Petty Magic by Camille Deangelis Read Free Book Online Page B

often hear spectral children whimpering in the middle of the night, but I’ve been here more than sixty years now and I won’t be moving again. It’s so much simpler to live in a reclaimed building, though it does make entertaining outside the covens rather impossible. Urban witchcraft is fraught with such mundane considerations.
    There are twenty-seven under-neighborhoods on the island of Manhattan, warrens we call them, and as you’d expect they are mostly concentrated in the island’s southernmost districts. We have our own shops, libraries, night schools, banks, cafés, and theaters, and all within buildings long since demolished in ordinary Manhattan.
    We have converted into apartments such vanished gems as the Singer and New York World buildings. It’s still possible to take a stroll through the Vauxhall Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. You can catch She Stoops to Conquer at the Nassau Street Theatre or diving horses at the Hippodrome. We use the old Pennsylvania Station for an exhibition space. The printing houses that put out seditious pamphlets during the Revolutionary era still produce our weekly newspapers, though if you remove them from the warren the words vanish off the page.
    All our neighborhoods have retained their original character. The Pandora Securities Company is located in the Gillender Building on Wall Street, for instance; there’s Boston Avenue for the swanky gals (who still throw nightly cocktail parties at the Stewart and Astor mansions), Little Hammersley for the fauxhemians, and Cat’s Hollow for those of us who don’t mind the lingering whiff of squalor. Oh, it’s not so grim as you might suppose; only the structurally sound tenements have been preserved by the reclamation board, and they’ve long since cleared the riffraff out of Mulberry Bend. No one’s training polecats or picking pockets these days—quieter and cleaner than your ordinary Chinatown, now, that’s for sure.
    Life must be easier in old-world cities, where “demolition” is a four-letter word, and so there is little need for hidden streets and all the requisite jiggery-pokery at post office and electric company. In places like London, Paris, and Edinburgh there are plenty of dark nooks where one may dwell undisturbed, where we doddering biddies of impossible age merely add to the atmosphere. European beldames have their warrens too, but they’re smaller, and the buildings inside them are often a thousand years older than ours are.
    Our graveyards are hidden everywhere, though—urban or rural, old-world or new—to avoid the troublesome truth that the deceased was two hundred fifty years of age. We have our own undertakers.
    Now, you might be wondering how one gets into a warren, provided one lives there. We enter our neighborhoods through gated alleyways: red-bricked, ivy poking through the wrought-iron slats so you can’t see in. Posh but inconspicuous, like the entrances to Grove Court or Milligan Place. There are such crannies all over the city, no matter how completely the skyscrapers and hotels appear to have gobbled up the landscape.
    But where one would expect to see a lot of quaint old town houses around a leafy courtyard, one finds instead the places vanished long since: a stable yard without any horses; a tiny swath of virgin forest above a tinkling stream; or a colonial cemetery, headstones poking out of the tall grass at precarious angles and inhabitants with names like Amos or Josiah. Let’s say I pass through the gate on West Houston. I’ll cut through one such graveyard, full of shadows even at noon because of the apartment buildings all around it. I turn the corner at the end of the alley and I’m on Little Hammersley Street, with its brownstones gutted in fires and corner gardens lost to the concrete jungle.
    In the downtown warrens especially one finds a gallimaufry of architectural styles, rustic colonial dwellings wedged between posh Beaux Arts office buildings and so forth. Some warrens are