The Killing Doll Read online

  The Killing Doll

  Ruth Rendell

  For Simon

  Contents

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  1

  The winter before he was sixteen, Pup sold his soul to the devil. It was the beginning of December and dark before five. About two hours after that, Pup collected the things he wanted and went down on to the old railway line. Dolly had gone to the hospital—there was visiting between seven and eight—and Harold was nowhere about. Possibly he had gone to the hospital too; he sometimes did.

  Pup carried a cycle lamp. He went out of the gate in the fence at the end of the garden and climbed down the slope through the trees and bushes. Here the old railway line lay in a valley so that the gardens looked down on to it, though in other places the grass path where the lines and sleepers had once been ran along a raised embankment. It ran over bridges and under bridges, four or five miles of it, so overgrown in the summertime that, from the air, it must have looked like a strip of woodland. Now, in the winter, the birches and buddleias were bare, the grass thin and damp, clogged with rubbish, sodden paper, and rusty tins. Between the clouds a misty moon glowed, a sponge floating in soapy water.

  To the left of him rose the brick arch over which Mistley Avenue passed. It was more than a bridge and less than a tunnel, a damp, dark hole through which a light or two could vaguely be seen glimmering. In the middle of it, someone had once dumped a feather mattress from which the down was still leaking. There were always feathers everywhere inside the Mistley tunnel, stuck to the bricks or ground in the mud or floating like white insects in the dark air. Pup shone his torch and its beam showed him the tunnel’s greenish walls, running with wetness. He squatted down among the feathers and lit the candle he had brought with him. He had also brought a small kitchen knife and a cup. His soul, he had thought, must take some visible, tangible form for him to hand over. The knife was quite sharp and needed only a touch to the ball of his thumb to bring the blood welling. A drop of blood, two or three in fact, fell into the cup, and Pup contemplated them by the light of his candle. Now he had gone so far, he hardly knew what words to speak.

  Up in a tall chestnut tree in one of the back gardens an owl cried. It was no hoot that it made, still less a tu-whit-tu-woo, but a cold unearthly cry. Pup listened as it was repeated, that keening eldritch sound, and then he saw the owl, a big, dark, flapping shape silhouetted for a moment against the inky reddish sky at the tunnel’s mouth. He was suddenly aware that he was cold. His blood was flowing in single sluggish drops down the shiny white inside of the cup. He stood up and held out the cup and said:

  “Devil, O Devil, this is my soul. If you’ll give me everything I ask for, you can have my soul and keep it forever. Take it now. In exchange you’ve got to make me happy.” He paused and listened to the utter silence. A feather floated down from the roof and was caught and burned in the candle flame. Pup wondered if it was a sign that his soul had been received. He decided to take immediate advantage of it. “Make me grow,” he said.

  It was two weeks before he told Dolly about it and then he told only part of it.

  “You what?” said Dolly.

  He was doing Marlowe’s Faustus for “O” level. “It’s in a play we’re doing at school. I thought I might as well try it. After all, my soul’s not much use to me, is it? You can’t see it or feel it or do anything with it, so I thought I’d sell it to the devil.”

  “Sell it for what?”

  “Well,” said Pup vaguely, “just good things to have. Everything I want really. I asked him for things.”

  “You might have asked him to stop Mother dying,” said Dolly as if she were talking of someone offering up prayers.

  “I don’t think that’s the kind of thing he does,” said Pup thoughtfully, taking a second chocolate éclair. Already, a little prematurely assuming maternal care of him, she was feeding Pup up on rich cakes and encouraging him to take plenty of sugar in his tea. Building him up, she called it.

  Harold, in front of whom any conversation, however private, could be conducted with impunity because he never heard a word when he was reading, had his book propped up against the pot of Tiptree pineapple jam. He was eating sliced tomatoes and egg-and-bacon pie with a fork, American fashion, putting down the fork to lift his cup, keeping his left hand free for turning the pages. Dolly never drank tea. When the visit was over, up in her own room, she would have her nightly ration of two glasses of wine.

  “You going to come with me, Dad?” she said. He gave no sign of having heard, so she tapped on the back cover of The Queen That Never Was, a life of Sophia Dorothea of Celle. “I said, are you coming with me?”

  “It’s a very painful thing, going to that hospital,” said Harold.

  “She likes to see you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Harold, using a favorite phrase of his. “She wouldn’t if she knew how painful it was.”

  There was no chance of his going. She went on her own as usual. After she had gone and Harold had departed for what he called the breakfast room, though no one within living memory had ever eaten breakfast in it, to spend the evening with Sophia Dorothea, Pup went up to the first floor where his bedroom was. There were three floors but they hardly used the top one. Pup’s room was at the back, looking out on to the old railway line, the backs of the gray stucco houses in Wrayfield Road, Mrs. Brewer’s garden next door and the Buxtons’ garden next door on the other side. He drew the curtains. These were made of very old pink and fawn folkweave and had belonged to Harold’s mother when this house had been hers. On the bedroom wall Pup had marked out, with the aid of one of Dolly’s tape measures, a column six feet high, divided on one side into centimeters (because he had learnt the metric system at school) and inches on the other because feet and inches were still more familiar to him when referring to a person’s height.

  He took off his shoes. It was a month since he had measured himself. He had last measured himself on 18 November and then he had still been four feet eleven. For months and months he had been four feet eleven, and now as he stood up against the gradated column, tension pulled at his stomach. He shut his eyes. What was he going to do if he stayed four feet eleven for the rest of his life?

  “Devil, O Devil …” prayed Pup.

  He marked where the top of his head reached. He turned round and looked. Four feet eleven and a half. Was he deluding himself? He didn’t think so. If anything, he hadn’t stretched his knees the way he usually did and his hair was flatter than usual, it had just been cut. The new mark was beyond a doubt half an inch higher than the last mark. Four feet eleven and a half. Anyone weak enough or vain enough to stretch a bit would have made it five feet. Had the devil done this for him? On the whole Pup thought it unlikely—it was mere coincidence.

  All the Yearmans tended to shortness. Harold was a small, spare man, thin as a boy at fifty-two, a just respectable five feet six. Let me be a just respectable five feet six, prayed Pup, looking at himself in Grandma Yearman’s spotted mirror. Six-and-a-half inches, please, Devil. Faustus had not asked for—or been offered—personal beauty. Perhaps he was handsome enough and tall enough already. Pup had the long Yearman face, domed forehead, long straight nose, wide mouth, the Yearman yellow-brown hair and the Yearmans’ yellow eyes, which those who were kind called hazel. Neither he nor Dolly
had inherited Edith’s red hair, Edith’s pale bright blue eyes, a redhead’s pink freckled, tender skin. He would be happy enough with his appearance, he thought, if he could grow six-and-a-half inches.

  Dolly would never be happy with hers. Dolly’s appearance was something else altogether, though she never spoke of how she felt about it to anyone, not to Pup, not even to Edith. She had not written the letter to the magazine, though it might have come from her. “Disfigured, Stockport” seemed to have precisely what she had. Coming home from the hospital—they had told her they doubted her mother would live to see the New Year—she sat on the bus reading the magazine with her right cheek against the dark window. On buses she always sat on the right-hand side for that reason and if there was no right-hand seat vacant she waited for the next bus. Of course she seldom went on buses. It was not as if she had ever gone out to work.

  “Being attractive to the opposite sex does not depend on being pretty in a physical sense, you know. Think how many plain women seem to have a host of admirers. Their secret is self-confidence. Cultivate your personality, make yourself an interesting, lively person to be with, try to get out and meet people as much as you can and you will soon have forgotten all about your birthmark in the excitement of making new friends.”

  Dolly had no friends. Edith had sheltered her and now she wondered what she was going to do without Edith. As soon as she was sixteen, Edith had got her to leave school. There was no question of her having a job. She stayed at home, helping her mother, in the way girls did years ago when Grandma Yearman was young. They used to go out shopping together and Edith got Dolly to take her arm.

  “You’re not helping that girl, treating her like an invalid, Edith,” Mrs. Buxton had said. “There’s girls with worse disfigurements than hers get married and lead normal lives. There’s a girl I often see about when I go to my daughter’s in Finsbury Park, she’s got a mark all over the lower half of her face, not just the cheek like Dolly, and I see her about with her baby in its pram. Lovely baby and not a mark on it.”

  “We took her to one specialist after another,” said Edith. “There was nothing to be done. Harold spent a fortune.”

  Dolly never said a word. She sat at the sewing machine, learning to be a dressmaker under Edith’s instruction. They never went anywhere but they were always dressed as if about to be taken out to lunch, trim homemade dresses, sheer tights, polished shoes, their hair shampooed and set, Dolly’s, of course, carefully combed so that a curtain of it hung across the cheek. The high spot of their day was Pup coming home to tea.

  For seven years it had gone on like that. Dolly was twenty-three.

  “It’s just as well I never went out to work, if you ask me,” she said to Pup. “At any rate I learned how to look after you and run this place.”

  It was a big house, furnished much as Grandma Yearman had left it. Most of the others like it in Manningtree Grove had been divided up into flats. The Yearmans’ house was shabby and rather dark. Squares of old carpet were islanded on its floors in seas of linoleum or stained boards. The plumbing was antique and the wiring unreliable. Harold and Dolly and Pup were not interested in homemaking or housekeeping. They did almost nothing about celebrating Christmas. Pup put up some paper chains in the dining room but no one bothered to take them down and they were still there in March when Edith died. There was snow on the ground and it lay untrodden, virgin, a gleaming white avenue of it, on the old railway line. Dolly fed the birds with cake crumbs that she put on an old bookcase outside the kitchen window and threw a brick at Mrs Brewer’s cat when it came after them. She didn’t hit it but would one day; she hated that cat, all cats, and one day she would get that one.

  Mrs. Buxton came in, wearing Wellington boots that had to be cut at the tops, her legs were so fat.

  “I just wanted to say how sorry I am about your mother, dear. I know what she meant to you, she was more than a mother if that’s possible. And your poor little brother, I feel for him. Fancy, you’ve still got paper chains up in March.”

  Pup had been sixteen in February but you felt he was younger than he was because he was so small. He was quiet and kind and polite and made no demur when Dolly got him to kiss her before he went off to school and kiss her again when he came in. The mantle of Edith’s maternity had slipped on to her shoulders and she was suddenly more maternal than Edith had ever been. She worried over him, wondering why he was so contained and reserved.

  He had measured himself on 18 January and 18 February and each time he had grown a little. On 18 March he was five feet one inch tall. He bought himself a paperback he saw on a stand about how to do magic. Faustus had been able to make gold, conjure apparitions, perform feats of trickery. More and more these days he was identifying with Faustus, though a healthy skepticism went on telling him his new growth was just chance.

  “I shall never get over it,” Harold said after Edith’s funeral at Golders Green. “She was all the world to me. I shall never get over it.”

  Dolly got him a new biography of the last Tsarina out of the library but it was twenty-four hours before he felt able to start on it. He refused to sleep in the bedroom he and Edith had shared but moved into the other first-floor front one and said he was going to have her room kept exactly as it was. This was what Queen Victoria had done for Prince Albert when he died. Dolly had to make the bed up and turn down the sheet and drape one of Edith’s nightdresses across it, although Edith herself had never lived like this, had rolled her nightdress up under the pillow and often hadn’t made the bed at all.

  Mrs. Collins, for whom Dolly was finishing a dress Edith had started before she went into hospital, said it brought tears to your eyes to see him. Entering the house, she had surprised Harold going off upstairs with a book about the Almanach de Gotha, had supposed it was the Bible and his destination his late wife’s room. Mrs. Collins was religious in a curious sort of way, a member, indeed a leading light, of the Adonai Church of God Spiritists at Mount Pleasant Green.

  “He ought to come to us,” said Mrs. Collins. “She’s bound to want to come through to him from the Other Side.”

  “She’s more likely to want me,” said Dolly through a mouthful of pins, going round Mrs. Collins’s hem on her knees. “You ought to ask me.”

  “We do ask you, dear,” Mrs. Collins said. “We invite all human souls,” as if Dolly were some kind of freak who could just lay claim to that definition.

  Pup got off the bus at Highgate tube station and walked home along the old railway line. In one hand he carried his school briefcase, in the other a plastic carrier containing the paper and paints and drawing pins and Blu-tak he had bought in Muswell Hill. It was July 18, a fine summer’s day. Pup wore clean blue jeans, a clean white shirt and a lightweight gray zipper jacket. Dolly would have liked him to wear gray flannels but Pup, who was easy about most things, insisted on jeans. Nor would he let her make them for him. Levi’s, they had to be like others wore, or F letter Us or Wranglers. He had come this way because he liked the old railway line but also to avoid the company of his friend Dilip Raj and certain others who went to his school and also lived in Manningtree Grove or its environs.

  There were a lot of people on the line this afternoon, mostly children sitting on the parapets of bridges, but grown-ups as well: a young man who walked along kicking a can, finally kicking it over the parapet at Northwood Road and down into the street below, and women walking dogs. Pup paused to stroke the noble head of a Pyrenean mountain dog being walked from Milton Park to Stanhope Road and back. The sun shone in a bland, hazy sky and all the buddleia bushes were in flower, a mass of long purple spires on which here and there alighted a peacock or small tortoiseshell butterfly. They were getting rare, those 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 i
n 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.