The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  “Dear me, I had forgotten. Is there a cushion anywhere, Hope?”

  “Not since Father Bountiful left.”

  “I got some dinky ones on Truth,” said the pilot, “but ’tisn’t worth the journey, really.”

  “I still haven’t grasped why you’ve seen fit to tie me up at all,” said Pibble more calmly.

  “Ah,” said Providence with a tone of surprise that anyone could be so dense. “Since you arrived in the island, Brother James, we have been vouchsafed three distinct signs: Sister Rita has had a serious relapse after months of steady progress across the board; Sister Dorothy has been miraculously drunk; and a well-cut stone has crushed the leg of one of our best masons. What can these be but warnings, warnings that Satan has entered Eden? Naturally our first duty is to capture and restrain him.”

  “You forgot our mike conking three times,” said the pilot. (Three? All that code wasted?)

  “I can’t argue about the signs,” said Pibble, “because that sort of thing seems to me quite irrational. Explain about the microphone.”

  He was getting pins and needles in his left calf.

  “You did it in three times running,” said the pilot viciously.

  “I mean,” said Pibble, “why was it necessary to have a microphone in Sir Francis’s room at all? He showed it to me last time I was there, but I couldn’t have reached it if I’d wanted to.”

  “Don’t tell me the wetting done it in after all,” said the pilot. The underlying accent of his garage-hand days was beginning to show through the elbows of his stage vowels.

  “A sign on the other side, I’d have thought,” said Pibble.

  “Certainly not,” said Providence. “But I will accept your ground, Brother James, and argue our case according to the logic of Babylon. Simplicity is old and tiresome, but he is a great soul, and there is hope for him yet. Furthermore he is valuable to us, not because he is rich, for he gave most of his worldly wealth to a worldly charity before he came here, but because he is famous.”

  “Like I said, he’s a good ad,” said Hope. No laugh this time.

  “So we have a duty to protect him,” said Providence, “both for his sake and ours, even when on one of the silly whims of the old he contrives to send a message to a man he has never met, asking him to come here without any explanation of why he wants to see him. A normal man, with honest motives, would, on receiving such a summons, have got in touch with us for further information. He would certainly not have dropped his work and rushed north at once; nor would he have pretended when he got here that he was not a policeman. But the Lord looks after his own, and we were permitted to know that the man, from the moment he arrived, was attempting to deceive us about his job. And we were also permitted to know that he had a claim, though a very fanciful one, on poor Simplicity. A claim on what is left of his estate, which now, suddenly, with the publication of his book, is vastly enlarged. He is going to be a rich man again, and already the first of the hyenas has arrived.”

  “No!” cried Pibble, but his protest was not to the bearded monk. This wild illusion could only have come from one source—the sealed envelope. The old demon had betrayed him before he’d even come! Why? Why? Why?

  “Yes, Brother James, we are not ignorant of the mean motives of Babylon. Now, we cannot protect Simplicity unless we know what has passed between these two men, so we install a listening device. The men meet, the device is working, and then suddenly it goes dead. The same at their second meeting. The third there is some doubt about. So we do not know what to think. Despite the signs that the Lord has sent we fear that we may have misjudged this man; in his direct dealings with us, he appears kindly disposed and intelligent for the most part; but we remember that he attempted to deceive us the moment he arrived, that his announced reason for coming here at all is unbelievably weak, and that at times he becomes both interfering and inquisitive.”

  “Punished, weren’t you,” pointed out the pilot, “when you come nosey-parkering into our Reet’s affairs?”

  “Then, Brother James, after his third interview with Simplicity this policeman walks for some time in the cloisters, as if making a plan. Next he comes and asks to use our radio to send a message to his wife. In the course of that message he inserts a cryptic instruction to a third person which, if he had been acting with honest purpose, he could have sent quite openly to the appropriate authorities. Until that moment, as I say, we did not know what to think. Hope and Tolerance were against you, but I was inclined to be for you despite both your behaviour and the signs the Lord sent us. But now we all know what you are.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Pibble. “All you’ve got to do is ask Sir Francis what he wants.”

  “Of course we shall do that, but as you know there are several hours to wait before he can give us a sane answer. And the old are very easily influenced, and subject to whims which they afterwards regret. So we can occupy the interval by finding out more about you.”

  “Tim Rackham is a colleague of mine at Scotland Yard,” said Pibble.

  “One corrupt policeman will know others, Brother James. There are some of us in the Community with direct experience of this sad fact.”

  “Not half,” said the pilot.

  “I don’t know how you expect me to think straight with my arse hurting like this and my legs going numb.”

  “But surely there should be no need to think, Brother James. All you have to do is to tell us the truth.”

  “Oh, rubbish. Of course I’ll tell you the truth, but I’ve also got to try and think of evidence and arguments to persuade you that I’m not a crook and that you must let me take Sir Francis back to the mainland.”

  “Alas for the weakness of sinful flesh. Perhaps we could slack his legs off, Hope.”

  As the straps eased, Pibble squirmed carefully and found a tolerable position. Curious reaction from the three Virtues, or from two of them anyway. Hope seemed genuinely sad in his ruthlessness—sad, perhaps, for corrupt mankind, ruthless with corrupted Pibble. Providence also appeared to take his role at two levels: on the surface he was enjoying himself, purring his cool ironies, the voice of the Head pacing the dais before full school, touching his cane lightly with the tips of his fingers while he talks about “civilised values” before calling out the boys he is going to beat; but that was just manner—underneath the elegant sadism Pibble could sense a sterner drive.

  The pilot, by contrast, was straightforwardly happy with excited malice. Mustn’t mention his real name, nor the stolen manuscript, nor the forged cortisone; push them too far and their mad self-righteousness would switch to madder self-preservation. Pibble felt he was dealing with spiritual psychopaths, unhampered by any legal or moral norm.

  “Well, Brother James,” said Providence. “We are waiting for your version of events.”

  “The message about the ambulance,” said Pibble. “That seems to be the main thing. I know Sir Francis doesn’t like reporters—he calls them the scum of the earth. And I imagine you’d also prefer not to have a great fuss made about his return to the mainland. If I were in my office I could probably arrange to get an ambulance to the harbour without anyone asking why, but I couldn’t possibly do so from here. The simplest thing is to get Tim Rackham to do it, and in such a way that the message doesn’t go in clear through the Yard switch-board, which is by no means leak-proof. And of course it would give my wife a spot of excitement when she learnt what it was all about, which would cheer her up.”

  Silence.

  “If anything, I was cheating her, not you.”

  Silence again. Pibble determined to leave the next move to them. His last sentence served as a warning against the delirium of confession, that curious condition in which tired, hungry and browbeaten prisoners talk and talk. Courts find it hard to believe afterwards that a man should have spoken so much to his own damage, and signed the statement as well. Men do, and now Pib
ble knew why.

  “Why did you come here?” said Providence at last.

  “I told you on the tower. I don’t see how I can convince you that it is very important to me to know as much as I can about my father. He was a man of. . .well, of enormous moral stature, I believe, and now he’s gone and almost forgotten, and I feel a duty to try and rescue what I can. His dealings with Sir Francis ended in a disagreement, or quarrel, or something—anyway it changed his whole life, and I want to know what it was.”

  “You didn’t tell me that before, Brother James.”

  “It was none of your business, honestly.”

  “It is now.”

  Silence. Let him come to you, boy.

  “So, Brother James, there is no question of your having come to take what you thought was your share of Simplicity’s sudden wealth?”

  “No. I’ve never imagined I had any claim on him at all. The first I’d heard of it was when you accused me of that five minutes ago.”

  “Oh, come. It is a far more credible motive. To deny it discredits the rest of what you tell us.”

  “Nonsense,” said Pibble. “You keep telling me how much you know of Babylon, but if you didn’t live so much out of the world—if you’d done thirty-five years of police work, as I have, you’d know that any motive is credible. Shall I go on?”

  “Who’s stopping you?” said the pilot.

  “Right. I didn’t say I was a policeman, because it’s always simpler not to when one isn’t actually on duty. I should think four out of five of my colleagues, when they’re on holiday, simply say they work for the Home Office. I was asked up here by Sir Francis, and I came for perfectly good reasons. When we first met we talked for a little about my father—he wanted to make sure I was the right Pibble—and then he told me he wanted to leave the island, but that he thought you wouldn’t let him go. Before he could explain any further he got too tired to pay attention. Next time we met there was a bit of fuss because a log had fallen out of the fire and the room was full of smoke, but when we’d settled down we talked again and I decided that he was fully compos mentis when he wasn’t tired, and that he really did want to go. But I still didn’t know whether there was any substance in his belief that you wouldn’t let him, so I decided I would try to find out more about the Community before I saw him again. I didn’t tell him that—I said I needed time to make up my mind. So I nosed around for a while—this is what you call being inquisitive and interfering. Of course I had to seem sympathetic. In fact I am sympathetic to certain aspects of your work. But inevitably I came to the conclusion that you would be likely to take an, er, rigid line about his leaving you.”

  Long pause: no reaction. The pilot was picking his ear.

  “In the interval I decided on a compromise course of action,” said Pibble. “I wouldn’t take him out with me, but I would take a letter to anybody he liked to name, telling them his troubles. He thinks his letters are being censored, and something you said suggested that there may be truth in this.”

  “Something I said?” said Brother Providence.

  “You said he contrived to invite me, but never mind. It seemed a fair course of action, and I was sure he was in no physical danger, even if he imagined he was. But the microphone changed my mind. It persuaded me that I ought to come and tackle you at once, and make certain propositions to you. The trouble was that I couldn’t explain any of this to Sir Francis, because we both imagined that the microphone was working; so we spent most of the time talking about what I remembered of my father from my childhood in Clapham. This rather upset me, as I feel, er, a strong antipathy to Sir Francis and didn’t like him intruding onto areas which I regard as private; so I had to walk round the cloisters after our talk, simply to calm down and put my thoughts in order. Evidently I didn’t calm down enough, because that’s when I thought of the unnecessary complications about the ambulance. That’s all, I think.”

  The room became so still that Pibble fancied he could hear the squelch of the pilot’s fingernail digging into a reluctant pocket of ear wax. Nonsense, of course, with this wind hissing through the gappy windows and dragging at the stonework.

  “An ingenious construction,” said Brother Providence. “Very ingenious on the spur of the moment. But it has a fatal hole in it. It is impossible to believe that you never spoke about Simplicity’s book.”

  Damn.

  “But I told you,” said Pibble, “that’s why he asked me up here in the first place—to talk about my father for use in his book. What else was there to say?”

  No reaction. They simply stared at him as if he were a rat in a laboratory experiment.

  “What propositions were you going to put to us, Brother James?” said Providence softly.

  “Oh dear, I shall have to reshape them. I hadn’t considered myself till now as a potentially corrupt policeman. They were going to be promises; now they’ll have to be threats.”

  “Same thing,” said the pilot. “I know coppers.”

  It was sinister how little he minded Pibble guessing about his intimacy with police affairs. Between the island and sanity loitered ten thousand indifferent waves, into any of which a poor swimmer might be made to fall.

  “Put it like this,” said Pibble. “I want to take Sir Francis (and Sister Dorothy, if she’d like to come) away tomorrow, without hindrance. I also want your word that you will arrange for Rita to have proper and regular consultations with a trained psychiatrist. In exchange I propose, rather against my own conscience, to keep quiet about a number of things when I get back to London.”

  “What harm can your noise do to the City of God, Brother James? This is not Jericho?”

  Providence was as calm as stone. All this had been foreseen.

  “Well, for one thing,” said Pibble, “I don’t know how many ex-convicts are living up here, but I imagine that the probation authorities would like to know where some of them had got to.”

  “My dear Brother James, I told you Servitude had excellent contacts.”

  “Perhaps. But I can’t believe that the Home Office—who are a good deal more on the ball these days than they were a few years back—would sanction your treatments of mental aberrants such as Rita, or near-deficients like St Bruno. Bruce, you call him.”

  “My goodness me, is that all? I assure you, Brother, James, the Home Office is delighted with the Community. We are keeping a fair number of habitual criminals out of trouble. Why, a year or two back there was a silly uproar about a Babylonish sect who called themselves Scientologists. We invited inspection then, and passed with honours.”

  “What about the Town and Country Planning people?” said Pibble, pleased that his voice could still be controlled to the donnish level of the dispute. “And the Ministry of Housing. And the local authorities up here. I can’t really believe that you’ve permission to smother the island with a city twelve thousand furlongs each way; and suppose they don’t order you to pull it down, you’ve still got a fearsome lot of re-building to bring what there is up to any kind of safety standards. I saw St Bruno using some very poor cement.”

  “Ingenious, Brother James,” said Providence. He didn’t look or sound as though a wrinkle of his visage had shifted behind the camouflage of hair. “I’m surprised you haven’t disparaged the quality of our drains—it would be consistent with your approach and I have always thought plumbing the dreariest of arts. But the question is academic now that you have decided to join the Faith of the Sealed and will not be going back to London.”

  “I have decided nothing of the sort,” said Pibble, louder than he meant.

  “Obstinacy, I warn you, Brother James, is a positive aid to our techniques. Be so kind as to fetch the seal, Hope.”

  The square monk bent and opened a drawer in the steel desk and took out a bundle of the green sacking in which most of the Community was dressed. This he unwrapped with quick reverence. In the middle o
f it lay a lump of coarse black stone, which he handed to Providence.

  “Hold his head, Hope, and you hold the chair behind, Tolerance, and then I shan’t push him over. I regret, Brother James, that you are deprived of the ceremony of initiation before a full council of the Sealed. But I assure you that the ritual is effective. I have read that one of the so-called saints of the persecuted church in Rome, chained to the floor, yet celebrated the Communion of his church for his fellow prisoners by using his own chest as an altar. The Lord, in His mercy, disregards the poverty of the apparatus and sees only the central purpose. This will hurt.”

  Pibble’s head was gripped against Hope’s muscular midriff. The chair was steadied. Providence held the stone before him, level with Pibble’s eyes, so that the crude carving on its one shaped surface was visible—not the expected cross but a ladder. Providence moved in until the stone blurred with nearness, passed from Pibble’s line of sight and pressed cold against his forehead. Providence bent below the line of his arm so that he could stare with cold passion into Pibble’s eyes. He shifted his feet back until his weight was actually leaning on the stone. He began to speak.

  “And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

  The stone hurt. The ladder was pressing through the thin flesh of his forehead until the outer skin seemed to be rammed against the bone. Rubbish, and sadistic rubbish, thought Pibble, and stared firmly back into his torturer’s eyes.

  At once he wished he hadn’t. There was power in that gaze which made it hard to look away. Besides, he was ashamed to drop his glance. Only his anger saved him from domination—not anger for his hurts or himself but for the whole of mankind, that anybody should feel they had a right to treat people like this. And Sir Francis was another of them, not giving a damn for mankind, packing off his only friend to choke in the trenches.