Chapter 4

Twenty-six stories above Fifth Avenue, Tabitha found her dreamer fast asleep. She breathed a quiet sigh of relief when she slipped under the door and saw him lying in his bed, one arm lazing off the edge, dressed in basketball shorts and nothing else. The past two times she had visited him, he had been gone.

The boy—and he was really not much more than a boy—had rebelliously longish blond hair tousled by sleep and a long Roman nose a bit too prominent for his narrow face. He stood at least six feet tall and his biceps were rather pretty, but he was otherwise skinny and quite pale. She had first seen him standing outside a coffee shop wearing his private school blazer and khakis, eyes locked on his phone. He was a senior, she learned, rummaging around in his bedroom once she’d followed him home. That was good enough for her. On the last day of her human life she had been seventeen years old, so in mortal terms, they were the same age.

He was not her type, physically. She sought out bigger men, thicker men, ones with strong shoulders and indifferent haircuts and noses that suggested they didn’t always walk away from a fight. She liked variety, but even when she ventured far from her usual preferences, she rarely wandered as far as the Kid.

He had other endearing qualities, however.

She stepped over to his bedside and lowered her face to his, tucking her long hair behind her ear. Softly, she breathed over his mouth and nose. The unique quality of her breath—they called it miasma—was how it worked as a sort of twilight anesthesia, allowing the dreamer to see and move and express their desires while still rendering it all as a dream in their mind. This was the crucial moment, because if he spurned her presence, she had to leave. And she very much hoped that he would not do that.

Instead, he parted his lips and kissed her.

The kiss excited her more than she had expected it would. She climbed into his bed, straddling his hips, and kissed him deeper. He pulled at her dress, and she tugged it over her head, letting it drop to the floor. His hands were on her breasts, pushing her bra roughly down, but she didn’t care that he was overeager. For that, she was hardly in a position to criticize.

The space around them was unnervingly silent, but for the sounds of their kissing. It was an impossibly large bedroom for a boy of seventeen, with a ceiling raised up at an extravagant height and windows that looked out over the busy side street, where it had started to rain, causing the stone of the nearby buildings to gleam in the streetlight-gilded dark. It was a tidy room, too, cleaned daily by a maid, who arranged the blue accessories on the white desk and the blue curios on the white bookshelf, and on and on around the room, at whose center was a white bed with blue pillowcases and a senior boy with a slender woman straddling him.

She took him out of his shorts and mounted him, and at this he clasped her hips and moaned. She tipped her own face upward, toward that grandiose ceiling, and closed her eyes, letting the feeling of him suffuse her. There was pleasure to be had with men like this, even if they were not the ones she would have chosen, and even if she would rather be, every day and every hour, with Sam.

After they had finished, and she had kissed him one last time to keep him dreaming, she pulled her dress over her head and quickly located his khakis by the laundry bin. In the left pocket she found a set of earbuds and a cigarette lighter. In the right, a business card, a wrapper from a Jolly Rancher, a small empty cocaine baggie, and two hundred and seventy-six dollars.

She tucked the money into her bra and slipped back under the door, a shimmering puddle.

Down on the street, she hurried toward the subway station, past police officers and businessmen coming home from the bars, and the occasional homeless person, though on rainy days like this one they mostly found shelter in one place or another. Soon she would do the same, slipping into one of the many water features that made the city parks so beautiful in the spring.

But for now, she got on the train and headed downtown, where she could safely stash the cash in her bag with the rest of it. She knew the fear was probably irrational, but she worried that the money wouldn’t stick with her when she was under the water all night, and it would somehow return to its form and float to the surface, offering a windfall to the locals and a night of wasted effort to her.

It would all be worth it if she found the relic. When she did—and she was certain she would, she had to believe she would—she would have enough money to pay for it, whatever it cost. It was the only way out of this punishment, or at least she hoped it was, because she could think of nothing else. And she had to keep moving forward. She owed Sam everything, but to start with, at least this much.

~ * ~

The section of Brooklyn that was called Williamsburg was a hipster paradise. The clothing shops were all minimalist, the grocery stores advertised organic and vegan and non-GMO specialties, and the coffee shops showed rows of Mac laptops along the window tables. As Tabitha walked up the street toward the museum she was seeking, the people flowing past her, especially the men, all had a certain unifying look. Close-fitting band T-shirts under plaid flannels, jeans that fit snugly all the way to the ankle, messenger bags, knitted beanie hats over carelessly mussed hair: it reminded her of the way Sam began dressing after they moved to Portland, which she had teased him about with regularity. Those pants look very inconvenient for prowling, she would point out, but he shrugged off her jests with the line he’d been using for a very long time: When in Rome.

She stopped beside a glossy “speakeasy”—a claim that forced her to control a snort of derision—to check the map on her phone. The museum was just a few blocks ahead, two up and one over. This neighborhood, in the balance of things, was not so bad; she would have to keep it in mind for evening excursions, for nights when she needed a break from the more pragmatic options. The vaguely industrial grittiness of its architecture reminded her of Lowell, which she still sorely missed, and she had passed a couple of very appealing small bookstores, which would be a fine way to kill time while awaiting a later hour. Besides, while she was fairly confident that there was a Searcher keeping an eye on her in Manhattan, she probably wouldn’t be bothered to track Tabitha all the way across the river to Brooklyn. The nature of a Searcher was that she was a very old and weary succubus, and that she operated within certain geographical boundaries, trolling the waterways for newly created succubi and keeping watch over the troublesome ones in the same area. Manhattan itself had to be an exhausting assignment, and a second borough was surely not in her job description. It would be refreshing to be able to visit a dreamer without feeling as if someone might always be watching her, waiting with bated breath to see if she would awaken him and speak to him directly again. As if she would ever have reason to do that twice.

She arrived at the entrance to the museum, which proved, to her surprise, to be nothing but a small storefront with a slightly dilapidated sign. Museum of Gotham Ephemera, it read in Victorian script.

Immediately inside, two dark wooden cases fitted into a corner caught her eye with a magnificent assortment of mementos. Painted ceramic plates and old bottles and medicine boxes from the pharmacies of days past, worn wooden tools, tickets on sepia paper, milky Depression glass and an old clock in an intricate silver setting. She pulled in a sharp breath and walked up to the display, enchanted.

“Good morning.”

The man sitting at a desk to the left was portly and scruffily dressed, with a frizz of gray hair and a bushy beard to match. He had on a tweed newsboy’s cap, like the kind Sam had worn for many years and still sometimes did. Tabitha said, “I’ve seen you before.”

“And I, you.” He smiled in a shy way, lips closed over his teeth. “Playing chess in the park.”

The memory came back to her. He was one of the men who sat at the stone chess tables in Washington Square Park, offering to play against people for five dollars per game. She stood and watched sometimes, enjoying the mild entertainment of some good-natured but cocky young man getting flustered as the old master slowly wiped the table with him.

She smiled. “You never lose.”

“Sometimes I do.” He took out a ticket from the stack beside him, though it looked more like a memento itself than a necessity in this place. “Are you here to see the museum?”

“I suppose so.”

“It’s five dollars.”

She unrolled a bill from the wad inside her bag and handed it over. “Did you help put this place together?”

“Somewhat. It’s a community effort. I’m more of a curator of what’s offered to us. Not every broken bottle swept up in a storage room is a piece of New York history.”

“Depends on what it held, I suppose. Or who held it.”

“Correct. We do have quite a few bottles that passed muster. They’re over there, in the cabinet with the horses’ teeth. People dig those out of their courtyards all the time.” He nodded toward the back of the room. “Something in particular you’re interested in?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

He looked up at her with interest. She was glad to see it was not merely a polite question. This was a man who liked puzzles.

“I heard about a saint’s relic that made its way to New York many years ago,” she told him. “It’s called the Hand of St. Bridget, but they say it was probably a finger bone. An Irish immigrant woman brought it here, supposedly, and tried to sell it to a priest when she ran short of money. Have you heard of it?”

He gave a single shake of his head. “Can’t say that I have. Did she sell it, or only try to?”

“Well, as the story goes, he looked it up and saw that it had been stolen in the twelfth century—that a knight led an army through a village, and ransacked it, and took the relic from the local church. So this priest—somewhere in Manhattan, it’s said—claimed it as stolen church property and refused to pay her for it. She was angry, of course, and returned with her son, who demanded it back, and knocked the priest out when he refused. They got the relic back, but in the end they were both arrested and sent to prison, and she refused to say what she’d done with it.”

“Huh.”

Tabitha shifted her backpack on her shoulders. “Of course, it could just be an anecdotal story. I ... I hope it isn’t, though.”

The man looked at her with faintly amused curiosity. “You have some connection to all this?”

“I just like St. Bridget.”

“Any idea what year this happened? The tussle with the priest, I mean.”

“No.”

He nodded. “Well, I can do a little research for you. See if anything turns up about it. Interesting story.” He pulled a hand through his beard. “Sounds like she could have sold it on the black market. That, or she chucked it into the fireplace or the river.”

“She didn’t throw it in the river.”

The man looked at her sharply, and Tabitha realized at once how her comment had sounded. “I mean, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do that, if it was valuable.”

“No, but sometimes people would rather destroy something than let the wrong person get their hands on it.”

“Yes. Well ... I’d love it if you could let me know if you find out anything.”

She wrote her phone number on the back of her ticket stub and handed it to the man, but he looked doubtful. “Believe it or not, I’m not very good at keeping track of things,” he said. “And I don’t really do cellphone business. You could just come by in a week or two, and I’ll tell you if I’ve learned anything. Or if you happen to see me in the park, but only after I’m done playing for the day.”

“All right. That works for me.” It seemed an interminable wait, but she had been here for four months already. She could manage a little patience.

“In the meantime, enjoy the museum.” He swept a hand grandly toward the exhibits. “Welcome to old New York.”