Alessio glanced at the seven doors. He hadn’t looked to see which one Giorgio used when he left. He was mad at him. Giorgio hadn’t wanted him to watch, and he knew that without being told. But now… For a moment he wished he’d kept that watch. Maybe it would have provided some kind of marker by which to judge his father and the things he did.
There was another sound from the corridor, and this time he was certain. It was a distant, low, male voice. Giorgio was there surely, waiting for him, wondering what he would do. This was the Palatino again, only more severe, a bigger test. Alessio stared down at his clean school clothes and wondered what his mother would say if he arrived home with them ruined.
Games.
There were so many games. Theirs was an entire relationship based on play, because when Giorgio wasn’t engaged in some obscure diversion he was somewhere else, inside a book, head bent deep over a computer, always avoiding what Alessio’s mother called “the real world.” Games connected them. Hide-and-seek. Show-and-tell. Games that collided with the past sometimes, and the stories he told too.
Theseus and the Minotaur.
That was one of his favourites. A brave lost warrior, a stranger in a strange land, meets a beautiful princess and, in order to win her, must accept a challenge. A monster lurks in a lair, a hidden labyrinth of corridors beneath the ground. Half man, half bull, a dreadful, unnatural being that devours young men and women — seven of each, which, Alessio thought, was one reason he remembered so clearly — as a tribute.
Theseus offers himself as a sacrament, enters the labyrinth, finds the monster and — this was very clear in his memory too — beats the creature to death. Not a clean end, cut in two by a sword, but with some crude bloody club, because this was a beast, not a man, and a beast deserved no better.
Or a half beast, half man. To Theseus there wasn’t much difference.
The princess, Ariadne, helped Theseus with a gift: a ball of string which he unwound as he entered the caves, and then used to find his way back home to safety, with those he had rescued.
Alessio sat calmly at the table in the bright, bright cave, remembering all this, wondering what it meant. Giorgio had retold this story only a few days before. Alessio knew that his father was a man who rarely wasted anything — breath, a sentence, the simplest of physical acts. Was that conversation, then, significant in some way?
Mithras, the god his father knew so well, had killed a monster too. One that was all beast. Alessio had looked in Giorgio’s desk once and seen a photograph there, lurking like a secret waiting to be found. The bold, strong god, straddling the terrified animal, gripping its head, thrusting a sword into its neck. Mithras hadn’t resorted to a club for this killing. But this was all beast, so perhaps that was different.
One more memory. In the picture, beneath the animal, there were creatures, strange and familiar, doing things he didn’t quite understand. The scorpion in particular, which wielded its pincer claws at those parts of the animal small children weren’t supposed to see, least of all mention.
“A game,” Alessio repeated quietly to himself. In the end, everything came down to this, whether it was seeking a monster in a cave to prove oneself worthy of respect, or peering through the keyhole of an order of ancient knights, looking for a familiar shape across the river, one whose presence would keep in balance the myriad worlds he saw through those stupid glasses.
A game was what Giorgio wanted. That was why they had come here in the first place. It was a challenge. Perhaps the challenge, one so large, so daunting, so difficult, like the Minotaur pitched against Theseus, that it would be his making. Giorgio Bramante was waiting for his son to understand, to rise and accept his fate, to find the courage to walk into the darkness and track down where he was lurking. After which… ?
It came to him, instantly. This was the first sacrament, the striking of fear in the beginner. Afterwards he would become Corax to Giorgio’s Pater, part of the greater secret. The elusive relationship of family, the eternal trinity, father, mother, and child, would be strengthened and one day made perfect by these changes. It would endure forever, never doubted, even in those dark moments when he heard the two of them, Giorgio and her, screaming at each other, full of drink and fury, bellowing words he didn’t quite understand.
Alessio Bramante looked around the room and laughed. Dark doorways didn’t scare him, nor the sounds he thought he continued to hear echoing from some distant, hidden location.
He got up and walked past each of the seven exits, thinking, looking, listening. He imagined that somewhere in the unseen distance he could discern his father’s voice, teasing in the dark.
Games involved two people. Both had to play.
He returned to the table and picked up the large flashlight his father had left there, deliberately, he now knew. It was big, almost half the length of Alessio’s arm, encased in hard rubber, and a long yellow beam spilled from it when he turned it on.
The light painted the shape of a full moon on the wall nearest the entrance, which was now almost completely in shadow, barely illuminated by the single bulb he’d left on. Alessio placed two fingers in front of the lens and made an animal shape. A beast with horns. Theseus’s Minotaur. The bull that Mithras sought.
There was a pile of tools near the exit he’d chosen. Pickaxes and shovels, iron spikes for marking things, spirit levels. And a large ball of twine, held at one end with what looked like a long knitting needle.
Alessio put down the flashlight and retrieved the twine, unpicking the iron object from the end. He tied the open loop of string to his belt and tugged. It came away easily and left a fresh end of the thread dangling in his hand. Alessio looked at the string again. Someone had tried to cut it once before, weakening it at the point before the loop. Quickly, he tied a second loop through his belt, tugged on that, made sure it was firm, then dropped the ball on the floor.
Then he retrieved the flashlight and turned to face the long corridor, wondering what, if anything, he — or Giorgio — would dare tell his mother when they finally came home.
Nothing, he decided. These were secrets, never to be repeated. This was part of the great adventure, the journey from boy to man, from ignorance to knowledge. He walked forward, feeling the tickle of the unwinding string fall against his legs like the desiccated wings of some dying insect, tumbling down to the ancient dust at his feet.
Book 2
Between Worlds
Pino Gabrielli wasn’t sure he believed in purgatory but at least he knew where it was meant to be. Somewhere between Heaven and Hell, a middle place for tortured souls lurking, waiting for someone living, someone they probably knew, to perform the appropriate feat, flick the right switch, to send them on their way. And somewhere else, too, much closer. On the wall of a side room in his beloved Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, the white neo-Gothic church that had become Gabrielli’s principal pastime since he retired from the architecture department of La Sapienza university almost a decade before.