The Killing Doll Read Online Free PDF Page B

these.
    Pup himself was as keen as any student might be, embarking on the long training for a professional career. He and Harold came home from work together, sometimes calling in at the Haringey Central Library to change Harold’s books; they had their tea and then, when Harold retreated to the breakfast room with the memoirs of a princess of Thurn und Taxis or went out on one of his mysterious trips, presumably to a pub, Pup would go up to the temple. He was obsessed with magic, it was an all-absorbing craze with him as football was to some of his contemporaries. The occult had him in its grip. He could hardly wait to get into the golden robe and begin an incantation or make divinations with the tarot cards or settle down to the study of etheric projection.
    He cast horoscopes and he made talismans. He went back to the shop where the man had cut him the plywood for the pentacle and got him to cut out in metal two small polygonal shapes and pierce a hole in each. Dolly was a Venusian subject, so her talisman was a seven-sided pendant which he painted green and the letters on it red as was correct. For this, he had to use “virgin” instruments, unused before, bought new for the purpose, the brush, the paint, the thong.
    “And I’m a virgin,” said Pup.
    Dolly nodded her head vigorously. That was how it should be. The magical powers were enhanced by virginity. Time after time, instructions in the books for performing a certain evocation or banishing ritual stressed that the magician should be chaste. It made Dolly happy that Pup never looked at a girl. He had friends of his own sex, sometimes he went to their homes, he went out for a drink occasionally with Chris Theofanou, but he had no eyes for girls. Carefully, almost reverently, she hung the talisman he had made her round her neck. It would keep away harm, he said, it would protect her from evil powers.
    Quite often he invited her into the temple to watch him perform a particular rite. She covered some cushions in scarlet and gold and black material and on these she sat, watching him with awe and admiration. But he didn’t always want her there and she never invited herself, she wouldn’t put herself forward. It was enough for her to know he was making progress, that he was not like so many other boys of his age but was up there, quietly applying himself to his studies.
    Sitting downstairs in the front room, pinning on a pattern or working the sewing machine, Dolly thought how proud their mother would have been if she could have seen him and known what he was doing. Perhaps she could see and did know. It was missing her mother that made Dolly go to the Adonai Church of God Spiritists.
    Mrs. Brewer had a new cat, a ginger and white kitten that was too wise ever to go near the road or even into the front garden. It stayed in the back, prowling across conservatory roofs and hunting on the old railway line. Dolly kept a pile of stones on the old bookcase outside the kitchen window to hurl at it when it came into her garden, just as she had done in the days of Fluffy.
    She wore her talisman for her first visit to Mount Pleasant Hall. Although she knew by sight many of the people who attended and could see that not one of them had any claim to elegance or style, she dressed herself with care. Dolly felt that if she could only be well enough dressed, well enough groomed, there must come a point where people would observe this alone and the nevus pass unnoticed. She wore the dress and coat she had just finished making for herself in tweed of a smart olive-drab shade. At the neck she tied a little vermilion silk scarf and hung on the pendant so that it showed between the lapels of the coat. She had chosen the tweed and the scarf particularly to complement the talisman.
    No one in Manningtree Grove and its environs dressed as well as her except perhaps some of the young black girls going off to catch trains in the mornings. And yet, as she seldom went out, all this elegance