The Killing Doll Read online

  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

  Will 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 oval mirror. She ran a mop over the floors twice a year, flicked a duster. That was how she knew he had locked the door of one of the rooms at the back. It was strange having these empty, scarcely known rooms in one’s own house, as if it wasn’t one’s own. A shadow crossed Dolly’s mind. Sometimes she had these premonitions.

  Pup unlocked the door of the back room. Dolly gasped. The daisies on the yellow stripes were gone. Pup had painted over them in matt black. The ceiling was red. Under the window Dolly recognized from its shape an old bamboo card table that had been in the sweet pea room, but Pup had covered it with a black cloth. Each of the four black walls had pinned to it a sheet of paper with a design on it. On the north wall was a yellow square for earth, on the east a blue circle for air, on the south a red equilateral triangle, apex upwards, for fire, and on the west a silver crescent for water.

  “They are tattwas,” said Pup. “They are the symbols of the four elements. I’m going to do magic.” He could tell by her face what she was thinking. “Not conjuring tricks, I don’t mean that, not rabbits out of hats.” One by one, he took his books off the table and showed them to her: Eliphas Levi, A. E. Waite, Crowley. “It’s a kind of science,” he said, knowing that would get her. “It takes years of study. I think I might have a gift for it.”

  Dolly said nothing. She had opened one of the books at random and was reading the words of an incantation so esoteric and abstruse, so protracted and complex, that it seemed to her a person would have to be an intellectual giant to comprehend it.

  “You can forget it if you don’t want to know,” said Pup. “You don’t have to be in on it.”

  “Oh, I want to be in on it,” Dolly said hastily. “If it takes years of study, d’you have to go to college?” She was ambitious for him; she didn’t want him to go into the business with Harold. This might be the answer. “What can you be when you’ve done it?”

  Pup nearly laughed. “It’s not what you’ll be, it’s what you can do. You can get yourself what you want, anything you want.” Doubt and hope were mingled in Dolly’s expression. “So will you make me a robe? I want a golden robe with a black sun and moon and stars sort of stuck on it.”

  “Appliquéd,” said Dolly. She suddenly realized he was taller than she. It must have happened very recently. She felt a tender pride in him. “Let’s go down and see what I’ve got. I’ve got a dress length of gold polyester I got in John Lewis’s sale that might do.”

  Dolly was at the machine in the front-room window, stitching the side seams of the golden robe, when she saw Myra Brewer walking along the pavement on the other side of the privet hedge. Myra was going to visit her mother as she always did on Thursday evenings. Passing under the overhanging branches of the two ginkgo trees which grew in the Yearmans’ garden, she put up her hand and plucked off a handful of the maidenhair fern-shaped leaves. Myra was one of those people who are unable to walk under overhanging leaves without snatching at a bunch of them. Those Brewers, Dolly thought, including the cat among “those Brewers,” were always damaging her property. She banged on the window but Myra had already gone by. No one had hair that red, not even Edith’s had been that red, Myra must put henna on it. Dolly heard the next-door door slam as Myra let herself in.

  “I thought you were never coming,” said Mrs. Brewer as her daughter made a pot of tea she wouldn’t put herself out to make.

  “You always say that. You always say, ‘Aren’t you late?’ or “I thought you were never coming.’”

  “If I say it, it’s because it’s true. You always are late except when he brings you in his car. Where is he tonight? Home with wifey, I suppose.”

  Myra could have cried when her mother talked to her like that. It was all true. He was at home with wifey and she was thirty-seven and her hair looked awful if she didn’t put henna on it. She had been in the ladies’ loo at West End Green on the way here and there had been this graffito on the wall that said: “The quietest thing on earth is the sound of hair going gray.”

  “It’s no good looking like that,” said Mrs. Brewer, putting cream in her tea the way she had done when a girl in Devonshire. “It’s no good getting down in the mouth. You can talk all you like about the second half of the twentieth century and all that but human nature doesn’t change. You should have seen the writing on the wall when his boys went to boarding school and he didn’t divorce her then.”

  Myra said nothing. She had had enough writing on walls for one day.

  “There’s that little bitch with the birthmark throwing stones at Fluffy again,” said Mrs. Brewer.

  Fluffy was a long-coated tabby that Mrs. Brewer called a Persian. Sometimes he sat on the post between the Yearmans’ front fence and the house next door. Mrs. Brewer had the ground-floor flat and the people on the next floor and the people on the top floor all had cats, though only Fluffy sat on the post. Dolly said there were more cats in Crouch End than in all the rest of London put together.

  “Well, there are more mice in London than people,” said Pup who knew about things like that.

  Edith used to tidy up the front garden in the autumn, cut down the Michaelmas daisies, pull out the enchanter’s nightshade and sweep up the leaves. Dolly supposed she would have to do it now. Wearing the cotton gloves that had been her mother’s, using Edith’s secateurs and Edith’s small red-and-silver painted trowel, brought her mother most forcefully back to her. She could almost see her when she closed her eyes, that thin, pinched face, that fiery red hair, and smell the lemon verbena toilet water she used. The tears came into her eyes. She began furiously digging out weeds.

  Fluffy came tightrope-walking along the fence, did his claw-scraping act up the side of the post and then sat on top of it. Dolly looked up at him while he was scraping and again when he settled down. Manningtree Grove was long and straight and fairly wide in spite of the cars parked nose-to-tail along it, and motorists used it as a through route between Crouch End Hill and Stroud Green. Cars went down it very fast, especially the ones driven by boys of seventeen and eighteen. Dolly heard a car coming as it bounded over the hump where Mistley Avenue went across. She knew what she was doing and yet she did not quite know; her intention was half-fantasy. She leapt to her feet, clapped her hands and shouted out. Fluffy jumped off the post and fled across the road.

  Dolly heard the car roar by, without a pause, with no sound of brakes. It had been going very fast; they thought noth
ing of driving at fifty down there. She waited for Fluffy to come back, to scrape the post and then sit on it. She even selected a stone to throw at him. After a little while she laid down the trowel and got up and went down the path, through the gate, out on to the pavement and looked. Fluffy lay near the gutter on the opposite side of the street between the front bumper of a red Datsun and the rear bumper of a green Volvo. Dolly went across the road. He was dead, limp, though still very warm. A little blood was coming from the corner of his mouth but otherwise he was unmarked. The impact had killed him and flung him there. Dolly felt rather sick. She went back indoors and washed her hands.

  Mrs. Brewer had been out at the time. She found the corpse during the evening and sat down and cried. She tried to get Myra on the phone but Myra was out somewhere with the married man. Dolly, who seldom drank before the evening, not before 5:30 anyway, had to have a glass of wine and then another after the Fluffy incident. An Indian woman called Mrs. Das who lived in the flat above Mrs. Buxton had heard Dolly yell and seen Fluffy flee and she told Mrs. Brewer about it. This was not because she liked cats—indeed, where she came from they outlawed cats, believing their bodies to be inhabited by the spirits of dead witches—but because Mrs. Brewer was one of the few people in the neighborhood, apart from other Indians, who condescended to speak to her. Dolly never spoke and Mrs. Das wasn’t to know Dolly hardly ever spoke to anyone.

  There was no way of proving it and nothing overt Mrs. Brewer could do. But she told everybody she knew.

  “Her mother was as nice a woman as you’d meet,” said Mrs. Buxton. “Your Myra reminds me of her in a way.”

  Myra had never seen Edith Yearman. She had already been ill before Mrs. Brewer came to live there. “In what way?”

  “The hair for a start. The eyes. Of course Myra’s a lot heavier built, she’d need to fine down a bit.”

  “Charming,” said Myra to her mother. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”

  Mrs. Brewer took no notice. “She must be sick in her mind, murdering a person’s pet.”

  It seemed to Pup that he had probably stopped growing for good. He had been seventeen in February and five feet seven and he was still five feet seven. No Yearman, as far as he knew, had ever been so tall and he was satisfied. In the golden robe, appliquéd with sun, moon and stars, he made quite a commanding figure.

  According to Eliphas Levi, author of The Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, the magician may buy a knife for use as his dagger, providing he uses this knife to manufacture his other elemental weapons. Pup bought a knife in the big ironmongers in Muswell Hill and painted the hilt of it with the name Lucifer and also with the archangelic name of fire. He could use the knife to make his wand and perhaps his pentacle but he was doubtful about carving a cup.

  On the old railway line, the bushes and the branches of the trees were still bare. It had been a cold spring. Harold had had the flu and Dolly had had it mildly and it had swept through Pup’s school and now Mrs. Brewer had it. Mrs. Brewer was fat and aging and her flu turned to bronchitis. Myra came to stay. She kept on with her job as part-time receptionist to a dentist in Camden Town, but she was there in the evenings and overnight. It was years since she had worked full-time. The afternoons were the best times for the married man to get away.

  “He won’t miss you,” said Mrs. Brewer, wheezing. “He’ll have a chance to catch up on things with wifey.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so cruel to me after all I do for you,” said Myra.

  “There’s a saying in the Bible about being cruel only to be kind. You’ve got nothing, d’you realize that? Not even a roof over your head. That little bitch with the birthmark that murdered Fluffy has got more than you have and she’s half your age. At least that’s her father’s house.”

  “He owns that great place? All of it?”

  “All of it, miss. And a nice little business in the Broadway. Hodge and Yearman, Typewriters and Instant Print. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it when you’ve been passing through in his car.

  “All right, Mother, for Christ’s sake. Now you’ve started yourself off coughing.”

  Very early in the morning Pup and Dolly went together down on to the old railway line to find a tree branch for Pup’s magic wand. Eliphas Levi, said Pup, suggested that the wand should be a perfectly straight branch of almond or hazel, cut at a single blow with the magical pruning knife or golden sickle, before the rising of the sun, at that moment when the tree is ready to blossom. He had with him his dagger with the painted hilt, ready for cutting the wand from the tree.

  It was a cool clear London morning and the old railway line was as green as a country lane. The grass and the budding trees were drenched with bright, cold, glistening dew. Dolly had hardly ever seen the dawn but she guessed that, just as the sky is flooded with gold after the sun has set, so it may be before the sun rises. Between bars of darkish cloud, the sky was livid. Birds had been singing, a concentrated, unmusical twittering, since long before they climbed down the embankment.

  Pup knew when the sun would rise, he had a sense about these things. Neither of them was entirely sure they could tell an almond or a hazel tree when they saw one, though Pup said it was faith and love which counted more than accuracy. They walked through the Mistley tunnel and along the channel between the weed-grown platforms which were all that now remained of a station that had once been there—Mount Pleasant Green. They had plenty of time and they walked nearly all the way to Tollington Road, over bridges and through tunnels, on the dewy turf, before they found a tree Pup said must be a hazel. From this tree, as the yellow of the sky began to brighten, he cut with a bold sweep of his arm a slender wand hung with golden catkins.

  They walked back the way they had come. The air was not yet tainted with the fumes that would soon come drifting from the traffic passing under and passing over. Along the old railway line you could smell pale green tree flowers breaking into blossom, you could smell the new grass and the cow parsley that sprang up to cover the rank wet newspaper, the empty cans, the broken bottles, the feathers and the cigarette ends. It was cool and fresh, the sun blazing now but cold as midwinter.

  Dolly wore her lion’s mane hair in a style designed half to cover her face. She had a tweed suit on and a red wool jersey, both homemade (though few would have guessed it), and sensible brown hide walking shoes. From time to time she glanced at Pup, who carried his wand like a pilgrim’s staff, with love and pride and hope. He had the same lion hair as her but he wore it just to the tips of his ears and this gave him a look of earnest innocence. His face was a long oval and he had the long straight nose and full lips of a saint or perhaps merely a bystander in certain medieval paintings. He was very thin and light on his feet. Although he wore jeans and a sweater and a jacket he somehow gave the impression, so contained and neatly made as he was, of being dressed much more formally.

  It was just after half-past seven when they turned the corner into Manningtree Grove. Dolly had not wanted to risk her tights on the embankment again, so they had got off the old railway line by going up the steps in Mount Pleasant Gardens. Harold must have come out to take the milk in, for he stood on the front garden path, a milk bottle cradled like a child in each arm, like twin babies, talking over the fence to Myra Brewer.

  With an instinctive gesture that was almost a reflex, Dolly drew the curtain of hair across her cheek. She looked but said nothing. Myra Brewer was wearing a bright green blouse and a green-and-navy check skirt and her gold watch and some gold chains and had on her full panoply of make-up, enough, in fact, for going on a television talk show under powerful lights.

  “Good morning, Myra,” said Pup who had never been introduced to her but who happened to know what her first name was.

  Myra said hello. Pup smiled gently at his father, gave Dolly the hazel wand to hold, and took the milk bottles out of Harold’s arms as if they were too heavy a load for him or an impediment to his continued conversation. Later that day, after sc
hool, he stripped the catkins and the leaf buds from the hazel branch and painted it yellow. He painted a black spiral round it and inscribed upon it the name of Lucifer. Dolly gave him a glass tumbler, the last remaining one of a crystal water set, and he used this for the cup, painting the name of Lucifer on it and the archangelic name for the element of water. The pentacle was more difficult. At last he found a shop in Hornsey where the man agreed to cut him a plywood circle. Pup told him he wanted it for backing a mirror.

  Dolly was invited to attend the ceremony of the consecration of the elemental weapons. At his request, she brought him a glass of red wine, a slice of bread and a saucerful of salt. He needed a rose too but they had none in the garden, so Dolly waited till it was dark and stuck her hand through the fence and picked a bud from Mrs. Buxton’s Rose gaujard which was just coming out. Pup made his own holy water. Facing towards the north, standing to the south of his altar, he extended his hand over the saucer of salt and chanted:

  “May wisdom abide in this salt and may it preserve my mind and body from all corruption. May all phantoms depart from it so that it may become a heavenly salt, salt of earth and earth of salt. May it feed the threshing ox and strengthen my hope with the horns of the winged bull! So mote it be.”

  He had got it out of a book but he had learned it by heart. Mixing the salt and some joss-stick ash into the water made it holy. Dolly sat on a cushion on the floor, watching him, feeling a deep thrill of excitement. Pup walked round in a circle with the glass of holy water, sprinkling it to the four quarters of the temple. He lit a joss stick and walked round again, saying:

  “And when after all the phantoms are vanished, thou shalt see the holy formless fire, that fire which darts and flashes through the hidden depths of the universe, hear, thou Voice of Fire.”

  There was a great deal more. It went on for two hours and Dolly loved every minute of it. As he raised his arms and the golden sleeves hung like pennants, Pup’s face was rapt, his eyes glowing with hieratic fervour. He was obsessed with magic these days, he admitted it himself. He read nothing but books on magic, which might have accounted for his failure to get more than three poorish “O” levels and made it seem unlikely that his “A” levels would be much better, always supposing he stayed on long enough to do them. The word “magician” had a frivolous or even charlatanish ring to it, so Pup called himself a geomancer.