The Sixth Key

1


The Writer of Letters

‘What then shall I ask?’

‘You must begin at the beginning.’

‘The beginning! But where is the beginning?’

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’


Venice, November 2012

I had fallen asleep on the bench waiting for the vaporetto and woke with a dry mouth and a crick in the neck as the boat pulled up at the Fondamente Nuove. Once we were chugging lazily over the dusk-coloured lagoon, I dared to ask the boatman where he was taking me. Luckily he spoke some English and pointed to an island in the distance, saying, ‘San Michele. The Island of the Dead . . . the cemetery of Venice.’

Well, I thought to myself. Why not a cemetery in the middle of a lagoon? It all made a crazy sort of sense – it was something the Writer of Letters, as I liked to call him, would do.

It was in character.

My publisher had forwarded his last letter, as always, typed on the same watermarked paper as the others. It contained these words:

Perhaps it is time we meet? Together, I am certain that we can find the solution to the riddle that is perplexing you:


HOC EST SEPULCHRUM INTUS CADAVER NON HABENS HOC EST CADAVER SEPULCHRUM EXTRA NON HABENS SED CADAVER IDEM EST ET SEPULCHRUM SIBI

This time, along with the letter there was also an air ticket to Venice and instructions on what to do when I arrived.

Counting this one, I had received six letters in all. At first I had thought them mildly amusing; after all, what author of mysteries doesn’t receive letters from shopkeepers, housewives, or even convicted criminals, offering interesting information? But I only realised how different these letters were when the fourth arrived. That’s when I began to wonder who this person was.

At the time I had just finished a novel and my editor discovered that a Latin word, a word integral to the plot, was grammatically incorrect. This unfortunate realisation occurred just as the book was headed for the printing press and I quickly got on the phone to several Latin professors. I needed a Latin word composed of seven letters – no more and no less – that meant ‘becoming’. I was on the phone to the printers trying to delay them when the fourth letter arrived. A coincidence, you might ask? No, I’ve come to know there are no coincidences. Inside the letter I found the Latin word I had been looking for – Fiesque.

Similarly, the fifth letter arrived when I was unable to source important details about an underground passage in an obscure castle on the border of Austria and Hungary. Once again, in that fifth letter I found a miracle – an essay written in the early nineteenth century by a Knight of Malta, containing the very information I needed. This was a mystery that could well have been written by Edgar Allan Poe!

So, you see, I wasn’t surprised when I received the sixth letter containing a Latin riddle that had been confounding me for months. The riddle was found on a sixteenth-century tombstone in Bologna. It was entitled ‘To the Gods of the Dead’ and translated it read:

This is a tomb that has no body in it.

This is a body that has no tomb round it.

But body and tomb are the same.

I had long been certain that it held the solution to one of the most important mysteries of our time – the mystery of life and death – and I had resolved to make the solution to this riddle the pivotal theme of my next novel. When it proved more than difficult to solve, I took comfort in knowing that it had obsessed and exercised the wits of better minds than mine: men like Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Jung and the French writer Gerard Nerval had also wrestled with it. But as time dragged on, and the deadline for delivery of the manuscript loomed, I began to wonder what had made me imagine myself capable of solving it. The timely arrival of that sixth letter was compelling evidence that its writer was either intuiting my thoughts, or indeed, perhaps even inspiring them. Of course I had to accept his invitation. How could I refuse? By coming to Venice I would be solving two mysteries – the identity of the Writer of Letters and the solution to the inscription.

Now, as I looked out from the vaporetto towards that cold island overhung with Cyprus spears, I marvelled at the ingenuity of the creator of those letters. He had orchestrated a scene straight out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead: I was travelling on the boat of Isis, sailing over the river of souls to the Underworld. It was brilliant!

When the boat came to the landing stage on the northwest corner of the island I climbed out, paid the man what I owed him and watched him pull his vessel away into the foggy evening. Above on the upper landing I saw a light moving in the darkness – it was a monk carrying a lamp. The monk turned out to be a rather pleasant Irishman. He made animated conversation as he led me through dark arches and cloisters, beyond which lay a world suspended in a mercurial solution of fog and Carrara marble.