Signal Transmitted, Message Received by Jennifer Weigel
The street was desolate except for a few stray streetlamps. There hadn’t been many stragglers around these parts; these back alleys of London didn’t see much traffic nowadays. Not since the murders started anyway. But I wouldn’t know anything about that. Wink.
A wailing shriek erupted through the darkness and the rain. A cop car was either hot on the trail or had a hunch about something. I needed to duck and cover, and fast. I dashed into a dusty old storefront to let the wailing sirens scream off into the distance and to get out of the rain for a bit. The rain didn’t bother me near so much as the commotion.
The smell of moldy books permeated the shop. There weren’t really any wares of note; the place was empty save for a smattering of old bookcases bereft of their contents. Despite the lingering odor, there were no books to be found, or anything else for that matter. There was nobody around to greet me, except for a strange object perched on the front table by an antiquated cash register.
It more or less resembled a baby doll head and other detritus on a metal structure. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, like some sort of horrific creation by one of those nasty children that harvested all of their sister’s dolls for parts. I grinned as I recollected my misspent youth. Eventually the dolls gave way to a bigger and brighter enterprise – harvested bits can get you a long way, you know. Even a crooked tooth can fetch a pretty penny if you know who’s in the market…
The cop car wailed past, off towards some unseen calling. Good riddance. The cops typically never take much interest in these parts, which is part of why I’d picked this as my stomping grounds. Less attention can go a long way. Smile. Yeah, a couple of vagrants had died here already. And sure, they’d started an investigation. But it wasn’t going anywhere fast, and it wasn’t likely to. No sense in moving on just yet.
The damn doll head continued to drill holes into my psyche. What was even more disconcerting was the fact that I could sense that it was watching me. Not that there was anything to show for it, since the eyes never blinked nor dilated or anything. But nonetheless, it was following my every movement, I was certain of it. I wanted to reach out and smash its head in but something within me dared not draw too close.
Still, the shopkeep would be an easy mark and there was no one to be found out and about given the weather and the recent circumstances. The remaining vagrants had cleared out save for myself. Best not keep my buyers waiting… I ducked behind a nearby bookcase and called out to the empty storefront, “Hello! Anybody here?” A gust of wind outside the window roared in response. I clutched my dagger close under the fold of my coat. Nobody came. I peered out toward the register.
Suddenly, the doll’s eyes flashed a blinding beacon of white light before returning to their vacant stare, as if I had been caught in the flash of a camera. A hollow shrill sound like a mechanical chime echoed forth from within the bizarre creature and was gone again only a moment after. What a creepy security system.
I was most definitely being watched and decided to take to the street again. I had to get out of there. Briskly, I left the dusty vacant storefront and crept out into the rain. I could still feel the doll’s gaze at my rear, causing the hairs on my neck to jolt and prickle from the wayward energies charging the air between us.
I swaddled myself in my trench coat as I turned away from the building to slink into the nearby alley. From there, a flash of light greeted me and I heard a familiar mechanical chime, My heart sunk in my chest. I turned slowly to see the baby doll headed creature a little ways down the alley studying me with those same hollow eyes from atop its metal tower. Only moments before it had been perched by the cash register in the vacant storefront and now here it was in the alley.
My mind reeling, I turned back towards the storefront and picked up my pace, heading for the park across the street. What was that thing? Why was it following me? Who knew? I stopped under a burnt out streetlamp and stared back towards the alley and vacant storefront. Nothing. The rain drummed down in silvery streaks across the street, flickering into and out of focus. I shuffled over to the park bench I knew would be waiting for me. Sigh.
As I glanced over my shoulder at the street, I saw it again. The same creepy baby-doll-head-watchtower-thing. It just stood sentry, offering no clue as to how it had gotten there. My fear gave way to hate, boiling and festering beneath my skin. No one was on to me; I’d covered all my tracks perfectly. Whatever this was, it had to go. Anger welled up in me. I stalked over to the thing and stared at it. It stood there unmoving, staring blankly ahead.
My hand drew back in slow motion, knife in tow. I lunged forward at the creature, intent on smashing it in. The butt end of the knife met porcelain as I made contact with the baby doll head, sinking into the fragile surface as if it were an egg. It gave way, shattering into a million points of light as it emitted one last bright flash and mechanical chime. I recoiled and stared at the scene before me as it came into focus.
“Don’t move,” a cop shouted from the car, hunched behind the driver’s side door like it was a riot shield. Another cop had his sights trained on me from the passenger door, I could feel the weight of his itchy finger at the trigger of his gun. The cop car headlight lay smashed and shattered at my feet, glass strewn everywhere.
You can read another tale of creepy doll head mayhem by Jennifer Weigel on Haunted MTL here.
You can read more of Jennifer Weigel’s writing here on Jennifer Weigel Words.
The gorse bush seemed taken aback. It bristled and exclaimed, “A bush!”
“I am so very sorry, my Lord, I can explain,” the goblin cleric bowed in reverence, eyes glued to the ground. Everything about his body language was submissive and nervous.
“Of all the useless… How is it that I got reincarnated as a bush?!” The shrubbery prickled, growing more and more agitated. “I should have come back as a great King, or an Angel, or a Demon, or a dragon, or something even grander… Hell, I’d have settled for returning as the undead Lich King Tyrant Boss-Man you all came to know and love and revere. But no, that wasn’t in the dice. And now here I am, A Bush!” The spiky leaves trembled and rustled as they spoke, both emphasizing and decrying their verdant stature.
“Well, we were in a rush to revive you, after that run in with the goody-two-shoes 20th level adventurers and the awkward retreat,” the goblin knelt before the bramble-vine. “All of our best clerics, necromancers, and acolytes were tapped for spells or had perished in the great battle. Those of us who got out of the caves were lucky to escape with our lives and make it to this little clearing on the mountainside. And we desperately needed your guidance. We still do…”
“That doesn’t explain why I’m a bush now,” the gorse stretched to its full height, about two-and-a-half feet of thorny rage. “And a Gorse Bush at that! Before too long I’ll have a stand of satyrs piping along with a centaur drum circle, all strumming up some fertility ritual at my feet… er, roots…”
“Well, I’m multi-disciplinary you know.” The goblin spell-caster muttered and meekly shifted to his other foot, bracing for the inevitable, “Sometimes I get the cleric and druid magics confused a little.”
“Confused a little?” the bush growled, “Confused A Little?!” The bush’s rage turned to magic as it burst into flames. “I’m A BUSH!!! That’s not just some modest little cleric-druid spell translation issue!”
The goblin shrunk from the blaze, “But my Lord, you are a mighty bush. The greatest bush, really terrific… The gorsiest, bushiest bush in all of shrub-dom… Other bushes? Losers! We all agree, your Lordship.” The trembling goblin horde in the scrubland shadows at the edge of the small clearing nodded emphatically in response, fearing their bushy leader’s wrath. And rightfully so…
A tongue of flame erupted like a lightning bolt from the gorse and zapped the goblin cleric-druid where he stood, leaving nothing but a smattering of ashes drifting towards the ground. The flame erupted through the goblin horde in a huge explosion that engulfed everything in its wake, leaving a circle of scorched earth covered in a fine layer of sooty ash, smelling a bit like cordite.
The bush sighed and took note of its surroundings, sulking. It waited for some would-be adventurer to wander up the mountainside to find it there, where they could revel in its awkward awesomeness. Seasons came and went, and time seemed to stand still for nigh eternity as the gorse bush seethed beneath its crown of thorny brambles. Perhaps it should have convinced the goblin cleric to transplant it to a more trafficked location first.
If you enjoyed that bit of snarky fantasy, check out Ppppffffttt my previous Poised Potion Poison Potential story.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
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.
We just can’t get enough of spiders here on Nightmarish Nature… so here are some more creepy spider facts for you to consider, outside of the giants, eating and mating habits, and wasp predation as previously mentioned in this series. Plus the finger spiders have taken over the whole of the month of September, so strap in because they’re here too – no goofy drawings this month just more terror unleashed in the form of AI art, courtesy of NightCafe.
Spiders Are Baby Mama Machines!
Spiders can lay hundreds and thousands of eggs in their egg sacs at a time. And when they hatch, all those tiny baby spiders can balloon, flying to new homes on airborne strands of silk as if raining from the sky… So if you suffer from trypophobia and are weirded out by large quantities of clustered small and tiny objects (especially when they are alive and moving) you may want to steer clear of these little bug bombs.
Spiders Are Athletic Archdukes!
Jumping spiders can leap as far as 40 times their body length. And wolf spiders can run up to 2 feet per second. In movement, spiders have four feet on the ground and four in the air at all times. And they have six knees on each leg for a total of 48 knees – that’s a lot of potential kneecapping, I’d try to take them down a different way if I were you…
Other Interesting Factoids
Spiders are on every continent except Antarctica and there are over 40,000 identified species of them. All spiders produce silk for all that they don’t all make webs, since some prefer to live on the move or ambush from hidey holes. There is a known species of herbivorous spider, the Bagheera Kiplingi, but most are carnivorous or omnivorous. And the longest lived spiders can survive for 40+ years.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
