Creepypasta Presents:
She Who Preys
March 27, 2019
by The Dead Canary
My daughter Hannah had always had a fascination with bugs of all kinds. She collected them and kept them in a terrarium she insisted I buy for her when she was six. It was on a constant rotation as her interests changed; when she was younger, it was ladybugs and caterpillars. Now that she was a teenager, she got into more unusual things, like mantises and stick insects. Much of the time, I thought she related better to them than she did to me and her friends at school. Not that she had many of them, but she was never bullied; she just kept to herself. That’s probably my doing, though; my wife and unborn son were both lost in childbirth, and when I adopted Hannah, I never really tried giving her anything girly to do. So, her going out and doing things in the woods and collecting bugs never struck me as odd.
What did strike me as odd was her terrarium was currently empty; I found the shoebox and asked her about it, and all she said was that she was working on a project. And as she reminded me, they don’t have cocoons, they have “ootheca.” It was something that kind of looked like a cocoon, but sounded more like a Dr. Seuss creation than a real thing. Still, of all the bugs she found, mantises were the most interesting to me; the way they stood, with those close in the air. Hannah and I watched one on the front porch once, stock still, just waiting for something to walk by. She said they ate other bugs, and sometimes each other. I asked why they ate each other. Without missing a beat, she said that sometimes, the larger females would eat the smaller males after mating, or if unlucky, sometimes before, leaving nothing but wings and a few legs behind.
That was around the time I stopped asking her questions about insects.
Despite how odd the shoebox was, I put it out of my mind, because what was most important to me was the annual town chili cook-off. To close out the summer, our little town put on a big fall festival, and besides cider, donuts, and local bands who couldn’t make it big anywhere else, we had a chili cook-off. I knew this year was my chance to win something. I had never placed, but this year I had a recipe I was sure was going to make everyone stand up and take notice. I especially wanted to beat out Harris Bolls, if nothing else. Harris usually won first place, but got dethroned last year, and had spent the better part of the year telling the winner, Ellie Hopkins, that she cheated every chance he got. He tried to pass it off as joking, but everyone knew he was just being bitter and an ass about it.
As I worked on my recipe in secret every night, perfecting the recipe wherever I could, life in the house went on as usual, with Hannah taking her little trips out the woods to collect and catalog all her little specimens. Thing is, she would come in fairly late at night, mostly around dinner time, and except for the shoebox, I didn’t see her doing much of anything else.
I wasn’t completely stupid; I felt like there was more to it than she was letting on, but hey, at least studying bugs was a better hobby than smoking weed and skateboarding around town like most of the teenagers around here did. But I couldn’t help the feeling that she had found someone, and just didn’t want me to know who it was. She probably would think I didn’t approve, but hanging out with anyone was a step up in my book.
On the day of the festival, I was sure my recipe was going to be a winner. Harris would never even know what hit him. I got up around the crack of dawn, only to find Hannah was already up. Now that was certainly strange; she barely woke up at all unless I went in to get her. Still with that shoebox at her side.
“Hey, Dad, just wanted to tell you your chili tastes great. You should make sure you have some later.”
I was flattered that she even cared. But, despite her kind words, I had tried so much of my own chili trying to get it ready that, to be honest, I was kind of sick of eating the stuff. I didn’t say that to her, but I did thank her. Amazingly, she wanted me to give her a ride to the festival, when I didn’t even know she had planned go. I was so happy, I didn’t even remember to buckle my seatbelt on the way there.
