Free The Sinful Stones by Peter Dickinson

making all due allowances for anthropomorphism, Pibble could still hear that in their distant squealing. There must be something on the beach below—perhaps even a stranded whale, which the Community could trundle back into its element. Worth a visit anyhow for a copper out of his element and with fifty minutes to waste. He picked his way along the path towards the cottage between rasping strands of heather. The heather covered about two thirds of the island in big blotches separated by coarse grassland; from the helicopter it had looked as if a camouflage artist had painted it over.
    This path also had been rolled smooth, but longer ago, judging by the fresh growth on it; as he came nearer to the cottage Pibble saw why. The grass of the headland was pocked with rectangles, like the graves of giants—there had been a village here, but all the houses were gone. Not fallen, but carefully removed, stone by stone, and rolled down the path. Only the cottage still stood.
    From its door a lean collie lunged yelping the moment Pibble’s bare feet chinked one granite splinter against another; but the dog was tied to the doorpost with a long cord and Pibble was able to circle out of reach. The door was propped open with a hay-rake, but no face peered out of it.
    The path became rougher beyond the cottage, but more worn with use; it curled round the shoulder of the headland, then dipped to a hidden inlet. Pibble left the path and picked his way between mushroom-shaped tussocks until he reached the edge of the near cliff and could see across the inlet to the far higher cliff of the headland beyond. Against that granite wall the wind hurtled, made visible by the gulls that rode it; they dashed so fast towards the rock that he expected to see each bird end as a mess of blood and feathers there, like a moth on a windscreen, but then the upthrust wind flung them skywards to join the column; the motion was like that of those trick toys which dash for the edge of a table, feel the fall with their extra wheel and dart away. Exhilarated, Pibble stepped to the rim of his own cliff and looked over.
    There was no beach in the inlet, only rocks; and no whale, only a squat, dirty fishing-boat, almost as round as a coracle. The brown sail was down but not tidied away; the part aft of the mast was open and full of a jumble of nets and rigging and oddments; on the deck in front of the mast two women sat with their backs to him, engaged in some repetitive task—ah yes, they were gutting fish and tossing the offal overboard for the gulls to scoop up and bear away. These must be the Macdonalds. They didn’t wear the uniforms of the Community, but grey jerseys, tweed skirts, and brown scarves over their heads.
    Pibble sat on the cliff edge for five minutes, thinking of nothing much but watching the balanced and predatory scavengers, the marching sky and the sea. The waves beyond the inlet came shoreward with a stodgy motion, breaking into fringes of white along the tops, steep-sided. They were not very big but looked uncomfortable for sailing on, and he was thankful there was a helicopter to take him to the mainland. When sitting made him cold he started back along the path.
    Again the collie lunged, and again Pibble skirted round, thinking how lucky he had been to meet the affable Brother Love in the night, and not this demented guardian of bothies. His circle took him off the path at a point where the grass seemed almost downy beneath his soles; he was too early for his tryst with sinister Brother Providence, and he was also bored by the idea of going back along the same path that he’d come out by, so he decided to work his way along the cliff-tops and revisit his midnight crony.
    But over the first low ridge the grassland became heather, through whose intertwined growth he began to pick his way. Each step under the billowing habit had to be a high-arched circle and then a cautious feel for the crumbly ground below. The cliff-top