After last call, shuffling down the street, something new - a flicker of light. He'd walked down that street for a few months, and that house had never stood out for any reason. Probably some hermit lived there, because there wasn't any trash on the steps or peeling paint to suggest it was abandoned.
And he got curious. Big mistake. Should've kept on walking. He knew better...
But he looked around the street, saw no one... and snuck up the steps. Hesitating again, he peeked in the window.
Dark hallway. No furniture -
Hands clamped on with a speed that was frightening.
And something pressed against his head, being tugged down. It was thick. Leather.
They pulled him forward.
Yelling was all but useless now, because there was a zipper over the mouth of the hood and it was closed. Flailing around, he was carried along. Too many hands had him.
Stairs, going down.
A door opened - he could barely hear it - and they sat him down. It felt like a simple wooden chair with a stadium pad on it, or something like that. Immediately they got his arms behind him, and grabbed his legs...
Tying him.
Then he struggled uselessly, and heard the door close.
Caught, by a bunch of guys - those hands had been strong - and he hadn't even seen 'em. And now, tied to a chair... in the basement room of some fucks who just happened to have a leather hood laying around.
And he could've just kept walking home. But no.
The knots ached. He needed to pee, but that was mostly fear.
This was the kind of place where ultimate things happened. They'd taken him down way too easily. Lots of practice. In the middle of a city this weird, it stood to reason that places like this existed. And now he was caught inside.
It must've been a hour before the door opened. He'd had time to get scared over and over again, but the effect was wearing off. He'd imagined the worst, and started to focus on getting out of that fright, or at least improving his situation -
Fingers pulled at the hood. He pulled away out of reflex, and then realized what they were doing. As it was yanked off, he sucked in a big, haggard breath. The air was cool, at least because his head was soaked with sweat. The only light came through a high window. Weak floodlight, dirty glass...
And bars. He stared at them -
"What am I gonna do with you," a low voice sighed.
Whipping his head around, he saw no one.
The voice hadn't sounded mean, exactly. That was a relief. But he heard authority, there. Power.
A hand dipped into his jacket - and pulled out his cigarettes. He blinked a couple times, but there still wasn't a hand shaking the pack. Pulling a smoke out.
Maybe he should've been trying to figure out a way to get to that door, while it was open. Or talking his way out of this. But his lighter was being dug out... by invisible fingers. It was intriguing.
"Thanks," he said quietly, kicking out smoke.
There was a smooth chuckle. Somehow that reassured him a lot. The magician knew he was gonna cooperate...
"Stick around," the voice teased.
Like he had a choice?
From outside the room, a fair ways off, he heard the occasional noise. Metal landing on the floor, some jingling, a softer dragging sound. The door was still open, but he couldn't get the fuckin' ropes to loosen up -
"Alright," the voice said. He jumped real big. The cigarette was taken away and dropped on the concrete floor.
Hands untied him, as others got a lock on his upper arms. A new cigarette was stuck between his lips. He got to watch the lighter fire up again without any fingers there to be seen...
Rubbing his wrists, he watched something float over to him. Lighter in color -
"You need this?"
He reached out, and felt plastic. A hospital urinal.
"Uh..."
His shoulders were squeezed even tighter. "Dude. This is as private as it gets, here."
So he whipped it out and pissed. His arms were still held, but he couldn't see those hands either. Invisible.
As soon as he finished, the urinal floated down to the floor. His hands were pulled behind his back and pinned there, before he had a chance to put his dick away.
"Up," the voice ordered. "Let's go."
"Uh, wait," he said.
"Move."
The hallway was darker yet. Maybe fifteen steps in, the hands turned him to the right. He walked into another room.
The door swung out almost silently, except for a familiar click.
"Let's see whatcha got," the voice said - with a dangerous, yet happy tone...
Most of the hands let go of him, except for his wrists. He took a quick drag -
Fingers. Touching his chest... and they crept in. Under his jacket. Armpits.
"N-no," he groaned. A terrible idea had occurred to him. Impossible. "Stop, stop, d-don't -"
But they didn't stop.
The hands started tickling the fuck out of him.
With a whoop, he started to chuckle... and thrash around.
"Alright," the voice sighed.
The hands worked solidly. They knew what they were doing.
His laughter wound up into weird keening wails. Locked in, expert hands. Fucked. Doomed...
He was barely aware of sitting down again. Something lower than a chair, and soft. Too low. By the time the word "mattress" occurred to him, his jacket and shirt had been pulled off.
"Pleeee hee heeee-eee," he crowed. How he wanted to beg, right then. But the damn fingers... "No nah hah hah naaaaaah!"
Down. On his back. Arms moving - away! No, no, wrong direction. He pulled, but they went over his head. His legs were moving apart. The tickling wasn't rushed, but each set of fingers was making the most intense electricity slam through him. He couldn't move, really. Or think...
Sounds. Pressure, tightening, creaking, jingling. He started to roar with laughter, desperate to roll or sit up. His body was going nuts...
After a few more seconds of insanity, the fingers on his right side disappeared. Then, his left side was spared too. Eventually all of his body was left alone.
He panted for air, trying to get up. But that wasn't going to happen. There were cuffs pinning him down now spread-eagled. From the feel, they had to be leather.
His boots were off.
He was so much more fucked than ever -
There was a little flare of light. A candle was being lit to his right...
Just enough light to see the stocks, across from him. Chains were hanging from the padded ceiling. Black foam rubber all around him. And no window.
He wasn't getting out of this one. Not tonight. Maybe not anytime soon. The magician knew he was ticklish. This was gonna be so incredibly grim.
Snapping at the cuffs, even if he was no match for the tight straps keeping him laid out, he looked around. His cigarettes and lighter laid near the candle. Who soundproofs a cellar floor, anyway?
He was a goner. With no window there was zero chance of a stupid fucker like himself walking by, getting curious...
He remembered the ruthless tickling of the hands, and shivered.
"Um," the voice said.
"Please, listen," he babbled. "You gotta listen to me -"
The pack of cigarettes lifted off the floor. That shut him up, somehow. A big mystery, here...
He took a smoke between his lips, and watched his lighter approach. "So," the voice said, bringing the flame within his reach. Even that one syllable sounded definite -
"I'm sorry," he sighed.
"Ssssh. Listen. Do you like to laugh?"
He closed his eyes. "No. Fuck. Oh, no -
A hand closed around his left foot.
"Really howl?" the voice said, obviously pleased. "Long and hard?"
"No, no, don't -"
"Ever laughed all night?"
"Help!" he wailed. Flailing at the restraints, he almost dropped his smoke.
"Every night."
Fear, of a new and vivid kind, swamped him so much he couldn't even beg anymore.
It was fuckin' brutal.
Laughing so hard he couldn't breathe - until the hands took it down a notch - he got the idea that the tickler didn't want to stop. Ever. This is what it liked. Driving him wild.
Hidden, locked in. He believed now that the soundproofing would keep anyone outside from suspecting a thing. If they hadn't heard him roar already, there was no chance...
He'd made a few raw sounds that were shocking. High-intensity. If the hands wanted him to scream with laughter, he did. When they preferred to make him a hysterical giggling mess, that was easy too. Seriously experienced hands.
That there was a house with torture chambers in it, in his neighborhood, was still hard for him to believe.
The shock of unbridled tickling continued anyway.
After what had to be an hour, he was allowed to gasp until he caught his breath. When he realized the urinal was back, it took him a few minutes to relax enough to piss into it. Every so often a round of fingers would dig back in - and he came to understand those were flashbacks, or afterimages, needing to be laughed out...
A cigar slid between his teeth. He was so tired - already - but resisting might bring back the enthusiastic hands sooner, rather than later. He puffed and puffed when a lit wooden match was brought up.
The voice didn't speak, then, but there was definitely a low sound. Approval, he thought. Maybe the cigar was a symbol. Another successful capture.
Welcoming a nice, ticklish prisoner to his fate...
Decent cigar, too. And it gave him at least twenty minutes of peace.
He imagined the hands all around him, motionless as statues, just waiting. As much as he longed for the cuffs to start loosening, it was just too much of a fantasy to comfort him. Nobody knew he was in there. They couldn't hear him laugh.
Once again, he tried to come up with a way to get out of there. About every minute the cigar was taken, and the ash snapped off before it was returned.
It got shorter, and shorter, until the time came when it wasn't given back to him. A water bottle came instead.
Driven by a deep, almost drunken reflex, he pulled at the restraints again.
Fingers started tracing around his nipples. Time to get back to it. He groaned -
Strong hands cupped his kneecaps.
The contact made him snicker, and they hadn't even started moving around yet.
The fireworks were no less rattling. His whole body was open, and the magician took advantage of that. It had so many hands... and he couldn't let go of the idea that it was really enjoying this. Fingers worked on him in a carefully obsessive way.
The hands got him hard, and after he exploded the tickling gave new meaning to the word "barbaric." His yelps took on a squeaky tone. There was no anger left in him. The magician had won. This was only the first night, and he was afraid it enjoyed doing this to him far too much.
Naturally, the hands rocked on.
It was alarming to discover the tickling had stopped, only because it took him a long fuckin' time to stop laughing and realize it. Worse yet, of course, a pause only meant the tickling would start up again...
He was well on his way to breathing normally before he figured out the hands were really, actually gone. Being too zoned to appreciate even a single minute between tickling attacks was pretty frustrating. He had a cigarette going, and it wasn't the first. He'd just been laying here, chuckling his way through a smoke or two, before he pulled it together enough to enjoy the break.
The tickling was not over. No other fact was as clear as that.
His captor spent a few hours investigating him. Instead of drilling him at the excruciating pace, the magician started discovering which techniques increased the ecstastic misery on the most ticklish parts of his body.
He felt like a blank slate - or a mixing board, all those dials, an infinite number of possible settings to get the mix just right. Hot, but not too hot. But there was no combination that couldn't be tweaked a little better.
Infinite...
That was the word, alright. He repeated it to himself hundreds of times.
The magician was from another place, or something. No boundaries. Unlimited power to grab, and rub...
Time didn't matter. Neither did laws. It ruled this place, and strong hands reached out to drag in a moron who peeked into the window.
He was usually too blown away to laugh. Hands slid everywhere, from pits to thighs to ass-cheeks, belly, calves, biceps, pecs, ribs, neck...
Feet.
Yeah, it turned out he was an infinite source of enjoyment, and it wasn't going to let him get away. He wasn't sure of much else anymore except the restraints - and most of all, the hands.
A cigarette had never been such a huge fuckin' relief.
Usually he'd get to smoke two or three, giving him time to get centered before the next disorienting blast of delight - lethal pleasure - came roaring back down.
"Guys come in," the magician said, as a fork fed him scrambled eggs, "but they don't walk out for awhile."
He nodded and kept chewing.
"A long while." It chortled a few times. "A whole lot of money buys enough privacy. Get it?"
"But I'm not gonna talk. Really."
"That doesn't matter now," it explained patiently. "At the window, you were just somebody I had to... convince to keep his mouth shut. Thoroughly convince. Get you on board."
"I am," he said quickly. "You can count on -"
"Listen," it barked. "What's the main thing I look for in a guest?"
He opened his mouth... and thought hard. It was just nuts about tickling. Maybe that was the whole reason for this place. Get guys who are really ticklish -
Like him. A trespasser who happened to be just what the magician liked to catch. Not only was he going to keep the secret... but he was the kind of guy it had in mind when it set up the place. Everything was all set, and any kind of disturbance from the outside was fuckin' unlikely.
There was no pressure on the magician. No hurry at all.
He gulped hard.
"I think you got it."
Wild laughter surrounded him...
12jun2005