Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove: Mannequin Horror Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 6
We interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to continue our summer story saga… Sit back, relax and enjoy the tale, game reviews will resume again next month.
Last time on Betty Lou’s Treasure Trove…
When Pauline awoke, she was in a small dark room. She was sitting motionless on a large old desk with an unkempt melanine top. A clip lamp illuminated metal shelving along the wall, with rows of arms and legs and mannequin parts that could barely be deduced at the periphery of her vision. Pauline’s gaze fixated on a shelf on a bin of glass eyes and could not be refocused. Everything was chilly, but not uncomfortably cold.
The world around her was clammy and metallic. The seemingly thin air enveloped her in a pervasive musk that was uniquely disorienting and seemed to permeate her flesh. The odor, if it could even be called such, slithered all over and throughout her skin. It was an indescribably odd sensation almost like tiny centipedes crawling all over her numb body like the tingle of being positioned poorly for too long and having part of oneself fall asleep to wake to pin and needle nerves twitching. Except that this was her whole being, not just an arm or a foot. Other than that, Pauline couldn’t feel anything. She couldn’t feel her limbs at all. Her only real consciousness was a sort of detached, reserved stiffness that rested at the root of her mind and held her in a rigid formal stare. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t turn her neck. She couldn’t avert her gaze. She just looked silently forward, unmoving, unblinking, unfocused.
There was a long tube extended down Pauline’s throat but she couldn’t sense it, and so she was completely unaware of its presence. The tube ended in a rusted out orange bucket and was extracting a thick reddish liquid from somewhere deep within her chest. The hollow cavity left behind in her bosom congealed and hardened to a resin-like consistency. She was unaware that she was only a torso, a framework upon which a full figure could be built, her arms and legs no longer a part of what was left of her body. She couldn’t see them on the metal shelves along the facing wall and, even if she could have, she certainly wouldn’t have recognized them as her own.
Off to the side, Pauline could hear a door open. A few moments later, a gaunt greying wire-haired man with deep black eyes strolled into her field of vision and stood before her… Chester. He pulled a nondescript wooden stool out from its nook under the table, sat down on it in one fluid motion, and studied Pauline intently through a pair of thick black-rimmed magnifying glasses pushed down on his nose. She tried to lash out or scream, focusing all of her energy into the effort, but she remained rigid and trapped in her postured pose. All that came out was a small worn whimper that Chester either didn’t hear or simply ignored.
He removed the tube from her throat and forced her mouth closed. A long sigh escaped as he pushed her lips together in a slightly smirking Mona Lisa smile. Despite whatever sound she had mustered forth, Chester just continued working, pulling a roll of blue painter’s tape out of his pocket to temporarily clamp her jaw in place while he waited for it to set. Pauline could feel her neck and mouth stiffening as they dried out.
Chester applied thick ruby paint to Pauline’s lips to gloss them a more sensual color and began touching up her blush to accentuate her high cheekbones in a stark retro-1980s fashion. He added smoky eyeshadow with powdery paints for a glamorous brooding effect. He super-glued a thick set of faux black feather eyelashes atop Pauline’s eyelids, curling them carefully to enhance the vampish vixen look. He carefully trimmed Pauline’s black bangs in a sweeping even motion and pulled the rest of her raven hair back, securing it in place with wig pins and a deep red satin bow. Pauline felt nothing, no gentle caress of her hair across her shoulders, no pinpoint pricking in her scalp, no head pinching from the fabric hair band… She stared straight ahead with distant eyes, blurring in and out of time and place.
Chester smiled at his handiwork, rose from his stool, and turned off the lamp, leaving Pauline to mewl voicelessly at the darkness as it engulfed her. She heard his footsteps creep up the stairs and echo overhead, joined by Betty Lou’s hobbled cane stride before being followed by a faint bell as they exited out the front door for the night.
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:
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Nightmarish Nature: Invisibles Among Us
