The Killing Doll
Authors: Ruth Rendell
The Killing Doll
Ruth Rendell
For Simon
Contents
T
he 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.
