The Killing Doll Read Free

butterflies now, but sometimes you saw them up on the old line when the bushes were in bloom.
    Just before the Mistley tunnel he climbed up the bank through the long grass and hawthorn seedlings, the yellow flowering ragwort and the pink flowering campion and the paper Coke cans. He let himself in by the garden gate. Dolly was waiting for him, like a mother or a wife, holding out the unmarked cheek for a kiss. He kissed her. He would have kissed the other cheek, for he felt no revulsion. Dolly picked up a stone from the heap she kept on the window sill and hurled it at Mrs. Brewer’s cat.
    “You ought to throw earth,” said Pup. “You might hurt it.”
    “It walks all over my plants,” said Dolly, though there were no plants in the garden worth mentioning, only Solomon’s seal and enchanter’s nightshade and, in their season, some anemic Michaelmas daisies. “What did you do at school today?” Dolly often asked him this, believing it a mother’s duty to ask and forgetting he was sixteen.
    “Differential calculus,” said Pup gravely. He had very little idea what this was but hearing that sort of thing made Dolly happy. He had begun, half-consciously, half-unconsciously, on a course of keeping Dolly happy.
    “It sounds difficult. Is that what your homework is?”
    “That and Finno-Ugrian languages,” said Pup, applying himself to salami, Cornish pasty, piccalilli, coleslaw and Battenburg cake.
    Bags in hand again, he was going down the cavernous hall (the walls painted dark green to the halfway mark and pale green at the top like an old-fashioned hospital or even workhouse, the floor quarry-tiled in red and black) when his father let himself in at the front door. All the years of his marriage, the first thing Harold ever said when he came in was that he was worn out. Pup greeted him in his usual polite, friendly way.
    “Hello, Dad. Had a good day?”
    “I don’t know about good,” said Harold. “I know I’m worn out.
    Pup went upstairs to his room. It was hot and stuffy and he opened the window. He took off his shoes. Today he felt no very great trepidation, for he could tell by the shortness of his jeans that he had grown, but even he had not hoped for five feet three. Five feet three. He was really growing and was no longer the shortest boy of his year. Dilip Raj and Christopher Theofanou were both shorter than him.
    He put his shoes on again and took the drawing materials out of the bag. With the magic book open before him at a page of diagrams, he began to outline a crescent shape on one of the sheets of cartridge paper. He had four sheets of paper, one for each of the four elements, one to go on each wall of the room on the top floor he had marked out for his temple.
    He was going to be a magician.

2
    W ill you make me a robe?” Pup said.
    “D’you mean a bathrobe?”
    Pup shook his head. “Come upstairs. I want to show you something.”
    “I see,” said Dolly like a cross mother. “I suppose it’s that room you won’t let me go in. I know you locked the door and took away the key. Now his lordship thinks it’s time to open up, does he?” She tossed her head. “I don’t know if I can spare the time.”
    Pup gave her his sweet smile. “Yes, you can, dear.” Sometimes he called her dear and she loved it. The caressing word melted her. “You know you’ll come. You’ll like it.”
    “Oh, all right.”
    They seldom went up there. Or rather, Dolly corrected herself as they climbed the last flight, she seldom went up there. Once these top rooms had been servants’ bedrooms, or so Edith had told her, but had anyone in Crouch End ever had servants? It was Dark Ages stuff to Dolly. There were five rooms, low-ceilinged, the walls all papered in strange faded patterns (bunches of pallid sweet peas of spotty mauve, daisies tied with blue ribbon on yellowish stripes), the floors lino’d, pink or fawn or blue, odd bits of furniture standing about, a bed, a pier-glass, a wardrobe on legs with an