7
THE HABSBURG CATACOMBS
Robin
Vinci, Louisiana
October 31st, 2014
Time: 8:00 AM
____________________________
Te dejaron quemar, Petirrojo.
They left you to burn, Robin.
The angels of the Catacombs wept. In their cherubic silence, blood streamed down their stony visages and draped their frilly wings in carmine. Dark as the rose; their faces bland and somber as their creamy white faces were smeared in the sins of Robinʼs guilt. The depth of the obsidian soles of their eyes showed no comfort, no beauty, just a blackness, and she watched. Watched the blackness that permeated, that radiated, that stung her deep in her core. The blood flowed like ichor from the Gods, silently trickling down the cracked curves of harsh contours of the cryptʼs floors, and as the sun burned in the darkness – smoke dying in the wintry mist – Robin felt her.
La voz.
Te ataron a la estaca, a la cruz, y te dejaron arder.
They tied you to the stake, to the cross, and they left you to burn.
The night was dark in its satin expenditures, perfuming the Scottish moon in a shadowy mist that growled overhead. Snarling against the sky in an assault of abusive lightning, bruising thunder, Robin became her, knife in hand. Underneath the canopy of the murky sky, the silver threads of moonlight trying to break the sheen of the eve, Robinʼs knife, la vozʼs knife, drank in the malice as she did. Choking on the blood of the noble Englishwoman before her as Robin choked on the sight of the Englishwomanʼs throat, her ut*rus, her body; defiled with the curdles of her v*rginʼs blood. The high was intoxicating, the pleasure numbing, and as she stared deeply, she looked ahead.
Hágales sangrar.
Make them bleed.
Like a predator – a predator with eyes black as the night – Robin staggered over Desdemonaʼs corpse. Hungry, ravenous. Watching, waiting. Her obsidian black curls spilled over her hourglass form, rotting her gilded physique with the ruin of Robinʼs knife. There was a calm that fluttered over her as the queenʼs body stilled into a murmur of labored breath and weakening respirations. A curiosity that only festered, only grew, only made her hungrier. Panting, she watched Desdemonaʼs crooked, crimson smile greet the Heavens, her sickly, pale face caked in her blood, her riveting blood, her divine blood.
En tierra de ciegos, la tuerta es reina, mi pequeño petirrojo.
Remember that, my little Robin.
"Robin!"
Listening to Lafayette trod into the Catacombs, full of dissonance, full of cacophony, she found herself crouched at the entrance of the crypt, she winced as blood pooled out of her palm. She had scraped her hand against a rock, where the blood came out thick and hot, and as she rose to her shaky feet, she felt Lafayette exhale profusely. Gasping against the wintry tombʼs mercilessness. The Catacombs, the burial of all the descendants of Štefania and Svetla Habsburg, the brutish Oedipal Lovers of her familyʼs history on her fatherʼs side, it was always cold, always frosty. She felt the ghosts of her ancestors make warmth ebb away with the dimming of the lights, and as she wrapped her palm with a torn piece of her ACDC tank, she tucked that painful memory away with all the others.
"Sorry, I spaced out," she muttered, her breath coming out in frosty little clouds. "You bring the stuff, La?"
Lafayette eyed the cut suspiciously, handing her an assault rifle and a leather bound backpack.
"Shoʼ did," he told her, skepticism ridiculing his voice. "Now, before you do anythinʼ you gonʼ regret, can we leave?"
The Catacombs were a network of caves. When Christopher Columbus brutalized the West, he had sent witches he was enamored by to solidify his family history; his familyʼs legacy. The constant reminder of winter was cold and harsh and fresh in the Catacombsʼ mind, and as she felt the silky black winds sing in haunting echo, she waited. Waited for ice to magically rise by itself, arming the ground with its spears and its spikes, waited for the howls to shake the walls, waited from the demons from Hevene to come and play. She waited for this land, supernatural, preternatural land, conceived from the blood and the bones of those cannibalized in the cruel winters...she waited for it to come to life.
A dark, dastardly thing like she was.
"Oh, come on. I thought the big, bad, Lafayette Royce wasnʼt afraid of the dark," Robin mocked.
She stepped inside.
Chiseled granite mounted towards the sky, carved in the images of the kings and queens that lived before her. Cunning and ruthless. Their eyes were a gelatinous black, thick and copious and large in size, a demonic black that knew no bounds, and as she walked, Lafayette snorted.
"What? Iʼm supposed to be satisfied beinʼ a short order cook at a few oʼ the fae restaurants in Louisiana, and beinʼ a bouncer at all the heterosexual, Jesus lovinʼ cringey clubs in Baton Rouge? When the Hellbenders write you a twenty thousand dollar check to go kill some roaches, you donʼt ask any questions, you take the d*mn check. Besides, ainʼt you seen the show? You know, the one witʼ the two brothers and the gay angel?"
"Supernatural?"
"Yes! That one," Lafayette told her, stepping over a crater of protruding ice in his fluffy leopard-skinned jacket with a frown.
"First thing that show teaches you: you donʼt f*ck with dead folk, and you donʼt f*ck with graves," Lafayette seethed. "Teenagers that go screw in haunted houses? Dead. Kids breakinʼ into one oʼ those unmarked graves? Dead. Go into some Marie Laveau lookinʼ coven? Dead. Fucks with a dude named Jeffrey? Dead and youʼre a creepy white boyʼs dinner. On my mamaʼs grave, Robin Marie, on my mamaʼs grave am I gonʼ be next."
Robin paused, frowning.
"Jeffrey Dahmer was from Ohio," she told him.
"Well, with these rednecksʼ education, we may as well be from motherf*ckinʼ Ohio," Lafayette told her, cringing at a sac of spider eggs coagulating against the ice: breeding, mating.
Robin rolled her eyes.
"Come on," Robin told him.
The flashlight mounted her assault rifle, feeding off the darkness. Staring into the abyss, she watched the smoky blackness envelop the Catacombs. With every step she took, the temperature dropped down ten more degrees, at least, and as their descent into the Catacombs grew darker, she saw them above an empty coffin. High above, for all the world to see: spirits. Glowing an incandescent white. They circled around the Catacombs, devouring the vitality of their youth, desperate to suck the jovial color from their flesh. The blood on the floor was sacred, as sacred as marriage, and as the dead danced, Robin imbibed its color. Indulged. Drank in the venom, the freshly spilled sanguine blood, its lifeline like a wine.
"Sh*t!"
Robin pulled the lid of the coffin up off the granite tomb, and watched as it shattered into an explosion of dust and rock. Blood trickled down the coffin, bursting from the seams, and as Robin frantically wiped off the dust on the sides with her jacket, splashed in fresh blood, she read the name:
REINA SANTIAGO
June 1988 to February 2002
"Sh*t!"
"Robin, you canʼt be sayinʼ sh*t like that! You say that, somethingʼs wrong, and if somethingʼs wrong, that means Iʼm gonʼ die! I ainʼt ready to die!"
Robin shoved her hands into the bloodied coffin. Hands turning blue from the lack of circulation, she grabbed the head of a woman with marigold curls, her sunken skeleton pale and creamy against the blood. Gasping, Robin felt her dying pulse race through her hands, surging against them, a rapidly played instrument awaiting a heartbeat, and her hands froze from the pressure of the cold. Shaking, wracked with tremors. The unnamed Southern woman bled in a gloriously horrifying fashion, blood slicing out of her body to greet the earth, gushing out of her mouth in hot, heavy spurts as fear clamped around Lafayette, around her, and threatened to elicit screams of terror.
Robin stared at the corpse, the blood soaking her entire body and the frost leeching off warm, buttery skin. The realization hit her in waves of grief, and as Lafayette wordless screams droned in her ears, she sat in her silence. Shook beyond belief. The darkness descended on the walls, and the angel that cried blood stared at Robin with a hollowness as it did, swallowing the Southern corpse as the carnage had swallowed Robin in one foul sweep.
Reina Santiago was alive.
But Robin remembered when she died. She had drank in her blood, consumed her flesh. She felt her body go limp, her veins soften, her throat tighten. She had tasted her last words; she had watched her die.
En tierra de ciegos, la tuerta es reina, mi pequeño petirrojo.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen, my little robin.
Reina Santiago was alive.
And she was a dead man walking.
"Robin, what the f*ck is happening?"
Blood splashed Lafayetteʼs face when she ripped the womanʼs arm from her shoulder. As her claws feasted with the ferocity of a raw storm, she ripped her leather jacket from her shoulder and wrapped the appendage into it, watching it leak blood in long, flowing, beautiful arcs of art. Pointing a gun at her, Lafayette watched Robin rise to her feet and tuck the hand in her bag. She shivered at the cold, her skin losing color, and as she stared at Lafayette, the darkness sheʼd known – the isolating, visceral darkness – it returned, spearing her through the chest with racing heartbeats.
"If you value your life and the forty-thousand-dollar check Iʼm going to write you, you didnʼt see anything. Do you understand, Lafayette?" Robin told him, speaking slowly, cautiously.
Dangerously.
"If you value your life and the forty-thousand-dollar Iʼm going to write you, you didnʼt see anything. Do you understand, Lafayette?"
Silence. Trembling, shaking, tears in his eyes.
"I said do you understand?"
"Y-yes."
"Good. Do you trust me?"
"Baby girl, you cannot be askinʼ me this sh*t now–"
"Lafayette, I need to know now. Do you trust me? With your life?"
Lafayette stared at her, gun still pointed at her face. The blood crowned her as it would a queen, and the fact she didnʼt flinch...it terrified Lafayette. Made his bones shake against his skin. But when she stared at him, eyes watery with tears, clinging desperately to the floor, he cursed himself.
"Oʼ course, Robin."
With the blood, she drew the symbol of the Destroyer against the ground in her blood. Kneeling on the ground, her fingers pressed into the floor; her arms and biceps crying out in pain, incineration marks and third degree burns decorating her arms in white, white, white. Gripping Lafayette, she chanted and gripped Lafayetteʼs hand and watched her skin burn, and bleed, the way la voz forewarned:
Double, double toil and trouble:
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
I look upon ye Weïrd Sisters,
And make a simple plea:
Bath, o Bath,
Turn your back to the heavens.
Bath, o Bath,
Turn your front to me.