The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  So Bountiful had dammed the freshet of Canadian dollars which once irrigated this spiritual desert. And that was the second time such a disaster had befallen Providence. The first time he had been Doctor Cecil Braybrook, all-powerful master of a machine which was going to restore the gentry of England to their former glories, make England itself a great moral force in the world again, and thus reform the whole round wicked world. Cruelly, the costs of running St Estephe’s had gone up just as the supply of boys (suitable boys, of course) was mysteriously going down. Pibble moved his hand to another section of vault and marvelled at the instinctive way the moneyed classes preserve themselves; none of the rumours about St Estephe’s can have started by then, surely.

  His fingers were progressing in their new trade. They recognised a crack, a join, and traced it all round four corners. Too large a stone, but at one point they found a dried globule of cement slurry, which crumbled beautifully when he probed it with his nail. The neighbour stone was also hefty—ah, Crippen, this couldn’t be the only section of the whole building fashioned from proper blocks! He let the network of joins lead him further down the vault, and came to a crack that widened until he could probe with his whole finger, as Tolerance had probed his own ear-hole, into the rubbishy bonding; and then the crack split, running down either side of a thin triangle, a stone wedge. Gingerly he lifted his left hand until the fingers of his right could feel the point of the chisel into the centre of the triangle; he nearly lost his place, and the tools, while he was juggling the log from his left to his right hand, but then he was steady again and able to tap the chisel-top with the log. He inched his feet round and found a position where he could really hit from, tapped at the chisel-top again to locate it in the dark, then swung at it, short-armed. Ouch!

  Yes, that was Braybrook’s style—vicarious sadism from lofty motives. At St Estephe’s the children were encouraged to “rub the corners off each other”. Here, by a further refinement, the victim bashed at his own limbs in the dark.

  He practised until he could hit with firm blows. The angle was deadly tiring; the log was too light for such a purpose; his bruised hip nagged, and the moment he allowed himself to notice it his buttocks also clamoured for sympathy; the fillet did not budge. For a rest, and the comfort of feeling that he was making any progress at all, he edged the chisel down to the place where the crack widened and began to prod at the filling. Dust and fragments sputtered, and when he tried to shut his eyes he found that they were already screwed tight from the instinct of groping in the dark. The steel waggled gratifyingly into the cranny.

  St Estephe’s, founded to reform the world, a machine for making children miserable, smartish (which of the Royals had been tipped to go there?), presided over by earnest, jovial, scholarly, rotund Doctor Braybrook—St Estephe’s had run into shoal water. The new stage, the new swimming-pool, the new labs, all had cost more than Braybrook had budgeted for. He had resorted to fraud. With a true scholar’s contempt for the world he had devised a wangle which was simple even by the simple standards of the City, and a merchant banker who was making the leap from Rumanian slum to heart-of-oak English squirearchy in one generation instead of the usual three had spotted him at once. So had other parents, but Doctor Braybrook had proved considerably more adept at blackmail than fraud—he had their sons’ whole future at stake, and the parents didn’t know of each others’ existence. What, risk young Marcus being turned out of St Estephe’s amid whispers of congenital depravity, and just when a Royal might be going there too! So young Marcus had stayed; and two parents had lent the school enough money for Braybrook to disentangle his fraud and devise, on the basis of his first experience, a considerably more plausible one.

  The chisel jammed as the cranny narrowed. Pibble felt it along to the centre of the wedge, whanged with no result, felt it back to the tip and tried there. A heartening flake rapped the bridge of his nose. Carefully, exploring with a finger for results every few strokes, he began to knock the tip off the wedge. At each pause the skin of his forearm seemed to have swollen tauter with effort.

  So Braybrook had bought calm for St Estephe’s; but into that limpid interval had fallen a thunderbolt. The banker’s wife had bolted, taking the executive jet, the pilot and the boy. The pilot, in a dither of lust and fear, had forgotten to check the fuel and the plane had ditched in mid-Atlantic, gliding down to the refuge of a chance sail—a lone yachtsman, trying to prove something, but now alone no longer. While the airman had sullenly steered and the boy had happily fished, the wife had kept the sailor away from his wireless, except for brief reports of his position—his navigational position—to his sponsoring newspaper. Then landfall, and a squealing press swallowed its tragic headlines in dizzy interviews during which many of the banker’s private oddities had crawled into public view. The wife was a U.S. citizen, with a passport green as a dollar bill, and though lawyers on both sides of the ocean took their usual pickings she kept the boy. The banker looked round for tender parts of society on which to revenge himself. He told the Public Prosecutor about St Estephe’s.

  Pibble eased aching shoulders against the cool stone and opened his eyes to see whether the dark was any less. It was not, but there was a noise in it—a faint hissing above his head, a tiny rattling at his feet. He moved his left hand in horizontal sweeps and held it still where the blackness tickled. Fine granules were pattering down, as if poured from a sugar-sifter; he traced the stream up and found, just as the last grains fell, that all the cement at the thicker end of the wedge had simply fallen out, though he’d never even probed there. The wonder was that the vault stood at all. He thrust his chisel into his new gap and levered. The whole wedge moved. The long cranny at the other end gave him less leverage, but he managed to nudge the wedge the other way. And then back. And then forward. He bashed at its middle, convinced that he was nearly through. No go; levering was simply shifting it a quarter of an inch on some hidden axis. Encouraged out of his aches he returned chipping.

  The rumour about the Royal had helped, but it was only when the case was under way that Fleet Street realised it was the Case. His Honour Judge Masham had always preferred a good ramble through the evidence, the more irrelevant the better; gradually and casually the extraordinary details came out. Pibble remembered the Senior Maths Master’s evidence—he had helped with the sums, and didn’t deny it. A youngish man, mumbling and shivering, a very bad witness. Judge Masham had lost his patience and asked how he managed to keep order in his class. You didn’t have to keep order at St Estephe’s, said the witness and his eyes flicked to the dock, where the accused nodded calmly. One of the things that had made the Maths Master so dithery was his evident belief that whatever Braybrook had done must, ipso facto, be right; and so the police and the court must be wrong—not mistakenly wrong but wickedly wrong. The boys had called Braybrook “God”, and though in every other way he had insisted on a fastidious piety, he hadn’t minded about this perversion of the First Commandment.

  Aha. A whole triangle of wedge, two inches deep to judge by the jolt of the chisel as it clove through, smacked down to the paving. Now his middle finger couldn’t reach the bottom of the crack at the thin end of the fillet and could probe into the hole at the wider end as far as the second knuckle; the stone moved to and fro between these holes; he decided to try bashing at the newly exposed face in the hope of breaking up the axis point of the wedge where the larger stones pinched it. A twisted stance, but a change for some muscles, at least. He licked the salt sweat from his upper lip and bashed back-handed. All his torso was aching now, even while he worked, and his calves were as taut as a wet hawser from the unconscious effort to clutch his toes into their rough pedestal.

  Not a scholarship school, St Estephe’s. Braybrook, in the course of accounting for the elaborate lies in the prospectus, had claimed that he created character, not bookworms. Nor did he sculpt his characters with the cane—much. That was kept for an occasional favourite, some key figure in th
e termly initiation ceremonies which the staff “knew nothing about”. A swishing from “God” endowed the victim with quasi-priestly stigmata: those who had suffered at his hands were surely entitled to inflict on other boys such trivial sufferings, as boys can rise to. But there were no suicides, few runnings-away. Somebody was keeping an eye on the children, judging their breaking-points with passionate detachment. So Braybrook, even while he juggled with loans, had toiled at his great task. He had got six years. It would have been four, the pundits had said, if Judge Masham had had a cheerier childhood himself. But there was no appeal.

  The awkward angle told after very few blows; he leaned back, greasy with sweat and panting despairingly. Thirty minutes gone, say. He must see daylight soon, or there’d be no point in slogging on. As he leaned, a fresh shower of grit fell over the back of his head and down the inside of the collar of his habit, coating his sweat-dewed neck like sugar on a ripe strawberry. Too tired to swear, he felt for the source of the cascade. The large stone between the wedge and the wall must have shifted slightly and the cement along its nearer edge was pouring out. Not so good: the further it came down the more tightly it would jam itself in, and jam the battered fillet of stone beside it. He pressed upward, a grunting caryatid, but it was wasted strength. The thing was to try to rotate the smaller stone out of its place; but it was a wedge in two dimensions, downwards into the arch and sideways where the two larger stones had left a narrow triangle between them. So … He laid the chisel almost flush with the curve of the arch with its point against the remains of the thinner edge of the wedge, and began to tap it sideways. It moved, moved, moved, jarred, stuck. He bashed harder.

  Six years for Braybrook then. Nearer four, with remission. He’d have come out two years ago, roughly—and in the meanwhile he’d have been visited by the absurd retired gunnery officer. Servitude would have been prison-visiting, under the mantle of some less peripheral sect; but later he’d have found his spiritual home, before Braybrook came out. He’d have offered Braybrook at least a hiding place from reporters on this bleak rock—a place to go while the world forgot him. That was a tolerable surface explanation; but Braybrook would have changed in prison, too. His great work ruined, he’d have judged that the world was not worthy of him, maybe. Also he’d have seen the extraordinary phenomenon, the almost pure power—pure because it brings no privileges—which some inmates achieve over the rest. He might even have achieved it himself: something, and it needn’t have been Servitude’s visits, must have sucked St Bruno and the safe-breaker and the other ones whom Pibble didn’t know up to this bitter outpost.

  Hell! The chisel jarred at every blow, achieving nothing. Pibble explored with his fingers and found that the further end of the wedge had retreated about an inch into the vault, but the stone would now budge neither back nor forward. He guided the chisel-point round to the other end and began to bash upwards. Either he’d knock that corner off or shove the whole thing through. Poor Pibble, you aren’t going to get out of here, are you, with your floppy wrists and all your muscles feeling like plastic membranes filled with warm water?

  Rather than think about that, he thought about Braybrook again, knocking glumly at the stone as he did so.

  The God-obsessed usher had come up here then, changed but confirmed in his mission. And here he had floated up through the hierarchy like a bubble rising in a marsh, knowing that God had given him a great work to perform. The Faith of the Sealed was a tool, he’d said on the tower; not a perfect tool—more like the battered log St Bruno had been breaking his rotten cement with—but it was the tool which God had put into Braybrook’s hands to build his Eternal City with. On a more earthy level, Father Bountiful’s loopy interventions must have been even more trying than the harryings of ninety sets of upper-bourgeois parents. Or the four years lost had shortened Braybrook’s tact. For the millionaire meat-packer had skipped off to his half-caste actress and communing with intelligent squid. Pack it in? Not Braybrook, while there was the Lord’s work to be done and something to sell to do it with. Cracksman handy, photocopier handy, St Bruno handy to forge the necessary letters and contracts. All Sir Francis’s mail could be censored; and if he guesses, why, he can be flushed down the everlasting sink in twenty-four hours by giving him chalk instead of cortisone. Packet of money in the book—six figures, probably. And no tax to pay as the Community was a charity under the meaning of the act. Crippen, thought Pibble, if they’d known I was coming they’d have flushed him away two days earlier. The old bastard’s still not used up all his luck.

  The jammed corner of the wedge gave, something cracked into his foot, and the stone began to rotate again as he tapped.

  Braybrook/Providence. Providence/Braybrook. He had changed, he had grown a beard, but he had not forgotten. A spasm of terror ran through Pibble as he remembered the mysterious joke on the tower about the prison inmate who had recognised him, but whom he would not recognise. It would be a confirmation of the Lord’s guidance if Providence were allowed to break one of the men who had broken Braybrook.

  The wedge jammed again. Learned in its ways now he began to knock another corner off.

  And the other Virtues would have welcomed Braybrook’s coming. They all needed him: Servitude, the Aquinas of the outfit, seeker among crank creeds until he found one where any concept, however eclectic, could be bolted on the main structure—a creed, moreover, which encouraged frequent trips to Soho; Patience was a doctor who must have stepped out of line somewhere—over-prescribed­ heroin, very likely—he’d the look of a man who has paddled in that Acheron; Tolerance, the ineptly named escaper, who’d found a sure hiding-place and enjoyed the play-acting, the getting-away-with-murder, the power that the brainwashers have over the brainwashed; Hope—Pibble was afraid of Hope, physically afraid, but he admired him too in a dazed way—he might have been a saint, a guru, leading threadbare peasantries to resist the oppression of the Mafia or marketing instant peace in Hampstead sitting-rooms. His accent, and Braybrook’s remark about Hope being the first of the Faith after Bountiful, implied that he was a very early convert. Pibble remembered his melancholy in the office, the melancholy of a Holy Inquisitor putting aside his humanity in order to inflict on each comer the necessary agonies of salvation. Forgive me, Father, for I know what I do.

  The wedge gave another half inch and a blast of light thrust at Pibble’s dazzled eye. Blinking and weeping, he could see the precise point at which the stones pinched it; with the controlling sense of sight new born it took him three blows to knock it clean out of its slot. He stood and rested in that shower of light and for the first time dared to think about himself.

  His heart slapped and thudded, rasping air whistled in and out of his larynx, his calves quivered and shuddered; his habit was dank with sweat and his hair clammy against his scalp; salt drops dribbled from his forelock, and when he wiped his mouth he found froth on the back of his hand. He had been working for a good hour in a barely controlled panic—not to save Sir Francis or Rita, or to uphold the honour of the Force—but for himself. Braybrook/Providence could have broken him in a fortnight, easy. Oh, not to mould him to a fully-fledged Virtue, fending his old life away as he strode towards his mad salvation; but to leave him a smashed creature, like the Maths Master in the witness box—useless­ at his job, quiet at home but given to shouted fragments of sentence between the silences.

  On, Pibble, on. Nothing larger than a soul could slip through that slot of windswept sky.

  The large stone which had delayed him by shifting inwards was still tiresome; it waggled, but not outwards. And now that he could see, he kept his eyes open and they were instantly full of cement-grit. All the aches of his body held a convention in the back of his neck, with the new effort of craning. He leaned out of the cascades of crumbs and studied the stone-work—if he could shift the big stone on the far side of the gap, then the even bigger one a course further up would be free along its lower edge. It came like a dream.

&n
bsp; A nightmare struck him as he prevented it from failing through: Hope and Providence would be up there, sitting on the wall and quietly watching the first stirring of his stone molehill. He hesitated, then deliberately shoved the block upwards and saw with surprise, as his hands emerged into full light, that blood was tunnelling down the inside of both wrists. From above that’d have a grimly surrealist look—two blood-boltered arms lifting a stone upwards out of rough masonry—like that horror-story Simon Smith had told him about a South American earthquake, of a mother who had fallen down a crevasse and thrust her babe upwards as the crack had closed, leaving the dead projecting limbs and their living load.

  Carefully he placed the stone out, standing on tip-toe and toppling it sideways until it rested where the dividing wall carried the arch. The long stone came as he touched it, tilting downwards, but he managed to steer it onto his shoulder where the cowl lay thick. When he climbed down to lower it to the floor he saw that fresh cascades of cement were streaming from all over the vault; he hurried back to his pedestal, and lifted out a large square block which proved heavier than he could hold so he simply let it drop with a jarring thud to the paving. He bent and found a suitable crack in the wall, where he drove in the chisel as far as it would go; his arm seemed to have no strength in it, and his palm was almost too tender to hold the log, from having gripped it so fiercely before. He put his foot onto the projecting chisel and reached for the top of the wall.

  Suppose there were no tormentors waiting on the vault, what then? The radio telephone was in the office, with a locked door at the bottom and windows twenty foot up a blank outside wall. Not that he knew how to work the machine, and if he locked himself in to send a message they’d just disconnect the generator. The helicopter? Only in dreams was he able to fly that sort of gadget, and then it always turned into his old police bicycle before the plot was half developed. Truth? A sod in this kind of sea, the pilot had said, but at least he knew how to start an outboard motor, supposing­ the things were mended. Then round the Macdonalds’ inlet, fetch the old man from the cottage, and away! Or perhaps the Macdonalds­ could be persuaded to sail them home. Or … Come on, man, face the enemy.