The Sinful Stones (13 page)

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 of 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.

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 phrases 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 …”