10. June 2026

Where Salvatore Stood

THE RED PATH

How an ordinary detail from a church in Kraków found its way into the heart of The Incomplete.

There are places that find their way into a story long before the writer understands why.

For me, one of those places was St. Joseph's Church in Kraków...

There are places that find their way into a story long before the writer understands why.

I remember standing there and noticing something that should not have felt extraordinary, and yet it did. The church itself carried the familiar gravity of old stone and silence. Gothic arches rose into shadow. Saints watched from carved recesses. The air held that particular stillness known only to sacred spaces that have witnessed generations of whispered prayers, grief, hope, and farewell.

And then there was the red carpet.

Spread across the altar steps, it transformed the sanctuary into something both beautiful and unsettling. It drew the eye immediately. It seemed almost too vivid against the black and white world around it. A path. A threshold. A wound.

I did not know then that it would remain with me.

Years later, while writing The Incomplete, it returned.

It became the place where Cardinal Salvatore Rizotello would stand before the gathered faithful, carrying within him both devotion and guilt, certainty and terror. The red beneath his feet ceased to be merely fabric. It became memory. Sacrifice. Blood. The price of promises made in silence.

I wrote:

"The atmosphere around the altar became even brighter, almost sharp enough to sting the eyes. The outlines of the great stone columns, proudly carrying the vault of the church dome, reflected the altar’s golden light. The altar, striking out with light, seemed now to hang above the church floor. From three sides marble steps descended from it, and the bright red velvet spread across them looked like a waterfall of blood. Broad, long strips of velvet, several metres in length, formed the shape of a cross, and at the point where its arms met stood the priest."

And later:

"White hosts scattered across the red velvet carpet, while the chalice rolled down the stone steps, leaving behind a trail of blood."

When readers ask whether the church in the novel truly exists, the answer is both yes and no.

The Church of Saint Joseph in Kraków exists.

The red carpet exists.

The stone steps exist.

I stood there.

But fiction asks something different of reality.

It takes what is seen and asks what it means.

The red carpet became more than decoration. It became a liturgical paradox. In Christian tradition, red is the colour of martyrdom, sacrifice, the Holy Spirit, and divine love poured out into the world. In The Incomplete, it also became the colour of human longing: the desperate refusal to surrender those we love to death.

And sometimes they begin with something as simple as standing alone in an old church in Kraków, looking at a red carpet spread beneath an altar, and feeling that it means more than you yet understand.

Perhaps writing is nothing more than spending years trying to discover why.

Because there are things that death does not take.

And there are images that refuse to leave us until they have found their place in a story.