The Spider Goddess Read online

  I did a quick, anxious scan of the large, open-plan warehouse conversion that made up the office. It was always hard to tell if my boss, Skye, was in, because she was the only one who had her own contained office. Her door was closed. I couldn’t see her or the deputy editor, Pepper. I figured it was probably safe.

  ‘Nah, she’s not in yet,’ Morticia told me, and I relaxed a touch. Skye DeVille was the editor of Pandora magazine and not the most easygoing boss in the world, to put it mildly. She evidently thought she was the love child of Anna Wintour and Medusa.

  I plonked my leather satchel at my feet, undid Celia’s beautiful winter coat and sat down on the edge of the wide reception desk. Morticia positioned herself at her desk, turned her computer on and whipped off her black coat. She brought an equally black fingernail to her lips and pulled a face. ‘You look a bit tired. Are you okay?’

  From this woman such comments were innocent and genuine. I couldn’t be offended. There was something quite weird, though, about coming to work tired so often and not being able to tell anyone why I had underslept. Perhaps they all assumed I had some kind of wild night-life? After all, I could hardly mention that I had been up late with a handsome, deceased friend. Or that I’d had to get up early to order a little something from my local ‘green’ grocer.

  My life is so very peculiar.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Sometimes I stay up late.’

  ‘You’re always reading,’ she commented. That was true. Although my voracious appetite for books had slowed recently thanks to the rather more peculiar and pressing goings-on of my life in Spektor.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask what happened with that guy you were seeing a while back? The roses guy? You two still seeing each other?’ Morticia asked me.

  The roses guy. I’d come to work one morning to discover a rather generous bouquet of roses on my desk. It had left quite an impression on Morticia, and, at the time, on me. I remembered the strange feeling I’d had when we’d first met by chance in the elevator at his work. The way I was jolted by a vision of my hand sliding up his bare chest. The way I’d fallen right into a feeling of his kiss, his hard body, some sensual moment between us which had not yet happened. And then, just like that, I was back to reality, standing in the elevator with him, at that stage a stranger. I’d been embarrassed, though of course he could not have known what I’d felt.

  I often thought of him. Jay Rockwell. We had a little hiccup in our relationship a month earlier. The hiccup was that he couldn’t remember me. It could be far worse. He’d fallen into the hands of a group of vicious villains (my fault, naturally) and I’d truly feared him dead. I couldn’t find him for days afterwards. What I’d discovered, however, was that rather than being killed, he’d suffered a rather inconvenient bit of amnesia. We’d only managed two dates, but he showed no evidence of remembering either. Finding that out had been rather an embarrassing exercise. That’s not a phone call I’d like to blunder through again. And now there were no emails from him. No roses sent to the office. Nothing. I’d even got my own mobile phone since the encounter, but now that I had a number, he didn’t even know that he wanted to call it.

  I had a strong feeling we would connect again. But what did I know?

  ‘We’re not seeing each other at the moment,’ I told her.

  ‘Shame.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘How was the shoot yesterday?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never been on a shoot before. It’s kind of . . .’

  I thought of the day I’d spent in the studio, watching the blonde model get made up and photographed, yawning between takes. They’d pinned the clothes at her waist to make them look better on her, and photoshopped her imperfections before she’d even left the studio. I wasn’t sure how to describe the experience.

  ‘Not how it looks in the photos, huh?’ Morticia said.

  ‘Exactly. The really weird thing, though, was that a spider got into the studio somehow, and everyone sort of freaked out.’

  ‘Really?’ Her pencilled brows shot up.

  ‘It was basically the end of the shoot, so it didn’t really matter. But it was definitely weird. And it was a big spider. Not a local, I don’t think.’

  ‘My brother used to have a spider,’ she mused. ‘They aren’t that scary, really.’

  ‘This one is a tarantula, I think. I’m going to have to find a pet shop or something to take it to, because I can’t keep it.’ I planned to use the office Internet to check the Yellow Pages for pet shops in SoHo. The spider was sure to have escaped from one of those. Someone had to be looking for that big fella – or big lady? Surely there weren’t tons of tarantulas in Manhattan?

  ‘You have the spider?’ Morticia said, shocked.

  ‘Not with me. Imagine what Skye would say!’

  It would be rather fun to put the tarantula on her desk though, just to see the look on her face. But no, I couldn’t do that.

  ‘I have it at home,’ I explained. ‘They were going to kill it.’

  Morticia shook her head. ‘Wow. So you saved it?’ She put her feet up on the desk. She did this whenever our bosses weren’t around. She seemed to wear Doc Martens every day, with striped leggings. Today was no exception. I liked that she dressed how she wanted to, despite working at the front desk of a fashion magazine. Granted, it wasn’t exactly Vogue, but . . .

  I heard the door and Morticia glanced over my shoulder. ‘Oh, here’s Pepper,’ she whispered, and took her Docs back off the desk in a flash. I stood up.

  The deputy editor was in, looking sober, fashionably dressed and whippet thin as ever. At the moment she wore her hair in a severe, bleached blonde short ponytail. Her carefully ripped jeans, paired with a silk top and fur coat, were probably worth more than everything I owned. I nodded to her by way of greeting and took my cue to hoof it to the back of the office to my little cubicle outside Skye’s office. I heard Morticia utter a polite greeting and, in usual form, Pepper ignored it.

  Morticia and I were the second-class citizens of Pandora – that much I’d learned fast. After the events of the past month, it felt rather ironic that Pepper and Skye treated me like a lowly peasant. But never mind . . .

  I put my satchel down on my desk, threw my coat over the chair and settled in. Absent-mindedly, I opened the top drawer of the desk and looked at a small, partially torn photograph I kept inside, just where I’d found it when I first got the job and had cleaned out the desk. It was a photograph of a young woman with blonde, wavy hair, worn just above the shoulder. She stood next to an older woman. They had similar hairstyles, the same smile, the same wide blue eyes and round faces. This was my predecessor. She’d been twenty when she went missing, and I knew she wasn’t ever coming back – not to Pandora magazine, anyway. I knew where she was and what had happened to her. But I couldn’t tell anyone. Not even the woman in the photograph – her mother.

  Secrets. So many secrets.

  The phone rang up the front, and Morticia answered in her usual chirpy voice. After a moment the phone on my desk lit up, and tore me from my dark thoughts. ‘Skye DeVille’s office, how may I help you?’ I answered.

  ‘It’s Mark Winston.’

  The photographer. I recalled his childish shriek at the sight of the spider, and my lips curled up into a little grin.

  ‘How may I help you, Mr Winston?’

  ‘Is Skye in?’

  ‘She’s not available right now,’ I said, looking at the time on the big round wall clock. It was 9.40 am.

  ‘Well, I’ll have the proofs ready by this afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll let Ms DeVille know.’

  ‘And tell her the Chow samples never arrived, so we only shot the Helmsworth, Smith & Co, Arachne and Victor Mal.’

  And that was it. He hung up.

  I took note of the call, and tried to ignore his rudeness.

  It was two hours later when I looked up and saw Skye marching through the office. I’d spent a criminal amount of time surfing the web for local pe
t shops, and had come up with a sure-fire answer for my spider’s origins. There was an exotic pet shop two doors down from the studio where the knitwear shoot had been. I hoped to check it out at lunchtime.

  ‘Good morning, Skye,’ I said as she breezed past in a long, tan fringed winter coat and heeled boots, with a silk scarf tied around her neck. Skye was petite, dark, formidably groomed and about ten years my senior. She never had one single slick black hair out of place on her head, and everything she wore, no matter the style, seemed to be a form of chic body armour on her. I wondered if she could deflect laser beams.

  She certainly had no trouble deflecting me. My polite greeting was ignored. She returned a minute later with her hand out, and I quickly placed her messages into her palm before she retreated into her office and shut the door behind her without a word.

  Yes, she is a pleasure to work for, I told myself.

  I sat back down and continued to wade through the computer’s inbox, sorting her correspondence from wannabe designers and second-rate advertisers. It had taken me a while to figure out which people were which, because initially I didn’t really know who was who in New York design, but I was getting the hang of it.

  The door flew open, and I spun in my chair.

  ‘You! Where are the Chanel samples?’ Skye screeched.

  My eyes widened and my heart did a little jump. ‘The what?’ I was caught totally off guard.

  ‘The Chanel tattoo samples that were on my desk yesterday. Where are they?’

  ‘Tattoos? Chanel do tattoos?’ I was gobsmacked.

  She gave me a withering look. ‘Pepper!’ she yelled, and the entire office leapt to uneasy attention at her call. Skye didn’t usually have these outbursts. Not when we weren’t close to deadline.

  The wispy deputy editor strode straight over and gave me a withering look of her own.

  ‘The Chanel tattoos are missing. Do you have them?’ Skye asked her.

  Pepper shook her head in response.

  I stood, and felt a bit small next to the two women, both literally and figuratively. ‘Um, they didn’t get brought to the shoot or something?’ I suggested.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Skye snapped. ‘They were in last season. We’re not using them in this issue.’

  Oh, they were in during the neo-goth vampire chic season? I must have been too distracted by the actual vampires to notice. Not that either of these two haughty women seemed to recall one darned thing about the vampires, or about what happened to them with the Blood Countess the night after the fashion parade we’d attended. Their memories of the incident seemed to have been erased. Just like my date Jay’s memory. I’d quickly guessed that much. Any attempt to remind them that I’d kind of saved their lives was totally useless.

  So I was just Pandora English, lowly subordinate assistant. Still, I dared to ask another question. ‘So if we aren’t using them for this issue, then why . . .?’ I began. The two women turned to look at me and I swallowed the rest of my question. ‘Why does it matter?’ I finally squeaked, finishing the sentence so softly the words barely formed at all.

  ‘You aren’t to leave for lunch today. Scour the office for those samples,’ Skye ordered.

  ‘But . . .’ I protested.

  By the time I closed my mouth again the two women were inside Skye’s office, and the door was slammed shut.

  At close of business, I sat on the edge of the wide reception desk, looking and feeling deflated. My stomach rumbled. My head hurt. It had been a long, particularly unpleasant day, made significantly more unbearable by the lack of a break. I was glad to be heading home. Morticia re-laced her Doc Martens, gathered her things and we left together without a word.

  ‘Well, that was a day,’ I said at the base of the stairs.

  We stepped out into the cool winter air and I felt relief wash over me.

  ‘Yes, I could see. What was Skye chewing you out about? Something about a tattoo?’ Morticia said. ‘I didn’t know you had one.’

  I managed a laugh, and dug my hands into my coat pockets. My breath made a little white cloud that drifted away on the cold street air. ‘I don’t have any tattoos. She said something had gone missing from her office, some kind of Chanel tattoo, and she wanted me to find it.’

  I hadn’t found it. As I had been reminded again and again through the day.

  Morticia’s animated face lit up with recognition. ‘The Chanel temporary tattoos? She got the new ones in? Cool!’

  I shook my head and stopped in my tracks for a moment. ‘Okay, I’m confused. You do mean Chanel, right? The Chanel with the pearls and the suits and things? Coco Chanel, Chanel?’

  Celia had given me something of a lecture about the iconic French designer Coco Chanel and her impact on the fashion world – her pioneering look of menswear-styled women’s tailoring, pant suits and layers of chic pearls at a time when many women were still expected to wear restrictive corsets and elaborate, cumbersome costumes. Celia even lent me some of her vintage Chanel from time to time; in particular, a lovely Coco Chanel designed jacket that had probably helped me get the job at Pandora. I could not afford something like that myself, not even secondhand. Needless to say, I found it hard to reconcile this image of Coco Chanel with tattoos.

  ‘Yeah,’ Morticia said. ‘They are amazing. Haven’t you seen them? They totally rock, even though they’re temporary. Just beautiful.’

  Once again I was reminded that I really wasn’t much of a fashionista.

  ‘I’ve got a new tattoo,’ Morticia said. ‘A real one.’

  ‘Oh, can I see?’

  We had stopped on the sidewalk, and now she pulled her dyed red hair to one side, ignoring the flood of pedestrians passing us. ‘It’s on the back of my neck. It’s only a week old.’

  I pulled her collar down a touch and saw a big cartoon skull. The skin around it was still slightly red. ‘Ha. I like it,’ I told her. ‘It suits you.’

  Morticia and I parted ways at the subway, as we always did. And I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d ever be able to introduce a friend to Celia. Or to Spektor.

  I had the feeling Spektor wanted to keep its secrets.

  It is possible to feel totally alone in a sea of people.

  This thought occurred to me as I made my way up the steps at 103rd Street station, exiting the coarse musk of the sub-terranean subway to take a deep breath of crisp winter evening air. Rugged up locals rushed past on the sidewalks of Spanish Harlem, and a male stranger bumped hard into my shoulder without seeming to notice me or what he’d done. Taxicabs and cars filled the streets, honking and moving in starts. I even saw a black car like Vlad’s, but could not see inside the windows. After growing up with the slow pace of staid Gretchenville, the charismatic chaos of Manhattan still jolted me at times. New Yorkers were always in a hurry to get somewhere, see someone, do something. Did they ever stop to smell the roses? I wondered. It was the state flower, after all.

  I took the subway nearly every morning and evening of the working week, and it still amazed me how little human contact there was on those journeys, despite the throng of people. Commuters did not make eye contact, and even the buskers and beggars who occasionally boarded to sing or recite poetry, or simply ask for money, often had trouble attracting so much as a glance. Of course, sometimes Vlad picked me up to take me home – usually unannounced – but I resisted making that a habit. Maybe it was my small-town upbringing, but the idea of being ferried everywhere by Celia’s statuesque chauffeur seemed wrong to me, despite her curious claim that she needed to ‘keep him busy’. New York might be a big, strange place but, after being cooped up so long in my small hometown, I needed every part of my independence.

  There was no subway stop in Spektor so I rode the subway uptown and walked the last stretch through Central Park. If my great-aunt thought this routine of mine was a show of stubbornness, she didn’t bother to mention it.

  I wrapped Celia’s cashmere coat tight around me, and began the solo walk home. On my first date i
n Manhattan a rather handsome New Yorker named Jay Rockwell – roses guy – had driven me home and said, ‘I hope you don’t go walking through Central Park on your own at night.’ It had seemed condescending at the time, as if he thought I was fresh off the boat and didn’t know a thing about personal safety. Yet here I was walking alone through the park most evenings after work.

  Thing is, after the events of the past couple of months, human villains no longer seemed so scary.

  Thankfully I was not accosted by any balaclava-clad baddies in the park, and the stroll rewarded me with the final minutes of a sunset of gold and red hues before the sky turned to total darkness. As I entered the omnipresent fog of the tunnel to Spektor I pulled the small bag of rice from my satchel.

  I could never be too careful.

  Half an hour later, I opened the heavy door of Celia’s building, balancing my satchel and my shopping from Harold’s Grocer, including a box containing the spider vivarium he’d got in for me. Oh yes . . . and I had a small box of live crickets to feed the spider before it starved to death. A box of live crickets. I hadn’t considered that. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  I stepped inside the lobby, juggling my parcels with difficulty, and let the door close behind me with a puff. When I turned to cross to the lift I saw that I was not alone.

  ‘Well, who do we have here?’

  Oh no.

  It was my nemesis, Athanasia, and her trio of supermodel cohorts – my ‘housemates’. Athanasia was a disturbingly beautiful creature, from her mane of auburn hair down to her stylishly stilettoed feet, and she had a striking ability to mesmerise people on first meeting. (I’d seen her practically hypnotise a whole room of cynical fashion types. An incredible feat.) Her physical attributes certainly helped; she possessed a lithe, willowy physique and a tiny waist. Her eyes were dark, feline and wideset, and she had a full pout to make even Angelina Jolie jealous. Her three friends were also exceptionally attractive, as I suppose one would expect of professional fashion models, though not one of them could outshine the dark beauty of their ringleader. One of the women was blonde, one a brunette and the other a redhead; and all were tall, pale and equally stunning in their own way. They were a kind of lethal version of the Spice Girls, except each one was Scary. I’d seen these four work the catwalk. They’d had a moment of popularity when vampire chic was in. The New York fashion scene really hadn’t known what they’d bargained for there because hidden beneath the models’ pretty lips were genuine ivory fangs the size of a wild cat’s.