Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove: Mannequin Horror Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 1
To help fill your summer reading needs, I’m doing another long-form story series like my Feeding Frenzy story from last year. This story is based on my life experience as an art school student, though perhaps with some embellishment. So without further ado…
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Pauline found the Treasure Trove on her way to school one day, set back off the road a bit. She thought it odd that she’d never noticed it before; she’d driven this strip of road every day for almost two and a half years. And yet, there it was. She pulled off the main road into the gravelly weedy overgrowth of the alleyway next to the shop and wandered around to the front.
It was the mannequins that had first caught her eye. Majoring in fashion design, Pauline had always wanted one. She owned a couple of simple dress forms, but they really weren’t the same. There was just something special about a mannequin, a young Fiberglass model smiling gently at the poor, aging passersby who gazed upon the eternal beauty in the department store window.
There were several stationed outside of the small antique store, welcoming would-be customers with their silent smiles and waving at the dirty, exhaust-fuming cars. A rather effeminate Fiberglass man was strapped to a metal pole with a couple of black bungee cords, holding an American flag to attention towards the street. He wore a sequined dress suit from the seventies, a slightly askew black Elvis wig that resembled a road kill lap dog, and a pair of dark rhinestone rimmed sunglasses. A statuesque woman with a long, brown wig in a blue, flower printed dress waved at the passing traffic from behind him while a couple of static children wearing shorts and t-shirts laughed silently with wide frozen smiles from a bench by the door.
Pauline swung open the red door to the antique store and was instantly greeted by loud, operatic music and the clanging of a brass bell tied to the inside handle of the door to warn of incomers. A heavy old metal cash register faced the door from its perch on a large mirrored glass case filled with knickknacks. A voice called out from behind it, “Welcome to Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove.” Pauline poked her head around the register. An exceptionally large woman sat in a worn Papasan chair, her girth spilling over the round nest. Awash in a boldly printed teal and magenta muumuu, she stared into a large oscillating fan as it twirled to face her. A small television sat in abandoned silence beside the fan. The woman turned to Pauline with a wide smile, “Thanks so much for dropping in. I’m Betty Lou. Just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, hon.”
“Thanks,” Pauline peeped, caught somewhat off-guard by the sheer immensity of the woman hidden behind the glass cabinet. “I’m just looking,” she called as she wandered off along the front window.
The store itself featured a bizarre mix of collectibles and junk. Expensive, hand-painted dishware sat in an open cabinet in a back corner, surrounded by racks of vintage clothing. Old, tattered quilts and bedspreads were folded over collapsing wire hangers on more metal clothing racks, next to a small bookcase heaped with metal tins half-filled with used kitchen spices. Corrugated cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates lined the floor offering old, worn shoes and unkempt wigs like kittens at only three dollars each. A short wooden bookcase housed an unbelievably large number of the same Perry Como record along the bottom shelf, while children’s dolls and toys were piled haphazardly on the top shelf. And there were about a dozen or so mannequins scattered about: next to bookcases, watching over to clothing racks, looming over wig and shoe crates, and otherwise standing at attention in whatever space had been made available.
One particular mannequin caught Pauline’s eye. She was little more than five feet high and balanced on her Fiberglass toes as if wearing heels despite being barefoot. Her subtly made-up face and long, brown eyelashes held a steady, soft gaze to her feet. Her lithe resin body twisted as if caught in a dancer’s pirouette. Her head was crowned in a short auburn wig and she wore a bright green dress, probably from the late 50s, which brought out the subtly painted green highlights in her glass eyes. She seemed alive, ready to complete her graceful turn at any moment.
This was the one – Pauline knew it. There was just something extra special about her that Pauline couldn’t quite place. She simply had to have this mannequin, in all of her youthful grace and beauty, exactly as she stood in the little junk shop. With the same auburn wig and the same bright green dress. Pauline fingered the price tag, biting her lip, two hundred fifty dollars for just the mannequin alone. Add another three dollars for the wig. And yet another twenty for the dress…
“I see you like that one, hon,” a voice cracked through Pauline’s silent reverie. Betty Lou stared at her from the other end of the junk shop, propped between the glass cabinet and a sturdy metal walking cane. “I can cut you a deal on it.”
“Thanks, but I can’t,” Pauline replied. “I’m just a poor college student. And I’m pretty sure financial aid doesn’t offer any scholarships for mannequin purchases…” she hid her discomfort behind a tinny giggle.
Betty Lou hobbled slowly over, balancing on the cane with small trying steps. She swayed back and forth as she moved, her body rippling into place with every footfall under its teal and magenta tent like a large, overfull sack of rice. Pauline couldn’t help but stare as the large woman approached cooing, “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse…”
Betty Lou circled over to where Pauline stood beside the bookcase of Perry Como records. She gently slapped Pauline on the back. Her immense hand barely even touched the girl, and her round fingers had the subtle feel of newly baked breadsticks. “Why don’t you work it off, then?” Betty Lou proposed. “I’ll give you fifteen dollars an hour towards that mannequin if you’ll help me get my shop in order. That’s less than twenty hours for everything you see there. You can drop by whenever you want.”
“Really?” Pauline asked, exasperated. She didn’t exactly relish the idea of making that many return visits to this backwash Treasure Trove antique junk store, but there was no other way she could even dream about purchasing a mannequin. Especially not such a nice one as this one was.
“Sure thing, hon,” Betty Lou smiled an unnervingly wide, toothy grin. “She was my first. I just couldn’t help myself. Now I’ve got a whole warehouse full of hundreds of them. I’d rather this little gal went to a good home.”
“Wow, thanks so much. But I couldn’t…” Pauline replied. She gazed back at the mannequin’s graceful form, bright lifelike eyes, and subtle smile. “I’ll drop by every Tuesday and Thursday after class – those are my light days. I can do four or five hours at a time, depending on my classes…” she stared longingly at the mannequin, “I can’t wait to take her home.”
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
So, now that it’s getting cold, here on Nightmarish Nature we’re going to talk about a different kind of terror – the starvation diet. It’s winter, and food is becoming ever scarcer, so many creatures will slow down to conserve energy. Let’s take this a step further to the sleep of the damned… But I’m not talking hibernation, or settling in for a sort of long winter nap version of seasonal affective disorder on steroids. No, I’m talking hummingbirds.
Sugar Rush
Hummingbirds are about the polar opposite of what you’d think of when you talk about inactivity. They’re more the picture-perfect speed demons. And yet, due to their crazy high metabolisms and constant need to refuel by consuming all the nectar and insects they can get their little beaks in or on, they have near death experiences on a regular basis. Even during the summer at night whenever the temperature falls too low. It’s like all their systems have to go offline for a bit just so they can survive.
Energy Suck
Essentially a hummingbird burns so much energy that he can die in less than eight hours of not eating. The little sugar daddy needs another fix just to keep going. This lifestyle is a far cry from the Energizer bunny. Essentially he has to enter a torpor state in sleep so he doesn’t succumb to his own starvation diet. Not every time, but when the temperature drops or food is scarce.
A hummingbird in torpor may, by all accounts, appear dead. He can be frozen in place, his tiny feet clasped rigidly around a branch as if rigor mortis has sunk in. He can be cold to the touch and unresponsive. He can face upwards, unmoving, breathing and heart rate slowed to near indiscernibility. He can even be hanging upside down, oblivious to the world. In fact, the hummer’s heart rate can reduce to almost one tenth of his waking state, and his temperature can drop by ~5o degrees Fahrenheit (~ 30 degrees Celsius).
Miracle Mavericks
Honestly, as shown in this article on Journey North, this ability to exercise such fine control over metabolic rate on a nightly cycle makes the hummingbirds more marvelous than terrifying, switching between cold- and warm-blooded. And they are very well-adapted to their eating regimens, especially given their diminutive size. But such is the cost of burning so much energy to keep going without much room to store fuel. Like I said, a strict starvation diet.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
This time on Nightmarish Nature, in honor of Thanksgiving, we’re exploring scads of scat! And not just because of the aftermath of all that eating we’re going to be doing, given that everything that goes in must come out eventually. But because turkeys are weird.
But, how weird?
Apparently, the shape and size of a turkey’s poop can tell you the sex and age of the bird. Male and female birds poop different shaped turds, and bigger ones with age. Your poop can’t do that, we’re pretty sure. And no, we don’t want to check, even if it does come in a whole host of rainbow colors with all the dyes in our food nowadays. Keep your weird quirks to yourself.
Fecal Fetishes
Vultures have very acidic scat that helps to keep their feet and food clean of bacteria from hopping in and around dead things. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a step up to us, but I guess if you’re a carrion crawler you take what you can get. At least you’d know where it’s been I suppose, and that’s more than you can say for some of your long dead food sources…
Rabbits must process their food twice in order to break down the grassy matter they digest (like cows chewing cud). And so they eat their own partially digested matter, the cecotropes they produce after the first digestion. This isn’t true poop per se, that fecal matter comes after second digestion, but it does work its way through the same way.
And that brings us to koalas. They are one of only a few mammals that can eat eucalyptus leaves (and are closely related to wombats, one of the other two). Koala offspring eat their mother’s pap, which is a specialized form of poop that allows the baby to transition from nursing milk to eating solid leaves. It is green, smeary, mushy, and can get everywhere. Just like you’d expect.
We aren’t exempt.
For all that we have learned to be poop averse, a lot of animals eat others’ scat and glean a lot of nutritional value from their detritus. It’s not just your dog raiding the cat litter box and then licking you in the face. And we humans have even fought wars over rights to seabird guano, which was used as a form of fertilizer in the late 1800s.
Anyway, that’s the scoop on poop for now. Maybe we’ll revisit this load later on, seeing as how there’s still plenty of content here.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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:
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