Dealing with the Devil: October Series by Jennifer Weigel, Part 2
Last time on Dealing with the Devil, the mourning Jonathan Menkhir was approached by Satan in the form of a dapper small dog while he was out raking leaves. Let us pick up where we left off, shall we…
“Wait, my input? What could you possibly need from me? Chloe never harmed anyone, she died trying to save the baby. She refused to give up.” My anger seethed forth in my voice as I spoke.
“Chloe died before she was supposed to because it was the baby’s time and she was too stubborn to let go. Now she is in what you mortals would call limbo. But in between states, she cannot act and so someone needs to engage on her behalf. You see it’s not nearly so simple as you might think. It’s like when someone goes to jail and needs someone else to represent in court so they don’t get convicted and sent to the chair. Oh, that’s a terrible analogy, but you get the drift, I suppose.” The devil dog winked again.
“What do you mean, go to jail?” I asked taking the bait, further losing my grip.
“Calm down, it’s not what you think,” the dog barked. “She’s not in jail, just in limbo. It’s more like that game show you mortals have been playing for decades, what is it? The one where you have to decide whether to hold or trade between what’s in the box and what lies behind door number one but without the pretense of costumes, that’s not required… Although you can dress up if you like,” the dog smirked.
The dog spun around the hunched over dog-walker’s legs and leapt in the air, leash vanishing. The devil stood before me, no longer a small dog being walked by a remarkably unmemorable gaunt silhouette but rather a fusion of the two. He was a menacingly impish man with amber eyes and a coif of frizzy white hair that hung in wispy clouds over his orange faux tan skin, wearing a white silk suit with red accents. In his outstretched hand, he still held the bag of dog poop and leaves he had collected, which he promptly swallowed in one gulp, his mouth opening wider than should be possible to reveal a cavernous maw of sharp jagged yellow teeth leading to a dark pit.
“Sorry, now where were we?” Satan smiled as he recalled the turn of events. “Ah, yes, you were about to embark with me to Purgatory to undertake the game on behalf of your dearly beloved Chloe.” He extended his hand towards me, now devoid of the bag and its unpleasant contents.
I was bewitched by his silken words and the flickering gleam in his eye and acted wholly on impulse outside of my own volition. Mesmerized and without hesitation, I took the devil’s extended hand, leaving the leaves to drift back into my yard to gather in their windswept ridges. We were instantly transported to a small staged room full of red velvet curtains and flashing lights. Chloe stood motionless in the center, rigid and frozen in space and time. She was dressed exactly as she had been for our wedding. Her eyes were open but unblinking and seemed to stare straight through everything as if she were not wholly there. The impish Satan smiled widely as he addressed an unseen audience from an overly loud gold microphone.
“Ladies and gentleman, angels and devils, tonight we bring you Jonathan Menkhir, who will be playing on behalf of his beloved wife Chloe. Chloe met with an untimely end due to complications carrying their firstborn child.” He motioned at the frozen woman front and center on the stage and then gestured widely to point directly at me. “So let’s give a warm welcome to Johnny here as we begin.”
The room was ghastly silent; crickets chirping would have been louder. Something about this wasn’t right. Of course, I was brought here by the devil, who had approached me as a Westmoreland Terrier and sweet talked and entranced me into going with him, so what did I expect? But the whole situation was amiss in a way that I couldn’t quite discern. Was it the grandiose gestures of announcer Satan as he addressed the nonexistent crowd? Or how Chloe just stood there unmoving? Or was there something more?
I was stationed behind a knee-high panel. It was all too short and seemed shoddily constructed, like a piece of bad chipboard stage scenery from a very amateur production. The lights all around us flickered as a spotlight panned the stage and myself before resting on the devil again. Everything appeared badly faked as though cobbled together from various backroom props and accessories. Even Chloe was not herself, just a picturesque image of her from our wedding photos, completely static and etched in place.
Satan spoke again, “Now, Johnny, let’s see what we have in store tonight. In order to save your beloved Chloe, you must choose wisely… I have in my hand a small box and token of your love. It’s your high school sweetheart ring!” He brought the box containing the ring over and handed it to me. It was just as I remembered it – a small gold band centered on a rose quartz gemstone. Chloe had worn this constantly until I was able to procure a true engagement ring in college. As we aged and put on a little extra padding, it grew too tight and found its way to the back of the jewelry box until it was lost in the move. Chloe had felt terrible about it at the time, but soon enough it was forgotten.
“Do you want to keep the box with your prize or see what lies behind curtain number 1?” Satan boomed, gesturing widely to the velvet drapery at his left.
“Where did you find this?” I asked. “It’s been missing for almost four years.”
“Never mind that,” the devil sidestepped. “Do you want to keep it or see what lies behind the curtain?”
I glanced again at the stage as things began to grow clearer. The knee-high pedestal had been from a middle school production of The Wizard of Oz, where I had played the Munchkin Mayor in my first real role. Chloe was standing beside a curtain that had served as a backdrop for the variety show in which we danced together; I had given her the sweetheart promise ring that night.
I discreetly slid the ring box into my pocket. “I guess I’ll take the curtain,” I said.
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:
