Headline – Nicolas Cage Crypt Caper
April 5, 2022 – New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
As curious tourists stretched on their tiptoes to see over the cemetery wall, Micah LaRue, dressed in his guard uniform, locked the gate. St. Louis Cemetery Number One only occupied a small city block, but it had to be the most famous cemetery in New Orleans. As far as Micah knew, it was the only one which required a paid tour for access. As the cemetery’s security guard, Micah inspected tour tickets and explained to disappointed visitors that the graveyard was private property and not open to the public.
In addition to being patient with clueless tourists, Micah prided himself on always opening and closing the gate on time. As he made one last check before quitting for the day, he spotted some local faces walking toward him. Brothers Tyree and Anton had finished their shift at Popeye’s Chicken and were still in their uniforms. The pair waved at Micah as they strolled casually down the sidewalk, sharing a joke.
“You two staying out of trouble?” called Micah.
“Today, at least,” Tyree called back.
The brothers’ route home took them past the cemetery nearly every day. Because they were outgoing and talkative, they inevitably struck up a friendship with Micah. They reminded him of himself when he was ten years younger.
“What are y’all laughing about?” asked Micah.
“Something from work,” Anton answered. “Some girl came in trying to get free chicken.”
“Did you give it to her?”
“I wanted to. She was hot. But the manager kept staring at me like I was part of a free chicken scam.”
“I guess she took off without the chicken?”
“And before I could get her number.”
The brothers stopped in front of the cemetery’s iron gate and stared at the crypts visible through the bars.
“Hey Micah, when you gonna let us inside?” asked Tyree.
“You wanna go in, you need a ticket,” Micah answered with a laugh.
“I’m not paying $25 to walk around a cemetery. How about you give us the twenty-five-cent tour?”
“For twenty-five cents, all you can do is stick your head inside.”
“C’mon. Let’s check it out for just a minute.”
Micah grinned, knowing he could grant a favor without much trouble on his part. “Alright, I’ll walk you around a little. But you can’t tell anybody.”
“Who we gonna tell?” replied Anton excitedly.
Micah unlocked the gate and led the brothers under the thick archway. Micah’s sitting stool hugged the shade of a gray wall, which ran the length of the city block. Recessed into the wall were rectangular, stone doors covered in names. Facing the wall was a row of crypts made from plastered bricks.
“We saw my great aunt get put in one of those things,” said Anton, motioning to one of the above-ground crypts.
“Can you ever, you know, smell the bodies inside?” asked Tyree.
“Nah, when the sun’s out, every one of them is like an oven. Bodies turn to ash before you know it,” said Micah.
“They’re full of ashes?”
“That’s what they tell me, but I’m just the security guard. C’mon, let’s walk around a little.”
Micah pointed out a paved path which ran through the maze of crypts. The group strolled past monuments that were well maintained and surrounded by iron fences. Other tombs were falling apart, with dislodged bricks falling into surrounding weeds.
“What if we were here on Halloween night?” whispered Anton. “I’d be freaking out.”
“Any night when it was pitch black would freak me out,” said Tyree.
“How about you let us in to play hide-and-seek?” Anton suggested to Micah. “We could scare people right out of their shorts.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Micah replied. “You two would invite half the city, including all the girls you know.”
“The only girls Anton knows are his mom and his cousin,” Tyree said with a laugh.
The brothers made fun of each other as they walked. Along the way, Micah did his best to point out the cemetery’s most important residents. He had picked up scraps of information from the daytime tour guides and knew where to find the Voodoo Queen’s resting place as well as those for New Orleans’ wealthy founders and politicians.
“Why do they need a guard around this place?” asked Anton. “Who’s gonna steal a bunch of bricks?”
“You’d be surprised,” said Micah. “There used to be lots of angel statues on the tombs. People snuck in, knocked them off, and sold them. And then you’ve got weird people doing ceremonies on the graves. The Church got tired of all of it and decided to close the whole place off.”
The trio reached a spot in the cemetery dominated by a ten-foot-tall white pyramid. Tyree and Anton gaped in amazement.
“That’s Nicolas Cage’s tomb,” said Micah.
“Nicolas Cage is dead?” asked Tyree.
“Nah, but he owns the tomb. I guess he’ll be buried in it someday. It’s crazy looking if you ask me. A few years back, he went bankrupt and the government took everything from him but this. The law says you can’t repossess a tomb. Some folks thought he hid money inside, so they tried to break in.” Micah pointed out a flat entrance in the bottom of the crypt, sealed with a lock.
“Did they find any money?” asked Anton.
“Who would be crazy or stupid enough to keep their money inside a tomb in the middle of the city? But the break in was another reason for adding a security guard.”
Tyree and Anton circled the pyramid and then got on their hands and knees to inspect the opening at the base where Nicolas Cage’s body would eventually be inserted.
Tyree knocked on the sealed barrier. “So this is where the money was supposed to be, huh?”
“You sure they didn’t find anything?” asked Anton.
“Pretty sure, but that was before I got here,” replied Micah. “C’mon, let’s wrap this up so we can get home.”
On the way to the front gate, Micah pointed out the one remaining stone angel in the cemetery. Tyree wanted to know if it was worth any money. Then Tyree pointed at a security camera and asked if it was always on. Micah gave a vague answer. The questions made him regret giving the brothers the tour. He might have planted dangerous ideas in their heads, ideas which might spiral out of control.
“You two stay out of trouble and don’t tell anybody about your visit,” Micah told the brothers as he relocked the cemetery gate.
The brothers promised to keep their mouths shut as they waved goodbye. By the next day, Micah had mostly forgotten about the after-hours tour. A packed schedule kept him busy checking tickets and turning away curious sightseers. His last group of the day ran long because one of the guests got heat stroke and had to lie down in the shade of a tomb. Micah was half an hour late closing the gate. As he did, he heard the sound of metal scraping along the sidewalk. He turned to find Tyree and Anton dragging a ladder.
“What are y’all doing with that?” called Micah.
“Uh, we’re just taking it to our grandma’s,” Tyree answered.
“What for?”
“To fix this and that. Some lights. Maybe a ceiling fan.”
“And some painting,” added Anton.
Micah eyed them suspiciously. Before this, he had never heard them talk about their grandma. And they looked surprised to see him. Maybe they even looked a little guilty. Surely, they had expected him to be gone at the cemetery’s normal closing time.
To anyone worried about cemetery security, a ladder set off alarm bells. Micah quickly jumped to the conclusion that Tyree and Anton were planning to use the ladder to scale the cemetery wall. Once it grew dark, those knuckleheads would call their friends for a party inside, or even worse, steal the last stone angel. They would end up getting caught and it would all boomerang back to Micah and his impromptu tour. That was the thanks he got for trying to be a nice guy. He would simply have to catch them himself and scare them straight.
While checking tickets and answering questions all day, Micah often dreamed of doing something heroic that resembled police work. Running a stakeout and catching a crime in progress sounded exciting and important. Micah returned home for dinner but was back to the cemetery as soon as it grew dark. He found a concealed spot near a power pole, which give him a good view of the entrance gate and the wall he figured the brothers would climb.
It was Micah’s first stakeout. Adrenaline carried him through the first hour. He stood tensely, eyes alert and clutching his phone. Then he began wishing he had his stool. By the second hour, he was leaning against the pole and paying less attention to each passing car. He figured that two people climbing a ladder would be hard to miss. Micah eventually dropped to the ground next to the pole and stayed awake by scrolling through his phone. Just after midnight, he looked up to find someone creeping down the sidewalk.
The shadowy figure was not dragging a ladder, but he stopped at the cemetery entrance. A few seconds later, he pushed the gate open and hurried inside.
Micah’s heart instantly accelerated. He was there to catch Anton and Tyree, not some unknown intruder. How had that person gotten through the gate so easily? Had Micah failed to lock it? He was usually so careful, but had this been the one time he made a mistake? If something like the stone angel went missing, he would instantly be fired. He could not simply ignore what was happening.
Micah ran from the power pole to the cemetery entrance, phone in hand and ready to record any funny business or to call 911 if he needed backup. The metal gate was ajar. Micah swallowed hard and stepped inside. No one was moving along the first row of crypts. Micah put one hand on his heart to calm himself. Between frantic breaths, he heard pattering footsteps toward the middle of the cemetery.
Phone in front of him, Micah stepped cautiously along the paved path leading through the shadowy tombs. He heard a scraping noise. Then silence. Then he heard the scraping noise again. He followed it to the Nicolas Cage pyramid tomb.
Micah flipped on his phone’s flashlight and discovered two legs sticking out of the pyramid’s base. The legs rocked back and forth before inching their way out of the tomb. They were followed by a torso and a head. The head looked up toward Micah to reveal a face covered by a black, knit mask.
“Who are you? And what are you doing here?” demanded Micah.
“What are you doing here?” demanded the man in the mask.
“I work here. Are you seriously trying to break into this tomb?”
The man in the mask turned toward the open gap below the pyramid and slid its stone cover back in place. Then he used a key in his hand to turn a lock embedded in the cover. Finally, he struggled to his feet and faced Micah, holding up the key.
“Someone breaking in wouldn’t have the key.”
“Then what were you doing inside there?”
“Putting something in.”
“What?”
“That’s for me to know and you not to find out.”
“Who do you think you are? Do you own this tomb? Do you work for Nicolas Cage? Are you Nicolas Cage?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Why not? I’m not going to ask for an autograph.”
“Listen, it’s not important who exactly is storing stuff inside the tomb. What’s important is that I have the key so I obviously belong.”
“Then why are you wearing a mask?”
“So if anybody sees me, they won’t get any strange ideas about what I’m doing in a cemetery.”
“So you are Nicolas Cage?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“This is too weird. I’m gonna have to call the police and have them sort all this out.”
“You don’t want to do that. You’ll only be wasting people’s time. When they see I have a key and I belong here, then they’ll start asking why you’re in the cemetery.”
“I work here.”
“At night? I’ve never seen you here before.”
“How often do you come here?”
“None of your business.”
At that point, the man in the mask slowly backed away from the pyramid. When he realized that Micah was not following him, he turned and ran. Micah listened to the sound of his shoes flapping against the pavement. He did not bother chasing after them. The encounter felt like a bizarre dream and his senses were too frayed to allow any quick reaction. Micah used his phone light to trace his steps back to the entrance gate. It was locked.
“What in the world?” Micah said to himself. “How does he have a key to the main gate and why would he lock me in here?” He pulled out his own gate key from his pocket and let himself out. On his way home, he wondered again if he might be dreaming and sleepwalking. He forgot all about his original stakeout plan and catching Tyree and Anton with their ladder.
The next day, Micah was not his usual self. He perched on his stool and leaned against the cemetery wall with sleepy eyes.
“You okay? You have a late night or something?” one of the tour guides asked him.
“To be honest, I’m not really sure,” replied Micah. “You notice anything different lately about that Nicolas Cage pyramid?”
“Different? It’s strange, but it always looks the same kind of strange to me,” answered the guard.
As he was locking up that evening, Micah heard the familiar sound of a ladder dragging on a sidewalk. Tyree and Anton appeared.
“We fixed everything at our grandma’s,” Tyree announced.
“We were talking about how this ladder would be perfect for climbing over the cemetery wall,” said Anton with a grin.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Micah replied sternly.
“We’re only joking,” said Tyree. “Other than the angel, we know there’s nothing valuable in there. No one’s crazy enough to hide money inside. That’s what you said, right?”
Micah shook the front gate to make sure it was secure. Then he yawned and replied, “Yep, that’s what I said.”
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