Okay, so we’re edging into genre territory now, but at this point I think we need some light relief and this story, well, it’s hilarious.

It’s the story of Amelia, a young woman who one day brings home a package. Inside is a wooden box resembling a casket. Inside the box is “the ugliest doll she’d ever seen. Seven inches long and carved from wood, it had a skeletal body and oversized head. Its expression was maniacally fierce, its pointed teeth completely bared, its glaring eyes protuberant.” Also in the box is a tiny scroll which states “This is He Who Kills. He is a deadly hunter.” We, the readers, already know that this isn’t going to end well.

The doll, we’re told, is a rare Funi fetish doll which Amelia found in a curio shop, which is supposed to have the spirit of a Zuni hunter trapped inside, and which is a present for her boyfriend, Arthur. Instead of casting the damn thing out of a window, which is what anyone in their right mind would do, Amelia sets in on the coffee table and heads off for a bath. Once she’s gone, though, the doll falls off the table and the silver chain wrapped around it which prevents the spirit trapped inside it from escaping, slides off. Ah, shit. Here we go.

When she returns from her bath, Amelia is unable to find the doll. She goes into the kitchen and finds that a small knife is missing from the knife rack. We know what happens next. She’s pursued about the flat by the doll, which is intent on stabbing her to death. Even when she locks herself in the bathroom, she sees the knife blade being jabbed beneath the door. My favourite moment in the story comes when Amelia traps the doll inside a suitcase – this thing is only seven inches long, remember – and we breathe a sigh of relief and think she might survive this ordeal after all. But uh oh she hears a cutting sound and when she looks at the suitcase she sees a knife blade “protruding from the suitcase wall, moving up and down in a sawing motion.”

I wonder if James Cameron read this story before he wrote his script for The Terminator. Remember Kyle Reece’s line in the film? “Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are dead!”

First published in Playboy, April 1969, and collected in Shock Waves, Dell, 1970 and a couple of Matheson Collecteds; also widely anthologised, including in American Fantastic Tales: Terror & The Uncanny From Poe to Now, Library of America, 2009