Tabitha surveyed the bright Thompson Street pub with a skeptical eye, taking in the high polish of its wooden bar, the fresh flowers in mason jars, the sharp haircuts and crisp dress shirts on the men slouched over glasses holding whiskey on the rocks. Happy hour had just begun, and the customers were scanty enough that she wasn’t yet sure it was worth her while to stop in. But she was thirsty, and after a long day of walking around New York City, the cool, clean interior beckoned.


    “Just water with lemon to start, and a drink menu,” she said, taking a seat, easing her bag off her shoulder to hang across the back of the stool.


    A corner of the bartender’s mouth lifted in a smile. “See some ID?”


    She produced her driver’s license, and he examined it closely before handing it back with only a slightly disbelieving smile. Nice work, Isaac, she thought.


    Sipping her water, she looked over the worn paper map, crisscrossed with white folding lines, that she had spread on the glossy surface before her. This portion showed only Lower Manhattan—the other pieces, carefully torn, were tucked into her bag—with each square crammed with tightly inked notes, X’es and circles, arrows labeled with multiple question marks. At first she had fancied herself a researcher, scrappy and intrepid like all the great female journalists she had admired over the years, but now her notes simply looked like the scribblings of a madwoman.


    “Here on a visit?” asked the man who had sidled up to her—dark-haired and smiling with feigned innocence, smelling of cologne. Though he was pretty enough, the lack of true attraction was instantaneous on her end, and so she felt no qualms about running him off.


    “Just doing a little historical research.”


    He tapped an intersection authoritatively. “The Tenement Museum is right here. You should check that out to start with.”


    Does it look like I’m just now starting? she thought with disdain, but, by force of long habit, she only smiled. “This is where I’m focusing,” she told him, indicating a section a long walk south from the bar. “It’s Chinatown now, but it used to be a neighborhood called the Five Points. In the 1800s it was full of slums and gangs and crime. The book How the Other Half Lives was written about it.”


    “I’ve heard of it. Never read it.”


    “This area used to be all tenements, and a really dangerous place to live. Do you know where Columbus Park is?”


    “Yep,” he replied. He smiled at her, and she sensed exactly what was behind it. “My apartment’s pretty close to there.”


    He wasn’t even subtle. She decided to go with the anecdote that would put an end to the conversation. “Neat,” she said. “There’s so much history in that part of the city. You know, right on that block, in 1852, a fire tore through a row of houses and killed a dozen people. A guy named Sam Sullivan died there, and his whole family—his mom and sisters. And then slumlords just rebuilt the tenements, but even smaller and shabbier than before. So sad.”


    The guy smiled thinly and picked up his drink. “Fuck the rich,” he said.


    “Indeed,” she said cheerfully, which, since he was walking away, was sincere enough. She ordered an Old Fashioned and gazed out the window at Washington Square Park just up the block, its fountain and triumphal arch lovely among the blooming Spring trees.


    It was perfectly picturesque, but in a way, like all of the city’s cleaned-up and gentrified spaces, it was a beautiful fa?ade. The park was built upon a cemetery, and beneath the feet of all those joggers and musicians and playing children lay the bones of thousands of people. Most had long since gone to heaven, or perhaps hell, according to the complex arithmetic of their lives and the orientation of their souls. Not many had remained in between, trapped in a sort of terrestrial eternity.


    It was meant to be a punishment, Tabitha knew, but most days it hadn’t felt that way. For more than three hundred years, half of which she had spent with Sam at her side, this life had seemed more like the distant borderlands of heaven, thin on luxuries and conveniences but altogether fulfilling. Until a year ago. And then, at last, the day arrived when it was finally indistinguishable from hell.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    ~ * ~


    As evening began to fall, Tabitha stepped into the nicely kept public bathrooms of Washington Square Park and changed from her college-kid jeans and tee into an older, more broken-in set of clothes. She didn’t like the way the short dress attracted male attention, but it looked upscale enough that she could avoid all presumptions of homelessness, and in any case she still hated wearing pants—although she had conceded that an active daytime life in the city required them. Old habits died hard, and even after all these years, wearing pants still made her feel like she was dressing in drag.


    She walked a few blocks to the self-storage lockers to secure her backpack, made her way to the subway, and took the train uptown. It was strange to imagine now that six months ago she had never set foot in this city and knew it mainly through Sam’s stories—all of which told of a New York of cobblestone streets and horse-drawn wagons, of violence and filth and alleys filled with drunken women and young men with knives tucked into their sleeves. He had told her of the cholera outbreak that killed his two brothers, the misery of tannery work under a sadistic manager, and, when he was feeling generous in remembering his previous life, the fleeting joys of a fresh pretzel eaten on the pier or the exhilaration of kissing a girl. He remembered the terror of the fire, and the strange detachment of watching from a distance as the firemen pulled his charred body from the wreckage of the tenement.


    The new Sam would have been a simple spark then—an ember drifting above the scene, inhabited by his old soul, unaware that a new body even awaited him. Tabitha had experienced the same thing, but the watery version of it: staring up from the bottom of the pond in her Massachusetts village to see her old body flopped just beneath the water’s surface like a rag doll, held in place by the ropes wound around the dunking stool. Her drowning, such an honest human death, had been the definitive evidence that she was not, in fact, the witch her peers had accused her of being. The trial by water had cleared her name, and turned her into something much worse.


    She got off the train at the Eighty-Sixth Street station and walked the now-familiar route to a particular apartment building near Central Park. Such buildings, which catered to the super-wealthy and the well-known, all had doormen and codes and tight security; they were built to keep out all intruders, and to guard against every possible way a motivated outsider might get in.


    Every way but hers.


    Name the forms of water, the Searcher had said to her, when she found Tabitha at the bottom of the pond on that chill winter day.


    Ice and vapor, and—well—water, Tabitha had said.


    The solid, the gas, and the liquid, said the Searcher. Yes. And there’s one more form. The enchanted one. You.


    It had made no sense to Tabitha. She could tell that her soul was free of her body. She remembered a brief flash of a moment after her drowning, when the space above her burst white and a form made of light appeared, reaching out to her. Tabitha had scrambled away from it in terror. She did not want to take its hand. She would not succumb to its pull. Instead she swam hard against it, plunging herself deeper into the dark water. And it had worked. The light shrank and snapped away, leaving her to the cool formlessness of the watery space.


    You rejected the Angel of Death, the Searcher explained, but you aren’t damned. Take comfort in that. You chose earth over heaven, and so earth it will be. But your body will be formed now of the element that consumed you. I suppose you could call it magic.


    The idea had petrified her. She had been raised all her life to know that magic was a kind of evil and that earthly things were of the Devil. I want to change my mind, Tabitha told her. I’ll go with the angel.


    The Searcher sounded weary, and perhaps a little amused. Child, if your soul cried out for heaven, it would have chosen heaven. There’s no need to fear what you wanted, and no need to long for what you didn’t. We all end up in the place where we belong.


    Sam said it much better, many years later, as they sat in a little booth at a smoky and jovial bar in Boston with his arm around her shoulders, taking stock of each new person who walked through the door. She remembered Sam’s leather vest, his floppy half-groomed hair, the way the cigarette smoldered between his fingers as he watched the carousing crowd. Let’s be honest, he said then. I was born to be an incubus.


    The apartment building loomed thirty stories high, its roof a deep blue against the blackness of the night. Up on the rooftop patio of the penthouse, bright lights showcased the topiaries—leafy balls and spirals, plants from a dream world.


    She snapped into a thousand droplets and splashed down to the sidewalk, then drew together again, a small puddle rolling toward the gray emergency-exit door on the building’s side, with its tiny crannies that stood no chance against a sudden unlikely storm.