The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson Page B

capable of explanation if one merely turned on a computer, something, some whispered cry from elsewhere, existed that said There is more, if you only knew.
    Most of the thrill-seekers were disappointed. They thought Purgatory and Hell were synonymous and came expecting something out of Hieronymus Bosch: real demons, real pits, places to convince the sceptical that the Devil still roamed the earth attempting to find a crack, between the bus ride home and the TV, through which to work his way into the lives of the innocent. In truth, despite the rumors, there was nothing lurid to see at all in Sacro Cuore. Gabrielli, a man with a taste for foreign fiction, frequently tried to put it this way: the Little Museum was more M. R. James than Stephen King.
    All he could show them—discreetly turning away in order to avoid witnessing their disappointment—was what had been here for decades, unchanged: two glass cases and the eleven small items they contained, mundane objects deemed to provide evidence that there were indeed souls in torment, elemental creatures who could, on occasion, penetrate the world of the living and pass along a message.
    There was one more item. But, given the chance, Gabrielli always stood with his back to that. The small case at the end of the little room was easily overlooked. It contained the only exhibit of modern origin, a diminutive T-shirt, with the insignia of an elementary school on the chest. It was an unusual decoration for a child’s uniform, one that was beginning to fade now, after fourteen years on the wall, behind the glass of the cabinet, beneath the persistent glare of the fluorescent tubes. Still, it was easy to see what was once represented on the cheap, white cotton: a seven-pointed star outlined in black, set inside a dark blue circle containing curious red symbols in its border, with seven smaller dark stars set at equal points around the outer ring.
    For a time Gabrielli had tried to decode this curious image, until something—a nagging sense of overzealous inquisitiveness, perhaps—stopped him. That and the sure knowledge that, whatever the symbol’s origin, it was most certainly not Christian, as befitted any modern school in Rome, even in a secular age.
    The characters in the border of the circle were alchemical symbols for the months of the year. The outer stars represented, he had come to believe, the seven planets of the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. The inner star was the Earth itself perhaps, although he was unable to find any firm reference material to support this idea, and the academic in him, though retired, found this hypothesis difficult. Whatever it represented, the symbol was pre-Christian. Gabrielli felt the inner star signified the soul, the essence of an individual’s being, trying to find its place among the eternal, celestial certainties.
    But by the time he had begun poring over that possibility, he had come to realise the object in the case was becoming more than a little discomforting. Everything else here belonged to the long-dead. This, however, was recent. On a few occasions, he’d even met the boy it had belonged to, when his father had taken him into the nearby archaeology department in La Sapienza where he worked and let him roam around the offices, charming everyone he met. Alessio Bramante had been a beautiful child, slender and tall for his age, always curious, if a little shy around his father, a man who dominated even his more senior colleagues. Gabrielli found to his distress that he could still summon up the visual memory of the boy very easily. In his mind Alessio still stood there in his office, quite serious and composed, asking slow, intelligent questions about Gabrielli’s work. He had long shining black hair, lively brown eyes that were forever wide open, and his mother’s looks, a quiet, unhurried beauty of the kind that, centuries ago, had found its way into paintings when the artist sought a