Attack of the Skrewt Spawn

[Amanda Geist]

Allow me to quote the description of Blast-Ended Skrewts:

" They looked like deformed, shell-less lobsters, horribly pale and
slimy-looking, with legs sticking out in very odd places and no visible
heads."

It is my sad and sober duty to inform you all, and to warn those of you who
live in dry, desert areas, that Hagrid is evidently *not* the first wizard
to breed such things. A close relative of the Skrewts evidently escaped and
has established itself in the native fauna. I know this because I killed one
in my garage a couple of days ago.

This creature, cleverly sensing the absence of my husband, He Who Must Deal
With Bugs, invaded the *day* he left. And it chose its time well. Picture
this.....a sleepy woman remembers she has not fed the cat (aided in this by
the cat making a constant stream of trills and hopeful little forays toward
the garage, wherein are his food and water bowls). Sleepy woman, I point
out, is wearing no shoes, which is very stupid given the fact that (a) the
cat's attitude toward his box has been very cavalier for quite a while, (b)
the garage is where I see most of the recluses (although the odds that they
can bite before being crushed against concrete are small, unlike when you
sit on them on upholstery or stand on them on carpet); (c) the garage is
also a very likely place for scorpions (in fact, the carcass of a rather
large dead one is, even as we speak, under the bag of cat food, startling me
on a regular basis, but I never have anything to hand to deal with it and
simpy make yet another quickly-forgotten mental note to clear it away in a
bit). So no shoes is not the brightest way to go into the garage, but the
foregoing should also let you all know that I am not entirely unprepared or
unfamiliar with creepies in the garage. Okay.

I turn on the light, open the door, and stand on the step in the garage.
Leon (the cat) comes through the cat door in the wall and begins his
loop-through-the-legs-and-cat-food-bag routine. A movement on the garage
floor (a couple inches below the raised area where the freezer sits) catches
my eye, and I think it is a scorpion, a large one. I look. It's not. I don't
know what it is.

Let me say now that I am a native Texan and have lived 37 1/2 of my 38 years
here. With the exception of about four years in Austin, all of that time was
in San Antonio. The most recent seven years were in this very house. And I
have never, never, never, *ever* seen anything like this thing crawling
(very fast)towards me. I am horrified.

It moves like a scorpion, in very fast little jerky rushes. Scorpions, in
fact, are loved by most cats because they move like cat toys and are fun to
play with (cats are way too fast to get stung). Not my cat, though, of
course, so no help in this situation either. Leon looked at this creature
and promptly ignored it, just as I have seen him watch a scorpion walk past
him, and he continues his "feed me" routine, getting massively in the way as
I try simultaneously to keep this thing in sight, stay away from it, make
sure I'm not stepping on any known evils while dealing with the unknown, and
find something to kill it with. Even if Jan were here, it's moving too fast
for me to go for help, and I am NOT going to allow anything that looks like
this to get away alive.

I am finding it a bit hard to look away from this thing, making it even more
difficult. This is true horrified fascination. It has two very long front
legs (I find out later they aren't legs, but such was my impression at the
time) held up and out, in the exact attitude you take when you are playing
scary monster with your kids and are chasing them--extended over its head
(except it doesn't look like it has a head) and forward. The pattern on its
back is very reminiscent of the scale pattern on a scorpion, and the color
is similar--that, combined with its movement, makes my mind *still* try to
make it a scorpion even when I can see it's not.

It comes up the little raised shelf and I do a creditable imitation of those
ladies in cartoons on chairs, jumping back onto the step below the door. [To
my credit, I don't think I yelled.] It goes back down, I jump down and grab
one of a pair of sandals that's in the garage because Leon hairballed in
them and I haven't had time to clean them out yet. I check for recluses
beneath and on the sandal--none. Good. I killed one under a garbage bag out
here last trash day. I look for The Thing.

It has gone along the edge of the raised area, heading toward some of the
Stuff piled in here, and is perilously close to escaping. This thing is not
only as fast as a scorpion, it doesn't stop like they do, it's in continuous
motion, little rushes. I quickly scan the vicinity for other nasties, see
none, vault the catbox, miss the cat poop, and smite this thing. It doesn't
stop moving, but it stops going anywhere, which I interpret with some
satisfaction as death throes. Eventually it does stop moving.

It's not moving and I am no longer threatened. I am still staring in
horrified fascination. I don't know what this thing is. A closer look is
unpleasant, because the oddities I noticed are reinforced. I wish they'd
been tricks of the light or the adrenaline, but what I saw was accurate. It
has a body like a spider, and those front things can't be legs because it
has eight other ones. It's about the size--for those of you in the US--of a
large one of those big garden spiders that roam the grass, a diameter
(including legs) of about 2 to 2-1/2 inches. Its head is awful. It looks
like a peach--just a groove, no eyes that I can see, no features. The head
is shiny. The butt (whatever that is in bugspeak) is indeed the color and
pattern of a scorpion, but no stinger. I am afraid to touch it and leave it
where it lies. I wonder if an alien ship has landed nearby and what other
odd things may be happening by. This looks like it belongs in a cave.

It's still there, by the way--I keep sneaking glances at it when I'm feeding
my useless cat, to make sure it hasn't reanimated and snuck off to plot
revenge. I was *totally* creeped out by this.

Last night, with Catherine's help, I did a Google search and *found* the
thing. It's called a sun spider. Or camel spider. Or whipscorpion or
windscorpion (due to its speed). I found the site of some lunatic who takes
pictures of arachnids as a hobby (rest easy, any of you who thought *we*
were weird), and I made a positive identification. [This guy even has
*movies* of this thing, if anyone is masochistic enough to want to see how
it moves.] But it's not natural, I refuse to believe it.

No, this is another wizarding thing that escaped, some experiment of a
teacher or student at the Texas wizarding academy. Like horny toads,
creatures like this are positive evidence that there is a wizarding
population in this area. To my disgust, the magic control office has as much
problem with people taking vacation in the summer as other offices, and
nobody has shown up to Obliviate my encounter with this (which I would
appreciate).

Anyway, I now give you the URL so you can see the Skrewt spawn. It's clearly
related to Hagrid's larger blasting Skrewts. From the descriptions I found,
this subspecies does not shoot fire. Thank all the good gods. I must warn
you, not only is this thing hideous, the lunatic taking the picture has it
sitting on his *foot* and his *hand.* This makes my skin crawl on two
levels, the thing itself and the thought of it touching me. I still won't
even poke the body with a stick; He Who Deals With Bugs must handle it when
he gets back. This is beyond me trapping stuff under bowls and cups and
balancing large unabridged dictionaries on top to keep them there until he
can arrive and handle it; this thing had to die and I'm even ooked out by
the carcass. Looking at the pictures, I can see the tiny black eyes buried
in the crevice, but they are much less harder to see on the one I met. And
mine was larger.

In a word. Eeurgh.

--Amanda the Skrewt-Killer

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