The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell

were planning an autumn holiday in Cyprus.
    “I don’t know about that,” said Harold. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
    “Oh, darling, you and your memory!”
    “I must be going now,” said Pup. “Goodbye. Thank you for the delicious dinner.” Some impulse made him go up to Myra, lift her hand and kiss it.
    It was a signal for everyone else to make a move. Myra could have killed him. Mrs. Brewer wanted Harold to accompany her next door, put all the lights on and search the flat in case an intruder had got in in her absence. Like the man who cut off heads, for instance. Pup went upstairs. Dolly was in their living room, drinking rosé. Often on summer evenings, instead of putting the light on, she lit a candle. She was sitting in the half-dark with her single candle burning, looking down from the window at Ronald and Eileen Ridge getting into their car.
    “Pup,” she said, “did you hear about the girl on the old railway line?”
    He nodded. “We don’t have to talk about it, do we? How was your meeting?”
    “It was all right. Listen, we’ve got a physical medium coming in three weeks’ time, what they call a materialization medium. You will come with me, won’t you? You have to say by tomorrow because the tickets are going to sell like hot cakes.”
    “I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot, did you?” Her puzzled, slightly offended expression made him smile. “Of course I’ll come, dear.”
    After Harold had left her, Mrs. Brewer began to feel very ill. She thought she had indigestion as a result of eating Myra’s strange food. It had begun as heartburn while she was still next door, sitting in one of the uncomfortable pine armchairs. Now this had intensified into a deep pressing pain down her left side, paralyzing her left arm and clamping her as if in an iron cage. It might have occurred to Mrs. Brewer that she was having a heart attack except that she believed women never have heart attacks and no one had told her that this immunity ends with the menopause.
    Gingie came and lay on her bed. She passed an uncomfortable night and felt so tired that she stayed in bed all day and the next day, but when Myra came in on Sunday, she was up and about again and she said nothing of her illness.

8
    O ne hundred and four people passed through the tunnel before the fateful one. Diarmit counted them. Three or four a day they came, occasionally more, and he had been stationed behind his barricade for twenty-three days before the attack came on the twenty-fourth.
    By then he was becalmed in a false security. Huge though they were, they kept to the center of the tunnel and he was just outside the range of their sweeping strides and great stamping feet. But the girl on the twenty-fourth day left the path and came juggernauting towards the mattress. She was in search of something, he thought in his terror, the roll of wire perhaps or the wooden cask or the old chair with which, through the weeks, he had bolstered his fortifications. Her head reached the roof, and her great flailing arms, swinging above the mattress, made a gale in the air. He jumped up in his fear, though he knew himself too small and too faint in substance to be seen, but he jumped up with a spurt of courage, a knife in each tiny feeble hand to defend himself.
    The sound she made was a screaming roar of fury. He almost quailed at that, he almost yielded. It was as much as he could do to keep on his feet, not to shrivel into the ground and scuttle, certain prey for her foot. But he remained there with unflinching bravery, stabbing his sting at her, his double sting, pounding into that vast threatening mass, until the weight of it subsided, sinking on to him, a bloodied hulk.
    He had done it, he had won. He struggled free. He stepped back, gasping, looking at the thing at his feet as a knight might have looked at a slain dragon. His hands were red and sticky with blood. In death his attacker had shrunk rapidly. Her body was