Rebecca Lim - Fury

The guy’s good at hiding his surprise. He raises his eyebrows only slightly before facing forward again. He says smoothly, without turning, in insultingly fluent English, ‘You are sure you want the Cimetière des Innocents? The place where it was ?’

There’s a strange emphasis on that word ‘was’, but I’m in so much agony — an agony of remembrance that has given rise to an almost physical pain — that I snarl, ‘ Oui .’

And he floors it in response.

‘There’s no point asking if you’re okay,’ Ryan says quietly with a quick glance at the driver’s back, ‘because clearly you’re not. Tell me what’s wrong . I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.’

Our entwined hands rest upon his jeans-clad thigh, and I think I might be breaking his fingers, I’m gripping them so tightly. But, as always, he takes what I dish out without complaint.

I whisper, ‘You’re my compass, remember? You’re here to light my way in the darkness of this world. This place is just a shadow from a distant past, but for me it has such a long and terrifying reach …’

I try to ease my hold, but he won’t let me move away. So I continue to grasp his hand in silence while we travel through a vast urban sprawl I don’t recognise in the slightest, passing motorway signs that read La Courneuve and Aubervilliers . But it’s hardly any time at all before we enter central Paris with a tide of other traffic, and I begin to see, here and there, a building, a church, a tower, a narrow street that brings with it a suffocation of feeling. Years ago, I crawled across a landscape that is buried now, submerged under a weight of modernity and progress. But the footprint of the old city I once knew is still here, underneath. I feel its pull.

As we pass a massive train station that was centuries from existence when I was last here, and motor down a broad boulevard that crosses over one unfamiliarly named street after another, I know where we are. I look up to see a sign that reads Boulevard de Sebastopol . The name of the street is no longer the same, but it’s here, that place, under our feet. I tell the driver to stop, and he does, leaving the engine running.

‘Where are we?’ Ryan asks, looking out the window.

‘Les Halles,’ the driver replies in his gravelly voice, shooting us a quick glance before staring back through the windscreen. ‘In the first arrondissement.’

All I see are large apartment buildings of great beauty and symmetry, well-tended stands of trees, their branches largely bare, everything regular and orderly and clean.

‘Les Halles, yes,’ I mutter, ‘but where is the great market itself? It stood alongside a vast parish cemetery filled to overflowing with the dead. A horrifying place, stinking of lime and decomposing flesh, bounded by the bones of the exhumed on all sides, piled high, like kindling …’

The young man at the wheel turns and gives me a strange look. ‘That “great market” you speak of, it has not been here since, eh, the 1960s. Many years before I was born.’

‘I don’t care about the market,’ I say sharply. ‘Where is Cimetière des Innocents? The place bound by bones?’

That was how Nuriel spoke of it. Surely there could not be two such hideous places in all of Paris?

In reply, the driver starts the car and turns one corner, two, draws up in front of a small square with a large stone fountain at its heart. When I peer through the tinted glass at the fountain, I’m almost overwhelmed. I cover my mouth with my hands. I know it, I recognise the carvings on it. It was once located elsewhere on this street, the Rue St Denis, which has also altered almost beyond recognition.

Ryan doesn’t ask if it’s okay, he just leans forward and enfolds me tightly in his arms from behind.

The driver disengages the window on my side of the car. ‘This is all that remains of Cimetière des Innocents,’ he says. ‘This square, this fountain. The bones, they were all moved a long time ago, over two hundred years. Nothing remains here of the cemetery you seek.’

‘Where were they moved to, the bones?’ I whisper, staring at the gently playing fountain, the pretty square beneath the bleak winter sky that is like smoky grey glass.

‘Officially? To Place Denfert-Rochereau,’ he says, ‘in the fourteenth arrondissement. I will take you there.’

In minutes, we are on a bridge crossing over the mighty River Seine that bisects Paris into north and south, right bank and left bank. Ryan gazes in awe at the crowds of people on the tree-lined boulevard, the ancient and vast complexes of buildings lining both sides of the street, the gothic facade of Notre Dame Cathedral flying by. I recognise it, and recognise, too, the delicate spire of Sainte-Chapelle towering over the streetscape. There are centuries of ‘modernity’ all around me, one layer intruding upon another, but there’s no time to reflect further on how much the Île de la Cité has changed because we’ve already left the island in the slipstream of a fleet of minibuses bearing southwest. Every few feet, I see something that triggers an image or stirs up some strong feeling that I thought I’d never see or experience again. I feel as if I’m under attack by random ghosts.

There’s a sense of unreality about everything I’m looking at, as if I see two cities superimposed one on top of another and the only real things in this world are Ryan and I, the driver and this car. I lean against the solid wall of Ryan’s chest to try to contain the sensation that I’m floating, that this is all a hallucination. All I let myself hear is his heartbeat; I do not admit the voices, the sounds, the chaos, of those days.

I’d assumed Selaphiel was being held in the Cimetière des Innocents, and my foolish assumption has cost us precious time. If we had any kind of lead at all on Luc and his forces, it’s probably vanished.

‘Stupid,’ I snarl aloud before I realise I’m doing it.

‘It is not a common mistake,’ the driver says over his shoulder, ‘but no matter. If you wish to see bones, you will see millions at the Catacombes de Paris, all arranged most strikingly. The tourists, they love it.’

When we finally reach Place Denfert-Rochereau, the car sliding in between a couple of maxi tour buses with side mirrors like the down-bent antennae of insects, Ryan says in surprise, ‘Uh, it looks like a museum.’

There’s a line of people dressed in layers of colourful, cold-weather clothing — hats, scarves, coats, gloves, boots — outside an unremarkable stone building. Some are sipping from thermoses or eating food from paper bags. Most carry backpacks and cameras, some have umbrellas. There are children among them. It has to be some terrible mistake.

Ryan reaches the same conclusion almost immediately. ‘Would it make sense, do you think, for, uh, Selaphiel to be imprisoned in a place with a queue of people outside —’

‘— wearing polar fleece and waiting to pay an entry fee?’ I cut in, my voice rising. ‘No, it would not make sense. This can’t be the place. But if this isn’t the place Nuriel saw, then where could he be? They cannot abide the cold, having turned away from first light , that’s what she told me. He’s in a place bound by bones, yet there can be no such place accessible by the general public. Nothing she told me lines up.’

Our driver’s voice is studiously casual as he interjects. ‘This is only the visitors’ entry. There is a mile of tunnel underground that the visitors are permitted to see, and they are pushed through it like sheep and emerge, blinking, into the light on Rue Dareau. But l’Ossuaire Municipal stretches much farther than this. There is a giant network of tunnels, of old quarries — carrières — beneath our feet. The Left Bank is riddled with them. We took the stone from under the ground to build Paris, and now much of Paris is built on air.’ He chuckles darkly, before continuing. ‘Yes, the bones were first brought here. But they had men below, moving the remains, night after night, year after year. There are many more bones — from des Innocents, from all the ancient, condemned graveyards of Paris — scattered throughout les carrières . The bones of millions of Parisians could not fit into this pleasant display that has been constructed for the tourists. There are many, many more entrances to the underworld, and many, many more bones.’