by KD Robichaux
When I open Calvin’s snap, both of their handsome faces are in the shot. Ricky speaks first, “That dirty, delicious jerk. How does that sexy douchebag keep thwarting your plans for adventure?!” I see Calvin roll his eyes before the video cuts off and then starts again automatically.
“Honey, this is like, what, the sixth time he’s done this? We’ve gotta come up with a plan to get you in,” Calvin says, sympathy and determination lacing his voice. His next video comes in, a smiling devil emoji in the bottom left corner of his shot. “You’ve tried every legal way of getting into one of these places. I say it’s time to play dirty.”
When my list of contacts comes up, I see Ricky has sent me a snap of his own, his head turned to look beside him. “Ooo, hubby. I love it when you go all naughty boy on me.” He faces his camera. “I agree. Time to break out the gloves, sister.”
I blow out a long breath, thinking about what they’re suggesting. Would I have the balls to do something that could possibly land me in jail if I got caught? I had told them a few weeks prior about the underground catacombs of New Orleans. Not too many people knew about them, because it wasn’t a famous tourist location like the ones in Paris. I hadn’t believed they even existed at first. I thought it was just part of a ghost story Gran had made up to scare me into keeping curfew. But sure enough, about a month ago, after being paired up with one of the more colorful and eccentric ghost tour guides in New Orleans, when my cousin Jamie came to visit, I managed to confirm they were real after our exploration of St. Louis Cemetery Number 1. The guide, René, an aging man with weathered skin and a shock of white hair under his tall top hat, seemed excited to answer my questions, after I had pulled him aside to ask him if he’d ever heard of the NOLA Catacombs.
“Ah, chère,” he began in his delightful Cajun accent. Luckily, it was light and easily understandable. “I have, and it’s true! Not many people be knowing about it, but I do, and I know where to find it.”
My eyes had widened and I looked at him questioningly, and then, he’d taken his hand and pointed downward. I had glanced at the ground and then back up into his smiling face, his eyes twinkling with mirth.
“You’re standing over it, ange. St. Louis Cemetery 1 be the oldest cemetery in N’rleans, but there was one here before it that just don’t exist no more. St. Peter Cemetery. Back in the day, we’re talking when the city was still brand new, in the middle of the 1700s, they buried them under the ground, like most normal cemeteries now do, but then the people started thinking it was bad for their health and they built up a big wall.” He expressed just how big by spreading his arms wide and flapping them above his head. “Then after a while, when the ground got all filled up with the dead, what everyone thought they seen was them covering the ground in lime. Oh sure, sure. They was making a show of building over the top of it, but it was all a distraction of what was going on underneath it all. Have you ever heard about the catacombs in Paris?”
Of course I had. No one in the field of archeology had not learned about the Paris Catacombs. I had done a report on them in one of the earlier classes of my college career. But the stories never got old, so I let him tell his tale. “A little,” I prompted.
“Paris is old. Much, much older than anything we have here in the US. So old, it’s hard to fathom. And being that old, it’s gone through generation after generation of people, all them people fighting wars, fighting plagues, or growing old, and then dying. Millions upon millions of ‘em. The graveyards would fill up, over and over again. They had to do something with the bodies. So what they do? After a certain amount of time in the ground, sometimes just enough to let the body break down to bare bones, they’d dig ‘em back up again, and they’d move them down into the catacombs to make room for the next.”
I knew all this already, but I still listened with bated breath, eager for him to get to the part I was waiting for, when he’d tell me about what was right there, beneath my feet.
He pulled his top hat off his head, ran his fingers through his white hair to scrape it off his humidity-dampened forehead, and then replaced his cover before continuing. “So that brings us back to here, in the late 1700s. They got the bright idea to make catacombs here, trying to plan ahead for overflowing cemeteries. It was before they knew about N’awlins being below sea level, or how they shoulda been burying the people in tombs above ground the whole time. So, while all the people of the early city felt relieved they was getting rid of the burial ground about a block thataway,”—he points in the direction of where St. Peter Cemetery apparently was over two hundred years ago—“they had noooo idea they was getting a burial ground nearly a hundred times the size of it, just about twenty-five feet deeper.”
Jamie had yawned beside me, completely uninterested, when I was listening to his every word like it was gospel. I knew she wanted to go home to get ready for a night out on Bourbon Street since she was visiting for her twenty-first birthday, but I asked him the most important of all my questions. “So how do you get down there?”
He pointed to a nondescript two-story building across the street from where we stood. “Have you ever wondered why none of the buildings in this area are taller than that? It’s because they didn’t know how much weight the ground around here could hold, being hollowed out and all. From what I heard, they was real good about supporting the walls and stuff while they were digging, using some of the lime I told you that they brought in. Anyway, inside that building, there ain’t nothing but a desk and a guard. The entrance is in there.”
I turned to face the structure in question. I had never noticed it in the twenty-four years I lived here. A simple brick building with a couple of undecorated windows and a front door with a mail slot. There wasn’t even a number on it to indicate its address. No hours of business sign, no nothing. When I turned to thank the tour guide for his help, he had disappeared.
A few days later, with copies of my credentials and camera bag in hand, I had gone to the building and knocked on the door. With there not being any type of contact information, not even a business name, that was the only thing I could do. I knew the street number had to be 307 because 305 and 309 sat quaintly on either side of it. One looked to be a sex shop called Pandora’s Box, and the other was a New Orleans souvenir store. When I Googled the address, nothing came up, not even any property owner information. Very strange.
At first, there was no response. But with determination and hope running through my system, I stood and continuously knocked on that door until my knuckles went numb, and finally, a giant hulk of a man opened, looking down on me from his well over six foot height. “What do you want?” he grouched.
“Hi there!” I chirped, high-pitched with my excitement someone actually answered. “My name is Amelia Crain, and I run an archaeology blog called Unearthed: Emmy Spills the Dirt.” I held up a printed picture of the blog’s homepage to show him. Before he had a chance to close the door on me, I switched documents in my hands and held my degree in front of his face. “I’m an archaeologist and would like information and to book an appointment to enter the NOLA Catacombs to document and photograph for my blog.” I decided to go with confidence, as if I did this all the time. Instead of asking with a plea in my voice, maybe requesting with self-assuredness would get me better results. The difference between ‘May I?’ and ‘When can I?’
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the ogre growled, and began to shut the door.
“Wait!” I cried, and locked my elbow as I pressed my palm to the wood. He sighed, but reluctantly opened it back up, his eyebrow arched. I felt what little patience he may have running out quickly, so I went with desperation. “Please! I know they exist, and I know the entryway is in there.” I stood on my tiptoes to try to see over the massive man’s frame, but he blocked all view with his towering bulk. “I swear I won’t touch anything. I just want to take a quick look around, snap a few pictures, and then be on my way. That’s all! Please.” I sighed tiredly before going on. “You don’t underst
and. I’ve been to so many places all over the states, and the only places I can get in, even after years and years of college, are the same places any Joe Blow can pay for a guided tour or a ticketed entry. I want to document the places that are off limits to most people, report on the things hardly anyone knows about. Please!”
He stared at me with a bored look on his face, but after seeing the growing hopelessness in my eyes, his softened just a fraction. “Look, I’m not allowed to let you down there. Even if I wanted to sneak you in, you reporting on it and posting it all over the internet would get me fired. Nobody gets down there without going through me, so that shit would come straight back to me.”
“Please, I…” My words trailed off and I glanced away. I knew begging wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I felt my heart breaking at another failed attempt, and realizing my dream would once again be unfounded.
“How about this? We’ve got some big shot TV show guy and his crew coming in a few weeks,” he began, and my hackles rose at the same time my hope did. “When they come and I show them around, I’ll take your camera down there with us and snap you some pictures. When you post them on your blog, you can just say one of the crewmembers leaked them to you.”
It wasn’t the same. I wouldn’t be able to truly describe everything from the catacombs, the way it smelled, the feel of the air that deep underground, the chills that would send the little hairs on my arms standing on end from the creep-factor I cherished so much. But if it was all I could get, then I would take it. I didn’t know how much information I’d be able to get from a few stolen shots, but maybe if I could sweet talk the big man into giving me some facts to go along with them, I might have enough to create an interesting enough blog post. It’s not like this was one of my moneymaking posts; this was more of a self-interest piece. Nearly all my others were solicited from tourist spots wanting advertisement. Apparently, an endorsement from the daughter of world-renowned archaeologists was good enough to bring in lots of adventure-seeking history buffs, but not good enough to allow me into the places I really wanted to see.
He told me the date Dean Savageman and his crew would be there to start filming, and we set a time for me to bring him my camera the day before. My camera was like one of my appendages. It was an extension of me, and I never went anywhere without it. Did it make me super uneasy to think about leaving my baby in the hands of a stranger for any length of time, even if it was just for one night? Yes. But if letting my precious have a sleepover with the secretly friendly giant meant I’d get a little bit of a scoop on a secret underground piece of history, then I could deal.
Fast-forward to earlier today, when it was time to meet up for the drop-off. I knocked on the door, not making eye contact with the grinning women coming out of the sex shop a few feet away as I fidgeted on my feet, waiting for the security guard to answer. When he did, much more quickly than the previous time, he opened it wider to let me through.
The place was bare. Nothing on the light grey painted walls, and the simple wooden desk with rolling chair that sat in front of a closed door was empty except for an iPad and a paper cup of coffee. This place gave me the creeps more than any burial ground would have. How could he sit here every day? It felt to me like it would be the same as a padded room in a loony bin, or would drive me into one. The guard closed and locked the door behind us then circled his desk and sat in the chair, rolling himself closer, and I pulled the strap of my crossbody camera bag over my head then placed it carefully in front of him. My hand lingered on the black canvas, as if it had a mind of its own and didn’t want to sever the connection.
“So, ummm…” I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t even know his name. I had asked him for it before, but he told me it was best for me not to know so none of this would come back to him. “Thank you for doing this. Is there anything you could tell me about it, to go into my article?”
He looked at me, seemed to think about my question, and sighed. After a moment, he decided to give in. “Almost the entire city’s underground is filled with water. It was just by luck that in the 1700s they found this one area that was solid. They dug in every direction until they hit water again, and there, they sealed it off with limestone. The NOLA Catacombs span roughly four blocks, with three main tunnels coming off the large center chamber. At the end of each tunnel is a smaller chamber, in which two are full of bones. The last one hadn’t been started on when the city decided it was much too dangerous to be down there after a hurricane in the mid-1800s, and they started using family tombs above the ground in cemeteries exclusively for a while.”
As soon as he started talking, I broke out the notepad app on my phone and typed everything out while he spoke, nodding as my excitement built. I glanced up at him to ask, “Is there any type of record of who is buried down there?”
He swiped his big paw of a hand down his face then leaned back in his chair. “I can’t let you see them, because there are some that are well over two centuries old, but yes. Everyone who had originally been buried in the St. Peter Cemetery is in Chamber 1, and—”
He was cut off suddenly by a phone ringing, and he leaned to the left to pull a cell free from his pocket. “Yes?” he answered abruptly. “Scheduled arrival tomorrow at 1700 hours.” A pause. The guard looked at his black G-Shock watch and let out a sigh. “That will be fine.” And then he tapped the phone to end the call without so much as a goodbye. Seeming to forget I was there, or maybe he didn’t care, he grumbled under his breath, “Cocky fucking prick.” When he looked back up at me, I lifted an eyebrow in question. “Seems the big TV star needs to come in early to set up marks before they start shooting tomorrow. He’ll be here in an hour.”
I felt my face heat with anger and, admittedly, a shit load of jealousy. There I was, finally getting more information from one of these off-limit site guards than I’d ever gotten before, and of course, was yet again thwarted by Dean fucking Savageman. It was like he had a built-in radar for when I was about to get the scoop before him, and had the money and power to stop me in my tracks. In the last couple years, we’d crossed paths six times, never actually speaking a single word to one another. Why would he, the rock star of history television, waste time on a nobody like me? The only energy he sent my way that I could tell were cocky smirks as he walked through the doors of record-breaking football stadiums and caves that hadn’t been entered since Prohibition ended, basically giving me the bird and singing ‘Neener, neener’ as he walked by. I never actually knew how he could catch up to me and, for all intents and purposes, cut me in line.
I tilted my head back to look up at the ceiling, letting out a cleansing breath to try to calm my growing fury. “That man is the bane of my existence.” I blinked back a couple of angry tears that were trying to form, and then faced the big man behind the desk. “He’ll be here in an hour. Sir, you would absolutely make my life if you’d let me just take one peek down there. You can keep my camera as collateral and still hold onto it to take the pictures later, that way you know I’ll just be in and out. I just want to feel for myself what it’s like to be somewhere before that…” My throat clogged, cutting off the many colorful things I’ve called Dean over the years. “Before he does.”
He rubbed the back of his neck like he was thinking, battling internally over his decision that could make or break my sanity. He checked his watch then looked up at me, narrowing his eyes, and I fidgeted on my feet. Finally, sighing in defeat, the guard filled me with more joy than I think I’d ever felt in my entire existence, when he said, “Five minutes. Five minutes, and I never want to see your face again after you come pick up your camera. Understood?”
“Yes!” I couldn’t help the hop and clap that echoed in the empty room. Without wasting another moment, I stripped off my purse and jacket, leaving them next to his desk as I followed him when he stood up and went to the door. There, he pulled the set of keys attached to his hip toward the knob, unlocking it.
As we entered the pitch-black area, I held my breath u
ntil he reached his giant arm in front of my face and flipped on the light switch, disappointment filling me when I saw it was just another empty office. He closed the door behind us, and I followed him to another door, this one containing three deadbolts above the handle.
I held my breath once more as he used a different key for each of the locks, and suddenly my ears started ringing, as my heart began to pound inside my chest so hard, I thought I might pass out from anticipation. He took hold of the handle and finally pushed it open.
It was the smell that hit me first. I loved that scent. It was nearly the same anywhere underground. I had smelled it first when I went to the Natural Bridge Caverns in New Braunfels, Texas, and then many other times when I’d gone to write pieces for places wanting to attract more tourists. It smelled like earth and nothing else, completely absent of the scents of the city it was beneath. I couldn’t see anything, so I took a step closer to the entryway, and just as the guard reached to I assume turn on a light…
A buzzer went off in the room, and the man cursed, slamming the door not a foot in front of me closed as he relocked the deadbolts with warp-speed. He grabbed my arm and I swallowed down a squeak, knowing immediately I needed to be quiet, and let him place me bodily next to the door we had come through only a minute before. He looked at me sharply and placed his pointer finger over his full lips, wordlessly telling me to do what I already planned—to stay completely silent. He reached for the knob and pulled it open, effectively hiding me behind it as I heard another man’s voice.
“Nox, there you are. Meet Mr. Savageman.”
In the crack between the door and the jamb, I saw a hand reach out before it was shaken by the guard’s, who I now knew was named Nox. I’d still take his identity to the grave, since he’d been kind enough that he was going to let me into the catacombs. My heart beat rapidly, which I think staved off the disappointment of the opportunity being snatched away after getting so close to fulfilling my dream. Right then, the only thing I could concentrate on was staying hidden so Nox wouldn’t get into trouble for my being here. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if it was my fault he lost his job.