some people say she was a cultist. She did the whole demon worship thing. But other sources have said she was basically like a hippie. But she had plenty of friends. Plenty of enemies, too.”
“How’d she die?”
“Judges sentenced her to drown. She drowned in a river not too far from her, in fact. We call it Morgana’s Lake.”
“Charming. You know, I have to say I’m not really understanding this part of the shop,” Janis said as she walked towards a corner which had racks of feathers, scrub brushes, rope, and other tools which bore a remarkable resemblance to what you might see at the BDSM section of a sex toy store.
“That’s a fine question, miss. Well, Morgana was somewhat of a revolutionary.”
“You’re kidding me. I thought she was a witch!”
“Well, it’s remarkable how those two threads coincide. One generation’s witch can be another generation’s feminist. Anyway, it’s not entirely clear why, but she revolutionised the torture industry.”
“Really? That’s not exactly what comes to mind when you say ‘revolutionary’.”
Lola shrugged. “Well, there are different kinds of revolutions. Anyway, Miss Lafey made friends with the local torturers in town, and she made all kinds of fuss. She had townfolk signing petition about how inquisitors suffered from so much stress because of the nature of their jobs, and how their clothes stank of blood, and stuff.”
“You’re joking.”
“They even started up a Torturer’s Union. What happened is they advocated—mainly Miss Lafey, really—for a new method of torture. Using tickling as a method of torture would reduce the mental stress associated.”
“Seriously? That’s my fetish.”
Lola gave a nervous chuckle. “I think it might have been Miss Lafey’s, too. After they successfully pushed this change through, she went and broke a bunch of laws just to get herself thrown in jail. The torture methods not only utterly failed to break her pride, but they seemed to have had a rather… titillating effect.”
“Nice.”
“Not really! Shortly afterwards, they had her tried on some other minor charges to cover up their embarrassment at being tricked. They were a prickly sort back then, easily offended.”
“So different from people nowadays,” Janis said, wanly. “Anyway, thanks for your help, Lola. I think I’ve learned enough. I’m gonna pick out a few books now.”
“Well… there is something else,” Lola said, averting her eyes. “We, erm, my husband and I, we could offer you an authentic witch experience. J-just because you’ve shown such an interest in Morgana Lafey! It could be really helpful for your article. Y’know, experiencing what it would really be liked to be tried. What do you say?”
“Hmmm.” Janis eyed the racks of implements she now recognised as obviously being tools of tickle torture. If she said yes, she was almost guaranteeing herself to being tickled silly. It was probably going to be a bit like that crazy Gimp scene in Pulp Fiction. “It’s sounds like a terrible idea. Let’s do it.”
Lola’s big brown eyes lit up. “Gale!” she called. “We got a taker!”
And in a flash, the store was closed, and Janis was led into a storeroom and strapped down to what Gale and Lola eagerly described as “an antique stockade”. For an antique, it had certainly been well-preserved as Janis’s ankles and wrists weren’t going anywhere. There were four padded holes in the stockade—the outer two bigger ones for her ankles and the two smaller inner ones for her wrists. Her body was slightly bent forward as the holes for her arms and legs were right next to each other in the same board of dark wood.
They stripped off her black boots and thick socks, cooing with relish at Janis’s freshly pedicured feet with those clean, shiny toenails.
“Well, well, witch, looks like you’re in our clutches,” Gale said in a low, rasping voice that made Janis almost want to laugh. He was trying so hard to sound menacing, though the effect was ruined as he still wore that nerdy bowtie. “And these soft tootsies of yours look like they won’t stand a chance against our righteous inquisition.”
“Indeed, witch!” Lola said. “Confess your crimes!”
“And what will happen if I do?” Janis said. She was genuinely curious. They weren’t going to like drown her or anything, were they? Surely that was a bit too hardcore, even for these guys.
“If you confess, then naturally, you’ll be punished. With more tickling.”
“Ah, so you’ve got me in quite the Catch-22,” Janis sad, and she saw their smiles widen at the verisimilitude of her statement. “Alright, bring it on, bitches.”
“You will regret those words, heathen!”
Janis’s stubby toes curled up when she saw them reach for their first tool—and they had a veritable armoury of tools, apparently, all laid out for when a customer requested this ‘authentic experience’. But she saw it was string, and she let her painted toes relax. So, they were going to tie her toes back? That made sense, she supposed, though it was a bit depressingly mainstream.
It was for this reason that she let loose a series of squeals when she felt the coarse, itchy wool of the yarn start to string through her toes. They both had a length of string and were dragging it through the undersides of her sensitive digits, as if her toes were teeth that needed thorough flossing. Janis was shocked by how much it tickled. The gap between her two smallest toes was particularly vulnerable to the rough surface of the string worming around there, and her two torturers exchanged delighted looks when they discovered this highly sensitive spot existed symmetrically on both feet.
After they flossed a few more times, they pulled the yarn between every gap at once so they could hit every spot between the toes on both feet at once, despite the wild scrunching and wiggling of her round, chubby toes. By then, Janis’s flamboyant hair was a sweaty mess, though she had not begged them once to stop.
Her torturers finished by using the string to tie Janis’s big toes back, so her feet were not taut and completely helpless.
“Ready to confess?”
Janis shook her head.
“This witch is one tough customer, ain’t she, Inquisitor Lola?”
“Right you are, Inquisitor Gale. Best we bust out the big guns.”
Janis let loose an embarrassingly girly squeal when she felt the rough bristles of a thick, handled scrub brushes sink into the soft, tender flesh of her arches. After the toe torment she had just endured, this was something completely different. They weren’t as mind-numbingly effective as hairbrushes with plastic tines on her bare feet, but they did the job well, filling every wrinkle and crevice along her arches with innumerable bristles. Those brushes were working ticklish wonders on her soft arches, so her two torturers ensured they never broke contact for a moment as they scrubbed from heel to the ball of the foot, with the main host of bristles always assaulted those arches. Thousands of tiny bristles run up and down each of my soles,
Tears were starting streak down her cheeks and cause her makeup to run as she hiccupped and howled with laughter.
“Are you okay, miss?” Gale said suddenly in the soft, caring voice of the shopkeeper. “Is this too taxing for you?”
Janis licked her lips and looked at them. “What are you talking about, inquisitors? Bring it on!”
Gale and Lola exchanged a gleeful look.
“The heathen speaks true,” Lola said with a wicked grin on her face. “We really ought not to give her time to recover, after all, in a real interrogation, we wouldn’t delay in doing something like this!” She grinned and started buffing the scrub brush over Janis’s right arch once more, though this time, her other hand wandered up to those unoccupied toes, and she began flicking her long fingernails across their pads.
“Well spoken, my dear,” Gale said. He introduced the scrub brush to Janis’s squirming toes, while he pressed a firm fingernail into the center of her soft arch and began stroking it up and down. “Confess, witch! Confess!’
Janis laughed. She laughed so hard. She laughed because of the absurdity of her situation, she laughed because of how absurdly ticklish her feet were, and most of all, she laughed because of how much fun she was having. She was sure her friends were having a more boring time than her.
O-O-O
“Thanks for taking the time to see me, Ms. Harrington,” Taylor said to the woman in the pinstriped suit. They were in the head office of a local gym. Taylor gazed out to the swimming pool behind the seated woman as the sunlight shimmered from those cool, refreshing waters. She’d love to chill in that pool a bit later if she had time.
“Please, call me Valerie,” said the business lady. Valerie had long silvery blonde hair reached her shoulders, dark-rimmed glasses, and full lips accentuated with dark red lipstick. When Taylor noticed the silver rings on this older woman’s manicured fingers, the silver anklet she wore over her high heels, and the glittering toenail polish that showed from those open-toed stilettos, Taylor thought she was looking like her future, though Valerie was shorter and paler than she was. Valerie should have been in her early forties, but she looked like a lady in her mid-thirties—Taylor could only hope she aged as well as this lady had. “And it’s no problem—business is slow in the mornings, and I’m happy to help some kids out on a newspaper project.”
“Well,” Taylor said, looking down. She played with her shoes a bit to buy time. “It may be a bit of an awkward topic. I want to ask about that time you went to Morgana Lafey’s house with your late fiancée.”
To her relief, Valerie laughed. “Oh, that? It was a silly old thing, really. Johnny and I were dared to spend a night in that creepy old manor, and being the kids that we were, we went off and did it.”
“What was it like in there?”
“Dusty? Creepy? I don’t remember it that well.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember having sex with him in Morgana Lafey’s bed,” Valerie said with a chuckle. “I remember raiding her wine cellar and uncorking a three-hundred-year-old vintage.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It was,” Valerie said with a fond smile. The smile died. “But then… argh, my head hurts. I guess we must have drank a bit too much. We got lost in the house. We panicked. And the dusty. Johnny had been an asthmatic, and he’d left his inhaler. Everything else is a blur. I remember the cops finding us later, and Johnny being dead…”
“I’m sorry, Valerie. I know she can’t be easy for you.”
“It’s fine. It’s well in the past. I remarried, and I have a beautiful son. He works for me as a lifeguard in fact.” She pointed out the window to the buff, blonde boy with sunglasses and a six-pack wandering the pool. Taylor had to resist the urge to drool.
“Where is this house, by the way? I haven’t been able to track it down.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s a bit out of the way in the hills. I’ll give you some directions if you want.”
“Okay, thank you… I have to ask, is there anything else you remember? Anything sort of otherworldly?”
Valeria brought a varnished nail to her chin as she thought. “I remember we played around in the basement. There was some kind of… dungeon down there. I must have got locked in one of those devices by accident.” She shivered. “There were things down there. Dark things.”
“You mean rats, right?”
Valerie sighed. “I don’t know. I would tell you not to go there, but you wouldn’t listen, would you?”
Taylor shrugged. “YOLO.”
“Well, I suppose. That’s what Johnny thought as well. The young are not immortal. Be careful.”
“I will. I’ll be there with my friends, and we’ll take precautions. By the way, do you mind if I use your pool before I go?”
“Feel free. Reception can hook you up with a locker.”
At the pool in a pink swimsuit she had luckily had the foresight to bring, Taylor cooed under the sun’s warm kisses. Her sequined flip flops slapped on the floor as she walked towards a pool chair in the centre of the pool. With her designer sunglasses, flowing blonde hair, long, shapely legs, and ample bosom, Taylor knew she turned heads, and with any luck…
“Hey, I’m Tyler,” said the handsome lifeguard she had spotted earlier, Valerie’s son. He looked to be about her age and well up for it.
“I’m Taylor,” she said. She wiggled her gold-painted toes to watch them glitter in the sun like precious metals. She caught him staring at them, at her toe rings, and she realised that maybe a quick foot worship session would not be out of the question—nice. She was no stranger to that sort of thing, as many a boy had become quick infatuated with her goddess soles. “Wow, our names sound so alike! Let’s like hangout.”
He laughed. “Right-on.”
The two of them retreated to a more discrete corner of the pool, where they made small-talked for a while mischievous hands wandered along certain sensitive areas.
“Hey, you want a blunt?” Tyler said, after such a session came to an explosive end.
“Sure. Pot?”
“Not exactly. More a local delicacy.” He pulled out a lighter and a white rollup from his shorts.
“Just an fyi, if you try to roofie me, I’m not calling the cops, but I’m coming back with her my posse and baseball bats,” Taylor said, taking the joint with a wink that managed to appear both flirtatious and intimidating.
She took a puff, and everything began to spin, like she had been sucked into a cyclone. When she blinked and the world stopped blurring, the world had become hellish. The blue sky had turned red, her chair had become some kind of booby trap that kept her wrists and ankles shackled in place, and in sweet Tyler’s place were three little imps who floated in the air, leering at her.
Taylor tried to scream, but her mouth seemed to have stopped working. The arms of the plastic she had been lounged in had turned into green, scaly arms that grabbed her by the wrists and spread them. At her ankles, slimy wet tentacles had spread from the ground to wrap around her shins and legs.
“Hi, Taylor!” said the first of the three imps. Taylor squinted, and she suddenly saw that all three of the black and silver demons had faces she recognised. They were about the size of cats, albeit cats with bat-like wings, horns, and pink hair. One had Lee’s cooler than ice look, one had Janis’s cheeky smile, and the last one looked like the portrait of Morgana Lafey.
“Wassup, girls,” Taylor said. “What’s going on here?”
“Kinky fun?” Janis imp offered.
“Probably a bad trip,” Lee imp said.
“Tickle magic, yo,” Morgana imp said, wiggling her long black talons. “Alright, let’s get to it. I have a hair appointment in an hour.”
Taylor’s mouth soon remembered how to laugh. And the three flying imps dug in. Janis imp dove for Taylor’s toned and trim stomach, wiggling her claws all over but aiming in particular for that cute pierced navel. The claws left her tummy red from their sharp and fierce touches.
Lee imp approached the tickling with a methodical curiosity. At Taylor’s soft, smooth hollows, she lightly them stroked up and down, up and down, up and down. Her eyes constantly darted from those quivering armpits to Taylor’s flushed face as if she was getting empirical data on the effectiveness of her technique.
Morgana imp hovered at Taylor’s right foot, and this imp had a tongue that seemed unfairly long for a creature of that size—it was the kind of tongue you expected from a serpent. The long, slithery tongue slid around her tanned soles till they were wet as if she had just stepped out of the pool. They constantly snaked through the toes, especially aiming for the second toes where those shimmering silver toe rings were.
“It tihihickles! It thihihickles!”
“That’s the point, sweetie,” Morgana imp said. She stopped using her tongue to rake her claws up and down the soles rapidly as fresh tentacles sprouted to ensnare those big toes to keep the foot taut and in place. “Cootchie cootchie coo!” she said, aiming her hands at those sparkling golden toes of hers.
“Pretty fun, huh?” Janis imp purred. “I’m a little jelly of you. It’s pretty hot to get triple teamed…” She triple-attacked Taylor’s upper body as soon as she finished talking. Her tongue crept into Taylor’s belly button while two claws pounced on her quivering sides.
Lee imp had discovered that the very centres of Taylor’s soft spots were a place where even the lightest motion set the blonde to squeaking, so she focused her claws on those spots. She drilled circles, shapes, and crisscrossing lines all over that area. Taylor’s biceps strained against the arms that held her in place, but her 120 miles per hour tennis serving speed did her no good her, as every time she seemed to be making a bit of traction, a touch to those armpits would render her muscles to jelly.
And at Taylor’s legs, more tentacles appeared, probing along her knees, her inner thighs, stroking dangerously, dangerously close to her secret lady spot…
“Shitballs!” Taylor exclaimed as consciousness came flooding back to her.
“How was it?” Tyler asked. He was still sitting beside her, bathed in sunlight.
“Well,” She said, blinking and examining her hands. They glittered in the strong sunlight, her rims and golden fingernails beaming. She was sitting back in her white poolside lounge chair. “That was freakiest trip I ever had in my life. Got another?”
O-O-O
“So, how did it go?” the girls asked each other all at the same time as they rendezvoused at the hotel room they had booked for their week of research. They all sat on the bed, barefoot and in their pyjamas.
“It was okay,” Taylor said, wondering if she should mention her drug-fuelled hallucinations of tickle imps.
“Could’ve gone worse,” Lee said, pondering if she should mention the imaginary feathers that had stoked her half to orgasm.
Janis looked at her two best friends. Taylor kept looking down at her nails. Lee was chewing on her lower lip. Without a doubt, they were both hiding something.
“Mine went fine,” Janis said, “Okay, I can tell we’re all bullshitting. I got the crap tickled out of me by these two shopkeepers. How about you guys?”
“When I was in the library, I felt feathers tickling me all over. But when I patted my body, there was nothing there.” Lee crossed her arms and tched. “I don’t suppose either of you drugged me with ecstasy or something, did you? Because that would be the only natural explanation.”
“What? I had tickle demons gang up on me!” Taylor hugged herself as if she could still feel the claws that had raked all over her sensitive bodies. “And one of them had Morgana’s face…”
“My experience was a bit more mundane,” Janis said, stroking her chin. “But they did mention Morgana was a huge fan of tickle torture. And now that I think about it, it is rather convenient that they happened to be tickle fetishists themselves… after they had worn me out, the man rather casually asked if I would like to help tickle his wife for a bit of revenge. That’s not quite normal behaviour, is it?”
Of course, Janis had accepted, taking a particular amount of joy on using the string and scrub brushes that had proved so effective on her on Lola’s wrinkly feet, but that was something she probably didn’t need to mention at this particular juncture in time.
“So, we are actually dealing with a tickle witch, aren’t we?” Taylor said. “What does that make us? Ghostbusters?”
“This could still be explained away with science,” Lee said, “I might have—I don’t know—got some food poisoning or something.”
“Yeah, and I did puff on a blunt before those tickle imps appeared,” Taylor said with a shrug.
“I’m not going to ask why you did that when you asked a forty-year old woman about the murder of her fiancée,” Lee said. “Anyway, what’s our plan?”
“Buy some garlic?” Taylor offered.
“That’s for vampires, nimrod,” Janis said.
“Well, what else can we do?” Taylor said. “Buy a proton pack? Call Danny Phantom? Get Casper to help us?”
“Your pop culture references aren’t helping,” Lee said. “What are you suggesting? We give up and go home?”
“You know, I’m surprised you aren’t more worried about this. Your name is literally Lee, as in ticklee. You know you’re going to be tickled like crazy, right?”
“Will changing my name to ‘Cindy’ help? Come on, there’s not much I can do about my name!”
“Alright, let’s all calm down, ladies,” Janis said. “What we need is a plan. How about we go to this abandoned manor—”
“—aka, the haunted house,” Lee interjected.
“Yeah, there. We go there, take a quick look around, get some pictures, then we skedaddle.”
“I think that’s a good plan,” Taylor said, “but there’s no way we end up sticking to it. I mean like zero percentage chance that is what happens.”
“Not with that kind of attitude!” Lee said, her eyes wide and aghast.
“Hey, I’m just saying.”
“Well, I suppose no plan survives first contract with the enemy,” Janis said. “But still. Try to stick to it? Anyway, let’s get a good night’s sleep and head out first thing in the morning.”
“For real? I’m more an 11 a.m. waking up time kind of girl…” Taylor said.
“We are not staying there once the sun goes down!” Janis said. “Have you never seen any horror movies? Like not even a single one?”
“Alright, fine, fine… You guys will help wake me up, right?” Taylor said as she sat up from the bed and went to the fridge.
“Sure thing,” Janis said, winking at Lee and wiggling her fingers in an unmistakably tickly motion.
Lee shook her head. “Why do I have the feeling we’ve already caught some kind of tickle bug?”
“Enough talk about that,” Taylor said as she pulled a six pack of beer from the fridge and handed one to each of her friends. “Let’s drink! A toast to our imminent success!”
As the girls lifted up their cans, they all heard a high, whispering, feminine voice that cut through the room like a chilly wind. “Cheers…”
The girls looked at each other. Taylor downed her can and reached for another. “Well, that was fucking weird, huh? Another drink?”
----
Morgana's Mansion: A Tickle Horror-Comedy, Part 1
In 1717:
“Morgana Lafey, we sentence you to death for the crime of being a witch,” said Judge Wilcox, who was stern and austere in his powdered wig.
“Oh, come on,” Morgana said, throwing up her hands, “just because I’m not very nice doesn’t mean I deserve to die.”
“Being a witch, not being a bitch,” said Judge Jane, who had her lips pursed in perpetual disapproval, “though if that were a crime, you’d be just as guilty.” She tossed her greying hair back and smiled thinly at Morgana.
The audience chamber ooohed at that.
“That’s not what your husband said to me last night,” Morgana shot back. “Then again, it’s a miracle he hasn’t hanged himself being married to a shrew like you.” With the two women standing so close to each other in the crowded courthouse, there was a rather powerful juxtaposition between the two. Morgana had skin of alabaster, striking green eyes, and long straight brown hair. Her eyes would occasionally glow yellow, but they were lovely most of the time. Judge Jane was an older, chunkier woman with more than a few grey hairs. However, her eyes were brown and rarely looked like the ones Satan might have, so she did have that in her favour.
Judge Jane looked like she wanted to spit at Morgana’s words, but before she could throw an insult back at Morgana, Judge Wilcox banged his gavel down repeatedly to quell the noise.
“Guards, take this woman away.”
“Wait, wait!” Morgana raised up her hands. She had thin arms, with fingers that were long and painted black. “What makes you think I’m a witch? What evidence do you have? Aside from my fact I had a mother who was stupid enough to name me after one of the most famous witches in history.”
“You just badmouthed your mother!” Judge Jane said. “Do you have no respect for your parents? A clear sign of an impure and tainted your soul!”
“You’re joking me. Outside the courthouse, you called me a ‘motherfucking harlot’.”
“A figure of speech. And I don’t doubt the fact you are a lewd and indecent woman.”
“And that’s my crime? Then again, your mother was a whore, so I could see how you could judge me from all the way up there.”
“Slander! People of the court, do we really want such a person in our fine town of Melas?”
There were murmurs of “no!” and “burn the witch!” but many people remained silent, particularly many of the men.
“I don’t really mind,” said the local Blacksmith. “She’s aight.”
“Cheers, darling,” said Morgana, winking at him, “if I get out of this with my head, I’ll pay you a visit.”
“Do you see?” Judge Jane shouted. “Such wanton behaviour!”
“I meant as a customer! He makes the best bondage equipment. He’s hooked me up with chains, stocks, handcuffs… I’m not really helping my case, am I?”
“Alright, enough of this mummer’s farce,” Judge Wilcox said, banging his gavel again. “All those who think she’s innocent of her crimes, raise your hands.”
About half of the court raised their hands.
“You’re joking me!” Judge Jane said. “Is she sleeping with all of you?”
“How would I have time? I’m spending every other night with that husband of yours.”
Judge Wilcox rubbed his eyes. “Good people of the court, could you explain your views to us?”
“She’s quite a good laugh,” said the local gravedigger. “And she’s good for business.”
“She’s great for sales on silver weaponry,” said the local weapons dealer. “And she’s easy on the eyes.”
“Garlic sales have gone up tenfold since she moved in,” said the greengrocer. “And she’s a nice butt.”
“Thanks, guys. Superstitious misconceptions for the win! Fyi, I’m a witch, not a vampire or werewolf.”
“Look at her, speaking freely of such dark knowledge!” Judge Jane pointed out.
“Don’t you start with that,” Morgana said. “Do you have any hard evidence against me? And don’t you dare make an erection joke.”
“I wasn’t going to! We have a witness.” Judge Jane beckoned, and a young, blonde-haired woman stepped forward.
“Oh, hey, wassup girl!” Morgana said. “That was some fun we had, huh?”
“Fun?” the blonde said. “You summoned vines, spirits, and imps, to tickle me!”
“Hey, they were succubi, not imps!” Morgana scratched the back of her head as all the eyes of the court turned to her. “Oh, that doesn’t really help my case, does it?”
“Nope.”
“She’s one eyewitness!” Morgana insisted. “I question her testimony! Objection, objection! Can’t we get 18th century CSI on this or something?”
“Who do you think you are, some kind of Ace Attorney?” Judge Wilcox said, “alright, all those in favour of executing the witch, raise your hands.”
About half the court raised their hands.
“Seems to be a tie,” Morgana said, with a smug smile playing across her full lips.
“That’s fine,” Judge Jane said. “Judge Wilcox likes to get some audience involvement, but this isn’t some kind of poxy democracy. All those whose votes matter, raise their hands.” The two judges raised their hands. “Alright, Morganna, off you go. We sentence you to drowning. This might hurt a bit.”
“That’s what your husband said,” Morganna threw back as the guards hauled her out of the courthouse.
“You always need to get the last word, don’t you?” Judge Jane rolled her eyes. “Don’t you get tired?”
“That’s what he said, too.”
“Bye, Morgana, see you never again.” The guards quickly took her to the nearby river tied rocks around her ankles and tossed her in.
“Well, let’s hope we never see her again,” Judge Jane said.
“Yup,” Judge Wilcox said, “so, drinks and orgies at my place?”
O-O-O
Present day:
For three childhood girls who had looked so similar in their youth, they had turned out to be quite different now. They sat back in the lecture hall while the professor gave out instructions for the final journalism project they would need to do to graduate.
The first girl was Lee, who sat with her back straight as a bow, scribbling furiously down in her leather-bound note pad. She pushed up her horn-rimmed glasses, ignoring the murmurs of conversation going on around her. She wondering with distaste why so many of her classmates were so lazy? Didn’t they realise that a strong final year project could mean working at the New York Times and some local rag?
“Hey, want to work together on this project? You Asians always get A’s, right?” The speaker was a guy with gelled back hair, parental-rebellion hand and arm tattoo, and muscular look of the perennial academic unachiever.
For a moment, Lee wondered what about her appearance would incur such a dose of yellow fever. She had dressed as if she were going to an interview, with a white blouse, a black pencil skirt, black stockings, and brown oxfords.
“Sorry, Chad, she’s mine,” a familiar said from behind. Once she glimpsed the flamboyant blue hair, there was no mistaking who it could be. Janis, the second girl.
“Erm, my name’s not Chad…”
“Begone! Shoo!” Janis said, waving the guy away with blue-painted fingers bedecked with silver rings. With her heavy eyeshadow, dark clothing, black combat boots, and piercings, she was the kind of girl that could come across as intimidating. “Another guy trying to get into your group for the easy A, huh?
“I bet he had a D on his mind, actually…” Lee said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, where’s Taylor?”
Janis waved a hand towards a crowd of ‘cool kids’ across the room. The third girl, Taylor sat with her long, tanned legs crossed, with a pink bejewelled flip flop dangling from the upper foot. Light glistened from her sparkling steely nail polish, her chunky silver toe rings, and her beaded anklet. She wore skinny jeans and a black crop top. It was no surprise that the buxom, blonde cheerleader who was also captain of the university tennis team would be popular. When Taylor caught them looking at her, she gave them a big smile and beckoned them to come over.
They shook their heads and asked her to come over. Taylor said a few more things to the group, giggled, and walked over. “Still too shy, huh? You don’t need to be so scared of them!”
“No, thank you,” Lee said.
“Not really my scene,” Janis said. “A bit too vanilla for me.”
Both girls looked at her.
“What?” Janis said. “You asked.”
“Have you guys given any thought to what topic you want to do for the project?” Lee asked as they sat down in a quieter corner of the room where they could discuss in private.
“Something scandalous and saucy, please,” Taylor said, faking an affected yawn. “If I have to type up another story on a lobster festival or something, I think I’ll go crazy.”
“You know, I’ve got something that might be suitable,” Janis said, “I heard a sort of folk tale, urban legend from my community.”
“Your fetish community?” Lee said with just a hint of disapproval.
“Oh, don’t give me that look.” Janis laughed. “We may all be a bunch of degenerates, but they know stuff.”
“What’s this story?” Taylor said, stroking her chin.
“A tale of witchcraft,” Janis said in a horror story voice, “of the paranormal, of a woman wrongly accused, and a possibly link to a mysterious death and disappearance just twenty years ago. And it’s almost certainly probably definitely a true story. Maybe. Possibly.”
O-O-O
“So, who was Morgana Lafey?” The three girls were chilling at Taylor’s favourite spa before they embarked on the gruelling five-hour road trip to Melas. They planned to spend a week in that small town gathering information on this story for their article.
“Well,” Janis said, zipping off her heavy black boots and pulling off her thick black socks, “she was supposed be some kind of freaky witch person. She apparently had her own cult of brainwashed followers.”
“That sounds cool,” Taylor said, slipping out of her flip flops. “I’m thinking gold today,” she said to the pedicurist. “It’s a rather auspicious colour, no? Symbolising victory, first place, wealth…”
“And vanity,” Lee said, dryly, as she rolled off her black stockings.
“Don’t be jelly because you’re too safe to do anything but red,” Taylor said with a playful smile on her face. She wiggled her long, thin feet that were tanned from her time at the beach. They were pretty well pampered from regular treatments, but coming to this salon had been more about enjoying the sensation of being spoiled for a day than anything more practical.
“Red is a lucky colour in Chinese culture, fyi,” Lee said, while her pedicurist dabbed crimson nail polish across her tiny toes. “Anyway, if this Morgana lady is ancient history, then, isn’t she? If this happened three hundred years ago, she would be.”
“Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Janis said, smiling and biting on her lower lip as her pedicurist’s hand accidentally stroked along her high, pale arch. Her feet were chunkier, a bit wider along the arches, and pale, with bold azure toenails painted in the same flamboyant hue as her hair. “Weird murder disappearance case took place at her old manor a few years ago. That could be an interesting lead for us to follow.”
“How many years ago was this?” Lee asked.
“A couple,” Janis said. “Or maybe it was like twenty. I don’t quite remember.”
“I see,” Taylor said. “How did you find out about this weirdass story?”
“That’s a good question,” Janis said. “Well, I was deviantArt—”
“—just the website for a sexual deviant like you,” Taylor said with a giggle.
“Naturally. And I was reading this erotica about her. The author has a big boner for writing stories about historical figures and their colourful sex lives. You wouldn’t believe the story he wrote about Cleopatra.”
“Tmi, Jan, tmi,” Lee said, shaking her head and chuckling.
“Anyway, that’s how I know about her.”
“So, what’s our plan?” Lee asked.
“Drive there, book a nice hotel, and write the shit out of this article,” Taylor said.
“Yup,” Janis said. “I suggest we split up once we get there. One of us could head to the local library for research, one of us could see if we could speak to the woman involved in the murder case, and the last one could investigate this witch. She sounded pretty famous, so there might be some kind of museum or memorabilia shop about her.”
“Dibs on the libr—”. Lee suddenly wrenched her foot back from the pedicurist’s grasp. “Woah, go easy on the scrubbing! My feet are really ticklish.”
“Good to know,” Janis muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ll speak to the lady,” Taylor said. “No fofence, but I think I’ve got the best interpersonal skills out of us three. She’s the one whose boyfriend was found dead, right?”
“Fiancé, yeah,” Janis said. “Fyi, you might not want to start with ‘did you kill your boyfriend’, Miss Interpersonal Skills.”
“But did she?” Lee asked
“He died in highly mysterious circumstances… so who can say? And she was blathering like a madwoman afterwards. Who knows? She owns a small business, so I bet we’ll find her at her shop.”
“Alright, let’s do it,” Taylor said, she raised a hand as if making an invisible toast. “Here’s to everything going smoothly!”
“What fun would that be?” Janis said, grinning. “Here’s to hoping that many things go wrong, and we have an adventure worth talking about.”
“Are you trying to jinx us, Jan?” Lee said.
“Jinxing us would be saying ‘nothing could possibly go wrong’. Oh, look what you made me say! You cheeky girl!”
All three of them laughed.
“You know, I realised something,” Taylor said. “I’m like super ticklish all over. Wouldn’t it be ironic if this woman turned out to be some kind of tickle witch?”
“That’s not even close to what irony means,” Lee said.
“And what an odd thing to say,” Janis said as Taylor shrugged in response. “It’s almost like blatant foreshadowing, or we’re in some kind of fetish story.”
O-O-O
The Melas Public Library was run by a bulldog of a woman, a large, spectacled librarian who scowled and frowned at every noise. When Lee had make the disrespectful mistake of coughing, the librarian had tutted, shook her head, and pointed to the large sign hanging which read in bold red letters ‘SILENCE IS GOLDEN’.
Lee poured over a stack of newspaper albums that were as tall as she was—sure, she was only a shade over five foot, but it was still a lot of books to go through. She knew the curious case of the dead boyfriend and the traumatized girl had taken place around two years ago, but she couldn’t exactly remember when. To make matters worse, many of the albums had not been indexed properly, so she had to go through them manually, page by page, and book by book, to find what she was looking for.
About half an hour in, she found herself starting to fidget in her stiff wooden chair. It was not like her—before her finals, she had all but lived in libraries, studying for hours and hours at a time. Yet there was something about this dusty old librarian which made her feel restless. She kept reaching down to scratch itches, more than once untying her brown brogue oxford shoes to get at difficult spot. She wondered if she had somehow picked up fleas within her first day here at this small rural town.
A few more tingly minutes later, Lee finally hunted down a newspaper report which pertained to the bizarre homicide. The story talked about how the young couple, Adam Walker, age 23, and Cosette Collins, age 21, had gotten engaged a few weeks before this terrible tragedy.
As Lee flipped past a page showing Collins looking resplendent in the wedding dress she had planned to wear, she felt another tingle, this one bigger, firmer, a bit harder to ignore. She shifted her weight in her chair, chewing on her lower lip. It felt like something light was brushing her butt, almost, almost like a feather. But that was absurd. Had some insect somehow gotten down her skirt? She fidgeted a bit more, her chair creaking and squeaking on the wooden floor, which made the librarian looked up from her book to throw out another disapproving stare at her.
Lee screwed up her face and contemplated patting a hand down there, despite the fact she knew it was terribly uncouth and most certainly an unladylike thing to do. But the sensations were growing stronger now. It definitely felt like a feather, though Lee for the life of her could not have said why she was so sure. She only just barely choked down a chortle as the feather stroked along her butt cheeks, exploring the abundance of sensitive, ticklish skin beneath her panties.
She was imagining this, she must be, Lee told herself. She forced herself to stare down at the preserved newspapers. Collins was a pretty girl—thin with curly brown hair, and her husband was a strongly-built man dirty blonde locks that fell to his shoulders. They looked really happy in the picture. Had she really murdered him?
A snicker passed her lips as her stoic resolve cracked for a moment. That feather was not going away, continuing to stroke up and down her bum, especially in between her cheeks, where she had never imagined she would be so ticklish. She knew her small feet were sensitive, which was precisely why she always wore lace-up shoes to protect them, but her butt had been an area less frequented by cheeky friends. She tensed up her body as she tried to focus on the words, but when she felt a second feather suddenly flick across her inner thighs, she jolted upright and let loose a girly squeak.
“Excuse me, miss,” the librarian said. Lee’s attentions had been so focused on the book and controlling her own reactions that she hadn’t noticed the Librarian looming over her. “This is a library. If you want to giggle like a child and make so much noise, I suggest you leave.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Lee said. She forced herself to keep her face straight, but that was easier said than done when she had two feathers stroking away merrily at such vulnerable spots.
What was going on? Risking everything, she plunged a hand down her skirt, hoping to swat or pat away whatever pest that had gotten inside somehow. But there was nothing there but her own flesh. This didn’t make any sense. Had Janis spiked her lunch with acid for a laugh?
She told herself to keep going, that surely this bad trip would pass before long. She felt the feather at her thigh reach down to the back of her knees, which she had been jiggling to try to take her mind off what was happening. She reached a hand down quickly to slap at where the feather was, as if she were trying to catch a mosquito, but she caught nothing. She stared at the back of her knee incredulously, as she phantom sensations of a feather twirling along them continued unabated.
The next article talked about the strange circumstance of the man’s cause of death and the woman’s disappearance, which was exactly why Lee had come to this place. But her ability to concentrate was seriously starting to wane under the unrelenting assault of these feathers. As if reading her thoughts about how her feet were her bad spot, a new feather had somehow crept into her right shoe. She scrunched up her tiny toes, stomped her foot up and down to try to squash the invader, but it had no effect. Despite her shoes, despite her black nylon stockings, despite her best efforts, the feather had free rein to wander wherever it liked. It currently nestled in the nook between her two smallest toes, spinning away as Lee’s small hands balled up into fists that crinkled up the page she was holding.
“Focus, focus, focus…” Lee repeated under her breath. The engaged couple had decided to wander around the district looking for houses they could move into once they got married. Then, one foggy winter’s night, they had gone house hunting and not returned for two full days, in which the man had died from a heart attack and the woman had rambled incoherencies at the police station when they had picked her up on the curb, half-naked.
Lee felt half-naked to the feathers that were continuing to pester her body, especially as it seemed that her clothing offered her no more protection than bra and panties would. The feather at her bum had blessedly move on, but it was no victory as it had gone up towards her small, firm breasts. It slid across her chest in slow figure eights, circling the sides of her breasts, changing pace after each full ‘8’ to brush across her rapidly stiffening nipples. She didn’t dare look down to see if they were showing through her blouse—had Taylor spiked her with some kind of aphrodisiac? All the while, the feather at her foot continued twirling between each of her toes, one at a time, while the one at her thighs continued to drifting dangerously closer to her womanhood with every circuit across her legs.
Argh, it was just too much, too much, Lee thought with a rising panic as the feathers forced a permeant grimacing smile on her face. She whipped out her smartphone, took a few quick pictures so she could look at them later, then pushed up from her chair. She needed to get back to their hotel, needed to shower, needed to sleep this off.
“Aren’t you going to put those books back, miss?” the librarian called in a hard voice.
For a moment, lee wished she was the kind of person who could have just ignored the old woman and ran, but she had been raised by her family to be meek and respectful, so she ran back to the books on shaking legs, her lower lip trembling with laughter that was barely held in check.
But there were so many books, so many of those heavy albums. And Lee’s resistance was all but extinguished having been teased and tormented by these ghostly feathers for near on an hour. She was so focused on the feathers, especially the one at her soles, that she didn’t see where she was going and tripped. On the floor, the teasing feathers decided to stop being so nice and went full force. When they swept across her body, they multiplied, till it felt like dozens of feathers were tickling her everywhere and anywhere as she squealed and slapped at her body.
And then suddenly, it stopped. Her heart pounded hard in her chest as the frowning librarian looked over her, muttering something about “stoners” and “kids these days”. A small crowd had gathered around her. Blushing, Lee adjusted her glasses, murmured a quick apology, and ran as quickly as she could.
She could only hope those spectral feathers wouldn’t somehow follow her home. What was going on?
O-O-O
Janis wondered what kind of people would open a curio store about a woman like Morgana Lafey. She supposed it was like those shops she knew that existed for Jack the Ripper, Hitler, or other sinister yet fascinating figures of history.
“Howdy!” said the tall, dark-haired man behind the counter as she pushed the door of the shop open, which set a bell to lightly tinkling. He had had the easy smile of a lifelong salesman, and under his bow tie, he wore a name tag which read, 'Gale'. “Here to learn a bit about one of Melas's most infamous figures?”
“You betcha. Mind giving me a tour of your wares?”
“Sure thang. Excuse me while I call for my wife. She's the historian in the family. I just do the grunt work. Lola! Darling?”
“Yeah, hun?” Lola popped her head out of a storeroom. She looked to be about the same age as Gale--late thirties, perhaps. She had sandy hair, freckles, and large glasses with round frames.
“Give this little lady a tour, would ya?”
“Sure thing. You new in town?”
“Yeah, just here to write an article on Miss Lafey, in fact.”
“Righto,” Lola said with a warm smile. “Well, I’m happy to show you what I know. Just give us a shout-out in your article, okay? We’re a mom and pop business, so we’d really appreciate it.”
“No prob.”
“Great! Well, follow me.” Lola led her to a bookshelf with titles like ‘Morgana Lafey: Sorceress or Swindler?’, ‘Real Witches’, and ‘The Great Witch of Melas’. “Morgana Lafey was a strange lady. There’s so many conflicting stories about her that no one is quite sure who she was. But by all accounts, she was one fine-looking lady, and people flocked to her.”
“What do you mean they ‘flocked to her’?” Lanis asked as she picked up a little bobble-head figurine of Morgana.
“Well, some people say she was a cultist. She did the whole demon worship thing. But other sources have said she was basically like a hippie. But she had plenty of friends. Plenty of enemies, too.”
“How’d she die?”
“Judges sentenced her to drown. She drowned in a river not too far from her, in fact. We call it Morgana’s Lake.”
“Charming. You know, I have to say I’m not really understanding this part of the shop,” Janis said as she walked towards a corner which had racks of feathers, scrub brushes, rope, and other tools which bore a remarkable resemblance to what you might see at the BDSM section of a sex toy store.
“That’s a fine question, miss. Well, Morgana was somewhat of a revolutionary.”
“You’re kidding me. I thought she was a witch!”
“Well, it’s remarkable how those two threads coincide. One generation’s witch can be another generation’s feminist. Anyway, it’s not entirely clear why, but she revolutionised the torture industry.”
“Really? That’s not exactly what comes to mind when you say ‘revolutionary’.”
Lola shrugged. “Well, there are different kinds of revolutions. Anyway, Miss Lafey made friends with the local torturers in town, and she made all kinds of fuss. She had townfolk signing petition about how inquisitors suffered from so much stress because of the nature of their jobs, and how their clothes stank of blood, and stuff.”
“You’re joking.”
“They even started up a Torturer’s Union. What happened is they advocated—mainly Miss Lafey, really—for a new method of torture. Using tickling as a method of torture would reduce the mental stress associated.”
“Seriously? That’s my fetish.”
Lola gave a nervous chuckle. “I think it might have been Miss Lafey’s, too. After they successfully pushed this change through, she went and broke a bunch of laws just to get herself thrown in jail. The torture methods not only utterly failed to break her pride, but they seemed to have had a rather… titillating effect.”
“Nice.”
“Not really! Shortly afterwards, they had her tried on some other minor charges to cover up their embarrassment at being tricked. They were a prickly sort back then, easily offended.”
“So different from people nowadays,” Janis said, wanly. “Anyway, thanks for your help, Lola. I think I’ve learned enough. I’m gonna pick out a few books now.”
“Well… there is something else,” Lola said, averting her eyes. “We, erm, my husband and I, we could offer you an authentic witch experience. J-just because you’ve shown such an interest in Morgana Lafey! It could be really helpful for your article. Y’know, experiencing what it would really be liked to be tried. What do you say?”
“Hmmm.” Janis eyed the racks of implements she now recognised as obviously being tools of tickle torture. If she said yes, she was almost guaranteeing herself to being tickled silly. It was probably going to be a bit like that crazy Gimp scene in Pulp Fiction. “It’s sounds like a terrible idea. Let’s do it.”
Lola’s big brown eyes lit up. “Gale!” she called. “We got a taker!”
And in a flash, the store was closed, and Janis was led into a storeroom and strapped down to what Gale and Lola eagerly described as “an antique stockade”. For an antique, it had certainly been well-preserved as Janis’s ankles and wrists weren’t going anywhere. There were four padded holes in the stockade—the outer two bigger ones for her ankles and the two smaller inner ones for her wrists. Her body was slightly bent forward as the holes for her arms and legs were right next to each other in the same board of dark wood.
They stripped off her black boots and thick socks, cooing with relish at Janis’s freshly pedicured feet with those clean, shiny toenails.
“Well, well, witch, looks like you’re in our clutches,” Gale said in a low, rasping voice that made Janis almost want to laugh. He was trying so hard to sound menacing, though the effect was ruined as he still wore that nerdy bowtie. “And these soft tootsies of yours look like they won’t stand a chance against our righteous inquisition.”
“Indeed, witch!” Lola said. “Confess your crimes!”
“And what will happen if I do?” Janis said. She was genuinely curious. They weren’t going to like drown her or anything, were they? Surely that was a bit too hardcore, even for these guys.
“If you confess, then naturally, you’ll be punished. With more tickling.”
“Ah, so you’ve got me in quite the Catch-22,” Janis sad, and she saw their smiles widen at the verisimilitude of her statement. “Alright, bring it on, bitches.”
“You will regret those words, heathen!”
Janis’s stubby toes curled up when she saw them reach for their first tool—and they had a veritable armoury of tools, apparently, all laid out for when a customer requested this ‘authentic experience’. But she saw it was string, and she let her painted toes relax. So, they were going to tie her toes back? That made sense, she supposed, though it was a bit depressingly mainstream.
It was for this reason that she let loose a series of squeals when she felt the coarse, itchy wool of the yarn start to string through her toes. They both had a length of string and were dragging it through the undersides of her sensitive digits, as if her toes were teeth that needed thorough flossing. Janis was shocked by how much it tickled. The gap between her two smallest toes was particularly vulnerable to the rough surface of the string worming around there, and her two torturers exchanged delighted looks when they discovered this highly sensitive spot existed symmetrically on both feet.
After they flossed a few more times, they pulled the yarn between every gap at once so they could hit every spot between the toes on both feet at once, despite the wild scrunching and wiggling of her round, chubby toes. By then, Janis’s flamboyant hair was a sweaty mess, though she had not begged them once to stop.
Her torturers finished by using the string to tie Janis’s big toes back, so her feet were not taut and completely helpless.
“Ready to confess?”
Janis shook her head.
“This witch is one tough customer, ain’t she, Inquisitor Lola?”
“Right you are, Inquisitor Gale. Best we bust out the big guns.”
Janis let loose an embarrassingly girly squeal when she felt the rough bristles of a thick, handled scrub brushes sink into the soft, tender flesh of her arches. After the toe torment she had just endured, this was something completely different. They weren’t as mind-numbingly effective as hairbrushes with plastic tines on her bare feet, but they did the job well, filling every wrinkle and crevice along her arches with innumerable bristles. Those brushes were working ticklish wonders on her soft arches, so her two torturers ensured they never broke contact for a moment as they scrubbed from heel to the ball of the foot, with the main host of bristles always assaulted those arches. Thousands of tiny bristles run up and down each of my soles,
Tears were starting streak down her cheeks and cause her makeup to run as she hiccupped and howled with laughter.
“Are you okay, miss?” Gale said suddenly in the soft, caring voice of the shopkeeper. “Is this too taxing for you?”
Janis licked her lips and looked at them. “What are you talking about, inquisitors? Bring it on!”
Gale and Lola exchanged a gleeful look.
“The heathen speaks true,” Lola said with a wicked grin on her face. “We really ought not to give her time to recover, after all, in a real interrogation, we wouldn’t delay in doing something like this!” She grinned and started buffing the scrub brush over Janis’s right arch once more, though this time, her other hand wandered up to those unoccupied toes, and she began flicking her long fingernails across their pads.
“Well spoken, my dear,” Gale said. He introduced the scrub brush to Janis’s squirming toes, while he pressed a firm fingernail into the center of her soft arch and began stroking it up and down. “Confess, witch! Confess!’
Janis laughed. She laughed so hard. She laughed because of the absurdity of her situation, she laughed because of how absurdly ticklish her feet were, and most of all, she laughed because of how much fun she was having. She was sure her friends were having a more boring time than her.
O-O-O
“Thanks for taking the time to see me, Ms. Harrington,” Taylor said to the woman in the pinstriped suit. They were in the head office of a local gym. Taylor gazed out to the swimming pool behind the seated woman as the sunlight shimmered from those cool, refreshing waters. She’d love to chill in that pool a bit later if she had time.
“Please, call me Valerie,” said the business lady. Valerie had long silvery blonde hair reached her shoulders, dark-rimmed glasses, and full lips accentuated with dark red lipstick. When Taylor noticed the silver rings on this older woman’s manicured fingers, the silver anklet she wore over her high heels, and the glittering toenail polish that showed from those open-toed stilettos, Taylor thought she was looking like her future, though Valerie was shorter and paler than she was. Valerie should have been in her early forties, but she looked like a lady in her mid-thirties—Taylor could only hope she aged as well as this lady had. “And it’s no problem—business is slow in the mornings, and I’m happy to help some kids out on a newspaper project.”
“Well,” Taylor said, looking down. She played with her shoes a bit to buy time. “It may be a bit of an awkward topic. I want to ask about that time you went to Morgana Lafey’s house with your late fiancée.”
To her relief, Valerie laughed. “Oh, that? It was a silly old thing, really. Johnny and I were dared to spend a night in that creepy old manor, and being the kids that we were, we went off and did it.”
“What was it like in there?”
“Dusty? Creepy? I don’t remember it that well.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember having sex with him in Morgana Lafey’s bed,” Valerie said with a chuckle. “I remember raiding her wine cellar and uncorking a three-hundred-year-old vintage.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It was,” Valerie said with a fond smile. The smile died. “But then… argh, my head hurts. I guess we must have drank a bit too much. We got lost in the house. We panicked. And the dusty. Johnny had been an asthmatic, and he’d left his inhaler. Everything else is a blur. I remember the cops finding us later, and Johnny being dead…”
“I’m sorry, Valerie. I know she can’t be easy for you.”
“It’s fine. It’s well in the past. I remarried, and I have a beautiful son. He works for me as a lifeguard in fact.” She pointed out the window to the buff, blonde boy with sunglasses and a six-pack wandering the pool. Taylor had to resist the urge to drool.
“Where is this house, by the way? I haven’t been able to track it down.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s a bit out of the way in the hills. I’ll give you some directions if you want.”
“Okay, thank you… I have to ask, is there anything else you remember? Anything sort of otherworldly?”
Valeria brought a varnished nail to her chin as she thought. “I remember we played around in the basement. There was some kind of… dungeon down there. I must have got locked in one of those devices by accident.” She shivered. “There were things down there. Dark things.”
“You mean rats, right?”
Valerie sighed. “I don’t know. I would tell you not to go there, but you wouldn’t listen, would you?”
Taylor shrugged. “YOLO.”
“Well, I suppose. That’s what Johnny thought as well. The young are not immortal. Be careful.”
“I will. I’ll be there with my friends, and we’ll take precautions. By the way, do you mind if I use your pool before I go?”
“Feel free. Reception can hook you up with a locker.”
At the pool in a pink swimsuit she had luckily had the foresight to bring, Taylor cooed under the sun’s warm kisses. Her sequined flip flops slapped on the floor as she walked towards a pool chair in the centre of the pool. With her designer sunglasses, flowing blonde hair, long, shapely legs, and ample bosom, Taylor knew she turned heads, and with any luck…
“Hey, I’m Tyler,” said the handsome lifeguard she had spotted earlier, Valerie’s son. He looked to be about her age and well up for it.
“I’m Taylor,” she said. She wiggled her gold-painted toes to watch them glitter in the sun like precious metals. She caught him staring at them, at her toe rings, and she realised that maybe a quick foot worship session would not be out of the question—nice. She was no stranger to that sort of thing, as many a boy had become quick infatuated with her goddess soles. “Wow, our names sound so alike! Let’s like hangout.”
He laughed. “Right-on.”
The two of them retreated to a more discrete corner of the pool, where they made small-talked for a while mischievous hands wandered along certain sensitive areas.
“Hey, you want a blunt?” Tyler said, after such a session came to an explosive end.
“Sure. Pot?”
“Not exactly. More a local delicacy.” He pulled out a lighter and a white rollup from his shorts.
“Just an fyi, if you try to roofie me, I’m not calling the cops, but I’m coming back with her my posse and baseball bats,” Taylor said, taking the joint with a wink that managed to appear both flirtatious and intimidating.
She took a puff, and everything began to spin, like she had been sucked into a cyclone. When she blinked and the world stopped blurring, the world had become hellish. The blue sky had turned red, her chair had become some kind of booby trap that kept her wrists and ankles shackled in place, and in sweet Tyler’s place were three little imps who floated in the air, leering at her.
Taylor tried to scream, but her mouth seemed to have stopped working. The arms of the plastic she had been lounged in had turned into green, scaly arms that grabbed her by the wrists and spread them. At her ankles, slimy wet tentacles had spread from the ground to wrap around her shins and legs.
“Hi, Taylor!” said the first of the three imps. Taylor squinted, and she suddenly saw that all three of the black and silver demons had faces she recognised. They were about the size of cats, albeit cats with bat-like wings, horns, and pink hair. One had Lee’s cooler than ice look, one had Janis’s cheeky smile, and the last one looked like the portrait of Morgana Lafey.
“Wassup, girls,” Taylor said. “What’s going on here?”
“Kinky fun?” Janis imp offered.
“Probably a bad trip,” Lee imp said.
“Tickle magic, yo,” Morgana imp said, wiggling her long black talons. “Alright, let’s get to it. I have a hair appointment in an hour.”
Taylor’s mouth soon remembered how to laugh. And the three flying imps dug in. Janis imp dove for Taylor’s toned and trim stomach, wiggling her claws all over but aiming in particular for that cute pierced navel. The claws left her tummy red from their sharp and fierce touches.
Lee imp approached the tickling with a methodical curiosity. At Taylor’s soft, smooth hollows, she lightly them stroked up and down, up and down, up and down. Her eyes constantly darted from those quivering armpits to Taylor’s flushed face as if she was getting empirical data on the effectiveness of her technique.
Morgana imp hovered at Taylor’s right foot, and this imp had a tongue that seemed unfairly long for a creature of that size—it was the kind of tongue you expected from a serpent. The long, slithery tongue slid around her tanned soles till they were wet as if she had just stepped out of the pool. They constantly snaked through the toes, especially aiming for the second toes where those shimmering silver toe rings were.
“It tihihickles! It thihihickles!”
“That’s the point, sweetie,” Morgana imp said. She stopped using her tongue to rake her claws up and down the soles rapidly as fresh tentacles sprouted to ensnare those big toes to keep the foot taut and in place. “Cootchie cootchie coo!” she said, aiming her hands at those sparkling golden toes of hers.
“Pretty fun, huh?” Janis imp purred. “I’m a little jelly of you. It’s pretty hot to get triple teamed…” She triple-attacked Taylor’s upper body as soon as she finished talking. Her tongue crept into Taylor’s belly button while two claws pounced on her quivering sides.
Lee imp had discovered that the very centres of Taylor’s soft spots were a place where even the lightest motion set the blonde to squeaking, so she focused her claws on those spots. She drilled circles, shapes, and crisscrossing lines all over that area. Taylor’s biceps strained against the arms that held her in place, but her 120 miles per hour tennis serving speed did her no good her, as every time she seemed to be making a bit of traction, a touch to those armpits would render her muscles to jelly.
And at Taylor’s legs, more tentacles appeared, probing along her knees, her inner thighs, stroking dangerously, dangerously close to her secret lady spot…
“Shitballs!” Taylor exclaimed as consciousness came flooding back to her.
“How was it?” Tyler asked. He was still sitting beside her, bathed in sunlight.
“Well,” She said, blinking and examining her hands. They glittered in the strong sunlight, her rims and golden fingernails beaming. She was sitting back in her white poolside lounge chair. “That was freakiest trip I ever had in my life. Got another?”
O-O-O
“So, how did it go?” the girls asked each other all at the same time as they rendezvoused at the hotel room they had booked for their week of research. They all sat on the bed, barefoot and in their pyjamas.
“It was okay,” Taylor said, wondering if she should mention her drug-fuelled hallucinations of tickle imps.
“Could’ve gone worse,” Lee said, pondering if she should mention the imaginary feathers that had stoked her half to orgasm.
Janis looked at her two best friends. Taylor kept looking down at her nails. Lee was chewing on her lower lip. Without a doubt, they were both hiding something.
“Mine went fine,” Janis said, “Okay, I can tell we’re all bullshitting. I got the crap tickled out of me by these two shopkeepers. How about you guys?”
“When I was in the library, I felt feathers tickling me all over. But when I patted my body, there was nothing there.” Lee crossed her arms and tched. “I don’t suppose either of you drugged me with ecstasy or something, did you? Because that would be the only natural explanation.”
“What? I had tickle demons gang up on me!” Taylor hugged herself as if she could still feel the claws that had raked all over her sensitive bodies. “And one of them had Morgana’s face…”
“My experience was a bit more mundane,” Janis said, stroking her chin. “But they did mention Morgana was a huge fan of tickle torture. And now that I think about it, it is rather convenient that they happened to be tickle fetishists themselves… after they had worn me out, the man rather casually asked if I would like to help tickle his wife for a bit of revenge. That’s not quite normal behaviour, is it?”
Of course, Janis had accepted, taking a particular amount of joy on using the string and scrub brushes that had proved so effective on her on Lola’s wrinkly feet, but that was something she probably didn’t need to mention at this particular juncture in time.
“So, we are actually dealing with a tickle witch, aren’t we?” Taylor said. “What does that make us? Ghostbusters?”
“This could still be explained away with science,” Lee said, “I might have—I don’t know—got some food poisoning or something.”
“Yeah, and I did puff on a blunt before those tickle imps appeared,” Taylor said with a shrug.
“I’m not going to ask why you did that when you asked a forty-year old woman about the murder of her fiancée,” Lee said. “Anyway, what’s our plan?”
“Buy some garlic?” Taylor offered.
“That’s for vampires, nimrod,” Janis said.
“Well, what else can we do?” Taylor said. “Buy a proton pack? Call Danny Phantom? Get Casper to help us?”
“Your pop culture references aren’t helping,” Lee said. “What are you suggesting? We give up and go home?”
“You know, I’m surprised you aren’t more worried about this. Your name is literally Lee, as in ticklee. You know you’re going to be tickled like crazy, right?”
“Will changing my name to ‘Cindy’ help? Come on, there’s not much I can do about my name!”
“Alright, let’s all calm down, ladies,” Janis said. “What we need is a plan. How about we go to this abandoned manor—”
“—aka, the haunted house,” Lee interjected.
“Yeah, there. We go there, take a quick look around, get some pictures, then we skedaddle.”
“I think that’s a good plan,” Taylor said, “but there’s no way we end up sticking to it. I mean like zero percentage chance that is what happens.”
“Not with that kind of attitude!” Lee said, her eyes wide and aghast.
“Hey, I’m just saying.”
“Well, I suppose no plan survives first contract with the enemy,” Janis said. “But still. Try to stick to it? Anyway, let’s get a good night’s sleep and head out first thing in the morning.”
“For real? I’m more an 11 a.m. waking up time kind of girl…” Taylor said.
“We are not staying there once the sun goes down!” Janis said. “Have you never seen any horror movies? Like not even a single one?”
“Alright, fine, fine… You guys will help wake me up, right?” Taylor said as she sat up from the bed and went to the fridge.
“Sure thing,” Janis said, winking at Lee and wiggling her fingers in an unmistakably tickly motion.
Lee shook her head. “Why do I have the feeling we’ve already caught some kind of tickle bug?”
“Enough talk about that,” Taylor said as she pulled a six pack of beer from the fridge and handed one to each of her friends. “Let’s drink! A toast to our imminent success!”
As the girls lifted up their cans, they all heard a high, whispering, feminine voice that cut through the room like a chilly wind. “Cheers…”
The girls looked at each other. Taylor downed her can and reached for another. “Well, that was fucking weird, huh? Another drink?”
