Shem the Penman
Verified
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2001
- Messages
- 1,020
- Points
- 36
Originally published in Tales from the Asylum.
“We need another one for the window display,” Jay said. “How about that one? It’s new, isn’t it?”
Adam shook his head. “It’s new all right, but I had a look at it before. The joints are bad – it’s ready to fall apart. Why don’t you take that one down to the window” – he pointed at another mannequin in the storeroom – “and I’ll box this up to send back to the manufacturer?”
As Adam had known he would, Jay shrugged agreeably. “Okay.” He loaded the older mannequin onto his hand truck and wheeled it out, leaving Adam alone in the storeroom. Rather than replace the new mannequin in the crate it had arrived in, though, Adam just shoved the crate behind a row of shelving, then put the mannequin on his own truck and pushed it toward the elevator. After glancing around the corridor furtively, he bent close to the mannequin and said in a low whisper, “Well?”
Silence was the only answer. The elevator arrived with an asthmatic rattle. Delavere’s was a small local department store, barely surviving against competition from the big chains, and there was never money to maintain anything. As the elevator door groaned closed, Adam looked around at the scarred steel walls as if expecting someone to be watching, then reached forward and carefully slid a finger down the mannequin’s side.
A crystalline giggle echoed through the elevator. “Hee heeheheee… don’t …” began a woman’s voice, and stopped the moment Adam took his hand away. Again, he touched her side, where the ribcage would have been on a real woman, and felt the delicate sculpture of flesh and bone. The voice gasped and giggled, and he could feel the ribs tremble with laughing breaths beneath his touch. “Don’t stop,” she implored. “I can’t talk unless you’reeee eeheeheeheheee!--tickling me--“
The elevator ground to a stop, and the door creaked open, the woman’s voice breaking off again as Adam grasped the truck’s handles and wheeled the mannequin out into the darkened store. Right now, he knew, the only people on duty in the store would be him, Jay, and the night watchman, Phil, who would be glued to his portable TV all night. In the hushed aisles, the slightest sound echoed.
But on the other hand, Jay hadn’t seemed to hear anything earlier that night when Adam had uncrated the new mannequin and his fingers accidentally brushed its stomach through a hole in the shrinkwrap and he heard that clear giggle for the first time. Startled, he looked around, but Jay was busy breaking down boxes and hadn’t even looked up.
Shrugging, Adam had put it down to an overactive imagination and continued stripping shrinkwrap off the plastic figure. The first time he had touched the thing’s surface, though, he stopped in astonishment. Instead of a hard smooth surface with a joint cut in it to swivel the head, what he felt was a warm, vital woman’s neck. It trembled slightly where he touched it. There was even a pulse under his fingers. But to his eyes, it looked just like an ordinary mannequin.
Wondering if this was some sort of weird fantasy or dream he was having, Adam started pulling the rest of the wrap off. And as he did so, his hands felt a delicate body revealed under it – strong, finely shaped shoulders, a smooth arch of back, slender arms … As he pulled a strip of the wrapping from under one of the arms, he heard the giggle again, and when he touched the place where the wrap had been, the giggle rose to a squeal. And with it came a woman’s voice, clearly saying, “Oh, that tickles!”
Adam snatched his hand away. “Did you hear something?” he asked Jay.
“Like what?”
“Someone, uh, talking?”
Jay cocked his head. “Nope. Just you.”
“Guess I was hearing things,” Adam murmured, and turned back to unwrapping the dummy. But he hadn’t been, he knew it. As he knelt to pull off the last of the plastic, temptation overtook him, and he reached out and touched the bottom of one molded foot.
As he had almost expected, what he felt was smooth skin. From above came a yelp. “Don’t do—“ Adam slid his finger down an inch or two and was rewarded with a storm of shrieking giggles. “Sto hehehehheheheh—STOP that!”
Adam looked over at Jay. There was no way Jay could have missed hearing that desperate cry. But Jay hadn’t even looked up from the flattened boxes he was stacking on a cart. When he finally finished, he looked up incuriously, and Adam had had to quickly stop staring at the mannequin to answer Jay’s casual question.
Now, Adam was rolling the same mannequin on his hand truck down the gloomy aisles of Delavere’s, past racks and racks of discount clothes whose shoddiness loudly proclaimed that anyone who wore them was cheap, broke, or both. Along with funds for repairs, Delavere’s also lacked funds to sell higher-end merchandise. Adam knew it hadn’t always been that way, but for most of his life Delavere’s had been the last resort of the desperate.
Arriving in the ladies’ section of the floor, he pushed the truck to the low podium where the mannequin was to be placed. The stand was already there; its previous occupant had broken when some dumb kid pushed it over. When Adam took hold of the mannequin and lifted it into place, he felt firm-muscled legs quivering slightly under his hands. He stared at its face, the blank painted eyes and unchanging expression, looking for some flicker of life. Had he just seen that dumb movie too many times? But there was no denying the evidence of his touch and hearing.
“Look,” he whispered to the dummy, feeling foolish, “do you have a name?” There was no answer, and feeling even more foolish, he reached out and squeezed its ribs.
“HAAA!” yelped the dummy’s voice. “HAAhahaha hahahaa myyy—hahahaha!—n-naaame—HAHAHAAA! Gentler, I can’thahahhaaa--!” Adam slowed his kneading of the ribs, lightly tapping them instead, and the voice stumbled on amidst shaky, breathless giggles. “I’m P-p—heehehee—Patrice Delavereheheehee, stop!”
Adam stopped, more out of surprise than anything. He knew the name. Everyone in town did. She’d owned this very store not too long ago, and had owned it since her father died back in the early sixties. Old man Delavere, everyone said, was a business genius who had turned a neighborhood five-and-ten into a chain of stores that extended across six states. Patrice had promptly reversed the process, burning through the accumulated fortune with a series of trips to Europe, expensive wardrobes, even more expensive lovers, extravagant parties, and the occasional ill-considered investment. Whenever debt threatened to overwhelm her, she hadn’t hesitated to close a store somewhere, lay off all its workers, and sell the building. So the Delavere’s chain had shrunk back to one store again, this one sunk so deep in disrepair and debt that even the old man couldn’t have saved it.
But Adam knew Patrice Delavere as an old woman who lived alone, who provoked a storm of gossip in town every time she stepped beyond the gates of her tumbledown mansion. The body he’d felt when he touched the mannequin was not an old woman’s. And—Adam felt a cold prickle at the base of his spine—Patrice Delavere was dead. She’d died in her sleep only a few weeks ago, her funeral attended only by the same people who loved to stir up the stories of her scandals again and again.
“The Patrice Delavere?” he asked, gently scratching at her ribs to hear her answer.
“Ohh! Yeeehehehehesss, you heeheheheee idiot! Who else? Stop now heehheheee!”
Adam frowned. Patrice’s flaming temper featured prominently in many of the stories about her, but he was not without a certain temper himself. Instead of stopping this time, he deliberately increased the pace of the tickling once more. “What are yoooouuu—“ Patrice broke off in a rising howl of laughter as Adam’s relentless fingers moved down to the edges of her ribs, then began to crawl up her sides, tickling all the way. The laughing crescendoed as he found matching tender spots just above her ribcage, on either side, and dug in with his fingertips.
Adam was astonished to discover how much he was enjoying this. It would have looked bizarre to anyone who passed by, but all Adam paid attention to was how Patrice’s piercing shrieks of forced laughter were already growing ragged and breathless, real as anything. The feel of her soft skin jumping and quivering under his fingers was pure vitality. He could feel her ribs swelling as her lungs and diaphragm spasmed with laughter, and the trembling of the long muscles as she strained to pull her arms down and cover her vulnerability. Those tiny, helpless motions were all she could do, though. Nothing else moved, no matter how Adam tickled her.
“You’re going to have to be nicer than that,” he told her. “Now say you’re sorry and we can move on.” He slowed the tickling for a second to let Patrice take a breath to reply. She filled her lungs and, instead of apologizing, screamed it all out in a string of vituperation that would have been surprising from a street criminal and was downright astonishing from a woman of her age and social status. Adam was only fazed for a second, though, then he swiftly began to tickle her armpits. They were smooth and finely sculpted and, he was unsurprised to find, extremely ticklish. The slightest flutter of his fingertips and the flood of curses suddenly melted into a small girl’s squeal. He kept up the swift tickling, tracing from the edges to the deep centers and back again, for a while. The dummy had been packaged with her arms down, but not completely so, which gave him plenty of room to rest his palms on her sides and tickle away, touching both ends of the hollows with a single flick of his fingers.
“Tickles a lot, doesn’t it?” he taunted. “Looks to me like you have three choices … you can move your arms an inch, you can apologize…or I can keep tickling you. What’s it gonna be?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer just yet, but pressed his wiggling fingers into the softness at the center of her armpits, gently at first, then harder, digging in. Patrice’s gales of hysterics had slacked off to a tiny squeaking sound, but not because the tickling had stopped affecting her—it was because she no longer had the breath to scream. Adam could still tell she was in a frenzy of ticklish agony from the trembling that shook her frozen body, the way tiny muscles twisted and twitched under his fingers, the heat of her flushing skin. It was slightly unnerving to look at the blank features and crudely sculpted body of the mannequin while his hands told him they were touching a beautiful woman in the throes of an unbearable tickling, but in a way it was intensely sensual as well, focused almost totally on his sense of touch and the feel of her body. He wished he could see her face, though—if only to see the look of desperation as she realized what kind of trouble her mouth had gotten her into.
Finally he let his hands fall away. As soon as he stopped tickling, silence closed in again. He looked around him to make sure Jay or Phil hadn’t come up while he was busy with Patrice, but the store was empty. He turned back to Patrice, and after a pause, he touched the soft plateau of her midriff, drawing a circle around its edge, and was rewarded with hoarse, startled giggles. “What’s it going to be?” he asked.
“You—“ Patrice began furiously. Adam drew a line straight down her belly, discovering her tiny navel halfway down, and she gasped and broke off as he began to toy with it. “Oh—get away—heehehee—you—“ And then, as if there had been a switch inside the dimple his fingers explored, she swung immediately from furious to a childish whining. “I’m soorrryy…come on, stop that, please—it tickles too bad!” Adam continued moving his fingers around and around her navel as she broke down into giggles again, then rallied: “It’s just—heehee eehehehee!—I haaaaaa—hate being tickled—hahahahahaa! STOP!—can’t even move…please…”
Smiling, Adam commented, “Looks like you’ll have to start getting used to being tickled, doesn’t it?” As he continued to tease her shuddering belly with one hand, he reached up with the other, took her wrist (pulse hammering in it), and deliberately lifted the arm up. When he released the wrist, the arm stayed lifted. Patrice cried out gratifyingly: “No—no—“ and then burst into hysterical screams once more as he began to tickle the exposed armpit as well. There was a new note in her wild laughter now, a panic on the edge of delirium, as if she was finally realizing the extent of her helplessness. She was pleading openly with him to stop tickling, when she could even talk—which wasn’t often, as she seemed to be getting more ticklish as Adam let his hands wander over her body. The slightest touch sent her into paroxysms of laughter. He teased her cruelly with quick skittering tickles that were over almost as fast as they started, enjoying the way her piercing shrieks trailed off into whimpers as she tried to anticipate where the next tickle would hit.
“Getting used to it yet?” he asked at last, then took his hands from her body before she could answer. Adam sat down on the edge of the platform the mannequin stood on, catching his breath and flexing his fingers. After a little while, he reached over and touched the top of one foot, finding the little slots between her toes by feel. Patrice erupted again. “NOT THERE! EEEeeeee hahahahahaa! No more ahahahahahaaa!” Adam traced up and down, rounding the tips of the toes, tickling their undersides, paying no attention to Patrice’s frantic protests.
Her foot quivered as if she were focusing every bit of her strength into moving it, but it didn’t budge an inch as Adam explored the curves of her ankle, then traced the edges of her sole, driving her mad with laughter. “Why—aahhh!--why are y-you being soooaaHAHHAHAAA! DON’T! HAAHAHAHAHAA!…oh God….don’t be so me-e-e-eehehean to me!” she protested. “I kn-knoooow things—I knew people eeeeeeeha hahaha hahahaa!—I—no, noooo, let me taaaalk—aaAAAAAAaahahhahaa!—I could he-he-heeelp you a lot, I could…just PLEASE, please stooooppppp torturing meeeeeee!”
Adam grinned. “You’re going to help me, no matter what. Were you planning to hold back some secrets from me, Patsy?” He raked clawed hands, very deliberately, down the soles of both feet. The mannequin was molded with toes bent, to make it easy for any kind of shoe to be fitted to the plastic foot, so Patrice’s toes were likewise flexed and the soles taut and supremely vulnerable. Her scream arced upward to a level only audible to dogs. “You’re going to tell me everything you know, if I have to drag it out of you.” Again he raked her soles, and Patrice howled. “Do you understand?”
Adam returned to tracing a finger up and down first one arch, then the other, in a lazy, serpentine path, until among the soft giggles he heard a faint “Y-yes…”
“And if you think I’m being mean, listen to me.” Adam curled his hands over her feet, the fingertips curving up to draw out a subtly varying, maddening rhythm all over her soles. Patrice reached total giggle meltdown in seconds as Adam went on. “You didn’t know my dad. He was a department manager over at your store in Madison Heights. You remember, the one you closed in ’82, because your plastic surgeon was demanding you pay his bills? And you fired the whole staff? My dad worked there all his life….” Adam paused and took a breath as his fingers worked on Patrice’s feet. She tried to speak, and Adam dug in, scratching the balls of her feet and dissolving her voice into screeching laughter. “I’m not gonna go into all the details, but you ruined my dad’s life, and my mother’s, and almost mine too. Aren’t you lucky I’m only tickling the hell out of you?” With a ferocious smile, he threaded his fingers between her toes, tickling the tender little valleys until she yelled out her agreement. Then he resumed his steady tickling of her soles as he continued.
“I never thought much about you before, because there was nothing I could really do to you. But having you here now, like this…it’s like something wants me to take revenge. I don’t have no idea how all this happened. And frankly, Patsy, I don’t care. What I do know is that I’m enjoying this a lot. And you’re going to pay for what you did to my family…and all those other people you hurt. You’ve got a lot of paying back to do, and it’s just started tonight.”
Adam stood up, then selected a short skirt and top from a nearby rack. With quick, practiced motions, he dressed the mannequin, tickling Patrice’s helpless body at every turn. She was trying to protest and apologize and promise all at once, but he ignored her babbling. All he cared about right now was her tormented laughter. When she was covered, he leaned close, staring into the immobile, blandly smiling face. Was there a flicker of something, deep in those painted eyes, the slightest tremble in the molded lips? “I’ve got some other work to do,” he told her, “but I’m going to be back. Soon. And we’re going to be spending some long nights together….”
Taking up the hand truck, he pushed it away, leaving her trapped in her eternal pose, staring off into the darkness.
“We need another one for the window display,” Jay said. “How about that one? It’s new, isn’t it?”
Adam shook his head. “It’s new all right, but I had a look at it before. The joints are bad – it’s ready to fall apart. Why don’t you take that one down to the window” – he pointed at another mannequin in the storeroom – “and I’ll box this up to send back to the manufacturer?”
As Adam had known he would, Jay shrugged agreeably. “Okay.” He loaded the older mannequin onto his hand truck and wheeled it out, leaving Adam alone in the storeroom. Rather than replace the new mannequin in the crate it had arrived in, though, Adam just shoved the crate behind a row of shelving, then put the mannequin on his own truck and pushed it toward the elevator. After glancing around the corridor furtively, he bent close to the mannequin and said in a low whisper, “Well?”
Silence was the only answer. The elevator arrived with an asthmatic rattle. Delavere’s was a small local department store, barely surviving against competition from the big chains, and there was never money to maintain anything. As the elevator door groaned closed, Adam looked around at the scarred steel walls as if expecting someone to be watching, then reached forward and carefully slid a finger down the mannequin’s side.
A crystalline giggle echoed through the elevator. “Hee heeheheee… don’t …” began a woman’s voice, and stopped the moment Adam took his hand away. Again, he touched her side, where the ribcage would have been on a real woman, and felt the delicate sculpture of flesh and bone. The voice gasped and giggled, and he could feel the ribs tremble with laughing breaths beneath his touch. “Don’t stop,” she implored. “I can’t talk unless you’reeee eeheeheeheheee!--tickling me--“
The elevator ground to a stop, and the door creaked open, the woman’s voice breaking off again as Adam grasped the truck’s handles and wheeled the mannequin out into the darkened store. Right now, he knew, the only people on duty in the store would be him, Jay, and the night watchman, Phil, who would be glued to his portable TV all night. In the hushed aisles, the slightest sound echoed.
But on the other hand, Jay hadn’t seemed to hear anything earlier that night when Adam had uncrated the new mannequin and his fingers accidentally brushed its stomach through a hole in the shrinkwrap and he heard that clear giggle for the first time. Startled, he looked around, but Jay was busy breaking down boxes and hadn’t even looked up.
Shrugging, Adam had put it down to an overactive imagination and continued stripping shrinkwrap off the plastic figure. The first time he had touched the thing’s surface, though, he stopped in astonishment. Instead of a hard smooth surface with a joint cut in it to swivel the head, what he felt was a warm, vital woman’s neck. It trembled slightly where he touched it. There was even a pulse under his fingers. But to his eyes, it looked just like an ordinary mannequin.
Wondering if this was some sort of weird fantasy or dream he was having, Adam started pulling the rest of the wrap off. And as he did so, his hands felt a delicate body revealed under it – strong, finely shaped shoulders, a smooth arch of back, slender arms … As he pulled a strip of the wrapping from under one of the arms, he heard the giggle again, and when he touched the place where the wrap had been, the giggle rose to a squeal. And with it came a woman’s voice, clearly saying, “Oh, that tickles!”
Adam snatched his hand away. “Did you hear something?” he asked Jay.
“Like what?”
“Someone, uh, talking?”
Jay cocked his head. “Nope. Just you.”
“Guess I was hearing things,” Adam murmured, and turned back to unwrapping the dummy. But he hadn’t been, he knew it. As he knelt to pull off the last of the plastic, temptation overtook him, and he reached out and touched the bottom of one molded foot.
As he had almost expected, what he felt was smooth skin. From above came a yelp. “Don’t do—“ Adam slid his finger down an inch or two and was rewarded with a storm of shrieking giggles. “Sto hehehehheheheh—STOP that!”
Adam looked over at Jay. There was no way Jay could have missed hearing that desperate cry. But Jay hadn’t even looked up from the flattened boxes he was stacking on a cart. When he finally finished, he looked up incuriously, and Adam had had to quickly stop staring at the mannequin to answer Jay’s casual question.
Now, Adam was rolling the same mannequin on his hand truck down the gloomy aisles of Delavere’s, past racks and racks of discount clothes whose shoddiness loudly proclaimed that anyone who wore them was cheap, broke, or both. Along with funds for repairs, Delavere’s also lacked funds to sell higher-end merchandise. Adam knew it hadn’t always been that way, but for most of his life Delavere’s had been the last resort of the desperate.
Arriving in the ladies’ section of the floor, he pushed the truck to the low podium where the mannequin was to be placed. The stand was already there; its previous occupant had broken when some dumb kid pushed it over. When Adam took hold of the mannequin and lifted it into place, he felt firm-muscled legs quivering slightly under his hands. He stared at its face, the blank painted eyes and unchanging expression, looking for some flicker of life. Had he just seen that dumb movie too many times? But there was no denying the evidence of his touch and hearing.
“Look,” he whispered to the dummy, feeling foolish, “do you have a name?” There was no answer, and feeling even more foolish, he reached out and squeezed its ribs.
“HAAA!” yelped the dummy’s voice. “HAAhahaha hahahaa myyy—hahahaha!—n-naaame—HAHAHAAA! Gentler, I can’thahahhaaa--!” Adam slowed his kneading of the ribs, lightly tapping them instead, and the voice stumbled on amidst shaky, breathless giggles. “I’m P-p—heehehee—Patrice Delavereheheehee, stop!”
Adam stopped, more out of surprise than anything. He knew the name. Everyone in town did. She’d owned this very store not too long ago, and had owned it since her father died back in the early sixties. Old man Delavere, everyone said, was a business genius who had turned a neighborhood five-and-ten into a chain of stores that extended across six states. Patrice had promptly reversed the process, burning through the accumulated fortune with a series of trips to Europe, expensive wardrobes, even more expensive lovers, extravagant parties, and the occasional ill-considered investment. Whenever debt threatened to overwhelm her, she hadn’t hesitated to close a store somewhere, lay off all its workers, and sell the building. So the Delavere’s chain had shrunk back to one store again, this one sunk so deep in disrepair and debt that even the old man couldn’t have saved it.
But Adam knew Patrice Delavere as an old woman who lived alone, who provoked a storm of gossip in town every time she stepped beyond the gates of her tumbledown mansion. The body he’d felt when he touched the mannequin was not an old woman’s. And—Adam felt a cold prickle at the base of his spine—Patrice Delavere was dead. She’d died in her sleep only a few weeks ago, her funeral attended only by the same people who loved to stir up the stories of her scandals again and again.
“The Patrice Delavere?” he asked, gently scratching at her ribs to hear her answer.
“Ohh! Yeeehehehehesss, you heeheheheee idiot! Who else? Stop now heehheheee!”
Adam frowned. Patrice’s flaming temper featured prominently in many of the stories about her, but he was not without a certain temper himself. Instead of stopping this time, he deliberately increased the pace of the tickling once more. “What are yoooouuu—“ Patrice broke off in a rising howl of laughter as Adam’s relentless fingers moved down to the edges of her ribs, then began to crawl up her sides, tickling all the way. The laughing crescendoed as he found matching tender spots just above her ribcage, on either side, and dug in with his fingertips.
Adam was astonished to discover how much he was enjoying this. It would have looked bizarre to anyone who passed by, but all Adam paid attention to was how Patrice’s piercing shrieks of forced laughter were already growing ragged and breathless, real as anything. The feel of her soft skin jumping and quivering under his fingers was pure vitality. He could feel her ribs swelling as her lungs and diaphragm spasmed with laughter, and the trembling of the long muscles as she strained to pull her arms down and cover her vulnerability. Those tiny, helpless motions were all she could do, though. Nothing else moved, no matter how Adam tickled her.
“You’re going to have to be nicer than that,” he told her. “Now say you’re sorry and we can move on.” He slowed the tickling for a second to let Patrice take a breath to reply. She filled her lungs and, instead of apologizing, screamed it all out in a string of vituperation that would have been surprising from a street criminal and was downright astonishing from a woman of her age and social status. Adam was only fazed for a second, though, then he swiftly began to tickle her armpits. They were smooth and finely sculpted and, he was unsurprised to find, extremely ticklish. The slightest flutter of his fingertips and the flood of curses suddenly melted into a small girl’s squeal. He kept up the swift tickling, tracing from the edges to the deep centers and back again, for a while. The dummy had been packaged with her arms down, but not completely so, which gave him plenty of room to rest his palms on her sides and tickle away, touching both ends of the hollows with a single flick of his fingers.
“Tickles a lot, doesn’t it?” he taunted. “Looks to me like you have three choices … you can move your arms an inch, you can apologize…or I can keep tickling you. What’s it gonna be?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer just yet, but pressed his wiggling fingers into the softness at the center of her armpits, gently at first, then harder, digging in. Patrice’s gales of hysterics had slacked off to a tiny squeaking sound, but not because the tickling had stopped affecting her—it was because she no longer had the breath to scream. Adam could still tell she was in a frenzy of ticklish agony from the trembling that shook her frozen body, the way tiny muscles twisted and twitched under his fingers, the heat of her flushing skin. It was slightly unnerving to look at the blank features and crudely sculpted body of the mannequin while his hands told him they were touching a beautiful woman in the throes of an unbearable tickling, but in a way it was intensely sensual as well, focused almost totally on his sense of touch and the feel of her body. He wished he could see her face, though—if only to see the look of desperation as she realized what kind of trouble her mouth had gotten her into.
Finally he let his hands fall away. As soon as he stopped tickling, silence closed in again. He looked around him to make sure Jay or Phil hadn’t come up while he was busy with Patrice, but the store was empty. He turned back to Patrice, and after a pause, he touched the soft plateau of her midriff, drawing a circle around its edge, and was rewarded with hoarse, startled giggles. “What’s it going to be?” he asked.
“You—“ Patrice began furiously. Adam drew a line straight down her belly, discovering her tiny navel halfway down, and she gasped and broke off as he began to toy with it. “Oh—get away—heehehee—you—“ And then, as if there had been a switch inside the dimple his fingers explored, she swung immediately from furious to a childish whining. “I’m soorrryy…come on, stop that, please—it tickles too bad!” Adam continued moving his fingers around and around her navel as she broke down into giggles again, then rallied: “It’s just—heehee eehehehee!—I haaaaaa—hate being tickled—hahahahahaa! STOP!—can’t even move…please…”
Smiling, Adam commented, “Looks like you’ll have to start getting used to being tickled, doesn’t it?” As he continued to tease her shuddering belly with one hand, he reached up with the other, took her wrist (pulse hammering in it), and deliberately lifted the arm up. When he released the wrist, the arm stayed lifted. Patrice cried out gratifyingly: “No—no—“ and then burst into hysterical screams once more as he began to tickle the exposed armpit as well. There was a new note in her wild laughter now, a panic on the edge of delirium, as if she was finally realizing the extent of her helplessness. She was pleading openly with him to stop tickling, when she could even talk—which wasn’t often, as she seemed to be getting more ticklish as Adam let his hands wander over her body. The slightest touch sent her into paroxysms of laughter. He teased her cruelly with quick skittering tickles that were over almost as fast as they started, enjoying the way her piercing shrieks trailed off into whimpers as she tried to anticipate where the next tickle would hit.
“Getting used to it yet?” he asked at last, then took his hands from her body before she could answer. Adam sat down on the edge of the platform the mannequin stood on, catching his breath and flexing his fingers. After a little while, he reached over and touched the top of one foot, finding the little slots between her toes by feel. Patrice erupted again. “NOT THERE! EEEeeeee hahahahahaa! No more ahahahahahaaa!” Adam traced up and down, rounding the tips of the toes, tickling their undersides, paying no attention to Patrice’s frantic protests.
Her foot quivered as if she were focusing every bit of her strength into moving it, but it didn’t budge an inch as Adam explored the curves of her ankle, then traced the edges of her sole, driving her mad with laughter. “Why—aahhh!--why are y-you being soooaaHAHHAHAAA! DON’T! HAAHAHAHAHAA!…oh God….don’t be so me-e-e-eehehean to me!” she protested. “I kn-knoooow things—I knew people eeeeeeeha hahaha hahahaa!—I—no, noooo, let me taaaalk—aaAAAAAAaahahhahaa!—I could he-he-heeelp you a lot, I could…just PLEASE, please stooooppppp torturing meeeeeee!”
Adam grinned. “You’re going to help me, no matter what. Were you planning to hold back some secrets from me, Patsy?” He raked clawed hands, very deliberately, down the soles of both feet. The mannequin was molded with toes bent, to make it easy for any kind of shoe to be fitted to the plastic foot, so Patrice’s toes were likewise flexed and the soles taut and supremely vulnerable. Her scream arced upward to a level only audible to dogs. “You’re going to tell me everything you know, if I have to drag it out of you.” Again he raked her soles, and Patrice howled. “Do you understand?”
Adam returned to tracing a finger up and down first one arch, then the other, in a lazy, serpentine path, until among the soft giggles he heard a faint “Y-yes…”
“And if you think I’m being mean, listen to me.” Adam curled his hands over her feet, the fingertips curving up to draw out a subtly varying, maddening rhythm all over her soles. Patrice reached total giggle meltdown in seconds as Adam went on. “You didn’t know my dad. He was a department manager over at your store in Madison Heights. You remember, the one you closed in ’82, because your plastic surgeon was demanding you pay his bills? And you fired the whole staff? My dad worked there all his life….” Adam paused and took a breath as his fingers worked on Patrice’s feet. She tried to speak, and Adam dug in, scratching the balls of her feet and dissolving her voice into screeching laughter. “I’m not gonna go into all the details, but you ruined my dad’s life, and my mother’s, and almost mine too. Aren’t you lucky I’m only tickling the hell out of you?” With a ferocious smile, he threaded his fingers between her toes, tickling the tender little valleys until she yelled out her agreement. Then he resumed his steady tickling of her soles as he continued.
“I never thought much about you before, because there was nothing I could really do to you. But having you here now, like this…it’s like something wants me to take revenge. I don’t have no idea how all this happened. And frankly, Patsy, I don’t care. What I do know is that I’m enjoying this a lot. And you’re going to pay for what you did to my family…and all those other people you hurt. You’ve got a lot of paying back to do, and it’s just started tonight.”
Adam stood up, then selected a short skirt and top from a nearby rack. With quick, practiced motions, he dressed the mannequin, tickling Patrice’s helpless body at every turn. She was trying to protest and apologize and promise all at once, but he ignored her babbling. All he cared about right now was her tormented laughter. When she was covered, he leaned close, staring into the immobile, blandly smiling face. Was there a flicker of something, deep in those painted eyes, the slightest tremble in the molded lips? “I’ve got some other work to do,” he told her, “but I’m going to be back. Soon. And we’re going to be spending some long nights together….”
Taking up the hand truck, he pushed it away, leaving her trapped in her eternal pose, staring off into the darkness.
