Baguette Rhymes with Dead || ONC 2024 | ✔

Chapter 10: Death Sentence

The corridor Uncle Richard took us to was filled with cells, and I could count exactly how many were occupied.

I shivered, unsure if I did so because of the figurative or literal coldness of the space around me. Harsh fluorescent light illuminated a grey floor and equally grey doors, the walls a depressing drab colour. Uncle Richard obviously never bothered to vacuum; the dust in the air tickled my nose and drew a sneeze out of me, the sound of it echoing in the quiet.

Though most doors I could see were open or hanging ajar, allowing for quick glimpses inside empty cells, I knew there had to be people behind the ones closed and locked. If I strained to hear it, I could catch snippets of muffled conversation through the soundproofing.

"We do not have many prisoners." Uncle Richard's eyes swept around the corridor as if he, too, saw all this for the first time. "Maybe five hundred in bad times, at most."

Considering that the necropolis' population, according to Béatrice, exceeded a million, that indeed didn't seem like a lot. But still too many people for one guard to handle. "And you take care of them all by yourself?"

"I do not need to do that. Take care of them." Richard cackled, his hyena laugh reverberating even longer than my sneeze. "The dead, they need nothing. No sleep. No food. No doctors. When the prisoners arrive to... purgent leurs peines..."

"Serve their sentences," Luc translated for me in a whisper.

"...they go inside their cell," Richard continued, conjuring up a keyring from inside the shabby jacket he wore. The metal jingled playfully. "They go inside, and I lock the door, and they stay where they are. I do not open the door after that. Only when they get a cell companion or when they are liberated."

I glanced at the variety of closed doors I could see, pity surging through me. I didn't know how long a prison sentence of, say, a year, would feel if I knew I had eternity still ahead of me; perhaps it would breeze by in the blink of an eye somehow.

But the thought of being forced to sit inside a tiny cell all day, cooped up with a cellmate I might not even like, with entertainment and true privacy both scarce, still made me recoil in horror. Having to stay in my house during the COVID pandemic had been bad enough (and I enjoyed staying inside), but something like that would probably drive me crazy within a week.

"Isn't that inhumane?" The look Luc gave his uncle showed clear unease. "They can't even get some fresh air outside every once in a while? That's terribly harsh."

"Nobody forced them to commit crimes," Richard replied, unperturbed and almost robotic, as if someone had hammered the phrase into his head so he wouldn't forget. "They get what they deserve. It is harsh. Prison has to be undesirable. It has to make persons want to stay away. Otherwise, too many prisoners. But we do not have many now."

I understood that prison was supposed to be a punishment, that a stay in a correctional facility wasn't meant to be a vacation in Paradise. But I still thought prisoners ought to be treated with more decency than this. "Who came up with this policy?"

"The City Council. An idea of Madame Heloise." Uncle Richard grinned. "Smart for a woman, I did say."

"So you use fear of prison to keep people in line," Luc thought out loud, still uneasy. "And you say it works, but not always, does it? Because there's going to be people who won't be deterred by fear alone, and you're not actually rehabilitating anyone here. If someone just keeps getting in trouble, ending up in jail and not giving a damn, then what do you even do? Lock them up forever?"

"Three times in prison, that is the maximum," Uncle Richard explained with a grimace. "After three times, it is rare a prisoner gets another chance. Ordinarily, they are forced to enter Père-Lachaise and disappear. I do not know where they go. And I do not want to discover."