Spooktober 2020—(Horror/Tickling/Paws)
Camila's a rational skeptic. Miles is open-minded. What is the true nature of the Amsted Laughing Hag? Will our two paranormal researchers finally uncover the secret?
Pale moonlight spilled into Camila's bedroom-cum-office, making the white bottoms of her feet--crossed under the base of her office chair--glow like polished clamshells. The skunk poured herself another coffee as she squinted at the squiggly lines and waveforms on her screen. She jabbed the Play button for what must have been the hundredth time that night and pushed her headphone against her ear so hard, the tips of her fingers ached. "No, this can't be laughter," she thought, cracking the knuckles of her free paw and then twirling her pen-shaped EVP recorder on the tips of her fingers out of nervous habit. "Must be some feral animal." Camila glanced down at her notes and found that she couldn't read, not because her handwriting was illegible--her penmanship was, in fact, stellar--but because a nascent migraine had seized hold of her temples. Defeated for the third night in a row by nighttime and her own body's demand for rest, Camila switched her monitor off with the poke of a finger and started towards the bed, where she hoped to get some shuteye before the quiver in the corners of her eyes progressed to a splitting headache. This, of course, assuming her body cooperated and ignored the two full cups worth of caffeine that was flowing through her system.
"Miles, I'm telling you," she said, kicking away a pebble that was a bit too rough for the bottom of her foot. "It's just some animal. Maybe a feral vixen." Camila swung her backpack forward and let gravity take over; its strap swooshed against the fur of her arm as it slid down onto the grungy dirt path they were on. "No ghosts. No demons, poltergeists, or whatever. Not here, not anywhere."
Miles adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and leaned to pick up the small rock Camila had brushed aside. "You don't have any proof." The dog bounced the pebble in his paw a couple of times and threw it past the row of shrubs that separated the pair from the ominous forest. Elms, oaks, and other kinds of trees that neither knew the names of loomed forward like giants examining smaller creatures. "Anything could be out there, C," said Miles. "An animal? Yeah, sure. But you don't have any proof that things outside of nature don't exist. Besides, the legend of the Hag has been around for decades by now."
"Tsk, tsk." Camila's sibilant taunt was easy to pick out over the soft, nighttime static electricity of what must have been at least a hundred cicadas. "What you gonna tell me next, Miles? You believe in Santi Claus?"
Miles ignored his friend's ribbing and squatted to dig into his own backpack. "So, are we doing this? You got your EVP recorder, C?" he asked, squinting at the brick-shaped voice recorder in his paw. A piercing red light came out from between his fingers, cutting through the crepuscular darkness--the device was now on, and Miles spoke into it; he said, "12:01 in the AM. Location: Amsted Paw National Park. For the past six days, we have been recording audio evidence of the Amsted Laughing Hag."
Camila brushed back a lock of hair and wedged the EVP recorder into one of the pouches of her tool belt. She used its Velcro fastener to imitate radio static and spoke into her balled-up paw as if it were her own voice recorder. "12:02 in the AM. Location: Amsted Paw National Park. For the past six days, we have been recording audio evidence of Miles Waggitail entertaining his superstitions."
He stopped recording, the red light reflecting off his glasses in elongated dots. "Can you be serious for just a second? We both heard it, and you know it's no feral animal."
Camila clutched her chest, her other paw squeezing the EVP recorder. "You're right," she said with an exaggerated, spooky vibrato and wild, wide eyes. "It's ... It's Santi Claus!"
She chuckled merrily, trying to cover her mouth with the back of her paw. Even though Camila was making fun of his naïveté, the two were good friends, and they loved to josh each other--it was par for the course when she, despite being oddly interested in the occult and the paranormal, was skeptical of all the supernatural and preternatural explanations furnished by local legends, psychics and mediums, and Miles was eager to believe, eager to capture definitive proof of that which violates the natural order. More to the point, Miles always did think the skunk was impossibly cute when she laughed, especially now, under the blue and pink canopy of twilight, where he could make out the features that stood out to him most: her slightly upturned snout, the white splotches that peppered her face, and the thin white lines on the sides of her feet that led to immaculately alabaster soles.
"So you think that's pretty funny, huh?" Miles narrowed his eyes at her hind paws and smirked in the now near darkness. "You know, one of these days I'm going to give you something to really laugh at!"
"Oh, yeah?" asked Camila, crossing her arms and raising her toes in amusement in Miles's direction. "And what would that be?"
Right as Miles opened his mouth to answer, from the direction of the forest, now drenched in obsidian darkness, came a hysterical cackle--reedy, thin, and unnaturally loud, like that of a hag putting a pox upon an innocent.
The otherworldly caterwauling stopped abruptly at a guttural croak, and Miles turned, both hands around his recorder in a death grip, expecting to find Camila where she was. But the girl was gone.
"Miles, keep up! Bring everything," she hissed at Miles. He could make out the sound of her backpack's contents shuffling back and forth over the monotone humming of the cicadas, and in the pitch-black darkness, all he could see were her four-toed white soles flashing as she ran towards the bushes beyond which lay the forest.
"Oh! Right!" said Miles as the sharp ache from the white-knuckle grip caught up. He stumbled a couple of times after leaping over the bushes, his friend's feet acting as his only guide. "C, hold up!" His backpack dangled precariously from his wrist as he regained his footing, and the underbrush--along with a sweaty palm--threatened to rob him of his recorder.
Moss, fallen twigs and fall leaves crunched under their feet. To his horror, Miles realized that Camila was getting further and further--her huffing, footsteps, and flashing feet faded. "C!" he yelled as he stopped, winded, and squatted into an exhausted crouch. "Slow down!" Miles tried to yell, but all that came out was a hoarse rasp. After a significant amount of rummaging through his backpack, he fished out his walkie-talkie and, with his body still in a squat, spoke into it. "C? Camila? Can you hear me? If you can, stop! Turn around. I have no clue where the hell you are anymore!" Radio static that mingled with the singing cicadas was the only response. Miles cursed and waved his recorder as if shooing away a swarm of gnats. "Camila? Can you see the red light? Please, if you're out there, answer!" As before, the crackle and fizz of voiceless white noise echoed throughout the forest. He reached into his pocket to yank out his cellphone, putting his other hand, the one with the recorder in it, on the forest floor. Under the dead leaves, something hard pushed against his paw. After clearing away the foliage, he found something that made him squint, despite the bright light of his cellphone's flashlight. The sharp red light, the way the corners were rounded off. The on-off switch, which had an eerily familiar amount of play from overuse.
He'd encountered--in the dead of night, under a bunch of random leaves that had started exhibiting the different hues of falls, in a random location where he just happened to succumb to exhaustion--a voice recorder identical to his own in every single way. A rhythmic crunching of leaves in front of him that got closer with each crunch made him breathe a sigh of relief. "C! I was just about to call you!" he said, grabbing hold of the mysterious duplicate. "Hey, you won't believe what I just found, I--"
When he looked up from his crouched position, what he saw wasn't Camila. Before the shock could wear off, before his mind's command to yell could register, a portal of some sort, a gateway that resembled a vertical, circular swimming pool with jet-black, rippling water, opened up behind him with an ethereal purple flash. The thing in front of him was obscured by the shadows. It was vaguely canine and as tall as Miles in its upright, rigid stance with two pointy sets of teeth and red eyes more piercing than the light coming out of the recorders that Miles now held in both hands. It raised a paw--emaciated and doglike--and sent a hysterical Miles flying through the drink. As Miles became airborne, his clammy grip around his own recorder failed, and, amid sloppy sounds, the device slipped out of his paw and came to land in the same spot where its doppelgänger had been uncovered, burying itself under a layer of fall foliage.
The eldritch apparition floated towards the frothing liquid maw and disappeared into it. The portal evaporated, bathing everything in this part of the park--the buzzing cicadas, trees, dead branches and what could be seen of Miles's recorder under curling, drying fall leaves--in an ephemeral burst of purple light.
"Sounds like it came from here," said a panting Camila as she emerged from the thick forest. She'd stumbled into an open area that would have been completely moonlit if it weren't for the leafless branch of a giant sequoia that cast a shadow in the form of a witch's gnarled, knotted hand on the underbrush. "It's like someone chopped down a bunch of trees to make a perfect circle out here in the middle of nowhere," she said, turning around. "Miles, this place is we--"
She scanned the dense forest behind her, waiting for any rustle, any footstep. Any familiar "C!". But only the forest, dark as midnight in Moscow, with its treetops shunning away even the faintest spec of moonlight, stared back at her.
Camila was alone.
"Ugh, you slacker. Keep telling you to work out so you don't get winded after taking two steps," she muttered to herself before calling out his name, only to have the woods answer in the form of her own echo, an echo that only momentarily overpowered the countless cicadas. "So getting you a treadmill." Camila reached into her butt pocket and walked towards what would be the center of the clearing as red eyes stared out of a rotted hole in one of the trees on the periphery of the clearing, following her. She shielded her phone's screen with the giant sequoia and dialed Miles's number.
As soon as her finger left the screen, a sharp rustling around her feet made her gasp, and a second later, the forest floor was inches away from her nose. The dead foliage, branches, exposed roots, and soil raced away as her stomach lurched and her phone slipped out of her paw--Camila was upside-down and being pulled up by her ankles by a rope to a remarkable height at a speed that would have made Evel Knievel upchuck.
She screamed once she reached the summit of her impromptu, unwelcome ascent, the shock wearing off to give way to an ice-cold rush of adrenaline, the deafening roar of blood against her eardrums muting her own frantic yelling.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!"
Camila thrashed and swung around like a hanged prisoner in final paroxysms. Her jacket and shirt slid down to reveal a toned, snow-white stomach with straining muscles.
"HELP!"
She hyperventilated as her scream was met with indifference by Mother Nature. But there was something out there that not even Mother Nature herself could control--out of the rotted, scraggly tree hole emerged an impossibly black creature, blacker than the blackest night. It peered up with two red eyes and, with the intermittent moonlight bouncing off sawtooth-shaped teeth, clambered up the trunk of the giant sequoia.
"Oh, God. What the shit?"
From afar, it seemed like a dark blob was hugging the tree and making its way up at an alarming rate. An intricate pulley and spring system had hoisted Camila all the way up so the tops of her feet were resting on the twisted branch, her soles completely exposed to the moonlight. In this position, the alabaster bottoms of her feet scintillated and shimmered, and, as the thing ascended, her toes--all eight of them--splayed and curled.
The thing took shape when it got to the branch, and it was eerily familiar. Camila brushed aside a strand of hair that had gotten stuck to side of her face during her struggle and strained to lean past her dangling jacket. Canine in its silhouette--for it was nothing but a silhouette--the thing blinked its red eyes and walked with a cadence, a clumsy yet cute gait, that she could pick out from a mile.
Camila's eyes widened and her mouth fell open.
"Miles?" she asked, her voice coming out as a squeak. "Is that you?" This thing wasn't an "it". It was a "he". Or so she thought.
"Sorta. Kinda," he said, walking on the crooked tree branch with astonishing surefootedness. The voice had an inflection that was unmistakable, but it was ... different. As if others spoke at the same time in lower tones.
"The fuck is going here? Why am I up here? And what the hell is up with that getup of yours?"
"Oh, this ain't no getup, C," said the thing that resembled Miles. He sat down with his crotch right up against Camila's big toes, his own canine legs and feet dangling off the branch. The moonlight went straight through the dark mass of his body, leaving her white soles glimmering as before. "Hey, you remember this?" He pulled out a recorder, one with a piercing red light that made blood pump against Camila's ears.
"Miles, I don't know what's gotten into you or how you got up here. But right now we need to get do--"
A black finger pressed the Play button, and Miles's serious voice poured out into the dark night in 22 kHz.
"12:01 in the AM. Location: Amsted Paw National Park. For the past six days, we have been recording audio evidence of the Amsted Laughing Hag."
The voice on the recorder--Miles's recorder--was his actual voice, the voice Camila knew, and now that she'd heard it, she realized with sinking dread that this black creature wasn't her friend. She let out a banshee wail and wiggled around like a worm being used as fishing bait. "Get the fuck away from me! You're not Miles!"
He chuckled, looking down at her gnarling toes. A minority of people in their universe had white soles and palms, and while this wasn't abnormal--much like how the human beings they read of occasionally had freckles--it did imply unusual sensitivity.
And Camila had _unbearably_ticklish paws.
"You always react the same way. At first I thought it was cute, but there's gotta be something different after a couple million times," said Dark Miles.
"No, fuck off!" she snarled at the creature she thought was posing as her friend.
"Aw, come on, C. Don't you want to know who the Amsted Laughing Hag is?"
Before Camila could answer, her lips curled involuntarily, and the nostrils of her cute, black nose flared.
"No, no, no, what are you doi--HAHAHAHA!"
Hearty, ticklish laughter accompanied the cicadas as Dark Miles ran the tip of a claw from uncalloused, perfect heel to unblemished ball. Though he was purely incorporeal and, as such, couldn't physically touch objects, the demon canine could stimulate nerve endings via electric magic. This was much worse than regular tickling as he could bypass skin and directly trigger the exact synapses required for maximum hysteria.
"I can't hear you, C. I thought you were the more analytical and rational one. I'm solving the mystery for you!" His maw twisted open into a sadistic smile. Using both ethereal handpaws, Dark Miles dug into the arches of her feet, his claws going past--but not physically breaking--her skin to tease the nerves.
She didn't get a chance to recover her breath from the first tickle. And this time, the burst of laughter was an explosive screech. Tears started streaming up Camila's blushing face, gravity making them snake up her forehead to disappear into her flailing, whiplashing hair.
Dark Miles gave her a minute of respite. The skunk spoke, her voice hoarse, a teardrop forming on the tip of a hanging lock of hair and about to detach and plummet down to its death. "Stop. Please," she implored, stomach greedily sucking air in and out to replace oxygen. "Why are you doing this? Please, I just want to get down and find my friend and--"
"But C," he said, voice more distorted than usual. "I am your friend."
The synapses fired again with a vengeance. Dark Miles's clawtips went up and down the bare bottoms of her feet. Her toes wiggled, curled, splayed, anything to escape the maddening tickling, all to no avail.
"I think all that thinking and rationalizing's got you grumpy, C," Dark Miles said over her hoots of hysterical laughter. "I think it's good to kick back and laugh a bit every now and then, don't you think?" he asked, using his magic grip to effortlessly keep her toes curled backward. "Especially now that we all know who the Hag is." He teased the devilishly delicate strip of skin between the ball of Camila's paw and her digits, sending the poor skunk into another fit of feverish hilarity.
"Oh, this part never gets old. You have millions of different reactions, C, I swear."
Dark Miles laid his black hands flat on her soles. Though she couldn't feel him, Dark Miles certainly could appreciate the warmth from her pristine white skin. Camila huffed and puffed as she caught her breath, rose red in the cheeks, a mix of sweat and tears dripping off the tips of dangling strands of hair. "Stop. Too much," she said amid deep breaths. Her toes twitched as if her foot bottoms had been tortured, even though, technically, the skin under her feet hadn't been touched.
"Oh, don't be a spoilsport, C," said Dark Miles, grinning down at her helpless feet. "Whenever I ask you this question, you always damn near piss yourself." His red eyes pivoted down towards the dangling damsel. "Let's see if you can control yourself this time for a change." He made a rubbing motion over each foot, and Camila's paws locked up--Dark Miles had placed a spell on them. Her feet became as still as the night, as motionless and stiff as the countless dead branches that littered the forest floor.
Camila squealed. "No! What the fuck are you doing, you freak?!" She commanded her toes to respond, to wiggle, to curl up. To splay, even if it meant exposing more of her foot to this demonic tickle freak, but it was as if she had feet that weren't hers. "Goddamn you," she said, squirming and twisting like a snake. "What the fuck did you do to my feet?"
"Relax, will you, C? Like I said, I just wanted to ask a question." Dark Miles, in his infinite sadism, had temporarily robbed her feet of locomotion. But not of any sensitivity. He began to stroke the balls of both feet with razor-sharp claws that thankfully couldn't actually touch the skin, but nonetheless probed the most sensitive nerve fibers in her body. "You always walk around barefoot, and the balls of your tootsies here are always touching the ground--how come they're so soft? You and I both know you're not getting a pedicure anytime soon."
Like she always had for the past two million times or so, Camila didn't answer. She _couldn't_answer. Earsplitting hollers, hoots, snickers, and teary-eyed guffaws made sure that she couldn't answer, because answering would break the curse.
And Dark Miles couldn't have that.
About a mile away, at the periphery of the park, her hysterical cackling dwindled into something reedy, thin, and unnaturally loud. Two paranormal researchers, a skunk and a dog, sprang into action, and the skunk quickly outran the canine. The exhausted dog uncovered a voice recorder just like his own in the forest and encountered a demonic apparition that looked just like him.
Except the demon had evil red eyes. And an undying love for cute paws and the hysterical laughter that could be extracted from them.