Piranesi

The following day, Piranesi wants to ask Ketterley about the named dead but doesn’t want to reveal information about his journals. Ketterley obsesses about 16 instead of working on his ritual.

On the 5th, the narrator smells something like perfume and tracks the scent for a while, but eventually loses it. From this smell, he realizes a new person—16—has passed through the halls, and tries to remain on guard despite the sweet scent. This foreshadows that the Sixteenth Person (the police officer), Sarah Raphael, is a woman.

On the 7th, Piranesi tells Ketterley about the new lemony scent. Ketterley says they should kill 16 and warns that an old man, who also should have been killed, might visit the labyrinth. The narrator currently thinks the this is the Prophet (Arne-Sayles), but doesn’t reveal he’s seen him because he believes he will not return.

On the 13th, it rains and birds seek sheltered spots in the labyrinth. Piranesi bides his time with bone-flute music and fishing. Once it stops raining, he feeds a flock of rooks and finds chalk marks on a door. He realizes he’s never had yellow chalk and so the writing can’t be his, then he finds more writing on the pavement. This writing is just arrows and directions. Under the writing, he replies to 16, saying she will never find him, signing the note Piranesi.

The following day, Piranesi asks Ketterley about the danger of reading 16’s writing versus hearing 16’s voice. This distinction doesn’t mean much; Piranesi is focusing on the potential of words to impart madness while Ketterley is just trying to cover his tracks. Ketterley says he bought a gun, and the Piranesi reiterates that he doesn’t want to kill anyone. Ketterley insists they must.

On the 17th, it has been three days since there was a sign of 16. The narrator wakes in the night, and walks the halls, hearing an unfamiliar sound. Then, he sees Ketterley with a flashlight calling for Raphael. Ketterley trips and drops his light, and when Piranesi’s eyes adjust, he sees the shadow of Raphael before she hides. Eventually, Ketterley finds his flashlight and leaves. The narrator watches Raphael’s silhouette as she looks at statues and writes a response to his message. While she is writing, rooks distract her and Piranesi sneaks away unseen.

In the second entry of the same day, after Piranesi has awakened in the morning, he looks through his index for an entry on Raphael but finds none. He glances at part of Raphael’s message (words pertaining to Arne-Sayles and room with the statues of minotaurs), but decides to stop himself before he can read the rest. In a half-hearted attempt at erasure, the narrator blindfolds himself and sweeps an old shirt scrap over the message. A few letters, words, and phrases remain, but make little sense. Piranesi writes a response warning that Ketterley has a gun.

The following day, Piranesi goes to his regularly scheduled meeting with Ketterley and asks why Ketterley never mentioned 16 was a woman. Ketterley eventually says he thought he couldn’t convince Piranesi that a woman was a threat. Piranesi admits he saw her when she was distracted by rooks, but doesn’t reveal any more to Ketterley.

On the 19th, the narrator wants to learn about 16. It is later revealed that this is an act of self-preservation and aids in his rescue, but in the moment it seems irrational to him.

In the second entry on the same day (the 19th), Piranesi returns to the Gorilla statue to skim his journal. He sees a list of pros and cons about writing a book on Arne-Sayles and finds notes for a talk with information about what Arne-Sayles calls Ancients, people who could communicate with the world but no longer existed; “There was [...] an actual, real disenchantment” (148). More details about Arne-Sayles are revealed, such as his experiments with ritual magic that involve breaking-and-entering to use the head of a bog mummy in a museum. 

Arne-Sayles became interested in where “lost beliefs and powers [...] had gone” (150), spawning his “Theory of Other Worlds” (151). The journal includes an extract from a book that describes a door that Arne-Sayles finds. The location of the portal varies for each person; for Arne-Sayles it is a garden. Innocence is the key to opening the passageway through the eight minotaur statues in the labyrinth.

In the third entry of the 19th, the narrator considers how his unremembered journal entries reinforce his belief that Arne-Sayles is the Prophet. He has become more comfortable with not recognizing words and feels like he can expand his vocabulary, such as recognizing a name (Addedomarus) from Ketterley’s ritual also appears in his journal.

On the 21st, Piranesi realizes that he has neglected his Table of Tides and discovers a “Conjunction of Four Tides” will happen in less than a week. This causes him to swear while walking through the halls, calculating the area the flood will cover. At their meeting, he warns Ketterley (who says vaguely that he will be elsewhere). He wants to warn Raphael, but he denies his concern for her to Ketterley.

In the second entry of the 21st, Piranesi decides to write a warning to Raphael despite her apparent lack of reply on the pavement. After he does this, he ascends to take down the bowls he uses to collect fresh water and looks down at the white marble pebbles at the base of the staircase. Some of these have been arranged to spell the question in the title of this entry, “Are you Matthew Rose Sorensen?” The name triggers a vague memory of a city in the rain, but then he snaps back to the labyrinth, “the Real World” (162), again. He asks statues for water, but realizes they cannot help him.

In the third entry of the 21st, the narrator reiterates his identity as the Beloved Child of the House and remembers the first time Ketterley used Piranesi as his nickname. He decides to look up Matthew Rose Sorensen in his index and finds an entry saying that Sorensen is writing a book about Arne-Sayles as well as a list of Sorensen’s previous publications.

Then, the narrator looks up “the Other” and finds a long list of familiar entries in the Index. When he looks up the name Ketterley, entries confirm that he was a student of Arne-Sayles. The narrator learns the word “Battersea” is a borough of London where Ketterley lives and where Sorensen was going to interview him about Arne-Sayles. The missing pages that follow were entries about Ketterley, and the narrator wonders who tore them out. He frantically pieces together the remaining scraps of paper from the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall and discovers they are his missing journal pages.