by KD Robichaux
Dean’s hand grasps the edge of the door above my head and opens it wider, being careful to not let it hit the still-open bone-covered gate. Obviously, there’s no lighting system, since no one knew this place existed. “Shit. My phone is almost dead. How are we going to see in there?”
Dean reaches into his pocket, and I think he’s going to pull out his own phone, but he reveals a lighter instead. “We’re going to make a torch,” he tells me, with a wink and grin.
“Out of what, exactly?” I ask. He turns to the right and looks up at the wall of femurs and tibias. “No way! Do you know how much bad juju it would bring on your head to burn someone’s bones? There’s got to be another source.” I look around. Then up at the ceiling. “Wait a second.”
“What’s the matter?” Dean asks, seeing the look of confusion on my face.
“The lights are installed in the ceiling, against the back wall, not the wall of bones four feet that way,” I say, pointing toward the center of the chamber. “How did no one know about this door? They would have seen it while they were installing the lights.”
“Not necessarily. Look. The lights are put in about every—what is that, twelve to fourteen feet would you say? It could’ve been pretty dark in here while they were working, and this clearing seems to be directly in the center of two light sources.” He points at the two flat fixtures in the ceiling on either side of us. “Unless they were looking for it, it could easily have been missed. Like we said before, this isn’t on any map.”
I nod, agreeing with his assessment. “And you said each one has its own power source, right?”
“Yeah…?” he says, his tone questioning where I’m going with this.
“If we can get to one of the fixtures, you think we could pull it out and take it in there with us? It would save us from having to burn anything.
He looks down at me and his face goes soft. “I fucking love your brain,” he tells me quietly, his eyes twinkling.
I feel my face flush and I smile shyly. “It works sometimes,” I reply.
“Seems like it works a hell of a lot of the time,” he corrects, and next thing I know, he’s spinning me by the shoulders and I’m up on his, being hoisted into the air once again. “Up you go, love.” He holds his hands up to me, and this time I know the drill. I place my palms in his, lift my feet to his shoulders, and stand, so easily this time it’s like we’re stunt doubles in the movie Bring It On. “Can you reach it?” he asks from below, after he comes flush with the corner made out of a stone wall on one side, and another made of bones perpendicular.
I reach my hand out, but it’s about three feet away, and too high out of my grasp. “No. Son of a bitch,” I gripe.
“How high are the rest of the skeletal remains inside the femur and tibia walls?”
“To the top,” I say. My turn to wonder where his line of thinking is going.
“It’s stacked completely full?” he questions.
“Yeees,” I drawl. “It looks almost flat on top it’s so packed.”
“Crawl across the top.”
“Dean, I—”
“Would you rather burn bones and risk bad juju, my voodoo queen, or crawl across carefully, only risking snapping a couple collarbones and fingers?” he cuts me off.
“Uuuugggh,” I groan. “I hate you a little right now. Just so you know.”
“Well then we have a love/hate relationship right now, baby. Now get your sexy ass up there,” he commands, and my eyes widen. Did he just—
He doesn’t give me time to think about it, as he grasps my ankles and starts to lift me, forcing my hands to come down on the wall of leg bones to catch myself.
They’re a lot steadier than I expected. Where I had assumed it would feel like a fragile Jenga tower, wobbly and unstable, they’re so tightly stacked that it doesn’t even budge. When my knees are just above the wall, I bend them and press my kneecaps to the remains, being careful as I walk my hands out past the long, smoke-colored tibias and femurs and onto the pile beyond. I feel Dean let go of my ankles and look up. I’ll only have to crawl out into the moat of skeletons just a little ways to reach one of the light fixtures.
Being as careful as I possibly can, I creep across the remains, trying not to think about the fact my hands are landing on human pelvises, feet, digits… Oh God, what is that? A vertebra? “Just keep moving,” I whisper to myself, and a few more paces forward, I’m directly under the light. I stand up on my knees, walking my hands up the stone wall, and when I’m balanced, I reach for the clear cover across the light source. Whatever the material, and whatever they’ve used as the bulb, it’s surprisingly cool. I was expecting it to be hot after being on for so many hours. I get my fingernails between the ceiling and the cover and pull. It pops off with ease.
I try not to look directly into the bright bulb, and reach in to figure out how to disconnect it. Feeling around, there’s a small box between the bulb and the stone, so I grasp it and tug gently. The whole thing comes out in my hand, the only thing remaining a tiny black cord I now see strung between the lights around the perimeter of the chamber. It hadn’t been visible from the ground.
I call down to Dean, “I’ve got it, but there’s a little cord attached.”
“Just pull it out. It’s what connects all of them to the solar panel they’re attached to outside,” his voice echoes from below.
“It won’t turn the light off?” I clarify.
“No. Once it’s disconnected, we’ll still have a good five hours of light out of it,” he assures.
“And once I disconnect it, will it make all the other lights shut off?” I question nervously.
“No, love. They’re all separate fixtures. You probably can’t tell, but each one gets a cord of its own, they’re just strung together so you don’t see them from the ground,” he promises.
In this moment, it dawns on me that I love how patient he is with me. He never rushes me, never brushes off my questions, never seems put out when I ask a million of them. And when he answers them, he’s never condescending. There’s so much I could learn from him, and he’d be such a wonderful teacher.
“You got it, Em?” he calls up to me.
I pull the cord out of the small box attached to the bulb, and all the lights, including the one in my hand, stay on, just as he promised. “Got it!”
“Awesome. Now, get back down here. I don’t like not being able to see you.” I barely make out that last part, as if he wasn’t saying it to me, but more to himself, yet with the hollowness of the chamber, his words drift up to me, blanketing me and making me feel protected, cared for… loved.
It’s a little harder to crawl across the bones on my knees and only one hand, but eventually I get to the edge and peek over the side, seeing him looking up while he waits for me. I smile down at him.
“Well, hey there, beautiful,” he says softly, a gentle smile of his own playing on his lips.
“Hi,” I reply dumbly. “Now how do I get down?”
“Hand me the light,” he instructs, holding his hand up. I reach down and place it into his open palm, watching as he takes it to the open doorway and sets it on the ground, not taking the time to look inside before hurrying back over to me. That makes me pause again. He didn’t sneak a look into an entrance that hasn’t been open in over a hundred years. Instead, he rushes to stand below me and lifts his arms, saying, “Okay, now sit on the edge then jump down to me. I’ve got you, love.”
I don’t even hesitate. Like a reversed trust fall, I gingerly lower my butt to the leg bone outer wall and then launch myself off. Dean catches me with ease, and I wrap my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck, and then kiss the ever-loving hell out of him. I don’t know what comes over me, but I take over his lips like a woman possessed, and I don’t stop, even as I feel him move. The next thing I know, my back is against the stone wall as he grinds his hardness against my throbbing heat. He breaks our kiss to move his mouth to my neck, trailing upward to the sensitive place behind
my ear.
“God, what are you doing to me, woman?” he growls low against my flesh, making me shiver.
“I’m… I’m sorry. I ju—”
“Fuck, don’t apologize. I love it. Scares the shit out me, but I love it,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to mine as he continues to thrust against my core, the seam of my jeans setting off fireworks behind my closed eyelids. “I want you so fucking bad. I want to lay you down and kiss you all over. I want to taste you again. God, once just wasn’t enough. So perfect for me. Between the best sex of my life and our flawless connection, I would keep you forever.”
I don’t know how to respond. No one has ever spoken to me like this before. Anything I say won’t do justice to what I’m actually feeling on the inside. Treasured, precious, wanted, beautiful, unselfconscious… almost powerful. His words strengthen me, and for once I don’t care about looking awkward, or feeling silly or worry about if I’m doing something correctly. I just want to feel. Feel what he’s doing to my body, and what he’s repairing inside my very soul.
“As much as I want to fuck you right up against this wall,” he breathes, “I don’t know how much time we have left before they get us out of here. By now, they have to know I’m trapped. I don’t want you to miss your opportunity to make your first of many great discoveries. And I have no doubt, love, as fucking brilliant as you are, there will be many, many more. I’m just happy I get to be with you for your first.”
He kisses me one last time then sets me to my feet, taking my hand and leading me toward the door. I pick up the light and step inside the doorway, taking my first look around.
“A mausoleum,” I exhale, taking in the three walls of floor-to-ceiling white marble, separated into row after row of tombs by vertical and horizontal lines of gold, each burial chamber marked with a golden plaque. Two walls, the one to the left of us and the one straight ahead, are separated into casket-sized tombs, and the one to our right is made into a grid of much smaller squares. I assume this wall is more a columbarium, a burial place for urns full of ashes belonging to people who chose to be cremated. In the center of the room is a stone set of table and benches, looking like it had never been used before.
I make my way to the left wall, holding the light up to read the names written on the plaques, feeling Dean close behind me. “This must be the exclusive part of the catacombs. The part only the most rich and infamous knew about and could buy a resting place,” he mumbles. “Guess they’re not in the second tunnel after all.”
We walk along the perimeter, reading from top to bottom the names of people I haven’t a clue who they were, the dates ranging from the early 1800s to the 1910s, when the catacombs were sealed and forgotten. “The dates aren’t in order, so I guess they didn’t bury them in the order they died,” I observe aloud.
“No, mausoleums are just like graveyards. You pick your own plot,” Dean explains, and I nod. It’s not until we have almost reached the end of second wall that I recognize a name.
“No. Fucking. Way,” I whisper, spinning to face Dean and hiding the plaque behind my ass, my eyes wild with astonishment and excitement.
“What?” He grins. “What did my beautiful little genius discover now?”
“Since I can remember, it’s always been a rumor that the tomb in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1 wasn’t actually her real burial place.” I pause for dramatic effect, enjoying the mirth dancing in his eyes. “Behold, Mr. Savageman. I give you… the final resting place of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau,” I say, and slide aside, allowing him to read the gold sign with her name and 1794 - 1881 engraved in the center.
His mouth drops open, and I’m so thrilled at what I found I do a pirouette, the light in my hand spinning along with me. When I stop, the name the spotlight lands on catches my eye, and I nearly trip trying to run toward it. “Holy shit!”
“You’re kidding me. Who is it this time?” Dean chuckles, catching my arm to steady me.
“We're devils and black sheep, we're really bad eggs. Drink up me 'earties, yo ho,” I sing. “Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!” I hand him the light, jump away, and start doing the running man dance, watching him shine along one of the rows of tombs until he lands on the name.
“Jean fucking Lafitte,” he hisses, and he turns to face me, where I’m now doing a combo of the running man with the shopping cart. “But he was buried at sea in the Gulf of Honduras.”
“Apparently not. New Orleans was his favorite city. It makes sense he would be buried here. Either that, or we just found his missing buried treasure. Yaarg!” I exclaim, and launch myself toward him, kissing him soundly on the lips before taking the light back out of his hand and making my way to the wall of smaller tombs.
Each one is about six-by-six inches, and as I count, up and then across, I see it is twenty-five chambers high and thirty across. So many tombs. It almost looks like a giant wall of mailboxes when you go to a post office. Abruptly, my enthusiasm plummets along with my stomach, and I feel my happy smile fall as well. “How in the hell are we going to find this damn ring?” I murmur, stepping back and taking in this side of the room as a whole.
Suddenly, I’m exhausted, and I plop onto my ass, right there on the ground instead of the stone bench a few feet away, and stare up at the white marble grid. Dean comes to sit beside me, wraps his arm around my shoulders, and pulls me in to his side. “Don’t get discouraged now, love. We’re right here. It has to be here, in this chamber. All the clues have led us to this exact spot,” he reminds me, and I let out a sigh.
“I’m just so tired.” I look at the watch on his wrist, seeing it’s well past six in the morning. I’ve now been awake for twenty-four hours, running on pure adrenaline for the past six since I got trapped in the tunnels with Dean.
“I know. I’m right there with you. When we get out of here, I just want to take you back to my hotel, curl up with you in my king-sized, fluffy, Egyptian-cotton-covered bed, and sleep for a week. After we shower first, of course.” He kisses the top of my head then rests his cheek there, and my heart flutters at the thought of us showering together, and then cuddling up… in a bed… outside the catacombs. It’s both exciting and terrifying at the same time.
“Dean, I…” My words trail off. I don’t really know what to say to that. He always says such sweet, overwhelming things to me, and then my brain can’t form the words to respond. But I need to. I need to find the words, because our time together in the catacombs will soon be coming to an end. “Soon, we’ll be out of here. We’re going to have to go back to reality.”
“Yes. And…?” he prompts.
I don’t look at him. Speaking my mind about this subject is tough enough. There’s no way I’d be able to do it while looking into those amazing eyes.
“When… when we get out, things will go back to normal. I-I mean, I know you’ll be with me through everything when we get rescued. Through the news reporters, and then everything about our discovery—”
“Your discovery,” he interrupts.
I push my hair behind my ear and look into my lap. “My discovery. But then, after that. After that, I’ll just go back to being me. Holed up in my room, working on my blog. I might get lucky and be allowed into sites, now that I have this under my belt, so yay for that. But still.” I clear my throat, trying to find more words for what’s inside my head. “Out there, I’m not brave. Shit, this is the first time I’ve ever broken the law. I’ve never broken a single rule my entire life. Out there, it’s scary. The world scares me. The only thing that doesn’t scare me is these abandoned, sometimes spooky places that would normally scare everyone else. And now that I think about it, maybe that’s why I like them. Because no one else wants them.”
I take a deep breath and confess the rest of my fears running through my mind. “You’ll go back to being you. The rock star of documentaries. Chased by women everywhere you go. Girls constantly offering themselves up to you, completely public on social media, right there for the world to see.” I glance u
p at him, a sad smile on my face. “You know, that’s another rule in our drinking game. ‘Take a shot every time a chick asks you to marry her while you Live Tweet during a new episode.’ We had to change the rule from ‘every time a girl propositions you,’ because that made us drink way too much.”
I gaze back down at my lap, not able to hold his stare. “I’m not like them. I’m not a flirtatious kind of person. I’m not brazenly sexy. I’m an admittedly socially awkward nerd who had to be told that your boner was caused because you actually wanted me. I’m… I’ll never be like them,” I whisper, feeling tears fill my eyes and trying my best to blink them back before they have a chance to fall.
“You done?” Dean asks, and his sharp but somewhat amused tone makes my eyes snap back to his.
“I—”
“Yeah. You’re done,” he cuts me off. “That’s the last I’m going to listen to you put yourself down.” He wraps his arms around my hips, and then lifts and spins me, sitting me down on his lap, my legs straddling him. I bite my lip, unable to meet his eyes. I don’t want him to see how emotional this has made me. “You think I want anyone else?”
A tear falls, and I sniffle, mortified I couldn’t hold back the damn feelings roiling inside me. I feel his finger under my chin as he tries to lift my face, but I turn to the side instead.
“Look at me, my beautiful, brilliant girl. Don’t shut me out now,” he begs, and it’s the sincerity in his tone that finally draws my eyes to his. “You think I’m this womanizing, philandering libertine, and maybe I was once. But I’m not that guy anymore. Haven’t been for a long-ass time. There’s nothing out there—or inside one of these sites—that scares me more than the thought of losing you. From the moment I kissed you that very first time, felt you in my arms, how perfectly you fit against me… I knew there was no version of my life without you in it.”
I suck in a breath, my lip trembling as fast as my heart is pounding inside my chest. “You… you can’t possibly know that, Dean. We haven’t even known each other a whole day. Relationships formed during crazy circumstances don’t last. You don’t even know who I am outside these catacombs. It’s not a promise you can make,” I breathe, the tears falling freely now, because what he said makes me realize the thought of losing him is scarier than anything else I’ve ever experienced before.