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Extract

Pesez le matin que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au soir, Et au soir que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au matin . Be aware every morning that you may not last the day, And every evening that you may not last the night.

 

– ENGRAVED PLAQUE IN THE CATACOMBS OF PARIS

A row of skulls glared from atop a wall of intricately stacked femurs and tibias. Though it was June, and she knew the sun was shining on the streets of Paris sixty feet above her, Dr Maura Isles felt chilled as she walked down the dim passageway, its walls lined almost to the ceiling with human remains. She was familiar, even intimate, with death, and had confronted its face countless times on her autopsy table, but she was stunned by the scale of this display, by the sheer number of bones stored in this network of tunnels beneath the City of Light. The one-kilometer tour took her through only a small section of the catacombs. Off-limits to tourists were numerous side tunnels and bone-?lled chambers, their dark mouths gaping seductively behind locked gates. Here were the remains of six million Parisians who had once felt the sun on their faces, who had hungered and thirsted and loved, who had felt the beating of their own hearts in their chests, the rush of air in and out of their lungs. They could never have imagined that one day their bones would be unearthed from their cemetery resting places, and moved to this grim ossuary beneath the city.

 

That one day they would be on display, to be gawked at by hordes of tourists.

 

A century and a half ago, to make room for the steady in?ux of dead into Paris’s overcrowded cemeteries, the bones had been disinterred and moved into the vast honeycomb of ancient lime-stone quarries that lay deep beneath the city. The workmen who’d transferred the bones had not carelessly tossed them into piles, but had per-formed their macabre task with ?air, meticulously stacking them to form whimsical designs. Like fussy stonemasons, they had built high walls decorated with alternating layers of skulls and long bones, turning decay into an artistic state-ment. And they had hung plaques engraved with grim quotations, reminders to all who walked these passageways that Death spares no one.

 

One of the plaques caught Maura’s eye, and she paused among the ?ow of tourists to read it. As she struggled to translate the words using her shaky high school French, she heard the in-congruous sound of children’s laughter echoing in the dim corridors, and the twang of a man’s Texas accent as he muttered to his wife. ‘Can you believe this place, Sherry? Gives me the goddamn creeps . . .’

 

The Texas couple moved on, their voices fading into silence. For a moment Maura was alone in the chamber, breathing in the dust of the centuries. Under the dim glow of the tunnel light, mold had ?ourished on a cluster of skulls, coating them in a greenish cast. A single bullet hole gaped in the forehead of one skull, like a third eye.

I know how you died.

 

The chill of the tunnel had seeped into her own bones. But she did not move, determined to trans-late that plaque, to quell her horror by engaging in a useless intellectual puzzle. Come on, Maura. Three years of high school French, and you can’t ?gure this out? It was a personal challenge now, all thoughts of mortality temporarily held at bay. Then the words took on meaning, and she felt her blood go cold . . ..

Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death And prepares himself for the end every day.