Good Vibrations Magazine

Crypta and Damien were watching on the wrong side of the streetcar, so they missed their stop.

They yelled polite obscenities at the driver — “fucking stop, please, Mr. Driver, goddamn it” — until finally, groaning, he stopped. They hopped off the streetcar and hoofed the two blocks back to the cemetery, dripping sweat. It was a hot, muggy late afternoon — a December heat wave. Where the hell else would something like that happen for Christmas break?

“Ohmigod,” said Crypta in her patented San Fernando Valley accent (Damien had thought they’d gone out with the 1980s until he met Crypta). “I am so totally drippy!” In response to Damien’s lascivious raising of the eyebrows and waggling of the tongue, Crypta giggled and swatted her boyfriend on the head. “Not like that, you sicko!” Then she took his hand and nuzzled it affectionately. “I mean, yeah, that way too. But I mean I’m like sweating like a pig, y’know?” She plucked at her faded black-to-gray Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, which was soaked through with sweat.

“Oh, that,” drawled Damien. “Yeah, no shit. It’s like a columbarium.”

“Hey, don’t flirt,” giggled Crypta, nibbling at Damien’s palm. “I mean, don’t flirt unless you mean it.”

Damien emitted a dry chuckle, and would have grabbed Crypta’s ass if he hadn’t felt so miserable. His black bondage pants and Bauhaus T-shirt were soaked through with sweat; it looked like he’d wet his pants or maybe fallen in a lake. The fact that he’d left his last pair of underwear at the bus station wasn’t helping, but those damn things had passed their sell-by date about a week ago. He was dying to take off his dripping T-shirt, but there was that jailhouse tattoo he had from his last girlfriend Miranda — and he didn’t want to discuss it with Crypta, at least not in public.

Damien sneaked a sniff under his arm and immediately regretted it. Both he and Crypta smelled pretty rank — it felt like he’d been holding his breath since Texas.

“It’s like totally disgusting,” said Crypta, and Damien felt a surge of embarrassment until he realized she was still talking about the heat, not his pits. “I can’t believe I’m sweating like this,” she bemoaned, slyly if somewhat indelicately reaching under her short black skirt and plucking her soaked underwear out of her ass-crack. It didn’t do much good — in fact, it sort of made things worse. “How do you Southerners get used to it?”

“Don’t ask me,” snapped Damien uncharitably. “I’m from West Virginia.” Crypta made that mistake often, only vaguely understandable because of Damien’s heavy drawl — his father was from Texas.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right, it’s not the South — ” she began; then, “we’re here!” chirped Crypta suddenly, jumping up and down excitedly as she pointed across the street at the entrance to the cemetery. Damien reflected momentarily on the fact that his new girlfriend was way too perky to be a proper Goth, but then she giggled again in that fetching way of hers and wrapped her arms around him, reminding Damien for the umpteenth time today that she wasn’t wearing a bra under that wet T-shirt, even if she, um, maybe should have been. As Crypta hugged and kissed him, Damien felt the stiffness of her nipples pressing against his chest — how she managed to get hard nipples in weather like this was beyond him. But feeling them against him like that made him want to find out. The acute awareness of Crypta’s firm tits whooshed through him like a shot of that green stuff they’d had in that drag bar the night before — and suddenly Damien was pressing Crypta against the lamppost, his hands on her breasts, his tongue eagerly exploring her mouth as she whimpered slightly and writhed against him. They’d only fucked once — in an alley behind a supermarket — since Tucumcari, when they’d spare-changed enough to get a $16.95 motel room and fucked six times until the manager finally had to knock on the door and ask them to quiet down. Then they’d slept luxuriously, tangled in the cheap stiff hotel sheets, and done it six more times — well, OK, maybe it was only three, but Damien wished it could have been six, and if it wasn’t for the fucking check-out time it would have been — I mean, doesn’t it seem like paying for a night at a hotel should mean you get it for twenty-four hours? God damn capitalist bastards. Damien was a communist, or at least he thought he might become one when he got back to school after winter break. UCLA’s famed left-wing Professor Miriam Antworthy had sure made a lot of sense to Damien in that Intro to PoliSci class she’d taught, though Damien did have to admit his receptiveness to Professor Antworthy’s pseudo-Randian, libertarian post-Glasnost Marxism might have been influenced by the fact that she was a bewitching raven-haired thirtysomething with a penchant for blood-red lipstick and the fashion sense of Morticia Addams, not to mention the fact that Antworthy’s class was where he’d met Crypta, who once let him fingerfuck her in the back of the room during a guest lecture. He was still surprised they hadn’t gotten caught that time.

“Ohmigod, you’re like totally turning me on,” said Crypta breathily when Damien’s tongue finally left her mouth. “I’m getting totally wet, I mean, yeah, that way — ” with a giggle ” — I’m getting wet both ways — God, you want to get us arrested?” She slipped out from between Damien and the lamppost, took his hand and dragged him toward the cemetery. “I mean, ohmigod, if you keep that kind of stuff I’m going to rip your clothes off and fuck you right here, and then we’ll never get back to LA! My sister’ll have to drive up from Gainesville and bail us out!” Crypta made a vain attempt to straighten her clothes.

But then, “Do you have a hard on?” she asked in a wicked whisper, leaning over so she could put her warm lips against his ear while she asked him. As if she couldn’t wait for the answer, she reached out and deftly grabbed the front of his bondage pants, which were pretty stretchy and really didn’t leave a whole lot to wonder about. A priest walked by with a scandalized expression on his face. Crypta giggled and licked the side of Damien’s neck.

“Mmmm,” she said. “Salty.”

#

“Ohmigod,” said Crypta as they stood at the entrance to the St. Louis Cemetery #1. “I’ve been fantasizing about this moment all my life. This calls for a new piece of gum.” Crypta made a deafening whooping sound as she spat her gun neatly into a corner garbage can, its arrival punctuated by the kind of bonging noise that Damien might have expected from an Old West-style spittoon or, perhaps, a church bell. Crypta opened up her Munsters lunchbox and broke out one of the packs of H.P. Lovecraft Trading Cards they’d shoplifted from that head shop in Corpus Christi. “Excellent, I got Cthulhu!” she cheered as she rammed the sickly-green stick of gum into her mouth and, before she’d finished three chews, produced a lit clove from her lunchbox. Damien still couldn’t figure out how she always did that so quickly.

“Ready?” Crypta asked, grabbing Damien’s shoulder and shaking it violently in anticipation.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” said Damien, breaking out his own pack of Black Deaths and lighting one with the Green Beret lighter his Dad had given him for his twelfth birthday. “Good to go,” he sneered, feeling military.

“I love it when you talk dirty,” said Crypta, and the two of them stepped forward, into the land of the dead.

#

“Ohmigod, this is so cool,” said Crypta. “It’s nothing like Forest Lawn.” Damien mused that Crypta was right — it was indeed nothing like the grotesque supermall of the dead, L.A.’s Forest Lawn, where the two of them had had sex the first time — no small task in the high-tech, well-patrolled modern cemetery. St. Louis Cemetery had that air that so much of New Orleans had, like it had been here long before you were born and it would be here long after you were dead, enduring through swampy corrosion and decay until it spontaneously dissolved into one big moldering lump about ten thousand years into the future, mostly unchanged from the late 1700s. Damien had to admire the place, and it made Crypta positively goofy with ecstasy.

“Because of the high water table in New Orleans,” Crypta quoted the battered 1983 edition of a New Orleans guidebook she’d picked up for a quarter at a thrift store when she was 13, “Bodies are not buried in the ground, but are interred aboveground in stone crypts.” Crypta shivered and clutched Damien’s arm excitedly. “Oh, isn’t this wonderful?” They roamed up and down the pathways among the fortunate dead, Crypta skimming the gravestones and reading the interesting ones out loud. Damien was just glad to be somewhere it was relatively quiet.

“I thought there’d be more tourists,” mused Damien. “It’s practically deserted.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” hummed Crypta, and Damien wondered what deviance her mind was cooking up, though it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Damien played dumb and restricted his commentary to a faint smirk.

“Ohmigod,” said Crypta as they arrived at a big stone block with three empty slots in it. The slots, of course, were almost exactly the size of coffins, and had not been filled in yet for some reason.

“I wonder why there’s no one in here,” wondered Damien. “Did the guy not die yet?”

Crypta pointed at the square stone slab leaning up against the side of the tomb. It was the same dimensions as the front of the opening of the individual vault.

Patrick John Hayes
Beloved Husband and Father
1760-1828

“Eighteen twenty-eight?” asked Damien dubiously.

“He died,” said Crypta wickedly. “I guess they took him out for some reason.”

“No. No. No. Oh my God, that’s gross.”

“I don’t think it’s gross,” said Crypta. “I mean, if he was still in there and it was open, then, sure, that’d be gross. But I think it’s kind of cool. We can see beyond the grave — literally.”

“You’re a freak,” said Damien with a smile.

“Who cares?” Crypta giggled. “I’m going in.”

Damien’s jaw fell. “No,” he said. “No, you can’t. And “No, you absolutely can’t.” Then, “No, don’t. I’m begging you, don’t. You can’t do it. It’s not right,” and finally “Well, then do it alone,” he said.

Crypta pressed her body against Damien’s, and once again he felt the curve of her breasts, the stiffness of her nipples against his chest, the slope of her thigh as it snuggled its way between his legs and nudged his cock.

“All alone?” she cooed as she kissed him, her tongue tracing a faint outline on his closed lips. “All alone? But Damien… lover… it gets so lonely in the grave… and I’ll be all… alone…” Then, “Mmmmm… but I see you’ll be thinking of me,” murmured Crypta as she felt Damien’s cock stirring against her stroking thigh. She reached down to stroke his cock through his bondage pants, wrapping her slender fingers around the rapidly hardening bulge.

Damien knew he was going to regret this.

#

Damien put his hands together and offered Crypta a leg-up through the opening. She neatly slithered through into darkness, and Damien felt his blood surging as he caught a fleeting look up Crypta’s skirt. Nothing he hadn’t seen a million times, but it still gave him an amazing charge. Crypta settled into the cramped space, dragging her lunchbox along with her (it made a horrible noise rubbing metal-against-stone). She got comfortable and said in a stage-whisper, “OK, now you too. There’s room.”

Damien took a deep breath and asked himself for the tenth time what he was doing. Wasn’t this sort of defiling the dead or something? He promised himself that he’d climb in there just to make Crypta happy — but he would not do what she was thinking they were going to do. What they’d done at Forest Lawn. What she always wanted to do in graveyards. He simply wouldn’t do it.

Damien took a deep breath, grabbed hold of the edge of the tomb and, using only his arms, hauled himself into the darkness of the tomb, feeling his hard-on brush the stone as he climbed. He wriggled his way deeper, feeling Crypta’s fishnet-sheathed legs against him.

#

The tiny space was filled with a strange, dark, sweet smell. The smell of bones? Damien wondered.

Damien’s first sensation was of Crypta wriggling against him; her skirt pulled up slightly by her shiftings. His second sensation was the feel of satin against his mouth — and he smelled Crypta’s pussy, sharp, musky and rank.

“How’d you get those off?” he whispered desperately.

“I’m a contortionist,” she whispered back. “Remember?”

He felt her rubbing the soaked satin over his face and immediately his hard-on pulsed back into existence — with a vengeance. Crypta teased the crotch of her panties into Damien’s mouth and he could taste her cunt, rich and dark. Then Damien felt Crypta’s breasts against him, her mouth on his, pressing through the crotch of her panties and shoving them deeper; then the panties were falling away and Crypta was kissing him, just her hot tongue on his and her teeth nipping at his lower lip as her wet lips slavered all over, and her hand on his cock, squeezing, as they tried to move in the cramped space. Damien’s arms were wedged down between them, and it took some work for him to get them around Crypta, and to take her ripe ass in his hands as she snuggled up her short skirt with the hand that wasn’t busy on his cock. Damien took hold of her firm ass-cheeks and caressed them, slipping a hand forward between her cheeks and finding her pussy — tight with heat and dripping, soaking, slick with want.

“The grave’s a fine and private place,” quoth Damien.

“Not any more,” said Crypta, pulling her T-shirt up over her tits and pressing her bare breasts against him. “Now it’s a party.”

#

It wasn’t easy at first, getting Crypta’s leg up over his he could reach between her thighs and slide his finger into her. He thought once about how filthy his finger probably was, and then forced himself to forget it — because Crypta was moaning softly and wetly in his ear and getting his pants open with one hand while rubbing his bulge with the other. He craned his neck so he could take one of her hard nipples in his mouth, licking and sucking and nibbling at it as the salt taste filled his mouth. Then Crypta had his cock out, and her hand was sliding up and down on it, lubricated by his sweat. For some reason Damien had thought the grave would be cold — but now he was hot, hotter even than he’d been before, walking in the sun, and as Crypta stroked him there was more and more sweat to lubricate with. And Crypta was producing plenty of lubrication of her own, with two of Damien’s fingers sliding in and out of her cunt and her rubbing the head of his cock against her clit. She tucked her leg further over his hip, snaking her booted foot around between his thighs so she could pull herself on top of him.

How she’d gotten a condom out of her lunch box and gotten it on him without his noticing, Damien would never know. But she had, and there was no need for lube as Crypta snuggled her tight, dripping-wet pussy down on the thick head of Damien’s cock. Damien moaned softly as Crypta pushed him into her. Her cunt swelled and throbbed with the heat. Damien bit his lip to keep from crying out as Crypta began thrusting his cock in and out of her — and somehow she got the soaked Sisters of Mercy T-shirt off and guided one of her ample tits to Damien’s mouth, letting him suckle as she fucked her pussy down onto his cock. Damien bit Crypta’s nipple, and she whispered “harder,” and then “harder” and “harder” again until she cried out in pain and pleasure, and then cried louder, and Damien brought his hips up to meet hers, knowing from the rhythm of her thrusts that she was going to come — she always came fast in this position — and he pumped faster and faster up into her until he felt ht muscles of her vagina spasming around his cock, felt the shudder of Crypta’s body as she finished coming. With some difficulty, Damien managed to roll her over without letting his latex-sheathed cock slip out of her pussy, and he settled on top of her and began fucking her, hard and deep, long strokes into her cunt as she moaned and whimpered under him, wrapping her legs around his to pull him close and hard with every thrust, and then Damien was coming too, clutching Crypta close to him and shivering as his cock spasmed inside her.

The two of them lay there, quiet, their breathing labored in the tiny space. It was becoming uncomfortably hot in the tiny chamber, but Damien had started to like it. As he and Crypta began to kiss again, they suddenly heard a chorus of giggles outside.

“What the fuck?” snapped Damien, instinctively raising his head and hitting it.

“Oooooh,” said Crypta, putting her hand gently on Damien’s head as he tried to crane his neck to get a look outside.

Then the lights went out.

They heard the giggles — children’s giggles — and then sneakered footsteps as the cemetery attendant shouted at them to get lost. The mischievous little fuckers had heard them, spotted them, and somehow hoisted Patrick Hayes’ gravestone into place, locking them in. “Son of a bitch,” said Damien, and Crypta giggled, even as the two of them realized that the shouting from the cemetery attendant was coming from right outside the crypt.

“God damn kids,” came the muffled voice. “Don’t have respect for nothing.”

The two of them knew there was no way they could get their clothes back on without attracting more attention. And here they were, in flagrante.

“Uh-oh,” said Crypta.

“Shhhhh.”

Silently, the two of them waited in the grave. Fine, but not private.

Thomas S. Roche’s short stories have appeared in such anthologies as the Best American Erotica series and The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. His short story collections include Sucker Punches and Dark Matter. He loves New Orleans but lives in San Francisco, where he recently finished his first novel, Violent Angel.