Rebecca's Ticklish Adventures

         Rebecca was just trying to fit in. So when the members of the high school book club told her there was one kind of odd formality before they could accept her, she was eager to know what it was, so she could be officially part of the club that met in the library or lunch hall after hours.

         They told her she’d need to sneak into old Mrs. Mallory’s house and swipe a small black sculpture of a human figure from atop her fireplace, she figured, “Easy-Peasey. I’ll just wait until late, then sneak out of my house, bicycle over, and enter through the first floor window the club kids promised was always open.
Sure, Rebecca had heard rumors about Mrs. Mallory since she was little, but she just chocked them up to children’s fancies.

         Sure enough, the window was open, and Rebecca is slender enough to shimmy in without having to try to budge it. Once inside, she is in a room packed with all sorts of oddities and artifacts, and as she moves through, looking for a fireplace, it seems as though the inside of the house is bigger looking than the outside, and the room stuffed with quasi-scientific contraptions and gizmos gives way to a hall with antiques and artworks. Walking down the hall feels strange in itself, and there’s no rational way this hall could possibly exist inside this house, but a dizziness overtakes Rebecca and she is thankful to reach the entrance to another room full of stately furnishings and the fireplace with the figurine atop it!

         Rebecca runs in what feels to her like slow motion across this area to the fireplace, where she sees that the figurine is surrounded by a little shrine lit with candles and featuring feathers and reeds, a glass jar crawling with ants inside, cords, a black blindfold, and more fetish tokens.

         Rebecca nonetheless swipes the small statue and makes her silent break back across the room, and down the art covered hall seemingly quicker than previously, and is crossing the other room to the window. So far, so good, when she is clamoring up to the window and notices old Mrs. Mallory, standing there at the hall end of the room, looking dead at her!