The Killing Doll (30 page)

“Twenty-seven,” said Pup gently. “I think you and I should get married quite soon, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, please,” said Yvonne, putting up her lips for a kiss.

Pup kissed her. He saw no reason why they shouldn’t be very happy. He wanted a large family. George hadn’t made a will but that was of no consequence since Yvonne was his sole heir. Above her downy golden head, Pup surveyed what he could see of the house that would soon be his and took in a corner of Kashmiri rug, a segment of Chippendale cabinet, a scarlet shimmer of Chinese bridge beyond the window in the green grounds. Sometime or other he had promised to go down to Arrowsmith Court and fetch home the Mercedes. It wasn’t bad, he thought, to have got everything you wanted by the time you were twenty-one, a flourishing business, a successful career, an apparently attractive appearance, a beautiful wife, and a million pounds’ worth of house just off the Bishop’s Avenue.

Dolly would say he had got it through selling his soul to the devil. In which case, like poor old Faustus, he would presumably be expected to pay some sort of awful price for it. Pup couldn’t think of any awful price that might be exacted from him and he laughed aloud, it was all such nonsense.

“I know,” said Yvonne, snuggling up. “I feel happy too. Aren’t we awful?”

Amid the rushing in her brain and the swirling mists, Dolly’s memory was clear. She could remember she was still wearing the talisman when she left the station, still wearing it on the bus and when she walked down Southwood Lane, across the Archway Road and up on to the old railway line. She thought she had still been wearing it when she passed over the bridge at Stanhope Road and came down into the valley, but that she could not quite remember.

It was a bland day, white-skied and colorless. She put on her coat, and as she came to the front door, she saw the shadow of Anubis on Myra’s biscuit-colored wall and now his face was neither friendly nor indifferent but twisted into a snarl. She wouldn’t look. She thought she would forever be afraid to look behind her. Out in the air it was better. She shook her hair down to cover her cheek. There were a few people about going Saturday morning shopping and they all had the heads of dogs set on the shoulders of their coats or sweaters. Sometimes if she looked away and looked back quickly they became people again, staring back with hostility. She walked back as far as the bridge at Stanhope Road. She was sure she had still had the talisman before she reached there.

Perhaps because it was so wet underfoot and the tree branches dripped dampness, there was no one else on the old railway line. If no one had been along, or no observant person, since she had, the talisman might still be there. She walked slowly, her head bent and her eyes down, and presently she picked herself a long thin wand of poplar with which to probe the grass. With a wand very like this, cut from a tree very near here, Pup had done so many wonderful magical things. The talisman was all that was left from that time and she must find it.

In the wider valley, searching was slower. She could not remember exactly where she had walked the day before. Against the grass the green of it would not show and the red part was very small. She peered from side to side, her head moving rhythmically. A feather, borne on a light breath of breeze, fluttered down and fell at her feet, and suddenly the memory came back to her, the feather recalling it, how on the morning before she had felt the talisman on her skin as she entered the Mistley tunnel.

So she had lost it somewhere between here and home. It was darkish inside the tunnel but no grass grew there, the ground was bare, dark and damp. A feather touched her face as lightly as Myra’s spirit fingers used to touch it.

Someone had heaved the mattress up on to its side. Dolly did not think it had been like that yesterday. Was it possible that she could remember just at this point a slippery touch as the thong of the talisman had come unfastened and slid down through her clothes? In the twilight of the tunnel, mud and feathers underfoot, she moved towards the mattress, the wand in her hands like a diviner’s rod.

And then she saw him, just the shape of him in the gloom, not his dog’s head nor his glistening body, and in his outstretched hands not the caduceus and the palms but two bright knives that caught what little light there was.

He had waited for her, knowing she was bound to come. She had known she must be caught by him sooner or later. Everything that had happened to them had inexorably led to this end, and as they closed together with the knives between them, each gave an equal cry of fear.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1984 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd.

cover design by Jaya Miceli

ISBN: 978-1-4532-1083-3

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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