Baguette Rhymes with Dead || ONC 2024 | ✔

Chapter 6: Passing Through

Around a quarter past two, Luc and I stood in front of the Sorbonne Interuniversity Library. Our subway journey there had gone by without a hitch; the only extraordinary sight had been a substantial amount of what appeared to be protesters. They chatted amongst themselves in tiny groups, some holding homemade cardboard signs and makeshift banners adorned with phrases I struggled to decipher. Luc roped one such group into a quick chat, asking where they were headed (a protest at the Place du Panthéon) and if they happened to know a Richard Vaillancourt (never heard of him). Uncle Richard evidently wouldn't be making it easy for us to find him.

But at least we'd arrived where we needed to be safely.

"Do you think they'll want to see a library card?" Luc asked as we strolled into the Sorbonne's building for the Faculty of Letters; it looked like a classical piece of history on the outside, but the entrance to the library within proved a sleek, modern whole of white walls and floors, black information desks, turnstiles and furniture of the sort my mother bought at IKEA.

"I have one in my cardholder," I replied, "but it's a Dublin City Libraries card. Think they'll notice?"

Luc pretended to think it over before shrugging. "They all look the same to me."

He approached the only librarian manning the information desks: a bespectacled middle-aged woman in a polka dot blouse, lounging in her desk chair with her nose buried in a book. While Luc inquired about her English language abilities in cheerful French, I noted whole towers of books piled up around her, many of them romance novels and crime thrillers based on their cover pictures. This librarian's job must've consisted of little more than providing the occasional directions, keeping an eye on who came and went, and sitting here reading to her heart's content. One day, I decided, I'd have to get myself a job like that, too.

"First question," I heard Luc say in English, "are we free to enter just like that? Or do we need some sort of membership card?"

The librarian regarded him with a stern expression, possibly miffed about us disturbing her reading process. She adjusted her tight ponytail in a hurried gesture. "Wherever would we make such cards?"

Full marks for hospitality, this one. I missed Béatrice. "Never mind about cards," I quickly jumped in, though half-tempted to pull out my library card just to show it off. "We're only looking for textbooks on medieval history. Do you know where in the library we can find one?"

The woman pursed her lips. "We have no access to the digital library catalogue, so I can't tell you where to find specific works, but I've seen books on that subject in the main reading room."

"Thanks. So, uh, can we go there?"

"And do you just happen to know a Richard Vaillancourt?" Luc added with shining eyes.

"Yes. And... No?" The woman's eyebrows furrowed, as if she paid full attention to us only now that our clueless questions were growing stranger. "Are you... new here?"

Luc masked his renewed disappointment with a slight smile and a lighthearted tone. "Nah. Just passing through."

"Passing through on your way where?" The woman's confusion increased, and the thought struck me that this probable library recluse had no idea tonight was the night in which the living could hit her town. Maybe not surprising, considering how few tourists with pulses typically seemed to stop by. "Perhaps nobody's told you yet, boys, but there's no way out of this city. There's only darkness outside of its boundaries. If you walk out into it, it'll spit you right back to where you came from."

No way out of this city. She still presumed us as dead as she was, didn't know we had access to a way out unavailable to her. I remembered Béatrice's words about her inability to enter Père-Lachaise without disappearing to God-knows-where very well. I also remembered that deep darkness I'd seen in the Monument aux morts, the one that had allowed Luc and I to travel between the Parises. I imagined that same darkness pooling around the necropolis boundaries, not facilitating travel, but keeping the cemetery's dead trapped in this limbo.