Miss Trickett's

It was many years later.

Susie Snook was now a world-famous horror novelist, known for such international bestsellers as It Girl, The Streaking, the Pink Tower cycle and, of course, her classic tale of an evil carnival haunting small-town America, Something Naked This Way Comes.

Curiously, all her books seemed to revolve in one way or another around the fear of public nudity and humiliation. Susie had explained several times that this was a very common fear, which interested her on a thematic level, and not a sex thing at all. Everyone always nodded respectfully whenever she said this.

Pretty much every popular Hollywood actress, including such well-known beauties as Sydney Sweeney and Jenna Ortega, had played leading roles in the many, many excellent films made of Susie's movies. Of course, these roles always involved considerable public nudity and prolonged scenes of ritual, almost fetishistic humiliation.

In The Streaking, for example, Sydney Sweeney and Jenna Ortega were tied naked to hotel beds and tickle-tortured by evil clowns for three hours straight, before being dragged into the middle of a crowded ballroom and made to have full, uncensored, unsimulated lesbian sex. But everyone agreed all this was vital for the artistic integrity of the films, and nobody suggested it was perverted or horny in any way.

All the extra footage was posted online for free, of course. And the actresses all admitted in public that they found the nude scenes in the films incredibly humiliating and degrading to do, but they felt compelled to do them anyway because of how important and meaningful the films were.

Anyway, as I was saying, Susie was a well-known popular novelist. Bonnie, meanwhile, was a world-famous ****-sports champion and private detective, as well as being Susie's wife, since the two had long since admitted to each other they were lesbians. (Or bisexuals, anyway, since they sometimes had threesomes for old times' sake with Ben or Hank from Pinkwhistle High). Of course, they were both intensely private people, and absolutely hated the idea of the public knowing anything at all about their personal lives, so they didn't talk about it much.

Neither girl was in the least bit prepared to come home one day, to the nice house in Pinkwhistle they both shared, and find Miss Trickett sipping wine in their living room, in her black cheongsam. "Surprise," she said, and held up her hypnosis amulet.