The gate is shut. It has been dark for an hour, it is January, and my train to Nice leaves from the other side of Paris in three hours. Casey is twenty paces behind me, still walking, not looking up at the bars yet, and I am doing the arithmetic in my head about how far it is back to the metro.
Ten minutes before closing
We had two hours to kill. The night train was not until late, the bags were in a locker at Gare de Lyon, and Pere Lachaise sits in the twentieth arrondissement with more than a million people buried in it and a good deal more than a million ashes behind them. Chopin is in there. So are Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf. The one grave we wanted was Jim Morrison's, because Casey had spent the better part of a decade playing The Doors badly on a guitar.
The man at the entrance spoke enough English for me to ask whether we could still go in. He looked at the clock, looked at us, and said, "Okay, at your risk." Those four words are the whole story of the next hour. Entry in winter is free, the gates shut at six, and the cemetery covers a hillside of paths that were laid out for people who were being carried, not people who were late.
He pointed over one shoulder without turning around. With a million graves and ten minutes of daylight left, that was the entire directions briefing we were going to get. I had a paper map folded in my coat pocket, useless at that light, and a torch that lived in a bag in a locker across town.
I should say why we were there at all. We had spent three days in Paris doing the standard list, the Louvre and the Orsay and the long walk up the Champs Elysees, and the night train south was not until after ten. Two free hours, a metro that got us across town in twenty-five minutes, and one name on a list. That is the entire planning process.
Following the light
The paths climb and split, and after two wrong turns the only rule left was to keep the wall on my right. In the dark a cemetery is a collection of edges: a gargoyle catches the eye at the corner of vision, an angel stands where a hedge should be, and every one of them reads as a person for half a second before it does not.
Then I heard music. Faint, coming uphill, and Casey heard it a moment after I did. Somewhere past the wall there was a light too small to be a street lamp.
We walked toward it because there was nothing else to walk toward. The music got louder in increments: first a bass line, then a bar of a song I could name, then the whole thing. What we had taken for a haunting was a cassette player and a set of candles in a ring of melted wax.
The candles
Morrison's grave is a plain slab, or was, until the fans arrived. The stones around it were covered in messages, flowers gone brown, and the graffiti of people who had come a long way to write peace on somebody else's headstone. Sitting on the slab itself, with the tape playing and the candles burning, was a man who nodded at us as though we were expected.
"Do you know what time they close?" I asked him.
"Six," he said, and did not move. Nobody behind him looked up from the candles either.
We stayed about four minutes. I took two photographs, Casey stood very still in front of the stone, and somewhere in the middle of it I realised the guards had gone home. When we walked back down to the entrance, the gate we had come through was chained. It was twenty past six.
Locked in
The honest reaction is embarrassment before fear. Twenty minutes earlier I had been fined on the metro for stepping over the barrier, the same trick half of Paris was doing that evening, and now I was standing inside a locked cemetery with a train to catch. My French is passable and Casey's was not, so I did the talking, which meant I got to explain to nobody in particular that we had a seventy-five dollar ticket leaving in three hours.
The main gates were eight or ten feet high with spear tops. There was a tree with a branch hanging over them on the left, and for about a minute we were seriously considering it, ankle damage and all, because the alternative was a night on a bench next to a man who had been dead since 1916. I tested the lowest bar with a boot. It did not give at all.
Nobody came down the path. The offices behind the entrance were dark, the street lamps outside were doing most of the work, and the only sound left in there was traffic through the bars. Casey sat on a low wall and started doing the sums out loud: locker, station, platform, and how many minutes we would need if we found a gate that opened.
The gate with give in it
Before we committed to the tree I walked the wall one more time, maybe thirty metres to the right of the entrance, and found a small side gate. It was locked, but the bottom corner had enough play in it that you could push the leaf and get a shoulder through. I went first, then Casey, and we were standing on the pavement in the twentieth arrondissement with the traffic going past as if nothing had happened.
We made the train. It left Gare de Lyon on time, and by morning the whole thing was a story rather than a problem. What I took from it was smaller than the story: the gates really do shut at six in January, the man at the desk really will wave you in anyway, and if you are going to follow a light uphill in the dark, you should mark the corner you turned at.
The grave has been fenced off since, and most of the writing has been scrubbed away. I am not sure whether that makes the walk back easier or harder, and I have not been back to find out.