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…
I thought about featuring some sort of Father Nature bit for Father’s Day, but having already explored Perilous Parenting I decided to focus on more creepy insects instead. Because we love creepy insects here at Haunted MTL. Thus, I present Assassin Fashion, featuring the Assassin Bug…
Fashion Plates
Now I don’t know about you, but my first thought after snagging my prey and slurping out their dissolved innards is that I totally want to wear the dried up husk of their now lifeless body. Like that necklace made of nothing but shrunken heads. That is some first-rate fashion right there, and no one would dare to say otherwise lest they want to become a part of the dead-flesh coat… And this is exactly what the Assassin Bug does. Like a spider, it stabs its unsuspecting prey, turns it into a giant protein shake inside of its insectoid shell-glass, sips it out, and then attaches the corpse’s carapace to its ever growing collection atop its back.
Aside from being totally badass, these nightmarish embellishments serve a number of additional functions. They help the Assassin Bug blend in among its prey, masking its own odor and helping it to appear as a mass of insects that belong in or near the nest (especially among those more social networking creepy crawlies like ants and termites). In fact, it may even draw the attention of those clean up crews seeking to bury their dead, luring them in to become part of the body snatched horde. And the horrifying additions also act as a sort of armor and potential decoy for other predators like lizards and birds, who can end up with a mouth full of dead bug bodies rather than a bite of juicy Assassin Bug.
Kissing Sucks
And Assassin Bugs don’t just carry around one or two dead bodies, they may totally pile them up, as well as use other insects’ and plants’ secretions to their own advantage. Here’s a cool video from Deep Look that shows a partnership some Assassin Bugs have with Tarweed, keeping moth caterpillars from eating all of its flowers so that it can itself reproduce and spread.
Fortunately humans are too big to be susceptible… Or are we? There are also parasitic Assassin Bugs known as Kissing Bugs or Vampire Bugs that feed on mammal’s blood at night; they even act as a vector for other parasites that can cause disease years after feeding, which are associated with Chagas disease and are transmitted to mammalian hosts when the Assassin Bug poops while feeding and the host animal smears the poop into the bite when itching it.
So here’s a pencil drawing I did of a dead bug I found (I had a whole series of these back in the day). I hadn’t at the time known what it was, but it turns out to be an Assassin Bug. I wonder what its fashion sense was like…
So remember, if you want to be at the forefront of creepy horrific fashion, just look to the Assassin Bug for inspiration. If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
This time on Nightmarish Nature we will again explore some of the more fetid fungi and plants, this time focusing on those that imitate rotten flesh in order to attract flies. Among the best known of these are the Stinkhorn and the Corpse Lily or Corpse Flower. The Language of Flowers be damned, literally…
Fungi
Many of the fungi in the Stinkhorn family erupt in mushrooms that reek of rotten flesh and sprout from a white sort of egg sac in various forms, the common type being a phallus like structure with a white body and olive head. The Beefsteak fungus resembles, well, a cut of beef oozing blood. And some mushroom bodies of the Clathrus genus bloom in elaborate lattice structures or devil’s tooth and devil’s fingers that resemble terrifying alien beings. These odoriferous fetid fungi grow in decaying wood material and use their stinky attributes to attract flies and other insects which will then spread the spores from their fruiting bodies. They truly look like something out of an outer space or aquatic nightmare.
Plants
Some plants also utilize pungent putrid odors to attract flies and other insects, in part to aid in the pollination and dissemination but also to attract insect matter for their own needs, to absorb the insects for valuable nutrients that they cannot otherwise obtain. The largest flowers in the world bear many of these characteristics, also being among the stinkiest. And some pitcher plants mimic rotten flesh to attract flies upon which they “feed”.
The Titan Arum of Sumatra and Indonesia is a plant that over time produces a huge flower somewhat resembling a calla lily but larger as the plant body stores enough energy to do so. While Calla Lilies are often used to symbolize rebirth and resurrection and can be associated with death, often in a funerary setting, the huge Titan Arum does more than that, strongly mimicking decaying flesh in order to attract flies. These flowers can grow to almost 8-feet tall and bloom for only about three days before wilting; they are a huge draw at botanic gardens when flowering because of the rare nature of the event and the remarkable presence that the flower has, in both size and smell. The US. Botanic Gardens has a page devoted to this plant here, where you can even track previous blooms.
Another noteworthy flowering plant is Rafflesia, a parasitic flower native to Indonesia and Malaysia that feeds on the liana vine and grows from a sprouting body bud into a huge flower over the course of five years. Its flowers, once finally formed, can grow to almost a meter across and resembles something out of a horror film. These too smell of death and decay to attract flies in order to cross-pollinate. You can learn more about these unusual plants on this video from Real Science here.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
So, as you may have noticed, we have a special fondness for spiders here on Nightmarish Nature. Well, they are kind of the spokes-critters for horrifying animalia, perhaps because they are so freakishly different from us. Or maybe it’s because I find them a little disconcerting for all that I try to take the “you mind your business, I’ll mind mine” approach, at least if they stay outdoors. Or just because I really like to draw spiders for all that I prefer not to find them sharing my home (though I’ll gladly take spiders over other bugs or mice or larger critters who didn’t get an invite).
Anyway, this segment is devoted to the largest Giants Among Spiders, as if you didn’t have enough to worry about already. And the top place is contested based upon body mass or leg length. Most of these are tarantulas, which globally take top place among the large arachnids.
Goliath Birdeater Tarantula
The Goliath Birdeater Tarantula of South America is the biggest brute of spiderdom, weighing in at over 6 ounces. They build funnel burrows and are known to eat birds (although rarely), mice, lizards, frogs, and snakes, but largely any big insects including other species of spiders. They have urticating barbed hairs that they fling at would-be attackers as an irritant to escape. And people even eat them after they singe the bristles off. Here’s a National Geographic video showing this spider in action, in case you wanted to see a giant spider take out a mouse.
Giant Huntsman Spider
And with the longest legs, we have the Giant Huntsman Spider of Laos, with a leg-span of 12 inches. Their legs have twisted joints and they move in a crab-like manner, which furthers their impressive appearance. ‘Cause they’ve got legs, and know how to use ’em. They prefer to live in underbrush and cave entrances. These are like the big relatives of their Australian cousins, which we’ve all seen online and developed a healthy aversion to.
Brazilian Salmon Pink Birdeater & Brazilian Giant Tawny Red Tarantulas
Next we have two more South American species: the Brazilian Salmon Pink Birdeater, which boasts one-inch fangs, and the Brazilian Giant Tawny Red, believed to be the longest-lived spider with a lifespan of up to thirty years. Both are in the tarantula family and have urticating hairs, a word you probably never read much before today unless you are in the hobby. So apparently South America is not the best travel destination for you if you struggle with arachnophobia, though I suspect you’d figured that out already. (I wouldn’t recommend Australia or Southeast Asia either.)
Face Size Tarantula
And finally the Face Size Tarantula, which has a very terror-inducing name reminiscent of the Face Huggers of Alien-glory. Anyway, these spiders have an 8-inch leg-span and live in India and Sri Lanka. They look kind of like big hairy wolf spiders with stripey legs, sometimes with pink and daffodil coloring.
If you enjoyed this eight-legged segment of Nightmarish Nature on Giants Among Spiders and their larger than life kin, please check out past segments:
