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The Ballad of Tammy Lou (F/FFFF)-- A classic from the vault!

munchausen

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The Ballad of Tammy Lou (F/FFFF)-- A classic from the vault!

Okay, so maybe "classic" is overselling it, but this is the first story I ever wrote for MTJ publishing, and it's still one of my favorites. It originally appeared in Tales from the Asylum #30 in August of 2009, with a fantastic FTKL illustration to accompany it: https://mtjpub.com/iteminfo.php?item_id=148

Hope you enjoy it -- in retrospect, I really dig the mix of genres, and I'm pretty damn proud of that stupid poem...

The Ballad of Tammy-Lou
By Munchausen

The sky was just opening up as Lucy flashed her ID badge to the gate guard and zipped into the visitor parking space closest to the front doors of Ravenwood House. Running a little gingerly in her flip-flops, holding her copy of Storytime magazine over her head to ward off the rain, she got through the great doors just before the storm hit in earnest. Hanging her windbreaker on the coatrack by the door, she smiled at Ed, the front desk guard, and blew out her breath.

“You just escaped the worst of it, looks like,” the older man said as he shrugged into his coat. “And lucky me, I get to go right out into it.”

“Leaving early?” she asked as she gathered her long, curly, dark brown locks into a ponytail and put on her sorority-lettered ballcap. It wasn’t worth hassling with her hair down on a rainy day, and nobody would be seeing her anyway.

“Yeah, I’ve got to see the doctor about this irritable bowel thing,” he said, oversharing as usual. “It’ll just be you gals here this afternoon. Reckon you’ll make it?”

Lucy stuck her tongue out briefly and grinned. “First, Ewww. Second, we gals will be fine if we don’t wash away.”

He gave her an appraising look. At 20, Julie was 45 years his junior, and his appreciation of her tanned, athletic form, clad in a fitted white t-shirt and low-rise jeans that gave a glimpse of her navel ring, was more a longing for youth and health than a leering sexual desire. Object of desire or not, Julie was one of those people who is simply pleasant to look at – beautiful, with dark, sparkling eyes, skin just starting to lose its summer tan, pixieish nose, and broad, smiling mouth, but also marked by a kind of down-to-earth good humor that made her instantly likeable as well as pretty. “Just be glad you got your health, young lady. One day you wake up having to crap every fifteen minutes.” He nodded gravely and went out into the rain.

“Nice to see you too,” Lucy said under her breath as she headed to the old, creaky elevator that led to the third floor of the mansion. Ravenwood House was an enormous manor home built in the early 19th century, but it had been converted in the early 1990s into a research facility for the study of what its endower, Edmund Ravenwood, had called “Psychological Phenomena.” Its small staff was impeccably credentialed, and the research that went on there, while certainly unorthodox, had gone a long way toward bringing about mainstream acceptance of some ideas that had formerly been dismissed as the stuff of science fiction. It was small, and was designed to be occupied by only a few researchers, subjects, or some combination thereof at a time – researchers from all over the world would apply to use Ravenwood’s state-of –the-art facilities.

Lucy had worked with the current facility head, Dr. Veronica Buell, on an internship the previous summer at the University, where she was a Junior Psych major. The two had gotten on very well, and, when Dr. Buell had secured the Ravenwood position, she had invited Julie to come by periodically to help with various non-essential tasks, take care of some sorority community service requirements in an environment where she might learn something professionally significant, and to observe, as much as she was allowed, how researchers on the cutting edge of psychological theory worked.

Her task this afternoon was more on the community service end of the spectrum than on the clinical. The current research subject at Ravenwood was a young woman named Tessa Lambert who had been in a bizarre “walking coma” for the past two years. The specific circumstances of her ailment were unclear – she had sustained no injury that anyone had been able to detect. She had simply fallen asleep one afternoon, a healthy 24 year old, and had not awakened since. There were some peculiarities in her comatose state – while left alone, she simply lay inert, she could be made to sleepwalk, do rudimentary exercise, eat and drink when fed, et cetera – she simply never regained full consciousness. She responded with clear biological signs to human voices, particularly to stories read to her, and there were some anomalies in how those responses manifested themselves that could only be described in terms of the paranormal. Veronica couldn’t tell Lucy any specifics, but an “incident” had occurred a year and a half ago that led to her becoming a sought after subject for psychological research.

Lucy came to the institute three afternoons a week to read to her. She was always met by one of three guards/caretakers insisted upon by Tessa’s very wealthy parents, and the reading material she brought was scrutinized with an intensity that could only be described as bizarre. They had to be children’s stories, and only of a certain kind – “No dragons, no giants, no monsters, no evil witches or wizards,” the guard had said to her the first day, as if reciting a script. Lucy was of course eaten up with curiosity but happy simply to be allowed to be a part of what Veronica had confided in her was truly potentially groundbreaking research.

As she passed Veronica’s office door she tapped on the glass and waved. Veronica glanced up from a mound of papers and waved back with a little smile, then immediately submerged herself in work again. At the end of the hall, seated outside Tessa’s closed door and reading a National Enquirer, was Lucy’s least favorite of the caretakers – Angela. Angela wasn’t mean, exactly – she was simply pure, cold professionalism in the body of a supermodel, and Lucy regarded her with a blend of resentment and envy that made her feel shallow and guilty. She looked as impeccably groomed as usual today, dressed in a sharp black jacket and skirt with glistening black pumps, her long, straight blonde hair as smooth and lustrous as if she’d brushed it a thousand strokes, her subtle makeup expertly applied to her patrician features and high, arched brows. Lucy wasn’t entirely sure why, but she, like the others, carried a small, discrete firearm in a shoulder harness under her jacket.

Angela nodded politely to her as she approached, and held out her hand. Lucy gave over the magazine, feeling the usual resentment that her judgment as to appropriate reading material couldn’t be trusted. Angela paged through, raised an eyebrow, then handed it back. “’Tammy Lou Ticklefoot?’” she asked.
“My choices are kind of limited,” Lucy replied, blushing a bit.

“Should be fine. The nurse is in there now, but you can go ahead in.”

Lucy thanked her and went in. Nurse Brianne was there, as Angela had said, checking Tessa’s vitals and writing on a chart. Tessa lay, as usual, regal in repose, her pale skin and long black hair in stark contrast, her long lashes resting on high cheekbones. She was a beautiful girl, and, thanks to the oddly quasi-ambulatory nature of her coma, she had not suffered physical ravages of her inactivity. Nurse Brianne, a buxom young redhead with pleasantly freckled cheeks, a button nose, and mischievous eyes, was just finishing up, testing her reflexes. “Hey girl,” she said, her Irish brogue making the greeting incongruous.

Lucy liked Brianne a lot – she was only about five years older than Lucy, and the two had similar outlooks and senses of humor. “How’s sleeping beauty?” Lucy asked. “Same as ever?”

Brianne grinned. “Mostly,” she said. “Ooh! But check this out.”

Brianne went to the foot of the bed and turned up the covers, revealing Tessa’s long, slender bare feet. “Look what I discovered while I was cuttin’ her nails,” she said, with a devilish wink. She reached down and tickled the sole of one foot. Tessa’s whole body jumped – her toes curled tightly and her breath caught. Her eyes, still closed, winced tight.

“Whoa!” Lucy exclaimed. “Is that, like, normal?”

“Who’s to say with this one?” Brianne replied. She tickled the other foot. The toes wriggled and twitched; the body writhed under the sheet. “I haven’t been able to get her to laugh yet, but she’s clearly having ticklish responses.”

“Have you told Veronica?”

“Yeah. She’s not sure what to make of it either, except that it bears further study. I haven’t been able to bring myself to keep it up too long. If she really is feeling everything in there, this actually seems kind of mean.” She tickled both feet again, evoking frantic twitching and toe-curling from the still comatose Tessa, then quit and covered the feet again. “I mean, I wouldn’t like to be in her shoes. Or out of ‘em, I suppose. Well, I’m off. Read away.”

As Brianne closed the door behind her, Lucy settled into a comfortable chair, pulled up the ottoman, and turned on the reading lamp. She slipped off her flip flops, put her feet up, and opened the brightly colored kids’ magazine she had brought to read. The opening piece was a lengthy poem whose title seemed a bit ironic given Brianne’s discovery – “The Ballad of Tammy-Lou Ticklefoot.” It seemed cute and harmless enough, and, infantile as it was, it was better than reading Tessa the phone book. The piece was illustrated by various margin drawings of cartoonish little western townspeople – here a schoolmarmish librarian, there a cowboy, there a dance hall girl, there a stuffily dressed mayor – being driven into wild, whooping laughter by a tall, darkhaired lady outlaw who was tickling their bare feet. Scanning through briefly, Lucy saw that by the poem’s close the outlaw got her comeuppance as a spunky-looking gal paid her back in kind. “High drama,” she sighed to herself. “Anyway, here goes.”


“The Ballad of Tammy-Lou Ticklefoot

With oodles of outlaws the wild west was curst,
But Tammy-Lou Ticklefoot may have been worst.
Her fame as a villain was spread far and wide,
She left victims in tears and with aches in their sides.
Now Tammy-Lou was not guilty of violence or theft,
She just tickled folks’ feet till they ran out of breath!
She would leave ‘em a gasping, without shoe or stocking,
And ride off with a wave and a laugh that was mocking.
Strangest durn’d outlaw the west ever seen–
Most folks just reckoned that she was plain mean.

She rode into Friendlytown one afternoon,
Ticklin’ those in her way, had ‘em laughin’ like loons!
She tickled the teachers, she tickled the clerks,
She tickled and tickled the poor soda jerk,
And each time she tickled a poor pair of feet,
She said she wouldn’t stop and she couldn’t be beat,
Till the sheriff and mayor would finally give in,
As she tickled their toes till tears ran down their chins,
They’d hand over the town to her, all would be hers,
And all lives but hers would take turns for the worse.

Cause when she owned everything, barrel, lock, stock,
She’d make all the townsfolk take off shoes and socks,
And be tickled and tickled, all day and all night,
While Tammy-Lou Ticklefoot beamed with delight.
Though the young-‘uns were spared from the coils of her lasso,
The grown-uppuns giggles rang clear to El Paso!
From the grandest of ladies to cops on the beat,
Not a person could safeguard their ticklish feet.
Tammy-Lou kept on tickling, and people did fear,
That a ticklish town future was terribly near.

At last, once she’d tickled the sheriff and mayor,
Tammy Lou took her place in the old mayor’s chair,
And announced to the town they could rest for awhile,
But know the next day they’d be tickled with style.
The township that was the saddest of places,
As barefooted victims with overcast faces,
Could only go homeward to soak their poor feet,
And collapse into bed, all downtrodden and beat.
“What can we do?” The question rang out,
But the peoples’ resistance was all tickled out.

But one spunky soul, a young cowgirl named Heather,

Had quickly been adding two and two together,
Heather’d taken a tickling as bad as the rest,
But she picked up her boots and she stuck out her chest,
And said, “If our town’s to be worth a plugged nickel,
“We can’t just surrender our feet to be tickled.
“I’ll bet if she thinks ticklin’ feet is so keen,
“Tammy-Lou’s got the ticklishest we’ve ever seen!”
Heather picked up her spirits and screwed up some hope,
Then she gathered up feathers and gathered up rope.


She marched to the mayor’s, where Tammy-Lou slept,
And into the office our heroine crept.
She tied up the outlaw in ten seconds flat,
Tied her up tight in the chair as she sat,
Then took off Tammy-Lou’s boots and socks as she dozed,
“Let’s see how you like tickling on your very own toes!”
Tammy-Lou woke up with a jerk and a shout,
And saw in a second her luck had run out.
The reason she tickled the poor men and girls,
Was that she had the most ticklish feet in the world.
And now she looked up at our heroine Heather,
Standing over her tootsies and holding a feather.

The tickling that our Heather gave Tammy-Lou
Was the tickliest tickling the world ever knew.
That black-hearted outlaw did giggle and shout
Till the sound of her laugh brought the townspeople out,
And as soon as they realized the cause of the din,
They lined up round the block so that they could pitch in.
They took it in turns tickling Tammy-Lou’s feet
Till she begged to be given the chance to retreat.
When they finally thought that her lesson was learned,
The mayor stood forth and in tones that were stern
Told her to head out of his Friendlytown
And if he and the good folks should see her around
They’d give her a tickling she’d never forget
And that that was a warning and not just a threat.
Tammy-Lou rode away without a look back
And Friendlytown was again safe from attack.

And for Heather, our hero, there was a parade
And a key to the town for the difference she’d made
As for Tammy-Lou Ticklefoot, some rumors say
That she gave up her tickling ways on that day
But others still claim, with a worrisome frown,
That she still can strike terror in ticklish towns,
So if you lay eyes on our Miss Tammy-Lou,
You’d best stay indoors – and put on your shoes!”

Lucy finished, smiling at the silliness of the poem, and glanced over at Tessa. The usually placid woman showed signs of distress – her eyes twitched beneath their lids; her breathing, while still quiet, was slightly faster. It was as if she was having an upsetting dream. Outside, the storm swelled; lightning flashed and thunder cracked almost in tandem, as if the center of the bad weather was right above them.

“Hey, it’s all right,” Lucy said gently, stroking her hair. “Maybe that wasn’t the best story to read after Brianne kept tickling your feet. That’s got to suck. Here, let me read something else. Here’s one about, um, a turtle or something…”

As she launched into the next story, Tessa seemed to calm down. Her breathing slowed, her eyes became still. The storm rolled on, the thunder fading to a distant crackle.

Brianne was happily getting ready to leave for the day. She still wore her nurse’s uniform, but she had let her strawberry hair down from its loose bun to fall about her shoulders, and had taken a moment to freshen her makeup – her boyfriend was bringing dinner over, and she wanted to look presentable in case he beat her home. As she filed away the last of the day’s paperwork in the file room, she heard an odd sound. It was footsteps, definitely, which were odd enough, given how few people were in the institute this evening, but it was more than that. In addition to the sharp clack of bootheels, there was a distinct jingle – like spurs in Western movies.

“Who’s there?” Brianne called, looking around nervously. Suddenly, she heard a whooshing sound – the repetitive whipping of a lasso being whirled in the air, though she would never have been able to identify it as such. Instinctively, she started to run through the file room toward the front doors of the institute, but the whooshing became a hiss and she found herself ensnared – in a manner that defied all laws of physics – in a garish yellow lasso that pinned her ankles together, tripping her up. Terrified, she peered over her shoulder at the figure that was now dragging her across the smooth hardwood floor of the entryway back the way she came. She screamed for help, though she knew none of the few people left in the building would be able to hear her.

The woman was a bizarre, almost comical apparition. She was tall and lanky, with long legs, slim hips, and a modest bosom. Long, coal-black hair hung in thick waves to her waist, crowned by a slightly oversized ten gallon hat –her pretty face wore a look of wicked exultation, the like of which one might expect to see on a Disney vilainess. Her clothes, in keeping with the cowboy hat, were stereotypical Hollywood cowgirl, from her cow-print vest to her black boots and the glistening spurs that had alerted Brianne to her presence.

“Gotcha! A city gal like you never had a chance of getting’ away from me,” she said in a scenery-chewing old west accent. “Tammy-Lou’s got her another one!”

Brianne’s scrabbling efforts to halt her drag across the floor failed miserably – the woman seemed almost superhumanly strong. “What do you want with me? I don’t have any money, or any drugs!” Her terror was rising. She saw with a flash of relief that the woman, for all her wild west regalia, at least did not seem to be carrying a gun.

Tammy-Lou hauled Brianne unceremoniously across the smooth, waxed floor to a desk, atop which Tammy Lou sat. Brianne found her legs hoisted off the ground, her shoulders and upper back still resting on the floor. Tammy Lou half-sat, half-stood, leaning her butt against the desk, essentially astraddle Brianne’s body, pinning her arms to the ground beneath her booted feet, and pulling her bound legs up between hers so that her feet were directly in front of her grinning face. She plucked off Brianne’s white tennis shoes, then tugged the white ankle socks off her cringing bare feet. What the hell is she doing, Brianne thought wildly.

“The name’s Tammy Lou Ticklefoot, sweetness, and I’ve got one job and one job only: to tickle folks’ feet till they’re plum tickled out!”

Brianne’s face screwed up in a look of quizzical disbelief. “Why do you do that?”

Tammy Lou paused for a moment, her face clouding briefly. “That ain’t in the story,” she said. “Anyhow, ready or not, here it comes!”

Brianne winced and struggled fruitlessly as her captor pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time, to reveal long, well-filed crimson nails. The barefoot nurse’s feet were a bit on the large side, broad through the ball and high-arched, with cute little toes that wiggled nervously. Tammy Lou, performing the one task for which she had been created in some likely stoned doggerelist’s mind, laid into them with the gusto of a true master. Brianne’s body jumped like she had been struck by lightning as Tammy Lou’s dexterous, graceful fingers flickered over the pads and undersides of her wiggling toes, scrabbled over the balls, zipped and danced into ticklish arches, rasped slightly over rougher but still quite sensitive heels. Brianne shrieked and giggled, whinnied and whooped, sounding for all the world like she was having the time of her life as Tammy Lou played a virtuoso performance on the soles of her feet.

As she tickled, Tammy Lou whooped and hollered like a cowboy on a bucking bronco, interspersing the occasional “coochie coochie coo!” with her yahoos. Never once did her grip falter, despite the desperate heaves and writhes that Brianne was executing prompted by her tickling touch. Brianne, face easily as crimson as her hair, found herself quickly reduced to silent laughter, eyes squinched shut, chest heaving, hands pounding the floor with diminishing intensity as Tammy Lou taught her in no uncertain terms what a real foot-tickling was like.

Finally, when the soles of Brianne’s feet were bright pink with overstimulation and her breath was a giggling rasp in her heaving, ample chest, Tammy Lou stopped, loosening her grip on the redhead’s bound legs. “All right, I reckon maybe you’ve had enough.”

“Th-thank…Thank you…thank you…” Brianne managed a squeaky little whisper amid giggles that still wracked her as phantom tickles haunted her poor soles.

Abruptly, Tammy Lou yanked her feet to their original position, wiggling her fingers menacingly over them. “That is, so long as you tell me where ta find the sheriff and mayor of this here place.”

“Sh- Sheriff and mayor?” Brianne asked, genuinely confused. A swift tickling attack on the arch of her right foot drew a hoarse, desperate howl from her. “Okay! Okay!” she blurted as the tickling stopped. The woman in charge – the, um, mayor – is Veronica Buell. She has an office on the second floor. The security person is gone for the day, but there’s a private bodyguard here – is that what you mean by sheriff?”

“That’ll do,” Tammy Lou said, one brow raised in interest.

“She’s on the second floor as well. Guarding a patient in room 214. Now, please, please let me go. Please don’t tickle me any more.”

“Can you honestly say you’re plum tickled out?” Tammy Lou asked, deadly serious.

“Oh, god, yes. I’ve never been as, um, tickled out as I am right now. Look at me, I’m still shaking.”

Tammy Lou glowered at her another moment, then twitched the wrist of the hand holding the rope. It fell away, freeing Brianne, who scrambled quickly, if unsteadily, to her feet.

“All right, get. But I keep the shoes and stockin’s fer trophies. An’ if you cause me any trouble in what I’m up to here, I’ll find ya again and you’ll get it twice as bad.”
Brianne hurried barefoot to the door, then stopped, her better nature taking over.

“You’re not going to hurt anyone, are you?”

Tammy Lou glowered darkly for a moment, then grinned. “You ain’t hurt, are you? Sweetheart, I ain’t written that way. They got the ticklin’ of a lifetime comin’, but don’t worry your pretty head. Ticklin’ ain’t so bad, is it now?”

Brianne rushed out and slammed the door behind her, Tammy Lou’s laughter echoing within. She reached instinctively for her cell phone, to call the police, then realized that her purse was still inside. She paused, hand suspended over the doorknob, then backed away. Her bare feet felt cold and vulnerable on the rain-soaked concrete, reminding her of their sensitivity. Going back inside meant risking more tickling, and for what? To spare the other women the same thing she already went through? What would the police say if she called from a facility devoted to studying psychological abnormalities to report a mad foot-tickler on the loose? “Sorry, ladies,” she said under her breath. “Brianne’s going to wait this out till the coast is clear.” She sat, cross-legged and small, in the meager shelter of a roof overhang and watched the rain continue to fall.

__________________________________________________ _________
Lucy was bored. The magazine she had brought from the library had caught her attention primarily for the first story about the foot-tickling outlaw – it struck her as funny and cute. The rest of it, though, was deathly dull. There was a whole story about kids helping each other rake leaves. If Tessa hadn’t been in a coma before, Lucy thought, this probably would do it.

She stretched dramatically, arching her back and throwing her head back and arms and legs out as far as they would go, spreading and wiggling her fingers and toes and making an involuntary little squeak. She let the book fall from her hands and closed her eyes for a moment, sleepy in the warm hush of the room…
She awoke to a commotion outside the room. Raised voices, scuffling, cursing, banging around – what was going on? Lucy, heart racing with sudden fear, glanced at Tessa in the bed. She still slept soundly, though one eye appeared to be twitching slightly at intervals. Lucy screwed up her courage – Angela, or even Veronica, might need her help. She rose and tiptoed barefoot to the door, then eased it open a crack.

Angela, the vision of cool competence and emotionless efficiency, was hogtied on the floor; her gun, black ankle boots, and sheer dress socks lay on the floor nearby. Her icily beautiful face bore an expression of total outrage as her assailant – the spitting image of the outlaw from the story – shored up the knots tying her wrists to her ankles. “Looks like there’s a new sheriff in town,” the attacker said, then let out a smoky-voiced chuckle.

“Holy crap,” Lucy breathed, wide-eyed. “It’s freaking Tammy Lou Ticklefoot!”

Suddenly, amid the insanity of the moment, things began to make a bizarre kind of sense. Tessa’s presence here, the amount of attention and monitoring given to her responses to aural stimuli, the strict controls governing reading material, the unspecified “incident” that had led to disaster at her previous facility. Somehow, Tessa’s mind had brought this fictional character to life. The story, innocuous as it was, had disturbed her to such an extent that its central villain had worked its way into her dreams – possibly due to the foot-tickling she had endured from Nurse Brianna shortly before. Now her nightmare – strange and comical as it was – was here, and, it appeared, about to do what she did best to the cursing, struggling Angela. Lucy watched in a mixture of horror, fascination, and, yes, a hint of crazed amusement as she began.

In contrast to Lucy’s nut-brown tan, Angela’s skin had a uniform golden tone, like a model’s in a suntan lotion ad. Lucy had never seen her barefoot before, but was unsurprised to see that her feet were like the rest of her – narrow, long-toed, elegant, graceful, and golden, blending into a light pink on the smooth, soft soles. They were clearly diligently maintained, and proved, as Tammy Lou brought her wickedly expert fingernails to bear, frightfully ticklish. Angela fought as best she could - - her curses first became angry gasping, then clenched-toothed animal squeals, torn from her in spite of her furious resistance. Her toes clenched with sole-whitening tightness; her fists, her eyes, her lips, her muscular buttocks, her entire body took on the aspect of outraged, tense resistance.

It lasted all of twelve seconds once Tammy Lou’s nails worked their magic on her defenseless bare soles. As the tickling wormed between her toes and flicked over the balls of her feet, the hogtied Angela bounced and bucked fruitlessly and let out a bizarrely comical braying laugh that completely undid her habitual aura of calm control. Her eyes were wide between her long, elegant lashes; Lucy thought she seemed terrified by her own ticklishness, panicked by the intensity of the laughter Tammy Lou forced from her. It was almost funny, watching this statuesque amazon bouncing and sputtering with tear-laced laughter, her long bare toes wiggling wildly as this cartoon-come-to-life tickled the bottoms of her feet unmercifully. Almost funny, but not.

Lucy stood up straight and breathed deeply, gathering her courage. She had to stop this. It was clearly torture for Angela; further, who knew how far it would go? Was it possible to tickle someone to death? She had to act.

She burst suddenly from the room, shouting wildly and leaping at Tammy Lou. She had thought briefly about going for Angela’s gun, but knew she’d never be able to bring herself to use it. If she could just buy Angela some time, maybe she could get free…

Tammy Lou caught her effortlessly in air and tossed her, not ungently, back into the room. Lucy crashed ignominiously but painlessly back into the chair she had been sitting in, and went over backwards in it. With unbelievable speed, Tammy Lou and her lasso went to work: before Lucy knew what was happening, she was lying on her back in the overturned chair, wrists bound to the arms, ankles bound to the legs. Tammy Lou, eyes flashing with excitement, shot her a wink as she lay helplessly on the floor. “Ah’ll be right back,” she said.

Lucy lay helplessly listening to Angela’s renewed hysterical braying, interspersed with gasping pleas for mercy. Her hearing seemed heightened – she heard every rasp of Tammy Lou’s fingernails against Angela’s soft, pampered, lotioned soles. After a full five more minutes – Lucy could clearly see the clock from where she lay – Tammy Lou seemed to decide that Angela had had enough. She dragged her hogtied captive into the room and left her unceremoniously in a corner, then turned her attention to Lucy.

“Now then, let’s see what we got here. A lil’ cutie tryin’ ta be a hero. A reg’lar Heather Trueheart,” she said with a sneer. In the back of her mind, Lucy registered with curiosity that the poem had never given Heather a last name. As Tammy approached, Lucy found herself wiggling her toes, squirming her feet in a futile effort to hide them. Habitually barefoot or flip-flopped, Lucy was proud of her feet – toe rings decorated the middle two toes of both feet. Her feet were tanned brown on the tops, a rich pink on the bottoms; her toes were cute and well-formed, her soles, though she didn’t think about them much, were richly wrinkled. They were also, Lucy knew with a soul-chilling certainty, excruciatingly ticklish.

Unlike Angela, Lucy surrendered completely at the first skittering touch of Tammy Lou’s nails on her foot bottoms. She squealed and giggled wildly, the natural touch of husky hoarseness that adorned her voice rendering her suffering undeniably cute. Each zone of her feet produced its own kind of ticklish sensations, all overwhelmingly powerful but each distinct. Probing between and beneath her toes brought forth wild squeals of what sounded deceptively like delight; scratching at the balls of her feet made her toes wiggle wildly as if to try and trap the tickling fingers as giggles rolled forth in waves; most devastatingly of all, invading the high, crinkly arches brought forth first screams, then a deep, resounding belly laugh that signaled pure surrender.

As she whooped and giggled, squealed and laughed, random cartoon scenes from the peom’s illustrations flashed into Lucy’s mind. She wondered crazily how she might look rendered by the cartoonist in this plight – would she come across as a dainty little giggling wreck like the schoolteacher, or a wildly wiggling fighter like the cowgirl? What sort of victim would she make, as she lay here red-faced, heaving, convulsing with laughter, unable to do more than wiggle her toes and flex her feet as this ridiculous figment of a storybook writer’s and comatose psychic’s collective imaginations tickled her bare soles beyond endurance?

For a moment, the tickling stopped. Lucy gulped a ragged breath, feeling relief fill her, then widened her eyes in terror as Tammy Lou produced a long, stiff, red feather from her belt. “Please, no! Have mercy!” Lucy managed, feeling ridiculous at her melodramatic but heartfelt begging. Tammy Lou winked at her.
“Don’t worry, sweetness. This ain’t fer you. Though I will give you a taste..”

To the extent that she had ever thought about it, Lucy had always thought that feathers couldn’t really tickle as much as fingers. The first brushes of this one over her highly sensitized foot bottoms, though, proved that this feather, at least, was lethal. “YAAAHAHAHAAA! WHOOHOOO!STAHAAHAAAAAP!PLEEHEEHEEHEEHEEASE!” She bucked and hollered as yet another distinctive kind of tickling sensation overwhelmed her senses. Twenty seconds of the feather’s touch had her babbling and in tears, laughing harder than she could ever remember laughing. Then, blessedly, Tammy Lou stopped.

“All right, I’m done with you two. Stay put, though. Once the mayor’s dealt with, I might have some the inclination to play with you some more.” And she was off down the hallway, spurs jingling, headed toward Veronica’s office.

Lucy lay there, feet twitching, tears drying, waiting for her heart to slow to some semblance of a normal rate. When she had taken about ten deep breaths, she glanced over at Angela, who met her eyes, then looked away in shame. “I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I failed you.”

Lucy was about to reassure this woman who, finally showing a bit of humanity, seemed much more likeable than before when another voice came from the vicinity of the bed. “So..sorry,” croaked a voice hoarse and faint from disuse.

“Oh my god!” Lucy cried. “Tessa, you’re awake!”

“I..did this, didn’t I? It’s like the ogres at the last place. I felt terrible about that. It’s like part of me knows what’s happening, can hear, feel, everything, but another part has kept that part beneath the surface.” Her halting speech was becoming stronger.

“No! Be careful,” Angela said, but the next thing Lucy knew Tessa had walked over from the bed and was untying her bonds. She untied Angela, as well, trembling slightly, a bit unsteadily, but with increasing strength. When they were both free, Tessa collapsed back onto the bed.

“You have to stop her,” she said. “I want to help, but I’m so weak…”

“How?” Angela asked. “I shot her point blank, and nothing happened.”

Tessa thought for a moment. “She doesn’t die in the story, so she probably can’t die here. You have to drive her away – back into the world of the book. You can’t do it by pure force – only she knows how to go back. You have to make her want to leave.”

Angela blinked at her in disbelief, utterly confused, but Lucy was catching on. “I know what we need to do. And I’ll need your help, Angela. And your keys.” She picked up her spirits and gathered up hope, as the poem said, and headed in the direction of the old supply closets at the end of the hall.
__________________________________________________ _____________

The two women crept on silent bare feet toward the office of Dr. Veronica Buell. They needn’t have bothered. The noises coming from the office would have drowned them out if they’d been wearing tap shoes. Peering around the jamb of the open door, Lucy saw the lovely Dr. Buell in quite an unfamiliar, if predictable, circumstance. The eminently professional doctor, with her pretty, elfin face, dark page bob, and expertly applied makeup, had been roped to her desk chair, her feet hoisted up onto the desktop. She was still in her doctor’s attire, save for her bare feet, and Tammy Lou was sawing the terrible feather between her tethered toes with one hand while scrabbling her nails across both vulnerable soles with the other. Dr. Buell was roaring with laughter, shaking her head wildly in ineffectual denial of what was happening, as her tormented toes clenched and wriggled.

“God, is everyone here tonight like super ticklish?” Lucy wondered aloud in a whisper.

“Let’s hope so,” Angela replied. “Come on. Let’s do this.”

The two were on Tammy Lou in an instant, Lucy helping to pin her arms while Angela, with practiced ease, applied the straitjacket – a relic of an earlier era, but a fortunate enough find given the circumstances. “What the goll durn…” Tammy Lou began, but immediately found herself thrust onto the desk on her back.

“Can you hold her?” Lucy asked.

“You bet. Help the doc,” Angela said, regaining the air of control that had been her strength before the evening’s humiliations.

Lucy quickly untied Dr. Buell, who got shakily to her feet, chest heaving. “Wh..what the hell is going on here?” She asked.

“No time now. Help get her boots off,” Lucy said. Tammy Lou’s eyes went wide and she began to buck like a bronco, but between the three of them the women managed to tie her to the table and tug the black boots and multicolored striped socks from her feet. Barefoot, Tammy Lou looked even more cartoonish. Like the rest of her, her feet were well shaped and pretty, but were exaggeratedly large – maybe a 14, Lucy thought – and animated. Her long toes wiggled and curled, flexed and clenched, as she began desperately trying to negotiate. “Now, come on, gals, this was just a little fun, wasn’t it? Nobody got hurt, right?”

“Right,” Lucy said, brandishing Tammy Lou’s feather in front of her fearful eyes. “And this won’t hurt a bit.”

If there were such a thing as an epic tickling – a tickling worthy of memorializing in epic poetry, even in the likes of Storybook magazine – the tickling those three ladies inflicted on Tammy Lou Ticklefoot’s big, bare, ticklish feet was it. Tammy Lou was at least as ticklish as any of them, and every inch of her big, wrinkly soles and long, dexterous toes proved a devastatingly effective target for the ladies’ fingernails, the feather, or whatever else the vengeful furies improvised as a tickling tool. It was actually kind of fun. Tammy Lou’s reactions, while clearly heart- (and sole-) felt ticklish responses, were fittingly cartoonish in volume and intensity, as if her tickle torture were being played, in every sense, for laughs. She whooped and hooted wildly as the feather explored between her toes; she threw her head back, dumping her hat to the floor and freeing her long, lustrous mane of black hair, and bellowed “YAAAAHAAAAHAAAAHOOOOOOO!!!!” as Dr. Buell produced a plastic tipped hairbrush from her purse, held her big toes together, and applied it briskly to her flexing soles. Angela’s well-manicured nails scribbling up her heels, through her arches, up to the base of her toes and back down kept a heaving cataract of guffaws flowing from her like a runaway herd.

In the wake of their own embarrassment and suffering, the women became remarkably inventive ticklers. Angela astutely realized that lotion might enhance Tammy Lou’s sensitivity – not that she needed it – and she squirted liberal quantities over the woman’s big feet and rubbed it in with tickly relish. At one point, struck by inspiration, Lucy ran to one of the labs and opened a couple of fresh test tube brushes – these brought forth banshee-like howls when the smaller dig between Tammy’s fourth and fifth toes and the larger sawed back and forth in the hollows of her arches. At times they held her feet together and tickled them as one; at times, they tickled them separately, two holding one each and the other swooping in as she saw fit. The more they tickled, the louder Tammy Lou laughed; even as her strength to resist waned, her laughter never diminished. In fact, with each innovation – the touch of the quill end of the feather to the very center of her sole, Angela’s scrunching her fingertips beneath the pads of her toes – she seemed to redouble her laughter, often with an astonished, cartoonish bellow: “OH-HO-HOOOOOOHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!!”

At last, after perhaps half an hour of unrelenting tickling, Lucy signaled to the women to stop. Tammy Lou lay panting, eyes closed, vainly rubbing the sole of one foot against the top of the other, occasionally letting out a faint, giggly “whew.”

“All right, Tammy Lou,” Lucy said with authority. “We know your game and we beat you at it. Now will you go back where you came from and leave us alone?”
“Yeah…Yeah, anything..Just quit ticklin’ mah feet, and ah’ll go.”

The three women untied her, then loosened the straitjacket. The whole time, Angela kept one foot by the ankle, nails poised over the sole, threatening her with the only weapon that seemed effective if she tried to fight.

At last, hands raised in a posture of surrender, she got to her feet. “Woohooo!” she yodeled. “That was some fun, eh girls? Ah’m almost sorry to go. But whose to say I won’t see you around again?” She winked broadly, as if at an imaginary camera or audience, then faded from view as the three women gaped, astonished.

They stood silent for a moment, then Dr. Buell spoke up. “What the hell was that?” she blurted.

“It’s a long, painful story,” Lucy said. “But maybe we should let Tessa tell you about it.” They moved off down the hall to Tessa’s room, talking animatedly, trying to make some sense out of the most bizarre day of any of their lives. In the distance, the thunder rumbled softly.

The End
 
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