Baguette Rhymes with Dead || ONC 2024 | ✔

Chapter 9: Cards and Wine

Around half past three, Luc and I stood in front of La Santé Prison's entrance: a blue gate set into a high, sturdy wall so unscalable Donald Trump would wish he had it at his border with Mexico. But we wouldn't have to scale that wall tonight. There was no need.

The gate, just like the one at the Other Paris' Père-Lachaise, was open.

"This is freaky, dude." Luc scrutinized the open gate, hands in his pockets. "If there's any place you ought to lock a door in, it's prison, right?"

I could only agree with that. Though an open gate was much more convenient than a closed one, it made me feel uneasy. Then again, La Santé had clearly been designed to intimidate, to instill fear into those gazing upon it, its bleak location not serving to make the place feel any less oppressive. Surrounded by dreary high-rise apartment buildings, what I could see of the prison towering over us seemed like the kind of dark, imposing structure that would be more at home in the most plague-riddled decades of the Middle Ages or a row of nineteenth-century insane asylums than in the city of love and light.

"Honestly, it is weird. But this entire place has been the world turned upside down so far." I looked Luc in the eyes. "We could still leave if you want, uncle or no uncle. Though I suspect you don't want to have come all this way for nothing."

Luc steeled himself, determination seeping into his posture. It was damn near the hottest thing I'd seen all night.

"Uncle Richard's family," he said. "I doubt Abelard or Heloise could've gotten to him before us and Omar said we'd be fine." He took a deep breath. "We did come all this way."

"So in we go?"

"In we go."

I nodded. "Fine. But we should exercise at least a little caution, okay?"

"Exercise caution instead of be careful." Luc chuckled as we entered the prison grounds, but there was no malice in his observation. He gave me his most heart-stopping smile yet. "You have a way with words, Nick."

I wanted to tell him thanks and add a smooth line right after, but all I could manage to produce was a shocked eh sound, which probably only served to tell Luc he'd spoken too soon.

We found ourselves in a small courtyard, deserted save for a trio of chatting ghosts getting drunk in one of the corners like average teenage loiterers out at night. They didn't strike me as the local prison employees, but I wasn't planning on walking up to them and inquiring; as long as they stayed preoccupied with their own nocturnal activities and stayed out of our business, I'd return the favour. Luc, too, wouldn't be distracted from his goal of meeting his uncle now, making for the closest door to the main building and pulling it open.

"Also unlocked," he muttered, holding it for me in a marvellous display of chivalry. "Maybe the ghosts don't actually use this as a prison anymore?"

"But Omar did call it their prison," I replied. "That would suggest they do."

I was fortunate enough to be able to say I'd never been sent to any sort of correctional facility. One school tour to the Kilmainham Gaol Museum aside, I'd never gotten up close and personal with prison environments. That said, I still felt fairly confident claiming a prison in the land of the living wouldn't feel as abandoned as this one. Luc and I moved ahead through a long corridor, passing through barred metal gates left likewise unlocked, and never encountered a soul. No guards or employees or loiterers like outside.

Not even vermin. No insects. No rats.

Even Père-Lachaise at night hadn't felt as eerie as this lonely place.