Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove: Mannequin Horror Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 2
Last time on Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove…
On her first visit, Pauline sorted old, partially used spices and cleaned residue off the shelves that housed them. She found it disgusting that such items were even offered for sale; they weren’t rare or even old enough to be valuable, just everyday used, slightly-rusted McCormick spice containers with various powders leaching out of them. Pauline decided that she didn’t really want to know where they had come from, some dead person’s estate no doubt. Lost in her reverie, she didn’t notice the shadow of the man standing behind her, watching. She turned and gaped at him, hastily dropping a small tin of what was once nutmeg.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” the man rasped and bent down to scoop up the dropped spice tin. “Name’s Chester. I’m Betty Lou’s hubby. I just wanted to meet the new young thing she’s got cleaning the shop now. Her last girl Dinah left unexpectedly. Just up and vanished.”
Chester stood there with his hand outstretched, his thin fingers clasped around the tin. He was a scant twig of a man, not even six feet tall, with dramatically bony features and dark brown eyes that came across as deep black pools without distinguishing the iris from the pupil. His thinning grey hair wired its way across the top of his balding head. A red and black plaid shirt draped itself over him as if still on its hanger. He gave the air about his extended gaunt hand a quick wave. Pauline hesitantly reached out and grabbed the nutmeg.
“Nice to meet you…” he exclaimed. “What was your name again?”
“Oh, sorry” she said with a jolt, “I’m Pauline. I’m going to school at the College of Art and Design, studying fashion. I’m here working off that mannequin,” she said gesturing to the elegant beauty that had transfixed her when she first stopped in.
“That’s good to hear,” Chester responded. “Just stay out of trouble and do what Betty Lou needs done, and you’ll have her worked off in no time.” His dark eyes sparkled as he smiled wryly. “Oh, and one more thing,” Chester said as his face and voice dropped. “Don’t be going downstairs – just a broom closet and my workshop down there. Nothing for you to be concerned with.” His black eyes deepened with a sinister undertone.
“Sure,” Pauline answered, glancing at the dark, empty stairs in the corner of the shop. Chester slunk off to chat with Betty Lou at the register while Pauline finished cleaning spice tins, warily shooting a glance at the stairs every so often. There was a soft swishing sound emanating from the basement, perhaps something mechanical like an overworked sump pump but seemingly echoing through a hollow space, more like a scuttling in the walls from mice or rats or something larger.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Yeah yeah, the insects tend to get ALL the attention here on Nightmarish Nature. But honestly, this one takes the beefcake. It’s the New World Screwworm Fly, and it’s as terrifying as the name suggests. And they aren’t limited to the Americas, there is an Old World version as well, as they can be found pretty much anywhere tropical or seasonably suited.
Revolting Little Buggers
The Screwworm Fly is a parasitic fly larvae that burrows into its host to feed, named because it seems to screw deeper and deeper into the flesh over time. This process is called myiasis and do NOT look it up online, you WILL regret it. They blur those images out for very valid reasons, trust me (and not because of pornographic content). And these maggots will continue to burrow en masse, rather than staying put as a botfly larvae would.
Do Not Do an Image Search on Screwworm Myiasis, Like Seriously – You Will NEVER Unsee That
The female Screwworm fly lays her eggs on an open wound or orifice of her chosen host… And not just one egg or a couple of eggs, no – hundreds, even thousands of them. Let’s let that sink in a bit, shall we? Or screw in as it were. Although any warm-blooded animal is a prime target, cattle are a fly favorite, costing millions of head of cattle to this sick and disgusting horror annually. And if beef isn’t on the menu, Fido or even yourself might be.
The Great American Worm Wall
In fact, this particular feature here on Nightmarish Nature is so terrifying that the United States has made agreements with all of Central America, even including countries that do not generally share its interests, in order to create a “Great American Worm Wall” to prevent them from spreading back into the United States. I’m not going to go into all of the creepy and juicy details of this bizarre science fiction freak fact, you’ll just have to watch it here on Half As Interesting’s YouTube channel.
Essentially, the Worm Wall is a complicated byproduct of scientists studying radioactivity on the flies’ maturity as well as the flies’ sexual lives and using this information against them to nearly eradicate the species and banish it from much of its former range. So, Peter Parker, if you thought everyone was messing with your love life before, be glad you weren’t bitten by a radioactive Screwworm.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
You’ve almost made it to the end of the finger spiders here at Haunted MTL! Because I made A LOT of unfulfilled requests for a spider out of fingers, I will continue this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva through the month of September… In case you missed out, here are the other parts of this series:
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: hand that is a spider; spider legs as fingers; fingers becoming spider; spider all fingers.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Keep Trying! Yeah, I’m sure you don’t remember being bitten. Because of the ways they warp time and space, and the natural chemical reactions involved, the AI art generated finger spiders’ bite isn’t typically felt. They are still attached to you, feeding… You have to get them off… Keep trying!
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: spider leg fingers; spider made out of hand fingers; hand spider picking banjo; fingers as spider playing banjo.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders That’s All Folks! Well, I guess that’s that then. It’s been nice knowing you. Enjoy your new form. Nothing left for it but to play the banjo…
All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
We just can’t get enough of spiders here on Nightmarish Nature… so here are some more creepy spider facts for you to consider, outside of the giants, eating and mating habits, and wasp predation as previously mentioned in this series. Plus the finger spiders have taken over the whole of the month of September, so strap in because they’re here too – no goofy drawings this month just more terror unleashed in the form of AI art, courtesy of NightCafe.
Spiders Are Baby Mama Machines!
Spiders can lay hundreds and thousands of eggs in their egg sacs at a time. And when they hatch, all those tiny baby spiders can balloon, flying to new homes on airborne strands of silk as if raining from the sky… So if you suffer from trypophobia and are weirded out by large quantities of clustered small and tiny objects (especially when they are alive and moving) you may want to steer clear of these little bug bombs.
Spiders Are Athletic Archdukes!
Jumping spiders can leap as far as 40 times their body length. And wolf spiders can run up to 2 feet per second. In movement, spiders have four feet on the ground and four in the air at all times. And they have six knees on each leg for a total of 48 knees – that’s a lot of potential kneecapping, I’d try to take them down a different way if I were you…
Other Interesting Factoids
Spiders are on every continent except Antarctica and there are over 40,000 identified species of them. All spiders produce silk for all that they don’t all make webs, since some prefer to live on the move or ambush from hidey holes. There is a known species of herbivorous spider, the Bagheera Kiplingi, but most are carnivorous or omnivorous. And the longest lived spiders can survive for 40+ years.
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