Free The Sinful Stones by Peter Dickinson Page A

was a series of undulations, so that sometimes he was only a few feet above the sea-slimed boulders and sometimes leaning into the wind on a bleak ridge. The half mile to the harbour took him nearly forty minutes.
    At last the heather became grassland again, a scrawny shoulder littered with boulders; from beyond it came the steady clink of hammers on stone. Pibble picked his way to the ridge expecting the grass to slope down to the cliffs above the harbour; instead he peered over a sudden drop into a huge bite that had been torn out of the hill-side—the quarry from which all those monstrous stones had been hauled to make the ugly edifice on the eastern horizon. A gang of green-clad brethren were on the floor of the quarry, chipping systematically at two big slabs that had been prized from the quarry face at a point where the granite was so fissured as to provide the beginnings of squared-up masonry. The process looked laughable, until Pibble remembered Mary’s slides of Mycenaean stonework, which for eighteen months she’d managed to show to almost everybody who’d set foot in the house—and still thrillingly impressive, even through the lens of a Ewell sitting room. Those palaces had been compiled by methods such as this.
    At the lip of the quarry was a timber construction: the chute by which the boulders, once shaped, were lowered to the quay before being hauled on rollers up to the buildings. And, true to the Community’s style, the chute was so sited that if a rock came loose in the slings it could do nothing but rocket, first bounce, into the lap of the launch. Pibble wondered whether the brown-habited engineer now bent over one of the outboard motors even looked up when the stones were slid down; or did he toil on, secure in the faith that He hath given His angels charge?
    Pibble shifted to his right to examine the cause of a movement on the quay, part-hidden by the bulk of the chute. Next moment he was shouting to the stonemasons below and pointing beyond them. They looked up, and then in the direction of his gestures, but already he was running along the lip of the quarry—running so fast, with the skirts of his habit yanked up to his hips, that he almost fell headlong over the true cliff and hurtled down to the shed roof a dozen feet below. Here the quarry floor on his left was barely lower than the hillside, so he jumped down and ran for the chute. The stonemasons were staring at him, like a theatre queue at a busker—staring at Pibble and not down to the quay, where Sister Rita lay supine under the snarling jaws of Brother Love.
    â€œCome on!” he shouted, and balanced himself on the chute. It was as steep as the pitch of a slate roof, and longer than he’d expected, but he launched himself down it in an unslowable, wallowing run.
    Above the slamming of his feet on the splintery timbers he heard the clink of the stone-hammers beginning again. He almost made it. But trying to brake a few feet from the bottom he lost control; his legs shot forward and the side of his head hit the rim of the chute with a pain so fierce that he never noticed the ragged planks scraping at his buttocks through habit and pants. “Go limp!” his training cried, but before his panicking limbs could obey they were sprawling out across the flagstones.
    Blinded with pain and dizziness he rose to hands and knees and groped for the edge of the quay. His head felt too hurt to raise, but he willed his eyes to open and found a grey-green plain in the middle of which a crimson dome glowed. Then another glowed beside it, then a third, as the blood fell in slow drops from his nose on to the algae-mottled stone. He stood up and walked, weaving like a drunk, towards the dog and the girl.
    She lay as still as a corpse but he could see the living tension in her terrified shoulders. The hound’s forelegs bestrode her, its lips grinning above the reef of creamy fangs, its hackles raised like a Huron