The people leaning over the pergoli were all in Renaissance costume, because of course it was Carnival, and everyone had joined in the spirit of Masquerade. Even he had not forgotten, for on looking down he saw buskins, hose and the rim of his cloak. Some people were taking the festivities a little too far, for they had lit fires on the rooftops, and as Bramanti had made so clear, the regulations concerning fire in Venice were strict.
Was it, he wondered, really necessary to travel by such a convoluted route just to post a letter? It had not occurred to him before, but the canals of Venice were nothing more or less than a gigantic aquatic labyrinth with Mystery at its heart. Was it the sunset which turned the sky blazing red, or those fires, which he now saw lined the canal, licking over ruinous buildings, silhouetting figures who teemed around vast engines that turned and swung in the glare. They were clearly devices of torture, hoisting bodies by the neck or stretching them cruelly between chains. And what he had taken for ruined houses were gigantic sarcophagi towering to the sky, mausolea raised by giants, burial chambers of the gods, all lit by the glare of funeral pyres.
Bodies were being broken upon wheels, torn apart, flayed alive. Fortunately, the gondola had become a funeral barge that carried him swiftly, nearer and nearer to the massive bridge, hung with gargantuan chains, that was his destination. Yes, there it was, the keystone carved into the form of a great face swathed in shroud like folds of cloth gathered on top of the head, its mouth the slit into which he must post his message.
Just as he was wondering how to reach the slot, the whole face began to grow, to fill the space under the bridge. Now he wondered how they could navigate the slit of a mouth. When he turned to ask, he saw that the gondolier had been replaced by something whose outline, so black against the glare, he did not wish to see. In any case, the problem was no more, for the stone head on the bridge, which now resembled Sigisomondo Mortensa, had grown snaky hair, and the mouth was gaping wide. Blood rained down from the machinery of death on either side as they swept on, into the gaping maw of darkness.
Summers awoke gasping and running with sweat. Even at that moment he confronted the truth he had not wished to admit to himself, and knew what he must do about it. Why would a successful architect write a letter to his apprentice threatening his high reputation? The answer was that he had not. The apprentice had threatened the Master. And if that was so, then the hand, and the dark utterances, he had taken for Borsini were those of Sigismondo Mortensa.
The implications were inescapable. Vasari had been wrong, or intentionally misleading. The darker annotations had come from the hand of the supposedly saintly paragon. Borsini’s threat of denunciation—the first draft of which he had concealed—had been forestalled by counter denunciation and “disappearance”. Mortensa, it seemed, had not even risked leaving Borsini to the judgement of the Council of Ten, for fear of what might emerge. And now the mills of a very different kind of Venetian justice were grinding on, while lawyers droned like blowflies in courts and offices, and the hand of decay spread a grey benediction of dust over the furniture and statuary of the palazzetto. If an unquiet spirit haunted Ca’ Mortensa—or Ca’ Maledetto as he now agreed it must be—there could be little surprise. Unquiet it would remain until someone at long last exposed the truth.
The next day he returned to Ca’ Mortensa and worked all morning as usual. At noon he ate and drank nothing. Then he waited. He would make himself available for any further communication the apparition wished to reveal about its fate. And he would change the book on which he had been working from the naïve hagiography he had intended to an exposé of the true nature of Mortensa and his heritage.
To pass the time, he read more of what he now knew to be Mortensa’s annotations in the works of architecture:
For by our use of full columns, detached columns, half columns and pilasters, so are the formulating shadows summoned or banished, starved or fed, and these are the four strengths of shadow. There can be no beauty of detail without shadow, and out of shadow comes all things. There is no Wisdom without the science of shadow and light. The architect can form no shape of meaning or purpose were his Orders not defined by darkness, nor offer to heaven what rises in light above, if not for what lies in darkness below.
Thus no Temple was raised by the Ancients without its sacrifice immured beneath, this and other more exquisite methods devised in the knowledge that success in such a work of creation requires the help of those who draw life from that particular vitality liberated by the fear and agony of a living human being. Were not the dismembered limbs of Dionysus boiled beneath the Pythia’s tripod?
It had not escaped him that the previous event had occurred at the striking of the Great Clock. As the same hour approached, Summers tried to keep calm, repeating inwardly to himself, I am ready, if there is anything more you wish to show me.
The silence of the library was eventually broken by the striking of the clock, and Summers was afraid. If he was approached again, would he be able to raise his eyes? What would he see? He waited breathlessly, but there were no slapping steps, no stagnant smell, and above all, no swimming, rippling form pouring horribly across the marble floor. He felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. Perhaps the message had been delivered, and the need for visitation ended?
He rose from the chair, turned, and there it was, there at the other end of the library, as though looking at him. It turned stiffly and moved through the shadows with slow, agonised steps. Passing the shelves with no effort to touch them, it walked deliberately up to the trompe l’œil door and disappeared through it. This was so surprising that Summers stood for some seconds before collecting himself and following its path through a channel of foul, bitterly cold air, to the painted door.
He examined the door more closely this time. The rippling canal light played over medallions and swags of muted purple and brown, over the old reddened gold of the door, scalloped and guarded by garland bearing cherubs, for all the world like marble. The panels were studded with metal bosses so real that he had to touch one to be sure they were illusions of paint.
He noticed something else too. The painted keyhole was formed by the mouth of a little gorgon head, and the effect of shadow in the hole was remarkably real, even by the door’s stupendous standards. He put his finger to the place and found a real keyhole.
At once he remembered the two keys on the string Bramanti had left, one of them with a gorgon head decoration. It was still connected to the one in the clock. He retrieved it, and unlocked the panel painted with a fake door that pretended to be real in order to conceal the fact that that was just what it was. The fleeting question of whether a Venetian painter could be correctly described as Machiavellian rose in his mind and was brushed aside.
The pressure it took to open the panel suggested a spring or counterbalance closing mechanism. No light switches met his fumbling hand so he concluded that the room had been unknown when electricity was being installed in the 20th century. His heart pounded with the thought that no one had entered the door for so many years, and of what might be there. Lighting a lamp, he stepped into the space. The door swung closed behind him on a counter balance. Stopping it before it closed fully, he satisfied himself that there was a handle on the inside and that it would open the latch. Only then did he let the door close, tried it once more for peace of mind, and gave his attention to the room.