The Spider Goddess Read online

  ‘Sorry, Luke. I was only dreaming,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

  ‘I thought you might be hurt,’ he replied, concerned.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  I had mentioned to Luke once that I didn’t like him turning up in my room unannounced. Although it was always wonderful to see him, there was an immediacy and intimacy to his materialising unexpectedly in my bedroom that was confronting for me, especially considering the nature of my dreams, many of which involved him. Now I sensed that he was unsure about appearing without being called upon. Which was, of course, just what I’d done by calling out for him in my dream.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I assured him, and did a terrible job of trying to disguise my excitement. I enjoyed being with Lieutenant Luke; forget that, I savoured it. Never mind that he died one hundred and fifty years ago and didn’t even exist to other people. I missed him when too many nights passed without a visit. But what could one do about a ghost crush? Not very much.

  ‘Have a seat,’ I said, patting the bed.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress more softly than any living man his size could manage. ‘You brought a strange spider home,’ he commented.

  ‘Yes.’ It was now in a large glass jar with a punctured lid, sitting on one of the shelves in Celia’s lounge room. I’d used the tin lid of a smaller jar as a makeshift water dish. ‘You noticed that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m not sure if it is safe to have it here, Pandora.’

  I smiled. ‘It’s fine, really. It’s harmless.’

  It was a peculiar creature, though. I had a feeling the tarantula was following me with its cluster of alien-like eyes every time I passed through the lounge room, and I found that no matter which way I turned the jar, it shifted around to stare back at me. Did spiders normally do that?

  ‘Besides, tomorrow I’m going to try to find out where it came from,’ I continued. ‘The poor thing probably escaped from a pet shop or something. In any event, I’ll find somewhere for it. It’s just here temporarily.’

  He didn’t seem reassured by any of what I said.

  ‘I’ve read about tarantulas,’ I told him. I’d read about many exotic things in my mother’s books. ‘The North American tarantulas aren’t actually that poisonous, they just look big and scary. They usually eat insects.’ I knew that tarantulas had a paralysing agent in their venom, and that they injected a powerful enzyme into their prey in order to eat them. It was kind of gruesome to imagine a spider liquefying the insides of their prey, then sucking them dry and casting away the husk.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea to keep it here,’ he repeated, but I stubbornly dismissed his warning.

  ‘It’s not for long.’ I rolled on to my side and smiled at him, propping myself up on one elbow. ‘Can we talk?’ I asked. ‘I have some questions.’

  At that moment, Freyja headbutted the partially closed door of my bedroom open. She walked straight in and leapt up on my bed, purring and settling between Luke and I with a distinctly feline sense of entitlement that was both endearing and amusingly arrogant. She appeared to gaze at Lieutenant Luke, who sat near me, silent and protective. I was sure she could see him. Her owner, Celia, could not.

  ‘If you want, I’ll tell you what I can,’ he replied. ‘But then you must sleep.’

  I looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was only one o’clock. I had to get up for work around seven. I was already beginning to feel the pull of sleep. ‘You know, there are so many things I don’t understand. Where do you go when you aren’t . . . here?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Pandora. There are . . .’ he paused, ‘rules about what I can and can’t tell you.’

  ‘What rules exactly?’

  ‘There are some things the dead can’t tell the living.’

  Luke had told me this before. The dead were prevented from telling certain truths to the living, which was one of the reasons so many ghost sightings involved precisely that – a sighting and no dialogue. To have a verbal relationship with a spirit, as I did, was unusual. Celia said it was one of my special gifts. But despite our special relationship, Luke could not explain everything I wanted to know. It didn’t stop me from trying, though.

  ‘Can you tell me if there is a heaven or hell?’ I asked.

  ‘You have some big questions tonight,’ he said. I smiled again. ‘I’ve never seen any evidence of the kind of heaven or hell people used to discuss in my day. The horned devil. The pitchfork. The men in white robes, with bright haloes. There are places where spirits go, but . . .’

  ‘No “pearly gates”?’

  ‘Not that I’ve seen. You’re getting tired now. We should make sure you get some sleep —’

  ‘And you don’t know where you were between the time you died and when you found yourself here in Spektor?’ I asked quickly. The building had been erected in 1888, some time after his death.

  ‘That is a curious thing to consider, Miss Pandora. I just found myself here after a time. I don’t even remember the exact moment when I arrived. I must have been in some kind of limbo before that. I’m not sure for how long.’

  Ghosts didn’t have a sense of time, I’d discovered.

  ‘I remember Dr Barrett and his wife, but . . .’

  ‘You do?’ Celia had told me something of them and their tragic deaths. ‘Oh, tell me about them. What were they like? What kind of experiments was he conducting here?’

  But Luke sat up quite suddenly, as if hearing or sensing something I could not.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Did you hear something?’

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, as if I could have followed him as he stepped past the four-poster bed and through the wall, disappearing from view. It always made me uneasy when he did that. When we were together, he made a point of walking through open doors, instead of closed ones, and he even sometimes took the lift with me, though I knew he could pass through the levels of the mansion with little effort, as he was probably doing now.

  I waited in my bed, feeling the strangeness of the hour and wondering how long it would be before my dead Civil War friend returned. I did need to get some sleep before work. But maybe I should get up and take a look?

  Perhaps two minutes passed before I heard Luke’s voice, and felt a cool mist descend. ‘There is someone downstairs who shouldn’t be here,’ he said, materialising. ‘You need to see.’

  ‘Oh.’ This was a first. I swung my legs out of the bed, and my bare toes touched the cold floor. Luke turned to allow me some privacy as I threw back the covers and emerged in my white nightie. I grabbed my winter coat and put it on over my gown while I slipped my feet into my soft house slippers.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and he turned.

  ‘We must hurry.’

  He took me by the hand and, unlike my dream, his hand felt nearly as real and solid as any I’d felt – an illusion we sometimes managed. He led me gently, but quickly, towards the bedroom door, remembering as always to open the door for me before passing through. We walked through the lounge room and arrived at the front door.

  ‘Do we have to go downstairs, or . . .?’ I began, but it was clear there was too much urgency to worry about precautions, like rice. We stepped out of the doors of the penthouse and Luke led me to the rail.

  ‘She was just . . . there, in the lobby,’ he said, and pointed.

  ‘Who was there?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I hoped you might know.’

  We stood for a moment looking down through the building. The elevator wasn’t at the penthouse level where I’d left it. Someone had used it.

  ‘Whoever the lady was, she did not belong here. I have seen her coming and going lately,’ he said, obviously concerned. ‘The lady should not be here.’

  ‘She’s a mortal? Is that what you mean?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’

  There weren’t a lot of us in Spektor. ‘What do you think she was doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘I think someone migh
t be using her. She seemed to be in a kind of trance . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. That sounded ominous.

  I wondered who it could have been.

  When I emerged on Tuesday morning the main street of Spektor was lifeless.

  I was growing used to the peculiar quiet of the suburb, and even to the fog that clung to the buildings with its faint odour of old books and mothballs. At one end of Addams Avenue, in the direction I was headed, the smell became a little more intense.

  Harold’s Grocer.

  In some ways Harold’s Grocer was your typical corner store. In other, significant ways, it was not. For one, it’s supposedly always open, night or day. Harold also claimed he could get anything for anyone in Spektor. I wondered if my request today would push that theory.

  ‘Hi Harold,’ I called out, as I pushed the door open. A bell chimed to announce my arrival.

  The store was a bit musty, and the shelves were stocked with old grocery goods. Harold had detergents and soaps, tins of vegetables, sauces, and boxes of cereal and rice, but I didn’t recognise the brands nor their somewhat antediluvian labels. I always had the feeling those boxes and tins had been there an awfully long time. He had an old, humming glass-fronted fridge that he kept stocked with things I regularly picked up: milk, cheese and soda; and he kept a fresh stock of my favourite crackers. But those tins on the shelves could probably walk out on their own, I thought. Harold had a cool, old-fashioned sign out front (declaring, simply enough, ‘Harold’s Grocer’), and his cash register was a collector’s dream. It was a big metal register with round keys that sat on metal stalks like an old typewriter, and big white number tabs that popped up to show the total. The most impressive thing about the shop, however, was Harold himself.

  ‘Well hello there, Pandora English.’

  Harold emerged from the back, trailing dust like a moulting dog might trail hairs. He was a short man, and he always dressed in the same plaid shirt, tucked into high work pants, his oversized belly bulging above the belt. The thin tufts of hair on his head swayed back and forth like green sea kelp, and his jolly cheeks were the colour of Granny Smith apples. He was, it must be said, the most green person I’d ever seen. The whites of his eyes were yellow. His viridescent appearance had taken some getting used to, but it was hard not to like him as he was always so agreeable.

  ‘Hi, Harold. It’s good to see you. Are you keeping well?’

  ‘I’m a little green around the gills,’ he joked. It was a joke he made often. I smiled every time.

  ‘I have a request,’ I told him.

  ‘Ms Celia let me know that you need a little house for your spider friend,’ Harold said before I could continue.

  ‘Oh. She spoke to you last night? Well, I don’t know if it is a spider friend, but . . . No, I don’t think I need a vivarium. I’ll only have it for another day. I was just going to order some food for it. Some crickets?’

  ‘Ms Celia said you did need a vivarium. But, quite right, she didn’t use the term friend,’ he remarked.

  Celia always made sure anything I bought at Harold’s was put on her tab, but buying a vivarium for a stray tarantula hardly seemed fair. ‘I suppose the spider has to be in decent housing until I find some place for it to go,’ I said, pondering the situation. ‘That small jar is a little inhumane, I guess.’ Celia tended to be right about things. ‘Well, I’ll probably only need it for a few days. A week at most. Can you get something like that? It shouldn’t be fancy. Just a cheap one will do.’

  ‘I’ve already put the order in. Should come in tonight.’

  My eyes widened. ‘Really? That was fast.’

  ‘That’s what I do,’ Harold said, and smiled. ‘Now just to be sure . . . It isn’t the Goliath, is it?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Well, Ms Celia – a great lady, Ms Celia – she mentioned you thought it was a tarantula. But there is one kind of South American tarantula called a Goliath Birdeater that would need a much bigger vivarium. Theraphosa blondi, it’s called. It’s supposed to be the largest natural spider in the world. I looked it up.’

  ‘Oh, goodness no. This is just a regular-sized tarantula. I caught it in an extra large coffee cup.’

  Harold chuckled softly and his belly moved up and down. ‘Oh, I see. That’s good then.’

  ‘How big is the Goliath?’

  ‘About a foot across.’

  No, I would not have been game to pick that up in a coffee cup. ‘Oh, no. This is nothing like that. Just a little tarantula. I’ll need a bit of food for it, though, just enough for a few days until I find its home,’ I said. ‘Do you think you can get a few crickets?’

  ‘I take it you aren’t afraid of creepy-crawlies then, Pandora?’

  ‘No spider has ever done anything to me.’ That was the truth. My late mother, the archaeologist, had told me that in some cultures spiders were thought to have weaved the very universe itself. We’d never killed spiders in our home, not like Aunt Georgia did. She smacked them with her cooking magazines, whether they were venomous or not.

  ‘No cricket has ever done anything to me, either,’ I added. ‘But I guess a spider has to eat, so . . .’

  He nodded. ‘You are one interesting young lady, Pandora. One vivarium and some crickets, coming right up. By the way, that’s a nice dress you’re wearing today.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, blushing a little. I pulled back the camel-coloured winter coat Celia had given me and gave a little twirl so that the hem of the dress underneath flicked up around my knees. ‘Celia made it.’ It was the black one with the elaborate, twisted gold belt and starched white collar. I was awfully lucky that her wardrobe fitted me. Celia claimed the Lucasta women were always the same size, right down to the shoes. I was a Lucasta through and through, she often said. I would have been Pandora Lucasta instead of Pandora English if the naming of children were not so unswervingly patriarchal, she also told me.

  ‘That Ms Celia is one great lady,’ Harold remarked again, and sighed.

  He often said things like that about my great-aunt, more to himself than to me. I was beginning to think he might be enamoured with her.

  ‘Well, bye, Harold,’ I said and made my way out. ‘I’ll come by after work.’

  ‘See you tonight. I’m always open,’ he said, as the door shut behind me with the chime of the bell.

  I reached Spring Street station a touch early, and made my way up to street level in a jovial mood. I felt upbeat, considering my lack of sleep. A visit from Luke could do that.

  South of Houston, or SoHo, was an area once known as ‘Hell’s Hundred Acres’, but now it was gentrified and even trendy, with beautiful warehouse conversions, high-end designer boutiques, studios and cool cafes. A lot of artists lived in the area. It was the suburb where the photo shoot had taken place the day before, and it was also where I was beginning my career as a writer at Pandora magazine. True, I wasn’t actually doing any writing – I’d been hired as an assistant – but it was a job and New York was a hard place to get a foot in the door. It beat waiting tables, and I really loved coming to SoHo each day.

  I arrived a few minutes early and was gawking at the Venus flytrap plants and strange taxidermy lined up in the window of the EVOLUTION shop at 120 Spring Street, when I felt someone sidle up next to me. I tensed.

  ‘I so want that skull.’

  I relaxed. It was only Morticia, the receptionist from Pandora. I think her name is pretty funny, though I’ve never told her so. It’s no more weird than Pandora, after all. Despite her name, she bore no resemblance to the Addams Family matriarch, except for her pale skin. In fact, she more closely resembled Olive Oyl, Popeye’s cartoon love interest . . . If Olive Oyl were into Tim Burton. A breeze flipped her shaggy, faux red hair over her eyes and she tucked a section back behind her ear. She gave me a lopsided smile and I bid her good morning.

  ‘Which skull?’ I asked. As well as the Venus flytraps and taxidermy in the window, the shop was filled with skulls and skeletons, both huma
n and animal. It was an odd shop. I often found myself staring in the window.

  ‘See the case there on the left, up on the wall?’ She pointed. I cupped my hands around my face and peered through the window. There were five human skulls lined up in an immaculate glass case on one wall. The middle skull was extraordinary to behold. It had been elaborately decorated with carved silver embellishments – silver teeth, ears and nose, and a headband of tiny silver skulls. There was a gemstone in position over the ‘third eye’ and the eye sockets themselves were big silver discs with luminous black stones for pupils. ‘That’s where they keep the real stuff,’ Morticia explained. ‘Not the medical models, but the real thing. I want that one in the middle.’

  I could see the price on it. ‘Expensive,’ I commented.

  ‘It’s not that . . . well, actually it is that, but even if I had a spare six grand, it would be illegal for them to sell it to me.’

  I’d heard that. It was illegal to sell body parts of any kind. The rule seemed to apply to anything that was derived from a human, with the exception of hair. I’d seen delicate Victorian heirlooms – necklaces and bracelets – made of the tightly braided hair of someone’s long-departed loved ones. Creepy perhaps, but beautiful.

  ‘This shop has a licence to sell though,’ Morticia said. ‘They can sell the real skeletons as well as those plastic medical models, but they can only sell the real stuff if it’s for medical research.’

  ‘You’ve really looked into this,’ I said.

  ‘I know. I’m weird,’ she replied quietly.

  I shook my head. ‘No, no. I don’t think you’re weird at all, Morticia.’

  We were both the same age – nineteen – and so far we hadn’t seen each other outside the office or the walk to the subway, but I was trying to think of ways to hang out with her more. The other part of my life – the part with ghosts and mysterious happenings – had been occupying me a fair bit. We stepped away from the window, opened the entrance next door at 120b and climbed the staircase, passing signs for photographers and PR companies. When we reached our floor with the simple but stylish little sign for Pandora magazine, we pushed our way inside the brightly lit office and saw that we were some of the first ones in. That wasn’t a bad thing.