Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove: Mannequin Horror Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 3
Last time on Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove…
On her second visit, Pauline cleaned and organized old sets of dishes along their display, dusting everything as she rearranged it. She faced a large plate or platter from each set towards the shop and stacked other pieces of the set in front of it to hold it in place. As she worked, Pauline became aware of a low sobbing. It was almost lost to the harsh wailing operatic trills piped into the small shop, but it was clearly audible. Pauline turned quickly towards the source of the sound, straining to hear. A hushed woman’s cries seemed to echo from the basement, down the dark rackety stairwell.
Dear God, that creepy man Chester has someone trapped down there, Pauline thought. She stepped towards the stairwell briefly and then stopped in her tracks. What if he was there? He had explicitly said never to go downstairs and, if he had one poor hapless girl trapped there, he probably wouldn’t think twice before adding another…
Pauline glanced around the shop. Betty Lou was sitting up front, motionless. She had apparently fallen asleep in her chair, waiting for the brass bell tied to the door to ring and alert her to any would-be shoppers. Chester was nowhere to be found. The downstairs lurked, dark and unobserved. Slowly, Pauline crept down the stairwell, slinking along the wall. It ended in a tight hallway. An open door straight ahead gestured into a small closet boasting a mop bucket, broom, and other cleaning supplies. A closed wooden door to the left led under the main body of the shop. The hushed wailing was louder now, emanating from behind the closed door.
Pauline felt the doorknob. It was cold and clammy, worn with age and use. It turned easily, apparently left unlocked. Pauline glided slowly into the room. It was dark, save for a small work lamp clamped to the corner of a reappropriated office desk that had been left on, but her eyes adjusted quickly. The room was a library of mannequin parts. Everything was categorized and shelved on hardware store metal racks accordingly. The lower level cradled an array of legs, some attached in pairs at the hip, others singly spilling over one another, loosely arranged in a pile. A higher shelf held a tangle of arms. An array of torsos sat motionless in the corner.
As she slid past the metal shelves, Pauline noticed a plastic bin with drawers of glass eyes, all sorted into pairs by color. Chipped china bowls held various nuts and bolts, a small jelly jar of nails and other metal tacks among them. Some cleaning and painting supplies took up one end of a shelf, their cracking paper labels faded and peeling beyond readability, along with several very used and notably rust-stained rags that reeked of strong chemicals and lingering funk. The sobbing grew louder as Pauline approached the desk, an out-of-date office monstrosity of rusted metal painted to look like wood with a poorly maintained melanine work surface streaked with gouges, stains, and glued-on detritus.
A lone mannequin torso was perched on the desk, that of a strikingly beautiful young woman. She seemed almost too real, eerily even more so than the elegant mannequin that had drawn Pauline to work in this creepy backwash in the first place. Her Fiberglass frame had a quality about it that seemed almost genuinely fleshy or waxy, like it was still pliable and malleable. A blonde cascade of curls draped itself over her shoulders and spilled onto the desk, coiling into a chipped china saucer filled with small wig pins. Her pale blue eyes appeared wet, staring pleadingly at Pauline. Everything about her looked alive but frozen in time and space, caught in a static hollow shell. She smelled of Fiberglass and harsh chemical cleaners, but also faintly of lilacs and lavender oil and of something else more offputting that Pauline couldn’t place, something decaying.
As she studied the mannequin intently, she realized the soft sobbing seemed to emanate from her. As Pauline stood staring, a single tear welled in the mannequin’s right eye, pooling into a full droplet before streaking down her cheek towards her pouty full lips. The lone drip was quickly reabsorbed into the Fiberglass form tracing only a shiny streak through the paint on her face until that too dried and she was again wholly static. The low weeping continued, and a second droplet began to form, again in her right eye. It pooled before streaking down her cheek like its predecessor. Pauline’s stomach tightened into a ball and locked in her gut. Something was decidedly amiss.
Pauline was shaken from the scene as she heard the bell on the door ring and muffled footsteps trail above her head. She dashed out of the room as fast as she could quietly muster, closing the door behind her on her way out. She slid up the stairs and slunk back to the dishes, returning those she had been cleaning to their shelf as if she had been there the whole time.
Betty Lou was engaged in talking to a couple of drag queens who came to pore through the boxes of old wigs, looking for gems that had henceforth gone undiscovered. As they rifled through a box, Betty Lou pointed out other crates hidden under clothing racks and on lower shelves. One of the visitors was trying on a pair of vintage crystal heels and trying to convince the other that they would work for the show if they just extended the straps a bit.
Pauline finished arranging the shelf of dishes wordlessly, focusing on the task at hand. She was still shaken by her experience downstairs, and could not get the image of the single tear winding its way down the mannequin’s cheek out of her head. She wrapped up what she was doing and flashed a goodbye at Betty Lou as she streaked past and out the door. Betty Lou was still fumbling through a box of wigs, pulling out one after another to run her thick fingers through them and hold them aloft for her visitors to consider. A pile of rejects sat to her side while those that passed inspection were lined up on the counter.
“Bye, hon,” Betty Lou cooed from behind the register. “See you next week.”
After what she had experienced downstairs, for all that she had no idea what exactly she’d seen, Pauline wasn’t entirely sure she’d be back…
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Sometimes it pays not to be seen, especially if there are things that want to eat you or if you have to sneak up on things to eat them. So this time on Nightmarish Nature we’re going to look at some of the creatures known for being invisibles among us. Some of these critters engage in mimicry, intentionally looking like other specific things, but a lot of them engage in camouflage, just wanting to blend in. In this segment we’ll consider both but focus more on the latter.
Buggin’ Ya
Some of the most notable invisibles are masters of camouflage in the insect world… Moths and beetles that look like bark or dead leaves. Mantids and other insects that look like leaves or flowers. Those stick bugs and walking sticks that I’m not sure how to classify (are they some kind of weird relations to assassin bugs or their own thing?). And my personal favorite, Umbonia Crassicornis, a type of tree hopper better known as the thorn bug. And don’t even get me started on spiders and scorpions… You could come face to face with pretty much any of these critters while mucking around in your garden and be none the wiser for it unless their movement betrays their location or you happen to scan the area with a blacklight before you dig in. It’s jump scare central, for sure!
Leapin’ Lizards
Lizards and amphibians are also masters of disguise, often resembling their surroundings much like the insect world does. Chameleons are celebrated because of their ability to change color to match their surroundings, but there are several lizards that do this, just not to that extreme. Like anoles. Take a trip to Florida and you’ll soon find that you’re being stared at by a lizard you didn’t even know was there, seeing as how anoles are everywhere and get into everything (one recently startled my mother after making its home in a hallway decoration). You don’t even have to go to Florida, they range anywhere from Texas to North Carolina, and there are other lizards that range further north that do this as well.
Cunning Cats
All those coat patterns you see on cats and other ambush hunters aren’t just for show – the spots and stripes allow our feline friends to blend into their surroundings while on the prowl. Sneaky sneaky. This helps them to be the amazing hunting machines that they are. Assuming they don’t raise the bird alarm and draw attention to their whereabouts. Because birds do love to raise a stink when there’s a feline predator about, and we can’t say we blame them.
Aquatics
Then when you go underwater, you take it next level. Camouflage is taken up a notch with seahorses, nudibranchs, and more that look exactly like random flotsam. Some critters, such as Majoidea crabs, even decorate themselves with ocean debris to blend in. And octopuses are like underwater chameleons on steroids that also utilize their surroundings to create a sort of protective armor that blends in, like when they carry anything they can grab to protect their squishy selves when sharks are about. There are even true invisibles like shrimp, fish, and jellyfish that are actually clear except for their internal organs that don’t necessarily register with everything floating about underwater. Even whales can appear to come out of nowhere depending on your angle to them to start with!
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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:
