Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove: Mannequin Horror Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 5
Last time on Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove…
On her fourth stint working for the Treasure Trove, Pauline was tasked with sorting muumuus, separating the vintage Hawaiian labels from everything else on two racks. She noticed that the new blonde-haired mannequin was no longer there and now the dollhouse she had arranged stood alone in the front window with the mannequin children peering in at it from outside, having returned to their place on the bench.
“What happened to the new one from the front window?” Pauline asked. “The one that Chester just finished.”
“Oh, that was a nice one. Got snatched up by a resale boutique from the downtown district,” Betty Lou replied. “Those lovelies are in high demand, they never last long here… He’s downstairs now, finishing work on another beauty in the basement.”
As Pauline finished separating muumuus, Chester clamored up from his workshop downstairs, carrying a new little girl mannequin who appeared about age eight. Her curly red hair framed her pale freckled face and brought out the gold in her hazel eyes. She was exquisitely detailed and remarkably lifelike, dressed in a white lace and taffeta Easter ensemble with a bright yellow sash tied gently around her waist. He arranged the girl next to the dollhouse, placing a diminutive teddy bear in her hand as if she was putting it to bed. Pauline thought she heard a small whimper arise from the mannequin as Chester let out a loud, hoarse cough. She hadn’t recalled seeing any child mannequin parts in the workshop, but maybe she’d just not noticed them at the time.
Chester left the girl in the window and returned to the basement. He reemerged with a heavy duty rusted out orange bucket filled with some kind of thick red liquid that stank of harsh chemicals and something else… whatever it was Pauline couldn’t quite place it over the astringent scent of bleach or degreaser or cleaning solution. But something about the mixture smelled familiar in a stomach-turning kind of way, and as he exited out the front door she recognized the lingering odor of rotting flesh as it settled into the back of her nasal cavities, burning in that kind of dead funk that radiates off of road kill that has been sun baked in the right conditions. Betty Lou gave the shop a good spray down with the tropical odor eater aerosol spray she kept up front by the register, and the smell was drowned out in cheap pineapple air freshener.
Pauline watched Chester as he dumped the bucket in the weeds that grew in the gravel driveway at the edge of the road and hosed it out to follow up with a second dump before returning inside. Betty Lou gleamed, “You’ve really outdone yourself sweetie!” Her eyes twinkled as she licked her thick lips. He sidled up to her and she landed a passionate plump kiss on his receding hairline. She rose up on her cane and hobbled towards the back of the shop with him in tow, calling out, “Watch the register, hon, we’ll be back in a minute…”
Pauline stood there in shock. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d just seen, but she was pretty sure she didn’t want to think too hard about it. She didn’t even know how the register worked. Not that it mattered, since the store was empty except for her and the mannequins. She felt herself entranced and wandered over to the new little girl mannequin playing with the dollhouse.
The girl was definitely whimpering. There was no doubt in Pauline’s mind this time – there was a faint crying sound sighing forth from the mannequin’s lips. It was barely audible, but for once there was nothing to drown it out. Betty Lou had left the television and radio off and she and Chester were off in the other room, engaged in God only knows what. Pauline stood in what should have been total silence, acutely aware that there were faint whispered cries all around her. The loudest came forth from the newest mannequin, the girl right in front of her, but she soon became attuned to the muffled screams that filled the rest of the room, radiating from some of the other mannequins as well. The more lifelike they appeared, the more sound seemed to emanate from them. Pauline’s heart raced as her eyes darted back and forth through the room.
Pauline’s mannequin, the one that she was working off who now bore the SOLD sign, emitted a shrill yelp as if someone or something trapped in a distant and far away room was tucked into the dark recesses of her hollow Fiberglass bust. A male mannequin with black Afro wig and vintage 60s fringed jacket, multicolored psychedelic flower power shirt and bellbottom blue jeans who was staged looking out the window, had a deep churning howl like a distant storm. Standing beside the 60s hippie mannequin was a little boy wearing a sailor outfit with blue rickrack trim who seemed to sigh endlessly, like wind whistling through pine trees. The shop was filled with barely audible hushed yowls.
All at once, the new redheaded little girl mannequin shot a side glance at Pauline out of her wayward left eye, meeting Pauline’s gaze in a sudden jerky movement. Pauline’s heart fluttered as she lurched into a rack of clothes in immediate response. She lost her focus as she fell backwards into the clothing rack, her mind reeling. As she righted herself, heart pounding ready to fight or flee, Pauline noticed that the little girl mannequin’s gaze focused forward on the doll in her hand, as it had from when she was brought upstairs and placed by the dollhouse. Her eyes were still cast in that same vacant stare. But hadn’t she just glanced at Pauline? What was going on? The room was painfully, deathly quiet.
The door to the back room opened and Betty Lou and Chester emerged, a bit bedraggled. “Had to help get Chester ready for his next project,” Betty Lou exclaimed as she shuffled back to her Papasan nest in the front. She flicked on the radio to blast forth with operatic music. “Did anyone drop by?”
Pauline shook her head no, unable to speak and standing beside the upended clothing rack. The air was suddenly heavy and smelled of lilacs and lavender oil. Something about it seemed dizzying and drowned out, like incense smoked to mask another smell. Pauline felt faint. She watched, cemented in place, as Chester, wearing a hardware store respirator facemask, sauntered to the front door and dead-bolted it. “It’s time,” he nodded towards Betty Lou, who was wrapping a long, loose scarf around her nose and mouth. The room began spinning and Pauline fell backwards into the rack of clothes she had only recently extracted herself from.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
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:
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.
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