Street kids still ape a wino's lumbering gait while daring each other to throw pebbles at its windows. If you can make sense of their mongrel lingo, you'll hear that blood once flowed and the dead were aprowl in the cast-iron loft building. As a gut-rehab it now shelters our modern undead, the homeless, but no amount of architectural ingenuity can shroud its likeness to a coffin stood on end.

Half as wide as any of its neighbors, it rises half again as tall. Two bas-relief griffins with raving beaks spread delicately detailed wings around the entrance. Cast from the same industrial alloy as the facing, but done in gold leaf and overlaid with a bluish patina, the sculptures would be bronze to all but the most expert appraiser if not for an intractable rust spot on each griffin's breast.

This bizarre architectural indulgence is the subject of much aesthetic debate among the artists and decorators who have bought up the abandoned factories and warehouses for their ateliers and galleries. Were the griffins meant to offer sanctuary from worldly travail or to bar premature exit from Manion's Coffin Works?

I hadn't been in real estate long — it began only as a hobby after the kids had grown and Reg started dating his secretary — and most of my work had been with neo-Victorian semi-mansions on the poplar-lined lanes of my quaint suburb. But there's as much of the nonconformist in me as in anyone. Ignoring hubby's considerable pique, I soon began chasing inner-city listings. A gallery owner, who wasn't about to lure sightseers in until the block had been gentrified, invited my operation into his storefront. So after Reg had him checked out and said no, I was motoring in six days a week and by appointment on Sundays.

The haunting wasn't my problem; on the contrary, it enhanced the demand. But Manion's latest owner had been letting some kind of freelance spiritual guru use the works for a drying-out tank. The artistic types were just beginning to offer a toe to the neighborhood waters, and no one could have been more sympathetic than they to misery, but it does dull one's sensibilities to be wiping barf off one foot while hopping over its originator with the other. So after much oration by city councillors, we had Manion's primped and prettied and the guru's clients packed up for greater glory somewhere else — anywhere else. But it would take more than an official ceremony to get a derelict to print new calling cards. An inebriate draped over a rafter queered as many deals as a rat under a sink.

No sale, that is, until Okay walked into what I was learning to call a life. "Whatcha get for that pretty pitcher?" she asked, peering through the doorway and pointing at an unframed sport scene behind my desk. She was wearing saddle shoes with anklets and a frayed field jacket over indefinable flounce and frou-frou. A bent stem on her cloche hat bore an oversize daisy that peered at me like an eye through a periscope. She was either a punk princess or a bag lady with eclectic taste at the rag handout.

I opted for the latter hypothesis. "The pretty pic-ture is an original . . . oil. Quite dear. Get your pitch-er at a crockery shop."

She pushed the door all the way open. "Ain't it a painting of old Ebbets Field? So that's got to be Big Newk on the mound chalking up another K, right?"

"If you say so." I looked for some work to return to.

"So how much for the pretty pitcher?"

Anyway, she wasn't a neighborhood regular. I motioned her in. "Nix on the artwork. Just real estate for now. I'm not the one to say it, but I wouldn't wander around this neighborhood alone."

"Landlady, huh?" Auburn ringlets squared the circle of her creamsicle face. "I'll need a place to hang my pitcher in."

"I said it wasn't for sale."

"So how about a place to hang myself in?"

"I'm not in rentals. Check the ads, knock on doors."

She pulled a tight roll of thousand-dollar bills out of her reticule. "I can cover the fixture fee on a loft if you can do me today."

I got up and locked the door. "Put that away. It's plate glass in the window, not steel. Checks only."

"Sure, dearie, but these hundred gees are safer in my purse than in the bank. My ex has a lien on my account."

"Brick and mortar need a deluge of demolishers" — or a pestilence of paupers, I thought — "to be taken from you. Can I interest you in a home?"

"Just a loft. How much you think I got here?"

"I've something in mind that'll run you less than a co-op and have unlimited investment potential. Handyman's special. You can pick any floor to live on and rent out the others as you remodel. I didn't catch the name."

"Bridget O'Kelly Smythe is who I was, but since the divorce I've been just Okay. Get it? O-K for O'Kelly."

"A way with words — sign of a creative spirit. The place'll give you something of an income while you pursue your career in . . . in fashion design?" She shrugged at my sherlocking. I allotted her twenty bills for construction, assuming most would be in sweat equity. "Eighty thou." It was maybe half of what the owner wanted, but I had his proxy and figured I could square it. "But only if the cash is in my bank today." I locked her in, fetched the Volks, and got her tush into the buggy subito, bambina. "You haven't paid me," I added, "till I get my deposit receipt."

I gathered from her nonstop chatter that her husband had gained an uncontested divorce after driving her insane — not once, but three times in five years, and she had the papers to prove it. He hoped a lump-sum settlement of two-hundred thou would rid him of any further traffic with her. She proceeded to donate fifty thou to a mission church down the block from his accountant, getting the contents of its three warehouses in return. Then she laid out forty-eight bills to a boardwalk hotel for a year in the honeymoon suite. Just to find herself, you understand. They took one look at the thrift shop she was moving into the suite, to say nothing of the hallways and lobby, and evicted her as a nuisance, never bothering to refund her year's rent. Meanwhile her ex was having her declared incompetent. He got a writ to put what remained of the settlement in trust for her rehabilitation. But he couldn't sell the home from under her saddle shoes, Okay summed up with a grin. I winked back and felt like my payments — low down — but no one expects a realtor to be a social worker.

We went through the bank and papers fast enough for me to show her her eighty-grand flop for the night. Facets of the polished griffins found the setting sun as we drove up. Wing feathers flickered from shadow to blinding glare as if they hid eighty-thousand eyes. The car reverberated with an ominous clank as I backed into a space in front of Manion's.

"The grating's a hazard," I explained. "A century and a half old and never been properly seated. I'm working on the community board to pave it over."

She relaxed her grip on my arm. "For a minute there I thought those creatures had listed with another agent."

"The old coffin makers used a toxic lacquer. Mixed with fine sawdust, the fumes were quite lethal. Electric fans in the walls predate lighting fixtures by twenty years. Exhaust came up through the grate under us, no doubt causing early deaths in this neighborhood till the works were finally abandoned in the twenties."

The griffins, entirely in shadow as we got out of the Volks, were guarding an ajar door. "Fly, fly," a voice heralded. "Manion's minions draw nigh. Fly ere our hearts are impaled on a gut-spiller's stake."

Okay cowered behind me. I shoved the door all the way open. "I know that's you, Kelly," I said to a shuffling blob draped in tattered shawls.

The blob turned in the dark hallway, reminding me of a cholesterol molecule in an artery. "Tis for my own Drydock that I linger," said the blistered remains of a woman, craning her neck to see who was behind me. "You'd not begrudge an errant lass the fellowship of wedlock, now would you?"

I drew as near as compassion demanded and delicacy allowed. "It's for your own good, dear," I cooed. She fell against the old delousing stall, whacking it into the wall. "You people have such a lovely new shelter. Much prettier than this old place. Besides, here's Manion's new owner. If you don't go, she'll be forced to call an officer."

"Oh no," Okay gasped, stepping all the way in as if finally deciding to take possession of her estate. "I mean, if the poor dear is meeting her man here, it'd be a gross sin to have her out."

"Don't you suppose," I hissed, "we all feel that way? But it's false charity. You'd be tempting her with the unattainable and luring her away from real help."

The homeless woman tried to wail me down. "Tis truth the fine lady utters. My own prodigal Drydock! Never to stroke the swabbie's swarthy flanks again!"

"Shame, Kelly!" I snapped. "A respectably fair-skinned lady like yourself!" I winked at Okay. "Get the caseworker to help you find that dusky old sea dog you call a husband."

Kelly strutted past us, her bindle bulging with the flotsam of her existence. "I'll trouble you," she called from the door, "for a dollar to convey my insufferable self to the loathsome lodgings."

Any cop would have taken her, but Okay was digging into her purse. So far as I knew, all she had were grand notes. I fetched Kelly her bill. One crazy down, one to go.

"I share a name with that fallen angel," Okay whimpered. "Why did God spare me such misery?"

"Honey, you were smart enough to shake a loose two-hundred thou off your husband's bush. But you need neither God nor the devil to join that guttersnipe and the dark, drunken degenerate she calls a husband. Fifty bills to the first Holy Joe with a hand stuck out! Another fifty to the Hilton Deluxorama!"

"Eighty for this shell of a building." She forded the rubble to peer behind the delousing stall.

"The historic Manion's Coffin Works is all you've got, missy, between yourself and the street. Just be glad I left you twenty thou to make the place livable for a few tenants. Because if you think you're going to support yourself as a fashion designer, you might as well pull up a sidewalk next to Kelly right now."

Okay looked back from the space behind the stall. "The Big Dipper is carved into the panel. This was an Underground Railroad way station, no?"

"You'll make a closet there. That's the old dumbwaiter door. Wide, isn't it? Coffins came up from the cellar, where the carpenters built them, to this floor, where they did the upholstering. Upper floors were offices and apartments."

"'Manion's minions'? A stake through Kelly's heart? She was bemoaning a spook, now wasn't she?"

"Gets her into the loony bin when it's really cold. You're asking for bad news, babe. But you'll hear it from someone sooner or later, so it might as well be me."

I started to make a seat of a splintery crate, before I remembered the little pale-green panne-velvet number I was wearing for my date with Reg that evening. I draped my trench coat over my shoulders and leaned against the stall.

"Never would've happened," I began, "if there'd been bedding, a pallet, just a pile of straw. But there was only the cobblestone floor in the cellar. You can't blame the boy for wanting to sleep on something. Probably came up in the dumbwaiter. They'd just finished a shipment. Mahogany lined with satin and stuffed with down . . . too much for him to resist after being on the run for forty-eight hours. It was Paddy the foreman's idea, you see, to put up slaves escaping to Canada. Didn't dare tell the old man. Manion would've flipped. We even have his diary where he calls it a sin for Lincoln to make cannon fodder of stout lads for the sake of a few Negroes."

"So the fugitive finds his way into a comfortable coffin for forty winks."

"Actually no one's sure it ever happened. Landmark committee's checked court records, newspapers for eighteen fifty-nine, sixty  . . . . Not a word! It was supposedly on the eve of a three-day break for the Fourth of July. Everyone had split. Except old man Manion returns to get the shipment ready for the teamsters on the morning of the fifth. People say Manion never heard so much as a lawdy, lawdy as he cinched the canvas covers."

"You mean the wretched runaway suffocated in a gift-wrapped coffin?" Okay looked even sicker than when she'd met Kelly.

"No, it wasn't airtight. Muscles just sort of cramped and atrophied from dehydration and lack of movement. Still, the men sensed something Tuesday morning. Of course they didn't do anything till Manion got there. Now, you have to understand the psychology of the coffin maker. Being buried alive — why, it's like ptomaine to a chef or a broken promise to a politician!"

"Or a hovel to a real-estate agent."

"Won't admit it's possible. Object must have been dead once and come back to life. Article of faith to them."

"You're saying a zombie."

"Or a vampire. When they finally unwrapped the coffin, or so the tale goes, the black man's eyes glowed red like the devil's, and his face had a look evil enough to bend an atheist's knees. Well, the poor fellow had been in the dark for three days, and it was the kind of unsettling experience that could've provoked a rise out of anyone. But Manion's wits weren't about him. Before anyone can stop him, the old man grabs a mallet and a stake . . . ."

"And now my home . . . is where the haunt is."

"Not really. Just a couple of spots on the griffins. The rust has supposedly been there since the day Manion drove his stake through the slave's heart. I'd've gotten them touched up once and for all, but try and find a contractor these days who knows how to make cast iron look like bronze!"

"She hears the rattle of the chain," Okay chanted in chest tones that I suppose were meant to scare me, "and says the presence is not plain."

"We did find a ledger showing the firing of a Journeyman Patrick in the week of July the fifth, eighteen fifty-nine. Stands to reason the slave's owner would've sued Paddy or Manion or someone, but no court transcript." I made a show of looking at my watch. "Well, my dear, my congratulations on your new home. Some day . . . a palace. Got to run — dinner date uptown. Keys are on the stall — locks are the best thing about this place." Then how, I asked myself, did Kelly get in? "Boiler's first on your repair list, but there are space heaters upstairs."

She assumed the lotus position on her tire. Her head wafted toward her ankles and up again. She'd be all right, I told myself. Loony, but a headstrong loony. A survivor.

"Oh yes," I said as I left. "Kelly was just raving about a husband. No way those two could connect. Drydock makes as much sense of her grandiose posturing as she makes of his babbling stream of mumbling consciousness. It varies only in tempo when he's asked to leave. If he gets in, stay cool. Winos, even the dark kind, are harmless."

I got to our bistro in plenty of time. It had simply slipped Reg's mind. There was no other explanation. Beginning of the end, I thought as I drove home after a reheated Thermidor served by a fey waiter who snickered behind my back. I pretended to be asleep when Reg got in. I'd never expected the thing with his secretary to go that far.

I let him fix his own breakfast. When I got to my office Okay was huddled where my Sears trash can should have been. Her flower-print frock was filthy, her cloche was gone, her ringlets were in knots. I put up some coffee and freshened her up in the john.

There'd been noises, she said, in her dumbwaiter shaft. Rats, I told her . . . no problem to exterminate . . . first thing on her list. She said they'd talked to her, moaning and cursing. Had she checked the cellar? She'd run out in the middle of the night and been at my door ever since, shoving both my garbage and its receptacle at the sanitation crew.

I relieved her of a grand note and drove her to the warehouse where the hotel had stowed her belongings. She had some nice period pieces covered several dozens deep by layers of junk clothes in plastic bags. I said to lose the rags — save her an hour, at least, in moving time — but she was going to redesign them, make her mark in fashion. I greased several strata of marshal's clerks, called a mover I had an arrangement with, paid myself for two new trash cans, and still returned five century notes to Okay when we got back with her cargo.

I wonder whether time heals or exhausts our supply of shoulders to cry on. But fear is self-fulfilling: weed it or feed it. Haunts lured from her home to her heart drove Okay to the outside world each evening. At a macrobiotic restaurant she met Lucien, a shaggy blond broomstick given five years by his father to succeed as a sculptor or return to the family Chevrolet dealership. He'd already frittered away eighteen months at the Y, too frightened of failure to find a flat, too taken by romantic destiny to go home.

Living on his allowance, they carved an apartment of sorts out of the first floor. Lucien would endlessly sketch from a snapshot of his mother for the monumental bust of his early period. His father was the "the warder"; his father's business, "the gaol." Okay, almost twenty years his senior, equated love with a prolonged stay in a rest home. They laughed at each other's fears; it was only a matter of time, we prayed, that they would come to laugh at their own.

It may expose the realtor in me to say so, but a house to be remodeled oozes a more cunning cement than sex. They worked together, spending what was left of her settlement in the prodigious swell of sweat unwanted anywhere else. The attic would be Lucien's atelier; the floor below, Okay's sewing room. But the noises persisted, and her fear of coffins never let her into the cellar. Seal and soundproof, I told them. The rats that didn't get clear of the house would starve in the walls, the smell stifled by the sealant until their bones became one with the foundation.

Reg finalized our divorce during Christmas week. I kept busy getting the community board to pave over the clattering grate in front of Manion's. As the crew poured hot asphalt, Lucien was schlepping floorboards to shear the dumbwaiter shaft at the first floor. I warned him he'd need to add at least two joists if he expected to bridge the eight-foot gap with one-by-twos. He acted as though a realtor's advice to an artist were censorship.

Enough had been done by February for a housewarming. I was expecting an invite or a floorboard in an incommodious spot, but got neither. I asked around. Okay and Lucien hadn't been seen, even at the macrobiotic place.

My swainless condition hit me hardest on Valentine's Day. By the sun's setting from an overcast sky, I was not yet steeled to an empty home. As I left my office, a fine mist of snow sprayed my face like hot bacon fat. It was something to push against in the frigid grayness. It honed my will, denied the holiday, excluded the world. A sputtering whine here was a car looking for a clear artery; a blur there, a soul as forlorn as mine. I was alone.

A translucent layer of snow was everywhere but on the paved-over spot in front of Manion's. Grate or no, I thought, the crawlspace was still dissipating its share of energy. The front door was open. Okay's Valentine to the winos? I asked myself as I went in.

The blinds were drawn, but the streetlight threw a spot on a fairy-tale tableau — a leprechaun's golf green, its off-center hole surrounded by cotton snow. It was the plastic garment bag that had caused the illusion. It had trapped the evaporating fluids into a fuzzy fungal veneer, hued pearl white to emerald green, and smoothed the contours of Lucien's reclining face, except where he had sucked the vinyl film into a concave bubble.

I recoiled more at the odor than at the sight of death and was facing Lucien's new closet. I flicked on the light and looked down the re-exposed shaft at the sculptor's slab that had splintered the flimsy floor. Under the marble block was something else, or rather two other things fused into one.

My left hand was on the frame, bracing me against the story and a half of abyss. "How do you restore a coffin?" asked Okay behind me as she jerked my left arm from its support and hammer-locked it behind my back. As I tottered at the brink, I groped across the shaft to push against the rear wall with my free hand. First a braided noose entwined my left wrist; then a film descended over my face. Should I yank the plastic with my right hand and risk a fifteen-foot drop, or remain buttressed and suffocate?

"You give it a fresh corpse," Okay answered herself as I struggled for breath and balance. She had my left wrist at the nape of my neck and was trying to wrestle my other wrist into the other loop of her knot. Flexing my knees and elbows before jerking them suddenly, I pushed as much of my weight as I could back into her, tore the bag from my face, twisted ninety degrees, and wedged myself in as I fell, right shoulder against the rear wall, feet against the rim of the hole. Mad to bind my right wrist, Okay mimicked my contortions, leaned too far, and descended into the pit.

Imagine your left arm slowly leaving its socket as your shoulders fold into an acute angle about your spine. Okay, who hadn't let the rope go, was suspended from the wrist behind my back as I remained wedged over the gap. Now imagine a vise clamping your rigid body at your shoulder and feet. I've just to bend my knees to fall free, I thought, when she relaxed her grasp. I heard sirens as I blacked out.

She broke an ankle and a few ribs. Despite Lucien's father's television interviews, there was no problem with an insanity plea. The gentrifiers responded to her courtroom statement with rare largesse and renovated Manion's into a permanent haven for the homeless. Would you believe I headed the committee from my hospital room? Old man Smythe, Okay's ex, never visited her but kicked in another couple of hundred thou for the Drydock and Kelly Memorial Home.

After five years they released Okay into supervised residence at the shelter she helped create. A prisoner in her own home! It was clear to anyone but Lucien's father that she felt genuine remorse for the murderous revenge she had wreaked after Lucien's bungling had exposed the bottom of the shaft. Eventually even experienced social workers came to accept her as a lay advisor.

The divorce left me with more gripes than rights, but Reg calls whenever that younger woman he married gives him grief. I hear from him more often than from the kids. He even stops by now and again to cry on my shoulder — but gently of course. I dislocated the left one on my gruesome Valentine's Day. I slipped a disk too. It pinched an artery feeding a neural fiber in the lumbar plexus, and they couldn't quite relieve the pressure in time. My brain no longer communicates with my legs, but I manage well enough in a wheelchair to dabble in summer properties.

If only separation had been so easy on Drydock and Kelly! The city's welfare system had scoffed at their spurious liaison and sent them to shelters segregated by sex. They would regularly break free to tryst at Manion's. They would get in through the loose grate, which communicated with the dumbwaiter shaft through a crawlspace. It was fear that did them in — terror that their secret would be discovered. They were clinging to each other in silence as we paved the grate over, as Lucien floored and caulked his closet. After that, Drydock and Kelly had all the privacy they needed to consummate a love stronger than death, a marriage as permanent as death.