The Killing Doll Read Online Free PDF

that she could read Conal’s note to him and so that he might have someone to talk to and be with. But every day it became harder and harder for him to do this, a now nearly impossible feat of effort and endurance. He had been to Kilburn, it was easy to get there from Mount Pleasant Green, you took the train from Crouch Hill to Brondesbury, it was easy to get there and he had got as far as walking along the road where Kathleen lived but he had not gone up to the house to knock at the door. He was too afraid. Sometimes he thought it would be better if he walked there instead, it would not be so quick and sudden as going by train.
    When he had finished his tea he put on his jacket and went downstairs and out of the house. He walked across the green towards Crouch End. There was a Budgen’s supermarket at Crouch End and another at Muswell Hill but neither had a butchery counter. Perhaps there were others he didn’t know about, he couldn’t ask, he didn’t know what to ask or how to frame the words.
    It was a coldish, dull, negative sort of day in autumn. He went into Budgen’s and bought a single item, a loaf of bread. It puzzled him that there was no butchery counter, only a section where pre-packed cuts of meat were on sale. He said thank you to the girl at the check-out but she said nothing to him. He wondered if she could see him or hear him, and he thought of giving a sudden loud shout but he was too afraid to do that. Never before had he been alone like this, but somehow always involved, for good or ill, with his large family.
    He came out once more into the raw gray afternoon. There were a lot of people in Crouch End Broadway, slouching along or scurrying or marching fast, regardless of the small and timid in their path. Their faces were sullen and hostile or indifferent. Now he had bought the loaf he knew he wouldn’t go to Kathleen’s, he would go back to Mount Pleasant Gardens and wait for Conal Moore.
    A woman in a fur coat walking ahead of him dropped a plastic carrier bag into the litter bin attached to a lamp-post. Diarmit turned his head this way and that to see if anyone was looking and then he took the carrier bag out again and put his loaf in it. It was a shiny olive-green bag with the name “Harrods” written on it in gold. He walked back across the green, carrying a small, sliced, wrapped white loaf in a Harrods bag, and the pigeons flapped and scuttered out of his way.

4
    A t the end of the autumn term, Pup left school. He left on a Thursday and on the Monday set off with Harold in the morning to work at Hodge and Yearman. Jimmy Hodge, who Harold had been in business with for thirty years, had just retired.
    Dolly was cross about it and disappointed. She wanted him to get his “A” levels and go to a university. He had read so many books and learned so much and spent so much time in the temple and now it would all go to waste.
    “It won’t go to waste,” said Pup. “I shall do it in my spare time, I shall do it in the evenings.”
    While he was at work, Dolly borrowed some of his books and tried to read them. The subject was immense and her brain reeled. The Philosopher’s Stone, the Ancient Mysteries, the Qabala, Dr. Dee and Helena Blavatsky, Magnetism and the Golden Flower—from all this she was able only to isolate and establish that the adept, the magus, once he had learned it all, might achieve anything he desired and have anything he wished. It was a science right enough, thought Dolly, to whom this signified a study that required protracted concentration and the learning of thousands of facts. What other science could be so complicated and so taxing to the mind? Dolly read about the magical Order of the Golden Dawn, that group or circle of magicians, founded in 1888, to which, it seemed, all the great names that figured in this pile of books had belonged. She imagined him one day as another Waite or Regardie, world-famous as the author of some such weighty textbook as one of