The walls smell like stale rain and mildew, and the darkness weighs heavily upon me like a hundred-pound rug. I cannot move. I cannot push it off. It is staggeringly heavy, and I am so weary.

There is a spider slowly crawling upon my left cheek and my hands won't move to brush it off. Inside, I am horrified as it comes closer to my open eye. God, where am I? Where is everyone? Why won't someone brush it off?! I want to scream. God, please help me. God.

I can hear them outside putting things on top of it. I can hear them scratching on the side of it. I have gone mad.

“C'mon, how long has it been darling since we've gone off together? Just you and me? No kids, no parents. No dog… we need this time together, Vidhya,” Varun said.

“But New Orleans? I've never really wanted to go there, Varun,” I replied. “The bars and the strip clubs -- really like going away to a seedy joint somewhere… and those girls -- the ones who bare their breasts all over the place for beads. Ugh!”

However, we needed the break badly and ended up buying the tickets the next day. We'd been working 12-hour days at our jobs non-stop on project after project for the past year; but this weekend we were free for a blessed 48 hours. My mother had taken the kids and given us some time to share together.

Varun convinced me, really -- but his memory of New Orleans was a wonderful one -- the grace of the old Victorian and Greek Revival, as well as shotgun style homes (narrow with room after room from front to back), the flowing blues and jazz, the friendly people and the artists on Jackson Square -- and of course, beignets at Café du Monde, open 24 hours a day -- those wonderful powdered pastries and chicory-laced coffee. The idea was romantic!

We held hands like newlyweds on the plane and I was excited when the plane touched down at New Orleans International Airport. The cab ride was interesting, and on the way to the hotel, the cabbie talked all about the history of the city pointing out the important landmarks.

It was a grey day in September and a short cool rain fell in bursts. The Maison Dupuy is a lovely old ivy-covered hotel near Jackson Square -- very expensive, very old and only 200 rooms on five floors, all with antique, turn-of-the-century furnishings in deep rich cherry and mahogany woods.

We unpacked our clothes and lay on the bed together reading the brochures in the hotel room and trying to decide where to go for dinner. Everything was appealing -- even the cemetery tours and voodoo tours through the French Quarter and the Garden District. We decided to walk around a bit on the famous Bourbon Street, have dinner at the Court of Two Sisters and then perhaps catch one of the cemetery tours.

The cemeteries of New Orleans are a tourist industry by themselves, featured in movies and Anne Rice novels. The oldest standing cemetery is St. Louis No.1, on the edge of the French Quarter. The most famous grave here belongs to Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen.

It is believed that if you go up to Marie's tomb, mark it with three X's (or whatever your magic symbol happens to be), turn around three times, knock three times, place a gift (such as three coins, three oranges, three pieces of candy, etc.) and negotiate your wishes with Marie, it will come true. 

My sisters and I played around as kids with Ouija boards and I loved getting under the covers at night with a scary mystery, so this was right up my alley. Varun was not as excited about the tour -- he wanted to wait and take the Greyline Bus Tour the next morning and see the entire city. He didn't like cemeteries, much less tours of the dark, haunted cemeteries at midnight in crime-ridden areas.  

I love my husband dearly. We have been married for almost 20 years. He is the quiet accountant type and I am the gregarious outspoken one. We're awfully good together -- even through three children and two sets of in-laws, five homes, four jobs, three dogs and various other trials and tribulations. He's my rock… and he probably gives in to my wishes too much! He's simply wonderful.

The French Quarter was pulsating with the sounds of smooth jazz and raucous crowds at 11:45. We'd just finished crème brulee at the Court of Two Sisters -- a lovely caramelized custard dessert -- and we waited for the tour bus to come pick us up outside the restaurant.

The bus arrived, full of midnight adventurers (albeit most were younger) like ourselves. Many were drunk -- those “hurricane” drinks are pretty strong on Bourbon Street! I was feeling a bit tipsy myself and held tightly onto Varun's strong arm. He smiled at me and whispered, “Now, don't you run away anywhere tonight, beautiful.”

The guide stood up at the front of the bus and lit a candle while the bus clambered slowly toward St. Louis No.1. She talked about the history of voodoo (voodun) in New Orleans and particularly about Marie Laveau's influence for about 10 minutes, as well as the history of the famous cemeteries in New Orleans. 

The first white settlers buried their dead in the levee in New Orleans, but the first time it flooded, all the bodies floated into town. (The Indians burned their dead, having realized that the below-sea-level land wasn't suitable for burying.) The next step was burying the bodies in the church, but space was really limited.

A cemetery was set aside at the "back of town," but the water “table” was a problem. Just burying the body didn't work -- after the first rains, it would "bloat and float". Putting additional weight in the coffins, or drilling holes in the coffins to allow drainage, didn't help. Finally the city built a brick wall around the cemetery to contain the bodies when they floated around during the rain. Even that didn't solve the smell problem, so eventually the cemetery (and all the bodies) were moved even further "back o' town" to St. Louis Cemetery No.1.

Here there are three types of tombs. Wall crypts are the simplest, but they cannot be reopened and re-used until a year and a day has passed. At that point, if there are pieces of the coffin that haven't decayed, they are removed, but the rest of the remains (as it were), if any, are swept to the back and the new coffin inserted. Then there are shelf vaults in which the top two shelves are mesh, and as the body and coffin decay, the pieces fall through to the bottom section and the shelves are ready for re-use sooner.  

Finally, there are society vaults in which those who were too poor to pay for their own crypts paid a small amount each month as insurance that they would have a burial crypt. These are circular crypts with shelves around the outside and a central chamber for the collection of the undecayed remains when the shelves around the outside are re-used.

It was all very mysterious and macabre. I loved hearing it all. Varun simply looked out the window. We had arrived at St. Louis No.1.

I leaned back against the tomb. Everyone held a candle and was walking around the crypts talking in hushed voices. Marie Laveau's tomb shone in the darkness and even in this dim moonlight you could see the hundreds of X's people had drawn all over it. There were coins and fruit on the tomb, and scrawled writing in chalk:

  “Please help us, we need money this year,” “Help Dad get over the cancer,” “Send Robert back to me,” and many more.

I felt around in my pocket for change, took out two coins and peered at them in the palm of my hand. The third fell to the ground beside the tomb. I reached down to pick it up and make my wish. I felt someone hit me hard on the back of the head with what felt like a hundred hammers and passed out. And I awoke again minutes? hours? later in the tomb of Marie Laveau.

It's so cold, I think to myself. So very cold and dark here. I shiver.