Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove: Mannequin Horror Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 4
Last time on Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove…
The weekend skidded by, lost to prepping for the big art history exam on the Bauhaus that Tuesday. Pauline huffed an audible sigh of relief following the test; she had identified the slides easily and felt confident in her essay writing. Apparently, all of the studying had paid off, and now she could relax. She had completely forgotten about the basement workroom until she pulled up to the store and a switch flicked on in her mind.
Chester was outside, moving some of the mannequins around to showcase the new front window display in the making. He hefted the children away from the bench and strapped them to the pole with the flag waving Elvis wannabe and his doe-eyed girlfriend. Pauline looked at the window and was taken aback; the lovely blonde mannequin was poised front and center, sporting a flowy teal formal gown with sequin accents from the late 1940s. Her blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders.
Chester’s eyes met Pauline’s gaze and he waved an abrupt hello.
“She’s a beaut, isn’t she?” he called out. “Just finished working on her this weekend.”
Pauline waved back with a slight roll of her fingertips nodding, unable to speak. She opened the door to be greeted heartily by Betty Lou, who was nestled in her corner watching the television for a change of pace, tuned in to an unfamiliar old game show in which a man dressed in a chicken suit was deciding something between a door and a box.
“You’re almost there, hon,” Betty Lou exclaimed from her ledger, taking note of how many hours she’d worked. “You’ll have that mannequin worked off in no time. I even put a SOLD sign on her for you. One or two more days and she’ll be yours… Now can you rearrange that front window? Chester’s finished his newest creation, and I want to make sure she gets all the attention she deserves.” She gestured towards the new blonde mannequin with her meaty hand. “Just clear out all of that junk around her feet and finish setting up that dollhouse display.”
Pauline drifted to the front window. The mannequin appeared much more static than she had when Pauline had confronted her downstairs, her skin less waxy and her eyes distant and dry. She stood sentry, staring out into the parking lot. Betty Lou’s voice drifted over, “She’s a pretty one. Looks just like that girl Dinah, who worked here before you came along…”
Apparently Chester had just piled everything to the side as he readied his new mannequin for her debut, and he and Betty Lou had been waiting for Pauline to clear the things out. Pauline picked up a couple of boxes of shoes from the heap next to the mannequin’s feet and hauled them to the shoe rack a couple of clothing displays over. There was a dollhouse and a box of doll furnishings and accessories at the ready, and once Pauline found new homes for all four boxes of shoes and wigs, she set to work on putting the dollhouse together. She could barely make out a trailing tiny and distant sound, like far away moaning, but it was largely drowned out by the television in Betty Lou’s corner. In fact, it was only barely audible within arm’s distance of the new mannequin, and only if Pauline strained to hear it at quiet points in the show. It was the same soft crying she had heard in the basement, but much more distant and muted.
The dollhouse was vintage and was in relatively good shape but had remained unfinished. There were some rooms that were more complete than others, wallpapered and floored in ways that were aesthetically pleasing, and Pauline could identify where the kitchen, bathroom, dining room, and two bedrooms were likely supposed to be, arranging furnishings from the box accordingly. She set up a sort of parlor in another room, and a den in another, before she left for the day. Every so often as she worked, Pauline would glance up at the new blonde mannequin out of the corner of her eye. She had the distinct feeling that she was being watched, and the eerie sobbing was unnerving. But the mannequin just stood motionless, silently staring out the front window to greet anyone passing by the store.
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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