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.

"He wouldn't have lied to us, would he?" Luc's voice had dropped down to a whisper, as if he feared speaking too loud would have consequences. "About my uncle running this place? He seemed so nice and genuine."

I remembered Omar's parting words, his message for his daughter. No, I wouldn't believe he'd lied. I didn't want to. "Hey, we're barely inside yet. Who knows, maybe everyone's gathered in a different part of the building for some reason, or..."

My voice trailed off when we reached the end of the corridor, the sight in front of me grabbing my full attention. Through a final barred metal gate, we entered what appeared to be a hub of sorts, octagonal, lengthy corridors like the one we'd come through radiating out from it, presumably leading towards various cellblocks. In the middle stood a little construction I'd have thought was a ticket booth if it hadn't been made so secure and we weren't in a prison.

Inside it sat a man. A man who stood up the moment he saw us enter, abandoning the game of patience he'd been playing in favour of approaching us.

There was still a chance he was someone else, but if this guy was Luc's maternal great-granduncle, Luc had gotten his good looks from his father's side of the family. The man had a mousy face, droopy eyelids and a slight overbite; his brown hair, I was certain, hadn't come into contact with a pair of scissors or a comb in ages.

The closer the guy came, the more whiffs of cheap wine I caught.

"Vous ne travaillez pas pour la police," the stranger began, "mais probablement pour le conseil de ville. Qu'est-ce que vous voulez?"

I understood 'work', 'police', 'what do you want?' and little more. Luc, fortunately, came to my rescue, despite his nervous picking at his sleeve, as if he wasn't sure if he wanted this man to be his uncle or not. "We don't work for the City Council, actually," he began to explain in English. " Parlez-vous Anglais? J'espère que vous pouvez parler Anglais. We were told we could find a Richard Vaillancourt here. Is that right?"

The man raised his eyebrows in surprise. "A little English. Richard Vaillancourt is my name," he replied, his accent thick and heavy.

"Richard Vaillancourt who worked as a carpenter when he was alive and died of pneumonia?" Luc's mother must have uncovered that information on her genealogical documentation quest.

"Yes." Richard's expression was a mixture of intrigue and scepticism; to be honest, if someone I'd just met started telling me facts about my own life, I'd probably pull a similar face. "Why do you know this? Who are you?"

Luc's earlier uncertainty ebbed away, the joy of meeting a long-deceased relative taking over, even though that relative reeked of alcohol and sat around playing solitary card games in a strange, dark place. "Then you're my uncle Richard! Well, great-granduncle Richard. It's so cool to meet you, man, seriously. I'm Luc and I came here all the way from Canada."

The look in Richard's eyes softened a little upon hearing this. "But still you are buried here?"

"No, no. We're alive, visiting for just one night."

"I... comprehend." When Richard turned to me, I swore he stared straight into my soul. "And who are you?"

"Nick," I blurted out fast, caught off-guard by the sudden attention on me. "Just a guy Luc met at the hostel."

"We're friends," Luc corrected without a moment's hesitation, which almost made me double over with happiness. "We snuck into Père-Lachaise together at night to toast to you and ended up in this necropolis by accident. Then we decided we had to track you down and now we're here, in the flesh. And it's been a real experience trying to get to you, Uncle Richard, lemme tell you that."

Uncle Richard cackled like a mad hyena, struck by amused delight. Luc was beaming and I chuckled along half-heartedly, unsure what else to do.

"That is gentle of you," Richard said. "Very gentle. I did not think living people would search me. I did not think anyone remembered."

"Surprise, surprise?" Luc laughed. "Somebody here told us he finds comfort in being remembered. I hope this is comforting for you, too."

"That is true, yes, that is true." Richard turned back to his little wannabe ticket booth, gesturing at us to follow, which we did. He entered his space, filled with monitoring equipment that was either turned off or not functional at all, and picked up a bottle of wine, accidentally wiping a few playing cards off his desk in the process. "Come sit with me, please. We can talk. I have wine, I can find... des verres... for you. I can learn you to play belote."

While it was nice of him to offer us drinks and a card game, I knew we couldn't accept that offer. It would simply take too long. Time wouldn't stop for us, and even if I'd had an appetite for wine, I didn't see a wine glass anywhere in Uncle Richard's general vicinity. That meant he'd likely been drinking straight from the bottle, which unnerved me.

"I'm afraid we don't have time to stick around for too long, Uncle Richard," I said before Luc could tell him yes. "We need to get back to our own Paris before half past seven and we still have one more person to visit here. But maybe you, or someone who works with you, could accompany us? We, uh... We could use a bit of protection."

Uncle Richard's movements stilled. "Protection from what?"

"Abelard and Heloise," Luc said, beginning to relay the theory I'd shared with him on our way here. "We have good reasons to believe they've figured out how to possess living people and they're trying to steal our lives. But we want to leave the necropolis alive and well, and that means we really need to stay out of their hands. So can you come with us or send someone else along for the ride?"

Uncle Richard's expression turned more pensive with each word Luc said. "Me, I do not know well Pierre Abélard," he finally replied. "Madame Heloise is fair. Reasonable. Smart for a woman. But her love poetry is bad."

As much as that made me want to read Heloise's poetry and judge its quality myself, I wanted to stay far away from her even more. And Richard hadn't answered our question. "With all due respect, Uncle Richard, we didn't ask about Heloise's hobby writing."

Uncle Richard shook his head, still pensive, almost troubled. "I cannot leave my work here in prison. And there is nobody else to do it. Only me."

If this truly was a proper prison, leaving only one guy in charge of the whole thing with no one there to assist him in running the place seemed like the worst idea imaginable. The more I learned about this facility, the more confusing it became. I couldn't wrap my head around how it worked, what Richard's job even consisted of or why, out of all the things he could do in this incredible Paris of the dead, he'd willingly chosen to sit around here with only alcohol for company and nothing but single-player card games to help him pass the time. Instinctively, I compared him to that lone librarian at the Sorbonne, but she, at least, had surrounded herself with books to read.

"Why are you here all alone?" Luc asked, as confused as I was. "If you're like a prison guard, then don't you need, you know... coworkers?"

Uncle Richard moved past us, once more motioning for us to come after him. "I can explain you that. Come, a short presentation. I will show you our prison."