The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  Armoured for the moment with this double rage, Pibble stared back into the tiger-coloured eyes. Providence was speaking again, chanting the words.

  “Everything you have said today, Brother James, your lies as well as your truths, has told me that you are soft wax, ready for our seal. You are unhappy in your job, and your home life is evidently a wilderness, even by the standards of Babylon. Your avowed search for your lost father is manifestly a deep longing for authority. Here you will find it. The initiation is prolonged and painful by the standards of Babylon. You must not believe that your colleagues, however powerful, will come to your help; Tolerance can delay them indefinitely. We know your reputation in the police-force—nobody will be surprised that you have forsaken that endless grind to seek for God. During the time of your trial you will not know whether it is night or day; whether it is a minute that has passed, or a morning; whether you are awake or dreaming. Nothing in your whole universe will be certain except one single voice amid the darkness. That voice will be mine. For I am the messenger of the Lord God, sent to deliver you from hell, to guide you through the bewilderment of chaos, and to set your feet upon the streets of the Eternal City. We will begin at once. Unloose his hands, Hope, and take his watch off. Stand up, Brother James.”

  The stone seal dragged at the skin as Providence took it away. Pibble stood dazed. He couldn’t argue; he couldn’t fight.

  “Raise your arms, Brother James.”

  He hesitated, then did so. It was best to seem beaten, and perhaps they would relax and give him a chance. Hope peeled the orange habit off him. For a moment he stood in his woollen underwear before the green and garlic-smelling sackcloth of his new uniform slid over his head. Hope unstrapped his ankles.

  “We shall need a lantern at this first session,” said Providence. “Will you fetch one, Tolerance? Be kind enough to follow me, Brother James. Hope will come directly behind you.”

  The twisting stair gave him no chance to run, even if there had been somewhere to run to. As they came out into the cloisters Hope took his arm just above the elbow with one hand, and with the other twisted his forearm up behind his back. The grip did not hurt, but it would if his wrist were shoved an inch higher. “Enough to make an ape scream,” the instructor had said at the crowd-control refresher course last autumn.

  A school of green-habited brethren were trooping through the cloisters, on their way to a sparse meal followed by an afternoon of spiritual discipline. Their eyes tilted away from the little cortege that pushed against the tide, as though the ladder-imprint that still throbbed on Pibble’s forehead were a grisly nævus which it would be rude to stare at. Providence led them up the passage towards Brother Patience’s surgery; half way along he lifted a stout beam and opened a door on the right, one of the mysterious doors which should by all logic have led nowhere. Providence stood aside so that Hope could spin Pibble into the darkness with an effortless flick.

  The three of them waited in silence, Pibble feeling the dankness of sunless flagstones strike through his soles and watching the grey rectangle of door where the two Virtues stood impassive. The grey changed its tinge and the pilot joined them with a smoky lantern.

  “Like me to send your dinner along, Prov?” he said brightly.

  “Yes, and Hope’s too, if you please. And Brother James will need the usual tools.”

  “It’s a pleasure. No dinner for him, then?”

  “He had Reet’s egg for breakfast,” said Hope.

  “Bags of protein there,” said the pilot with mock encouragement and handed Providence the lantern.

  “Perhaps you would be good enough to fetch the microphone, Hope,” said Providence. “I do not anticipate any violence.”

  “A OK.”

  When Providence pushed the door shut and carried the lantern into the room Pibble had his first chance to see the scope of his prison. A “lonely cell” the builders had called it. It was a barrel-vaulted chamber, about eight foot square, containing nothing but a large, unhewn boulder in the exact centre of the floor; on this Providence sat, settling the lantern on the floor beside him so that half the cell was gold with its light and the other half black with his huge shadow.

  “You are very silent, Brother James,” he said.

  “One cannot argue with madmen.”

  “You imagine that you can endure until your fellow-conspirators­ come from Babylon to rescue you?”

  Pibble said nothing.

  “Supposing you did, you would still be without hope. Simplicity has voluntarily signed a perfectly valid document—in fact it was his suggestion—making the Community his heirs and also the managers of all his literary affairs. You would return to Babylon not a penny richer. Worse, you would return with a ruined name—the name of a policeman who left his duty and rushed north on the flimsiest of excuses to pester a dying genius over a fancied claim on his estate, which he had already bequeathed to a respectable religious body. We live in an age which, I am sorry to say, is only too ready to believe the worst of policemen.”

  “Dying?”

  “Patience tells me he cannot survive long. He has a terrible disease. I was certain you knew—you came in such haste. I fear that your attentions may have hastened his death.”

  Two green-clad brethren entered, the first carrying a platter of vegetable soup with two oatcakes at its rim, which he handed to Providence. The second placed on the floor a small log, an ordinary cold chisel and a fish-tailed bolster chisel. Both brethren made the ritual bow and left without a word. Providence began to spoon up his soup with careful slowness, speaking a few words between each spoonful.

  “Our technique is perfectly simple,” he said. “You must have read of it as it has been applied by other bodies for other purposes. We detach the imprisoned spirit from the material world, by removing it from any context it can understand. We give the material body apparently meaningless tasks, which are meaningful only in the logic of the Eternal City. We drill the material mind in an apparently meaningless catechism, which is meaningful only in the logic of the Eternal City. We detach the spirit from time, in the form of hours and days, and from any sensation save that of the holy stones. At whiles, but in no set pattern, we administer an excess of sensation in the form of pain—in Babylon they would call it aversion therapy. You may think it hard for well-meaning folk like us to have to torment our fellows, but it is not. I myself can endure the task without flinching, and Hope has progressed so far up the spiritual ladder that pain, of himself or others, is meaningless to him. So you will endure pain, but not as a punishment. You will be allowed food and sleep, as little as you need, but not as a reward. Your punishments will be spiritual and your rewards will be spiritual. You will suffer according to the will of God, and not your own will. You will be released from suffering according to the will of God, and not your own will. And you will eat, sleep, suffer and defecate in total dark.”

  Pibble shook his head, as if to clear his ears of water. The spoon glinted as it moved rhythmically from plate to mouth, from mouth to plate. The light voice mouthed its repetitive phrases in a slow monotone, without emphasis, draining every word of its colour and texture. The effect was powerfully, and deliberately, hypnotic, coupled with the fear of the monk’s threats and the pressure of his brooding personality. Yes, a weak mind, deprived of light, woken from irregular sleep to face meaningless torture.

  It was dangerous to say nothing … Providence put his plate down.

  “Brother James, this is the last time I shall use your name until you are accepted on to the Great Board. Your work is valueless, your life futile. Your only hope is in our guidance. And we have more to offer than the spiritual gift of initiation. Our Community is expanding and we have need of another Virtue. The Lord sends us such rare souls when we have need of them, and I discern that yours, for all its wounds, may have been sent to this end. Now I shall instruct you in your task and teach you the first phrase
s of your catechism. Your task is this: you cannot be accepted on to the Great Board until you have thrown the holy Six, and you cannot throw until you have a die to throw; so in the dark you will cut the stone on which I sit until it is as square as a die. Cut it true, with God’s help, and it will be the cornerstone of your salvation. The catechism opens with question and response. The first question is this: ‘Can you count the hairs on your own head?’ And …”

  “Only God can count the hairs on His own head,” intoned Pibble solemnly.

  “Good, good,” said the monk without surprise.

  “And he has none,” added Pibble. “Or at least I shouldn’t think so. I remember reading a piece by the editor of the New Statesman arguing that God must have a sense of humour because it is a desirable human characteristic and He must be endowed to a supreme degree with any desirable human characteristic. But so’s a head, I’d have thought, and if you have a head it’s desirable to have hairs on it, but I wouldn’t imagine that anyone believed any more …”

  “You will find that a sense of humour is a very undesirable human characteristic,” said Providence, rising heavily from his boulder. When he was half way up Pibble jumped him.

  It was like an exhibition bout in the police gymnasium, with the right hand, moving apparently of its own free will, swinging horizontally in a perfectly timed curve to catch the big man between the jowl and shoulder. Pibble had always doubted his ability to deliver a chop like that without some fatal last-minute compunction which would abort the blow and leave his enemy angry but unhurt, like a wasp one has failed to swat. But now dislike and humiliation drove the arm and hardened the hand, and Providence, still unsurprised, flopped soundlessly sideways and lay still.

  Pibble eased the door open and peeked out. He couldn’t imagine Hope being caught and immobilised by a fluke like that; but the corridor was empty. Pibble shut the door and quietly lowered the beam into slots cut in the stone; then he nearly went back for the lantern—Providence deserved to come to in blank dark.

  Supposing he did come to? But no bone had snapped, surely?

  Patience’s room was glazed with fixed panes, Pibble remembered, so he tried the door opposite him and found a store-room between whose mullions the big wind boomed unhindered. The sill was too high to climb to, but he dragged across a bale of the same coarse, green, garlic-smelling cloth as he was wearing and clambered up. He was crouched on the sill, balanced for the leap down into the grey grasses, when a hawk’s grip seized him by the ankles, tweaked him back so that he didn’t topple outwards, and dumped him on the bale.

  This time he fought, for five useless seconds. Then Hope had him pinned in the old police hold, with his arm twisted fully upwards till the pain of it bit to the marrow of every bone. He managed not to scream, but by the time he was tossed against the far wall of his cell sweat had chilled all his surfaces until they were kin to the dank flagstones.

  Providence was sitting up in the yellow light, rubbing the side of his neck.

  “The mike’s still dis,” said Hope. “God told me not to try to mend it. You OK?”

  Providence got to his feet, swayed with shut eyes, and then gazed at Pibble through three long breaths.

  “Behold the man of blood,” he said. His speech was slurred now. “How near damnation is he who will assault the servant of the Lord. How proud is that spirit; but it shall be led to humility. How vain is that mind; but it shall be shown its emptiness. And the leading and the showing are mine, for this burden God has laid on me. The blow is forgiven already, but the spirit shall be humbled, the mind brought to nothing. This man, Brother Hope, has undone many souls in Babylon. Many poor sinners has he humbled before the vain laws of Babylon. But now God has placed him as a counter on the board, and it shall be my hand that casts his dice, my finger that moves him from square to square, from ladder to ladder, from snake to snake, until he discovers the humility of stone and the patience of stone. As he has done to others, so shall he be done by. Now let us leave him to the mercies of the dark.”

  Hope picked up the lantern and left. Providence picked up his plate and spoon, walked to the door, turned under the lintel and nodded. In that moment Pibble knew at last who he was.

  “I didn’t recognise you with the beard, Doctor Braybrook,” he said.

  The door shut. Outside came a heavy thud—not, alas, the sound of a big torso falling dead from a heart-attack, but the beam dropping home into its slots.

  Pibble swayed in the dark. Now he was really terrified.

  6

  With precisely that turn, with precisely that nod, had Doctor Braybrook, M.A., D.D., said his farewell to the world when the policeman led him, grosser then, out of the dock at the Old Bailey. A nod as calm and dismissive as if he had been turning away on the expensive new stage of St Estephe’s Preparatory School after telling the assembled boys exactly how far they fell short of the ideal of the English Gentleman which it was the mission of St Estephe’s to produce.

  Pibble crouched in the dark and started to work his way across the cell, waving his arms like feelers before him. Even in that position it was difficult to resist the instinctive ducking of his head, as though the cell were suddenly full of solid obstacles.

  It had been a Fraud Squad case, but because of the number and influence of the parents involved an officer of known tact had been seconded to help with the blackmail side; that had been Pibble. He had given evidence for four hours, watched all the time by those unforgettable gold eyes. And yet he had forgotten them.

  His left hand found the boulder. He clutched it with his right. It felt strangely slimy. No, that was the sweat on his palms. He rested against the rock, knowing now that he would have to find a lot of strength somewhere in the crannies of his own system. He had, so far, endured or drifted on the island with a curious fatalism. All he was really interested in up here had happened so long ago, was already fixed in time, that it seemed as if each minute of the current day was equally decreed and fated. A dangerous attitude, that, for a man about to be forcibly converted to a fanatical faith. So far as he’d thought about it, he’d done what he could with logical argument; now the insane tide of the Faith of the Sealed had obliterated all the landmarks of reason, and the only sensible course, it had seemed, was to wait till it ebbed and try again. Sir Francis had thirty-six hours-worth of cortisone. Pibble had been sure that in that time his captors must see that they couldn’t get away with it. But now … if Providence was Braybrook, the tide would never ebb.

  He stood up, unhunching his head by an effort of will. In about two hours Sir Francis would be at the Macdonalds’ cottage. They might be persuaded to hide Pibble, and then in the night he could try to sneak back to the radio telephone. Or … But not unless he could get out; and the walls were two feet thick, or the building would never have stood. Digging took weeks. That left …

  On the way back from the Common with his draggled and muddied kite under one arm, young Jamie had stopped to gawp at the viaduct as a tank engine trundled a line of clacking trucks across it. Father’s mouth was already open to explain, but Jamie was bored with the phenomenon of steam-power and forestalled him.

  “But how do the arches stay up when they’re made of such small bricks?”

  So it had been the principles of the arch for ten minutes, while Jamie had teased at the rags of the kite-tail and half listened. Pibble could remember the smeary green of the tank-engine still, and the pink-and-white stripes of the tattered pyjamas which Mother had found to make the tail from, and the actual softness of the rotten cloth, and the smoky air and the smell from the paint-factory. But of all that earnest teaching only two sentences had endured:

  “So you see, Jamie, an arch is like an egg-shell, and if you push it inwards you only make it stronger. Of course if you push it out, like a chick tapping at its shell, it’s got no strength at all.”

  From on top the stones of the barrel vault had looked smallish
. Pray God that there weren’t two layers. And that no sentry had been set, in the absence of the microphone, to listen for his screamings and blasphemings. And that St Bruno’s hadn’t been the first batch of dud cement. And …

  Curious, that. You could understand the inadequate tools as part of the dreary discipline needed to provide God with His broken spirits, but damp cement?

  As he gruntingly tilted the boulder towards the side wall, waited for the thud of its toppling and stooped and felt to tilt it again, illumination struck him. The Community was broke.

  Father Bountiful was being bountiful no longer, except in teasing postcards. The half-caste actress half way up Everest was now getting the benefit of the Hackenstadt millions. He had set the Community up with a beautiful boat unsuited to these seas, an elderly helicopter, brand-new office furniture, and the girder-work of an inane theology. But no steady income—that had depended on his continuing favour, which he had now withdrawn.

  Fourth time, the boulder fell with a different thud as it settled against the side wall. Pibble levered it about until it stood stable, then crawled back on hands and knees, groping for the tools.

  No need to ask, either, why Bountiful had lost interest; what else could happen to a playboy Messiah when a spirit as stern as Braybrook’s comes to the Eternal City?

  He missed the tools and turned to begin a new sweep for them. At once he knelt painfully on a chisel; groping he found the little log and the other chisel. He crawled to the wall, stood and felt his way round to the door; there he knelt and prodded the fish-tail chisel into the crack between the wood and the threshold. Missing once or twice he banged it home with the log. Then he felt his way round the wall again to the boulder. At least the involuntary head-ducking seemed to be getting less. He climbed on to the rock, steadied his shoulders against the wall and with his right hand felt for the vault. As slow as a slug nosing through grass he moved his fingertips across the stone. It seemed to be all undifferentiated roughness to his touch, but in his mind’s eye he kept the image of the fillet of masonry which had been inserted into the lopsided arch over the outer gateway; if they’d needed to fudge an important and visible place like that, surely in this hidden vault there must be half a hundred botchings. What he needed was a stone plug he could hammer out.