Liliales Colchicum 

Body horror.

There was a grim rumor circulating in that town.“If you ever happen to see a ball-jointed doll wearing an autumn crocus and speaking, you must never answer its questions.
There is no right or wrong answer. The moment you answer, that poison doll will devour your soul.”

However, this rumor had a slight inaccuracy, or rather, a missing piece. The poison doll’s true objective isn’t souls.
The poison doll absorbs souls to grow replicas of the victim’s body onto herself. And only the most beautiful parts of her victim.
To the poison doll, a soul is nothing more than raw material for crafting a beautiful body.

In the forgotten depths of an old, creaking doll shop, a doll lay carelessly abandoned.
In place of the left eye of her adorable face, an autumn crocus peeked out. Limbs and torso dressed in fragrance-soaked cloth, stretched out like branches and leaves from her delicate body, making it look just like a foreign deity.

No one knows who made this doll.
No one knows why she was made. The only thing known was that this doll was a poison doll that lived through poison circulating in her body.
And so, with the twinkling of the stars, the poison doll roamed the streets, calling out to humans with beautiful bodies, and using the poison mingled in her breath to extract their souls.

Why would she do such a terrible thing?

By inhaling the extracted souls, the poison doll could grow a new body from herself, one that mimicked the most beautiful part of the victim’s body.
If she absorbed the soul of a human with beautiful legs, those beautiful legs would grow from the poison doll’s own body; if she absorbed the soul of a human with beautiful ears, similar beautiful ears would sprout anew from her body. This is why the poison doll has so many limbs and bodies growing from her.
She firmly believed that if she continued to gather so many beautiful bodies, she would eventually become human herself.

“I have so many beautiful bodies, so why am I still not a human? Why am I still just a doll?”
The foolish poison doll sat alone at the very bottom of the pitch-black doll shop, letting out a cobalt-blue sigh.

The poison doll does not like the sun. If she is spotted by that meddlesome, presumptuous sunlight, the beautiful bodies and fabrics she has painstakingly collected will fade. Therefore, whenever the sun is out, the poison doll stays completely still at the very back of the shop. She only begins to move once the sun has left, around the time the short and long hands of the clock meet at the top, and then she goes out for a walk.

But today, long before the shorthand had even reached the top, she jolted awake with a loud clatter.
The poison doll’s second-to-last toe on her right foot had been gnawed by someone. The culprit who gnawed her toe was a bone mouse.

“Oh my! I really loved that little toe! Of course, all my toes are wonderful, but this one was just the perfect length, you know? To go and gnaw it down like that! I’ll sandwich you between two metal plates, flatten you, and write insults on your back!”

The poison doll screamed this as she picked up the bone mouse. While an ordinary mouse would die instantly from poisoning if it bit a poison doll, the bone mouse was unharmed. Since he was nothing but bones, with no flesh and no blood flowing through them, the poison couldn’t take effect. However, even with a mouse’s agility, it was impossible to escape the many arms sprouting from the poison doll.
The bone mouse resigned himself to his fate and squeaked pitifully, begging for mercy.

“I’m terribly sorry. I never imagined you were alive. I’ll do anything you say, so please spare me.”

The poison doll thought it felt like a waste not to make the bone mouse do anything, even though he had offered to obey every command. That said, there was nothing she wanted from a mere bone mouse, not even the tip of her little finger’s worth. And so Liliales Colchicum decided to ask this bone mouse for advice on how to become human.

The bone mouse’s point was valid. Indeed, she had never heard of a human without internal organs. Perhaps the reason Liliales Colchicum still couldn’t become human was that she lacked internal organs. However, the poison doll herself shook her head in exasperation.

“But no way. Stuffing something so fishy and filthy inside me? That’s just crazy. Besides, look around. Neither the clock nor the organ piano is stuffed with anything that unsightly, is it?”

The honest bone mouse persisted nonetheless.

“You have almost all the body parts, yet you still can’t become human because your insides aren’t up to par. You can’t be a human if you’re empty inside. Oh, I know! Why don’t you try stuffing some hair in there?”

Liliales Colchicum, even though she’d asked the question herself, replied with obvious annoyance.

“No way. They’ll stick out and tickle.”
“How about eyeballs?”
“That’s not bad, but aren’t eyeballs usually something you put in your mouth? Aren’t manners important?”

The bone mouse spoke, thoroughly exasperated.

“Isn’t there anything you’d be willing to be filled with? There must be at least one thing. Humans are made up of all sorts of parts, after all. You’ve got to pick the best ones.”
“Hmm… In that case, maybe I’ll fill myself with teeth?”
“Squeak! That’s a good idea. We can get plenty of teeth from a single person, and the void will be filled right away.”

And so, that night, Liliales Colchicum and the bone mouse went around pulling teeth from the mouths of people they found on street corners, grabbing whatever they could get their hands on.

“I don’t want these ugly human teeth. I want teeth from a cuter girl.”
“Be patient. Weren’t you the one who said you didn’t want tiny baby teeth? You’ll get better-shaped ones from fully grown adults, right? We’ll soak them in detergent later to clean them up, so it’ll be fine.”

The problem quickly escalated among the humans. Until now, the poison doll had extracted souls in such a delicate, dreamlike manner, taking care not to mar their beautiful bodies in the slightest, that the physical corpses remained completely intact. Moreover, since there were so few humans beautiful enough to meet her standards, she had spent a long time gathering them bit by bit.
Even on the rare occasion that a young woman would stop breathing on a night walk, the humans never suspected she had been attacked by the terrifying poison doll; the unsavory rumors circulating in the town were dismissed as someone’s careless fabrication.

But once the poison doll sought only teeth, her methods were far more crude than before. She would first capture a suitable human, crush their legs so they couldn’t escape, swiftly behead them without any particular ceremony, and simply pull out their teeth without bothering to extract their soul.
Since she carried out this process multiple times in a single night, by dawn, the street corners were littered with toothless heads and headless corpses, and the humans finally realized that something terrifying was lurking in this town.

And from the testimony of a child out late at night, who had only baby teeth and had witnessed the entire scene, they came to know that the rumors about that doll were true. The people trembled with fear, and those who had lost friends and family shook with rage and grief.

The doll hunters naturally came to the doll merchant’s shop as well. The doll merchant begged them not to destroy his merchandise, but they couldn’t possibly leave the hated, poison doll lurking somewhere untouched, and the cautious humans suspected it might be disguised as an ordinary one.

Smashing every doll in the shop, the doll hunters finally stomped their way into the damp back room where the poison doll lay. It was still only noon, and finding the whole situation a bother, Liliales Colchicum pretended to be just an ordinary doll, rolling on the floor without even greeting them. But to her surprise, a burly human swung his axe the moment he stepped through the door, chopping off the poison doll’s third right hand.

Startled, Liliales Colchicum let out a loud cry.

“My! What a rude human!”

Looking up at the poison doll as she clattered to her feet, the human couldn’t help but scream.

“There it is! It’s really there! The monstrous talking doll!”

At that cry, doll hunters armed with blades and bludgeons poured into the room one after another. Liliales Colchicum swung her limbs, as numerous as the intruders, to knock the rude intruders aside, then fled deeper into the dark, narrow passageways of the doll shop with the agility of a centipede.

Having lost sight of the poison doll, the doll hunters decided against pursuing her any further and instead resolved to burn the entire building to the ground.

Fire was immediately set to the doll shop, and the flames, fed by old planks, cloth, and the dolls themselves, roared and raged like a massive, raging bear. It seemed that even the poison doll was destined to be reduced to ashes, but that was not to be. Beneath the doll shop lay an old basement used as a storage area. The poison doll and the bone mouse narrowly escaped into it, managing to avoid being engulfed by the raging flames.

Fortunately, the flames raging noisily above ground did not reach the stone-walled basement.
But once the flames ran out of fuel and died down, the doll hunters would surely discover the basement. They had to find a way to escape this dilemma before that happened.

The bone mouse squeaked and said, “We’ll use your extra body parts to make a decoy doll. Luckily, there are plenty of other dolls in the underground warehouse, and if we mix them with your real body, we should be able to fool those guys.”

The poison doll was startled by this.

“No way! I’ve worked so hard to collect these beautiful bodies! I’m not going to waste them on anything extra!”
“Even if they’re not extra, you can just collect more, right? Come on, if we don’t hurry, you yourself will end up getting dismantled along with the rest of the dolls.”

The bone mouse was right. Reluctantly and with a heavy heart, the poison doll tore off a piece of her own body and mixed it with the others to create a decoy doll. The bone mouse tied a string made from the doll’s hair to it and, from atop the beam, moved it as if it were writhing in agony.

In the dimly lit basement, the decoy operation went exceptionally well.

When the doll hunters spotted the decoy doll, they were completely convinced it was the real poison doll and frantically slashed and smashed at it.
For just this moment, the humans’ rage and hatred slightly outweighed their caution, and with dark, glistening eyes, they continued to destroy the countless bodies sprouting from the decoy doll.

“You murderous trash doll! You killed my father! Die, die, die!”
“You killed my daughter! I’ll never forgive you! I’ll kill you over and over again!”

As they did so, the poison of the autumn crocus seeped out from the decoy doll’s body, shattered by the doll hunters. It gently spread across the cramped basement like a tablecloth and sent a tingling numbness through the hunters’ limbs. It was only a slight, faint numbness, but for the poison doll, that was enough.

The poison doll, which had been hiding in the pile of stock dolls by the wall, finally leapt out. Like a whirlwind crawling across the floor, she swept through the doll hunters, and with her long, sharp claws, she sliced the poor creatures to pieces. It happened in an instant, so fast they didn’t even have time to scream.

“It’s finally easier to choose, but I don’t really need any of these bodies. It feels like a waste, but they’re only good for fertilizer.”

Though the poison doll grumbled at the sight of the shredded flesh, she couldn’t forget the hatred directed at her by the doll hunters.
Until that very moment, the poison doll hadn’t given a single thought to the fact that humans hated her.

Liliales Colchicum felt as if her chest, where her teeth were chattering, was being squeezed tightly by an iron vise.
She was doing everything in her power to become like the humans she loved so much, yet those very humans resented her, cursed her, and seemed intent on shattering her into pieces.

“You’ve taken plenty of lives from those humans, haven’t you? You pulled out so many of their teeth without permission. People usually get angry when they’re the ones being robbed.”

The bone mouse offered a perfectly reasonable opinion, but the poison doll replied sulkily.

“Humans are different from dolls. There are so many of them, and above all, they multiply on their own. I think it’s only fair they share a little with us.”
“Next time, we’ll just have to ask them if they’ll share. If they agree, there’s no problem.”
“You’ve got a tiny brain, yet you’re so clever.”

The poison doll was impressed by the bone mouse’s idea.

Since then, no one in this town has seen the poison doll. Just like in a song from long ago, the poison doll set out on a journey, hiding among the mail carrier’s packages. Even without a stamp, she can go anywhere.
Anyway, that’s how the poison doll vanished from this town.

Around the time spring yawns and the flowers sway, a letter written in crumpled, reddish-black ink arrived at the former doll shop.

“Dear Doll Shop Owner. Since then, we have traveled to various countries, gathering fine bodies once again. But there’s no need to worry. This time, to avoid being hated, we’re collecting bodies that are no longer needed.

Also, we’ve recently started collecting bones. No matter how foolish a human may look, their bones alone possess beautiful, alluring curves… This is a major discovery. I believe this discovery has brought me even closer to being human.

I look forward to the day when I can greet you as a human.”

When you have truly given up on everything, the poison doll will come rolling in from nowhere, making a clattering sound.
Perhaps she’s already this close.

“Hello, my dear. Do you have a lovely, charming body? Do you have teeth without cavities, or smooth bones? If you don’t need them, please give them to me. You’d like to become me, wouldn’t you? I’ll turn you into me. I’ll take you in.”