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.
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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