Blowback (Scot Harvath, #4)

by Brad Thor

he noticed that this building had the same danse macabre under the eaves as the one across the street. It reminded him of a story he had once read about what the French did with the bodies from the Holy Innocents cemetery when it got too full and they needed to make room for new arrivals. Originally, they placed them in charnel houses adjacent to the church, but they didn’t have enough space to keep up with demand. So they started quietly buying up buildings in the neighborhood to use as undisclosed charnel houses. Sometimes they’d wall the bodies up and rent out the apartments to help recoup some of their costs. Sometimes they’d place the bodies on the top two floors and rent the floors beneath. Everything was going just fine until the walls and floors began rotting away and dead bodies started falling into people’s living rooms. Even building to building, corpses were falling through the walls. At this point, Paris caught a break. They had pretty much stopped mining stone under the Right Bank because they were afraid that all of the tunnels had weakened it close to the point of collapse. It was the perfect place to transfer the contents of the charnel houses. They hauled the dead out in the dark of night by the wagonload, stacked their skulls and bones throughout the tunnels, and voilà, the Paris catacombs were born.