The Seventh Sacrament Read Online Free PDF

came.
    Seven was the magic number.
    There were seven hills in imperial Rome. The Bramantes still lived on one that, in parts, was not that much changed over the centuries.
    Seven were the planets known to the ancients, the wonders of the world, the elementary colours, the heavens deemed to exist somewhere in the sky, hidden from the view of the living.
    These were, Giorgio Bramante told his son, universal ideas, ones that crossed continents, peoples, religions, appearing in identical guises in situations where the obvious explanation—a Venetian told a Chinaman who told an Aztec chief—made no sense. Seven happened outside mankind, entered the existence of human beings of its own accord. The Masons, who were friends of the Knights of Malta, believed seven celestial creatures called the Mighty Elohim created the universe and everything in it. The Jews and the Christians thought God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. For the Hindus, the earth was a land bounded entirely by seven peninsulas.
    Jesus spoke just seven times on the cross, and then died. Seven ran throughout the Bible, his father said, during that private time they had before the balloons and cake and the stupid, pointless singing. In something called Proverbs—a word Alessio liked, and decided to remember—there was a saying his father recalled precisely, though they were a family that never went to church.
    “‘For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumbles to ruin.’”
    He’d shuffled on Giorgio’s knee, a little uncomfortable, and asked what the saying meant. The Bible puzzled him. Perhaps it puzzled his father too.
    “It means a good person may do the wrong thing time and time again, but in the end he, or she, can still make it right. While the bad person…”
    Alessio had waited, wishing the hated party would begin soon, and quickly end. He wouldn’t eat the cake. He wouldn’t be happy till he was left alone with his imagination again, his father back deep in his books, his mother in the studio upstairs, messing with her smelly paints and unfinished canvases. Some of the others in the school said it was bad to be an only child. From what he understood of his parents’ whispered conversations, which grew heated when they thought he was out of earshot, it wasn’t a matter of choice.
    “The bad person stays that way forever, whatever they do?” Alessio suggested.
    “Forever,” Giorgio Bramante agreed, nodding his head in that wise, grave fashion Alessio liked so much he imitated it from time to time. This gesture, knowing and powerful, established what his father was: a professor. A man of learning and secret knowledge, there to be imparted slowly over the years.
    Forever seemed unfair. A harsh judgement, not the kind someone like Jesus, who surely believed in forgiveness, would make.
    That thought returned to him the next day when, in the hill beneath the park with the orange trees, he listened to more secrets, bigger, wilder ones than he could ever have imagined. Alessio Bramante and his father were in a small, brightly lit underground chamber only a very short distance from the iron gate in an out-of-the-way channel at the riverside edge of the park near the school. A gate Giorgio, to his obvious surprise, had found unlocked when he arrived, though the fact didn’t seem to bother him much.
    Seven.
    Alessio looked around the room. It smelled of damp and stale cigarette smoke. There were signs of frequent and recent occupation: a forest of very bright electric lights, fed by black cables snaking to the doorway; charts and maps and large pieces of paper on the walls; and a single low table with four cheap chairs, all situated beneath the yellow bulbs hanging from the rock ceiling.
    He sat opposite his father in one of the flimsy seats and listened in awe, as Giorgio told of what they’d found, and what greater secrets might lie elsewhere, in this hidden labyrinth beneath the hill where