The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  And that was where the book had chosen to open. Pibble flipped through the other pages and found that the glossy-coated leaves moved as if they had seldom been separated; but these few pages towards the end of the book were soft with much turning. He read rapidly, keyed for the pad of returning soles. Lethargy, sudden falling asleep, characteristic pigmentation of the skin, treatment with cortisone and hydrocortisone, twice daily, elderly to be given cortisone only with salt instead of the hydrocortisone, danger from secondary infections, first symptoms often manifested after physical shock especially surgery, lapse in treatment likely to lead to rapid collapse and irreversible brain-damage.

  Sir Francis was pink, not brown, but perhaps the cortisone had kept him so. And there was nothing in the text about the lethargy coming at precisely regular intervals, nor not sleeping for twenty-seven years, but the rest fitted as pat as the final piece of a jigsaw. The white pill was cortisone, the salt, because he was elderly. He’d had an operation, maybe to cope with incontinence, witness Rutherford’s rug and his damned bladder. Nor could the old man send for someone and tell him to take the mike away—things a’n’t like that, not like that at all. Kick too much for the comfort of the Community, and where’s your cortisone? Twenty-four hours would crumble the most famous intellect in Europe into a senile shambles.

  For a few clear-headed seconds Pibble knew which side he was on. Hitherto Pibble had been neutral between his two hereditary enemies, the betrayer of his father and the seducers of his mother. (Mr Toger could not be present, so the whole Community stood proxy.) But murder is murder.

  The dust-mark on the shelf showed where the book had lain, so he put it carefully back. The bottle had about a dozen of the genuine white pills left in it, and Pibble considered swapping six of them for the fake ones in the lozenge-tin; but they were so obviously more professional that it was too much of a risk—Patience would be sure to pick among them to choose the least deficient, and then to spot that they were all suddenly perfect. No one is so aware of the blemishes in his work as the actual forger.

  Instead he took two pills out of the bottle and knotted them into the corner of his handkerchief. He would like to have taken more, but three seemed to diminish the contents by a noticeable amount.

  4

  Well, then, the only other natural way to be found waiting was staring out of the window. The line where sea met sky was quite clear under the scouring wind, which hissed round an ill-fitting pane like a groom rubbing a horse down—the draggled pony that had pulled the Clapham Patent Bread Company van and had been stabled behind the Pakenham Arms, where old Simon the pot-boy had inexpertly tended the poor beast in preparation for the dream time coming when he’d go and live in the country and have a farm of his own. Hinges creaked.

  “Ready?” said Brother Providence’s donnish voice.

  “I hope nobody was badly hurt,” said Pibble.

  “Hurt?”

  “I thought a stone had fallen on someone’s ankle—Gavin’s.”

  “Alas, Superintendent, one forgets how to think in these terms. God has chosen to punish us by breaking the leg of a strong workman. Compared with the shock of that the hurt is nothing, an illusion of fallen matter.”

  And the iodine was nothing. And Ted Fasting’s pea-sticks nothing.

  “Do many of these, um, punishments happen?” said Pibble.

  “None hitherto.”

  “I hope it isn’t me that brought you the bad luck,” said Pibble. The presence of the bearded monk seemed to bring inanities to his lips unwilled. And the remark was a mistake, too—not for its inanity but for some other unguessable reason. Brother Providence’s remote amber gaze became intent as a lepidopterist’s, and his tone darkened.

  “Luck is an illusion also,” he said. “Nothing occurs without reason. We will begin by climbing the tower.”

  Sister Dorothy came striding along the cloisters towards them, grim-faced, carrying a steaming enamel jug. Pibble, used to the lightning instincts of London pavements, veered a little to his left to let her pass, expecting her to do the same; but she came on like an ironclad, seemed only to see him when she was a foot or two away, started to say something but stopped as she plunged into him, tilting a gill of hot water over his thigh. Swearing under her breath she staggered towards a pillar, hugged it with her free arm, waited for the jug to stop slopping, and marched off without even a snort of apology. Behind her the chill air reeked like a Dublin pub.

  “Sister Dorothy seems an unusual member of the Community,” suggested Pibble.

  “She was tight,” said Brother Providence calmly.

  “I had not imagined that you made use of spirits,” said Pibble. The prim phrase and the primmer tone were Mr Toger’s, remembered from a doorstep conversation when Mr Toger, an Elder of the vehemently teetotal sect to which Mother belonged, had called one evening after Mother had taken a dose or two of her “medicine”. Early ’thirties, maybe.

  “. . . no alcohol anywhere on the island,” he heard Brother Providence saying with exactly the same calm. A faith whose founder converses with intelligent cuttlefish could presumably resolve this mundane contradiction; it didn’t make for easy conversation­.

  The tower door was the one directly opposite the entrance to Sir Francis’s rooms. While Brother Providence fished for the key in the green corduroys which he wore under his habit, Pibble glanced to where the flex of the microphone had lain. It was gone.

  “This is the first locked door I’ve seen on the island,” said Pibble.

  “In the Faith of the Sealed, stairs have a special significance. One does not want any of the simpler brethren confusing this sinful stone with the spiritual reality.”

  “But I thought stone was, er, OK for you.”

  “Sinful stone, Superintendent, sinful flesh. Both are made of sinful atoms. We cannot, in our fallen nature, carve our spirits to the perfect squares needed to compose the Great Board, but we can practise the necessary discipline on stone. It is not for nothing that the right-angle is so called, but it needs discipline to achieve it.”

  “Ouch!” cried Pibble, bashing his bruised toe into a particularly ill-disciplined riser in the dark stairwell.

  “The stones are your brothers,” said Brother Providence.

  “Do you mean that the City you are actually building here is really only a sort of metaphor?” said Pibble.

  His guide sighed, turned and sat down on a stair. Pibble, conscious of the condition of his buttocks, leaned against the outer wall. Brother Providence had chosen a spot where a slit window let in a patch of grey north light in such a way that his face and beard showed clear but all the rest of him was a formless presence in the dimness. The head seemed to float unbodied, and as it talked the curl of the stair gave the careful vowels a chill resonance, as of dungeons.

  “You are using terrible words in a loose and frivolous fashion, Superintendent. I tremble for your immortal soul. The first thing to understand is that there are degrees of reality. The central reality is God, and all religions and faiths are instinctive attempts to arrive at that reality, but in our fallen nature the faiths have hitherto been mistaken, often leading their believers still deeper into illusion. The next degree of reality is the soul’s relationship with God. The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit. That is the one truth above all others. A broken spirit is a spirit which has been reduced to its constituent elements so that it can be remoulded into a shape wherein it can come to its God freed from all the shackles of fallen matter. The third degree of reality is the method by which this remoulding can be achieved, and the only method, we now know, is the Faith of the Sealed. The City is part of this Faith. From the higher degrees, the Faith may indeed be, in your word, no more than a metaphor; but from the innumerable degrees below it is a very powerful reality.”

  The man was a hypnotist. Only Pibble’s aches, prodding him with their own realities, kept him from surrender.<
br />
  “You mean your faith is a tool for breaking people’s spirits,” he said.

  “That is a way of putting it. You must remember that a tool, to be useful, must be strongly held. And so must a faith. A powerful mind must grasp it before it can be properly used.”

  “Aren’t analogies dangerous too?”

  (Interrupt, and perhaps the spell will weave itself into a tangle.)

  “Most are indeed barren, Superintendent. But some were sown into the language, built into the very shape of the human mind, as clues to lead us to our true destiny. You will have noticed, for instance, that we speak frequently of the relationship of brotherhood. This is to remind us that we must, in the words of the poet, die of the absolute paternal care …”

  “My father wasn’t like that at all,” said Pibble, with bright interest, tangling the web again. Brother Providence rose with another sigh and started to climb the stairs. Pibble followed, wondering whether his slight grogginess came from delayed shock at his fall or from the sense of having beaten off a sudden, violent ambush. Crippen, this was a nasty creed. Or perhaps it was only nastily explicit. Even at fifteen, shambling up the street with his torn satchel under his arm, Jamie had sensed that Mr Toger would have liked to have come a good deal further into the house than the doorstep, and comforted the smooth-skinned widow with more than tracts.

  Where had Providence come from, Pibble wondered. What had he been in Babylon? There was something teasing about his manner of speech. Donnish, he’d first decided, but now he felt that was wrong; there was a man-of-affairs undertone too, and a sort of social ease that hinted at a life among the nobs. Also, unconnected with this, a curious feeling that he knew Pibble better than Pibble knew him. It made Pibble uncomfortable.

  At the top of the stairs Providence lifted a trap-door to let in the brimming light and the hissing, gull-riddled air.

  “What a marvellous view,” said Pibble.

  “All the kingdoms of the earth.”

  “Really?”

  “Really in our terms, metaphorically in yours.”

  No ambush here—the smile was that of any New Theologian expounding on Meeting Point a paradox which he knows his four million viewers are too crass to resolve.

  “I’m not so sure of my own terms as you are of yours,” said Pibble.

  “Tell me why you came here, Superintendent. I know that Simplicity contrived to invite you—without telling us, I may say—but it must have been inconvenient for a busy policeman, and I am sure you are not the type to make a tedious journey for the pleasure of meeting a famous name.”

  “It’s difficult to explain,” said Pibble. “I was an only child and my father died when I was eleven. He mattered a lot to me, and I’ve always wanted to know more about him—in a rather obsessive way, you might say. Anyway, he worked for Sir Francis for several years before the First World War, and when Sir Francis sent for me I thought it would be my last chance of meeting anyone who knew him in that period. The letter reached me in a roundabout way, and he’d given me a final date which was to-day, so I had to come in a hurry.”

  “Why should he do that?”

  “I think he thought the letter mightn’t reach me, and he wanted to feel that there was a date beyond which he wouldn’t expect me any longer.”

  “It seems a curious way to acquire information for his book. He cannot have expected you to have much to contribute.”

  “I thought the book was supposed to be some sort of a secret.”

  Brother Providence laughed benignly.

  “My dear man,” he said, “how can it be a secret? I should think the sections he has finished must be being translated into forty languages at this very moment. Why, it’s my only regret since I left Babylon that I shall never be able to read it.”

  “I meant a secret among the Community.”

  “Strange.”

  “Well, nobody talked about it, and otherwise I’d have thought they would have. It must be quite an excitement for you all.”

  “Our excitements are not of this world, Superintendent.”

  “I meant that having publishers and editors coming and going must have been a bit of a disruption.”

  “Simplicity conducted all his negotiations by post. The first we knew of the book was the arrival of two journalists in a launch, wishing to interview him. That would have been about five weeks ago; but we told them how ill he was and they left. I believe he made it a condition of his contract that he was not to be disturbed by visitors from the journals which are printing the extracts.”

  “How ill is he?”

  Brother Providence smiled sweetly as the wind fidgeted with his beard and slapped the straining folds of his habit against his legs.

  “Ah, Superintendent,” he said, “you have caught us out. We were guilty of some exaggeration in our negotiations with the press-men. Answer a fool according to his folly, eh?”

  “My wife showed me a rumour in her paper about his being sick,” said Pibble. “By the way, how did you know I was a policeman?”

  “Some of the Sealed are ex-criminals, and it happened that one of them had actually been through your hands, and recognised you. I doubt if you would recognise him, now.”

  And that was a joke, a confident if secret teasing. You could hear it in his voice, though the beard hid any smile. And, hell, it might all be true, and only Sir Francis lying—a man who has betrayed one Pibble (so Mother always maintained) could now betray another. Pibble only just prevented his hand from straying to his pocket to feel if the two pills were real and there; instead he peered round at the mottled and monotonous landscape, the blank and monotonous sea. The Isle of Tiree brooded on the northern horizon; Scotland lay east, but the driven clouds had massed against the land and it wasn’t visible. To the south-east Dubh Artach light house notched the horizon, but apart from that the visible world was bleakly mediaeval.

  “I suppose you keep the helicopter in the shed on the quay,” he said, “so that the dog can guard the boat as well.”

  “Yes, Love is enough—William Morris, I think?”

  (Now, who would draw attention to his little crossword-clue joke in exactly that accent?)

  “You seem to have some very modern equipment for a … well …”

  “A society so deliberately Spartan, you wish to say? Say it, my dear man—we have no feelings to hurt. But we need the boat, the helicopter and the radio for communications with the mainland. Would that we needed none, until it pleases the Lord to send us more success with our crops; the authorities on the mainland insist on the radio.”

  “And I suppose you have a generator to provide Sir Francis with electric light.”

  “And for the radio also, but for nothing else.”

  (Slight over-emphasis there. What else might they need a generator for?)

  “Shall we go down now?” said Brother Providence. “I see you are not wearing trousers, so you will find it cold in this wind.”

  “You too,” said Pibble.

  “The wind bloweth whither it listeth, and is nothing to us, only fallen matter at its most irrational.”

  “Brother Hope has a remarkable physique. I saw him in contemplation last night.”

  “So he told me. I’m sorry to say that you interrupted at an exciting moment. After Father Bountiful, Hope was the first of all the Sealed. He alone, so far, has achieved anything like Father Bountiful’s powers of soul-transfer. This is a central technique in the Faith of the Sealed, as it enables us to search for peoples who have progressed further along the path of regeneration than poor, fallen man. Last night Hope was achieving, for the first time, contact with the souls of another sphere, and you brought him back. Did you hear anything?”

  “It sounded like voices,” said Pibble.

  “Very likely. They wouldn’t, of course, be voices from another planet. The technique is in some ways l
ike a strong spiritual current, which sets up eddies round it, displacing local phenomena in curious ways. When Father Bountiful was among us, we became accustomed to hearing snatches of conversation from adjoining rooms.”

  “I’ve no experience of this sort of thing,” said Pibble doubtfully. “I’m sorry if I interrupted.”

  “The interruption was willed by the Lord,” said the monk, stepping into the dark stairway, “and Gavin’s ankle was broken to confirm His will. We are not yet worthy. Be careful—the seventh stair is the sinful one.”

  Um, thought Pibble, ingenious, given their premises. Could they really think he believed it? This bullying intelligence on the stairs below him couldn’t be that naïve—or did he have pockets of naïvety, geodes in the flinty mind? No, more likely they’d think he thought they thought he believed them—but that meant they didn’t mind his knowing they knew he knew about the microphone. Dizzy with this double helix of deception and the single helix of the stairs he padded out into the cloisters. They were trying to kill the old man—hold fast to that.

  The rest of the tour was boring. The buildings held nothing but a succession of small rooms, meanly proportioned. The Refectory, which occupied almost the whole length of the cloisters on the side to the left of the tower, was more nobly conceived but had come out not a whit less ugly. The Virtues slept in cells which guarded the harsh dormitories of the green-robed initiates. Presumably Rita had slipped past her warders when they too were worn down with the long abrasions of the day and deep in the ozonised sleep of the sea-wind.

  The day was certainly hard. Pibble was shown a patch to the east of the buildings where stunted broccoli leaned from the wind like thorn trees on the Downs; beyond, a scum of green on the sour earth showed where the spring oats were coming up; beyond that a gang of the brethren were subduing a new stretch of soil. But most of the inmates were involved in the ceaseless expansion of the buildings themselves, digging the foundations for a second square of cloisters, or adding a storey to one side of the existing ones. They climbed a warped ladder to see how this was done.