The Doll
Lady Moon-Chan
AN: This is just a little ficlet based off a Chrono Crusade fanfiction I read recently. Hopefully it's creep-factor is satisfying. Warnings: Dark, creep-factor, blood, alluded violence. Rating: PG. Disclaimer: Tecmo owns Fatal Frame 2. I own most of the plot. The rest of the plot belongs to a Chrono Crusade author.
A beautiful doll in a pristine white kimono stands in the window of an antique shop.
The shopkeep takes intense pride in the doll's appearance: the silky black wig that just catches her chin, the wide, luminous obsidian eyes, and of course the fine, ivory-colored bisque porcelain the doll is made of. The doll stands in the window day in and day out, attracting customers with her fragile beauty, and searing into the people's memory the petulant pout her rosy lips were crafted into.
The shopkeep is immensely proud of her, and daily, like a ritual performed for the benefit of the huddled masses beyond the display window, picks the doll up as carefully and tenderly as if she is a child, and carefully brushes out the fine, oil-colored wig, dusts the face and bisque hands no bigger than her thumb, and dusts lint off the pristine white kimono, then stands the doll in the window once more, because she is better for business than a sign or a name, because people come back again and again to revere her otherworldly beauty.
Day in and day out she performs the ritual, and over time, the doll's beauty begins to repulse her. But by now she is under a spell, and as she affirms once again her exclusive right to touch and hold the lovely doll, she can do nothing but act as loving as usual, though she would love more than anything to throw the doll through the display window and shout to the worshipful idiots outside that they can have her. And the doll knows she wants to.
Play with me. She entreats with her glistening black-glass eyes. Stay with me forever.
The next day stepping into the shop, the doll's eyes ask, You won't leave me again, right? And she has no choice but to say no and begin the ritual, and all the while her hatred for the doll grows deeper and deeper, and the doll's hold still grows stronger and stronger.
Stay with me!
Play with me!
Love me!
Never leave me, Nee-chan!
And she doesn't, if only because the doll's hold is now so strong that she can't.
The sun rises early the next day, and more eager pilgrims who want a glimpse of the doll's beauty follow not long after. They peer through the glass, mindless before her delicate, fairy-child beauty. But the collective thought races among them that something is different today.
The collective memory tries to remember what it was that is missing now, from behind the display window. Something to do with the shop, possibly, an employee? Was there ever an employee even there? It doesn't matter anyway. The doll is so lovely and captivating, with her sparkling black eyes, her white kimono with the lovely red patterns down the front, and her rosy lips crafted into a sweet smile.
AN: Well, there it is. Tell me what you thought in a review! Buh-byes!