Extraordinary People

Prologue

He finds himself in a cobbled courtyard, breath hissing back at him from buttressed walls. A rasping, gasping breath, full of fear and the certainty of death.

He knows every window by heart in this cloister of the two charnel houses. Colours embedded in the glass with affixed enamel. “Le Miracle des Billettes,” “Elijah’s Sacrifice,” “The Mystic Wine-press.” Beloved images lost forever in the dark.

Moonlight glances off the shiny surface of cobbles worn smooth by the feet of holy men. His own feet slip and clatter as he scrambles through an alley between buttresses, heart squeezed by the hand of desperation. A green bin spins away in the darkness, spilling its decaying contents across the yard. The door ahead of him lies ajar, the corridor beyond bathed in the ghostly light of the moon, angling between tower and apse to slant through frosted glass arches. He sees a sign and a red arrow — Vitraux du Cloître — and turns the other way, past the sacristy.

The door to the church is open, and he is almost sucked through it into the vast, glowing stillness. The stained glass rises all around, its colours turned to black by the dead light of the nearly full moon. His panic fills the vaulted vastness with every painful breath. To his right a statue of the virgin cradling the baby Jesus watches impassively, impervious now to the prayers he has offered her so piously over so many years. The neighbouring chapel has been given over to notice-boards pasted with announcements that he will never read.

He hears the footsteps following in his wake, and breath rasping in lungs that are not his own. He flees along the north ambulatory, past the Chapel of St. Paul, the Chapel of St. Joseph and the Souls in Purgatory. At the end of the church, ninety silvered organ pipes rise in shining columns to the figure of Christ Resuscitated, flanked by two angels. He wants to scream, help me! But he knows they cannot.

He turns beneath the nine meter span of the only remaining screen in all of Paris, a delicate tracery of stone carving and spiral staircases curling around slender columns soaring into blackness, and he stops beneath Christ on the cross, a Calvary taken from the chapel of the École Polytechnique to replace a predecessor destroyed during the Revolution. How often he has knelt here, before the altar, to receive His flesh and drink His blood.

He stops here now, and kneels again for one last time, the footsteps almost upon him. And as he rises and turns, the last thing he sees at the far end of the nave, before red turns to black, is a sign commanding him to SILENCE.