The Spider Goddess Read online

  I abruptly stood up. ‘But Skye . . .’

  ‘Open them!’

  The blood drained from my face. This was a new level of humiliation. In two months of working at Pandora she had treated me rudely – usually by ignoring me – but now she was accusing me of theft? Horrified into a stunned silence, I bent over and pulled open the drawers of my desk one by one. I saw pens and paperclips and notepads, and that sad, crinkled photo of Samantha and her mother that I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw away. Of course there was no jewellery in there. I didn’t even know what jewellery she meant. I tried to think back to the shoot and what the model was wearing. Something brightly coloured? First Skye was missing some temporary tattoos and now some jewellery? What was going on?

  ‘And your bag,’ Skye demanded after I’d shown her the contents of each drawer.

  ‘My bag?’

  By now we’d attracted quite a little crowd. Pepper had walked over with her brow furrowed. She watched the display with agitation. Crowded behind her was the rest of the staff of Pandora, none of whom had bothered to get to know me. Some impression this will make, I thought. Pandora the suspected thief?

  Morticia, I noticed, hadn’t left the reception area, but was craning her neck to see what was happening. She held one hand over her mouth and her eyes were large. She looked concerned for me. That was something we had in common.

  Skye and I locked eyes again. ‘Open it,’ she demanded again.

  I really don’t want to do this . . .

  I carefully pulled my leather satchel up on to the desk, my face positively radiating with humiliation. I opened it for her. ‘See,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

  She stepped forward and rummaged around in my bag, and then to my complete horror she picked up the satchel and turned it upside down. She shook it roughly and all the contents spilled out.

  No!

  I somehow caught the jar with the tarantula in it before it hit the desk. In a flash it was in my hand, hidden behind my back. I’d never moved so fast in my life. I couldn’t even recall catching it.

  I backed up a few paces, and then realised that, from her position, Morticia could see what I was holding behind my back. I glanced over my shoulder to see her eyes fixed on the jar. They were the size of dinner plates. The hand returned to her mouth. She said nothing.

  What a day to bring a tarantula to work.

  Amazingly, Skye didn’t seem to notice what I was holding, or care. She was too intent on seeking out the jewellery. Of course the jewellery wasn’t in my bag. I may be a strange girl. I may even be living a double life, but I am no thief.

  Pepper finally stepped in. ‘Pandora, I have an errand for you to run,’ she said.

  I nodded stiffly.

  ‘I want you to get a quote from Victor Mal for the knitwear feature. Just a few good lines will do. Something about his collection and knitwear in general. Okay?’

  I nodded again. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Nothing else,’ she said pointedly. She put an address in my hand. She guided Skye back into her office while I gathered my things into the satchel.

  ‘Everyone back to your desks,’ Pepper ordered, and the rest of the staff scattered as she closed the door of Skye’s office. A tense quiet descended.

  I grabbed my coat and bag, and walked to the reception desk. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Wow,’ Morticia whispered.

  ‘I know,’ I replied in a low voice, and put my coat on.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I nodded. ‘Pepper has given me some errand to get me out of the office.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘And . . .’ Her gaze fell to the jar in my hand, and I slipped it into my satchel. It wasn’t the time for show and tell. I had to get the tarantula out of the office. The poor thing would be quite distressed after being tossed around like that. I’d been foolish to try to save it in the first place. I probably should have let someone else take care of it at the studio. Imagine if Skye had found it, in front of everyone?

  ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I know.’

  I left.

  The fresh air outside was a godsend. The cold hit my hot cheeks with a sting at first, and then slowly the cool winter breeze and the anonymous, impersonal flow of traffic helped me to feel human again. I was no longer the centre of attention or the subject of indignity. In this crowd I was nobody, and that felt like a good thing.

  I questioned my future at Pandora. Could I quit? Should I? Finding a job in New York was hard, I’d discovered. Heck, these days it was hard to get a job anywhere – or that’s what everyone said. I hardly had impressive qualifications. I’d been lucky getting work there on Celia’s advice – really lucky – and I couldn’t count on having that kind of luck again. I’d worked in Bettina and Ben’s Book Barn through much of high school, before they went out of business when everyone started buying books online. (The shop had been a boon for my voracious reading habit.) And then I’d been Skye’s assistant for a short time. That was it. I had never landed that job at the local paper or got any of my articles published. And my ‘special’ talents (as Celia so encouragingly referred to them) didn’t amount to much in the business world. Who wanted to hire a strange girl with a penchant for unconventional feelings about supernatural occurrences, and an ability to speak with ghosts?

  I held Pepper’s note in my hand. Victor Mal. I needed to get some quotes from him for the feature. Nothing else, she’d said, as if I needed a reminder that the last time I’d put my reporter skills to work I’d uncovered a huge story about the cosmetics industry, and Pepper had taken all the credit for it. As if I needed reminding of that.

  I felt around in my satchel and pulled out the jar with the spider in it. It was looking at me again. It seemed surprisingly docile – I was worried that was because it was starving to death. As good as Celia had been to let me keep it at her house, it needed to be with people who could feed it and look after it better than I could. It needed to go back to where it belonged. And I was confident I knew where that was.

  ‘Hi there,’ I said, looking over the desk of SoHo Exotic Pets. The pet store was surprisingly unkempt, lined with glass vivariums and fish tanks. It harboured the strange smell of reptiles.

  A woman was on her knees behind the desk, but she stood when she heard my voice. ‘Welcome to Exotic Pets. How may I help you?’ she said. She was wearing very thick glasses, and an even thicker cable-knit sweater. She looked like she didn’t leave the shop very often.

  ‘I was wondering if you might have lost someone?’ I said with a cheer I didn’t really feel. I fished around in my satchel and pulled out the jar. I placed it on the desk. The tarantula inside shifted a little and then turned around to sit facing me. Again, I felt its stare.

  ‘Do you need some food for your pet?’ the shopkeeper said. ‘We have crickets, and all kinds of gut load available . . .’

  Gut load? ‘Oh, no, it’s not my pet. I found it nearby and assumed it had escaped from your shop,’ I explained. ‘A lost tarantula in New York.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Hang on a moment.’ She leaned away from the desk. ‘Jason!’ she shouted. ‘We missing any tarantulas back there?’ There were only two customers in the shop. They both turned around to stare.

  I winced.

  After a few minutes, Jason appeared. The two were related, if the glasses and sweaters were anything to go by. ‘You want us to buy this off you? You a breeder?’ he said and scratched his short, grey beard.

  ‘A breeder? No. No. I thought you might have lost it. I found this guy practically next door, at the studio.’ I motioned to the photographer’s studio just down the street. ‘I felt for sure it had escaped from here.’

  ‘Not from here,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’re the only exotic pet shop around.’

  ‘We aren’t missing any animals,’ he said.

  Darn it. How did I get myself into this?

  I couldn’t insist that it was theirs if they said it wasn’t. But what could I do? I picked the
jar up and looked at the spider. It was still staring at me. ‘I can’t keep it,’ I finally said, feeling deflated. ‘Do you know of anyone nearby who would be missing one? It seems so docile, it must be a pet.’

  ‘No one has come in looking for a spider.’

  I put the jar back down on the desk. ‘It’s a tarantula, right? It’s not native to New York, is it?’

  The woman bent forward and looked. ‘It is a tarantula. I’m not sure what breed. Not a Chilean Rose Hair or Mexican Red Knee,’ she said, and adjusted her glasses.

  ‘Not the Red Leg. Or the Honduran Curly,’ Jason added, peering down to look as well. ‘The markings are a little unusual. Is it Old World, do you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s not the Malaysian Earth Tiger, or the Thai Black. Look at that colouring . . .’

  I watched them study the spider for a while, as it, seemingly, studied me. I couldn’t get past that feeling of being watched by those eight tiny eyes.

  And then it happened.

  I felt a familiar coldness in my belly.

  Death.

  Danger.

  I stiffened. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. In a flash I turned around, my blood already coursing with panic. Something is wrong. Danger was approaching, unknown danger. The feeling was so strong I felt I needed to flee the shop immediately.

  I backed away from the counter. ‘I have somewhere I need to be,’ I called out as the two shopkeepers continued to argue over what kind of tarantula it wasn’t. ‘Will you take it?’ I said.

  They looked at each other. ‘We can’t just buy this off you —’ Jason began.

  ‘I don’t want any money,’ I said, gathering my satchel and already heading for the door. They both looked at me strangely. ‘Please just take care of it. It hasn’t eaten.’ I pushed the door open and made it out on to the street, feeling as if I were in the grip of an attack of claustrophobia. The cool winter air felt refreshing on my face after the stuffiness in the shop, but unfortunately my sense of foreboding didn’t improve. I loosened the collar of Celia’s coat for more air and hurried up the street towards the subway station.

  When I reached the top of the steps I felt compelled to turn. There were countless pedestrians moving past me on the sidewalk, but one person stood out.

  Her.

  An unusually tall woman about ten feet behind me, moving in my direction. I felt sure she’d seen me come from the pet shop. She paused now that I had stopped moving. She was swathed in black and she sported a short, dark bob and large black sunglasses. My eyes were drawn straight to her, and beneath those dark glasses of hers I felt my gaze was met.

  There was something there. Something.

  I didn’t pause to find out what. I turned and hurried down the subway steps.

  The green oasis of Washington Square Park opened before me.

  I’d been tense on the subway trip to W4th, shaken by my strange foreboding and the tall woman with the dark hair. I’d jumped at every loud noise and every stranger’s voice. After the humiliation I’d endured at the office, my overactive imagination had got away from me. I needed to relax. Now, as I walked towards the park on my way to the address Pepper had given me, I revelled in fresh air and snatches of winter sun, happy to be outdoors. Thanks to Pepper’s errand, I could take a moment to escape the oppressive concrete of this urban island for the temporary company of trees.

  Washington Square Park was a sanctuary, though a bitterly cold one. Wind whipped past the barren trees across expanses of grass, kicking up fallen leaves and littered newspaper. On this weekday afternoon the park was peopled with joggers, dog walkers and students from the surrounding university campuses lingering after lunch. Despite the cold, I found myself smiling as I entered the square by the north-west entrance, my long hair whipped by the breeze. The sense of foreboding I’d felt at the pet shop had disappeared and I reminded myself that, despite my panicked behaviour, the spider was finally in good hands.

  No one had killed it. My mother would be proud.

  With my mother on my mind I passed under the dark, barren, silently reaching branches of an ancient elm tree towering a hundred feet over me, far above the other trees, and the cold thing reawakened in the pit of my stomach.

  Death.

  People died every day, and nearly every square foot of the Earth had seen that normal cycle of life. But wrongful deaths – murders, executions, unspeakable suffering – left a lasting imprint on a place, and often the spirits of the dead could not fully escape the place of those final, terrible moments. Some spirits circled endlessly, trapped in their own private torment. Some reached out to me. On this occasion I heard an unearthly choking, and I closed my eyes and tried not to see the faded shapes of perhaps twenty men, many of them young, all of them skinny and sad in their worn rags, gasping with ropes around their necks, just as they had two centuries before, sentenced to hang for crimes only some of them committed.

  The Hangman’s Elm.

  A couple of students sat beneath the Hangman’s Elm, chatting and snacking on sandwiches in the winter sunshine. Unbeknownst to the woman, the dangling feet of a murderer hung not inches from her mouth. I looked away and hurried through the park at a brisk pace, making for the other side. By the time I’d reached Washington Place and Greene Street I’d rid myself of the image of the Hangman’s Elm and her victims. But strangely, my stomach was no less cold. I stopped by the Brown Building and caught my breath. I had not run terribly fast, but my throat felt tight, my lungs constricted.

  I coughed.

  I coughed again.

  Could I smell . . . smoke?

  I looked up and stifled a scream. A young woman was falling through the air above me, caught in a death leap. I cowered beneath her falling form before realising that she was suspended there. She too was a spirit faded in the daylight; the essence of a lost life caught between worlds. Her mouth was open in a silent scream and her clothing flared out behind her in wings of flame. And she was not alone. Above her were others like her, trailing into the sky. All young women. On fire.

  These spirits, or imprints, appeared not to see me. They weren’t ghosts like Lieutenant Luke. I could not talk to them. I could not interact, but I could see them, feel them.

  I shivered.

  What a place for Victor Mal to have his showroom, I thought. Though I supposed not everyone remembered those long ago events, or felt the tragedy of the largest industrial accident in New York’s history as if it were still happening. As it was, I had to work hard to block the psychic aftermath of the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 and the imprint left by the deaths of the 146 women, most younger than me, who burned within the locked doors of the textile factory, or plunged a hundred feet to their deaths down the elevator shaft or from window ledges trying to escape the flames. Over a century later, they were still leaping to their demise, forever trying to escape.

  A New Yorker strolled past in a smart business suit, toting a briefcase, clearly immune to all the death. He didn’t look up.

  Pandora. You are strange.

  I found the address Pepper had given me, mere metres from the falling bodies of the century old fire’s victims. Feeling drained, I walked through a lobby and into a lift, where I found a sign for Victor Mal. When I stepped out on his floor I found myself in a brightly lit reception area the size of a small baseball field. This was Victor Mal’s studio all right. Each letter of the words VICTOR MAL DESIGN was taller than I was and flanking this impressive signage were floor-to-ceiling reproductions of his advertisements over the decades.

  Is that Cindy Crawford? Claudia Schiffer? Gisele Bündchen?

  I stopped midway through the reception area to gawk.

  ‘May I help you?’ The words were polite. The tone was not.

  I turned to see the receptionist looking at me. She was blonde, petite and unseasonably tanned. I guessed she was wearing one of Victor Mal’s creations. She appeared to be midway through packing some things.

  ‘Um, I am Pandora
English of Pandora magazine, here to interview Mr Mal.’

  She raised her head from what she was doing, and then she raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Ah, yes. I wondered when you’d come,’ she replied, as if I was late, which I didn’t imagine I could be. ‘No photographer?’

  ‘Photographer? No. Just me. I have a few questions. It shouldn’t take long.’

  Two men who seemed somewhat more groomed, plucked and waxed than I was strode past me without a second glance. They were wearing the fashionable satchels that were once called ‘man bags’. The office was emptying out for lunch.

  ‘I’ll take you to the work room,’ the receptionist said. I followed her down a short hallway towards a large, white door. She was indeed wearing one of her employer’s creations – a figure-hugging knee-length knit dress with a vibrant criss-cross pattern and asymmetrical draping around the hemline that swayed when she walked. She stopped at the door and knocked.

  ‘Victor, there is a journalist here to see you.’

  I became a touch taller. I wasn’t sure anyone had actually called me a journalist before. It sounded nice.

  Pandora English. Journalist.

  It beat being called a freak.

  There was a muffled reply, and the receptionist swung the door open and left me at the mouth of an oversized room filled with spools of yarn and fabric swatches. There were a few half-finished designs on mannequins in the room too and I made my way around them as I entered.

  Victor Mal was a surprisingly diminutive man – no more than five feet tall – but I could see right away that he was the type to compensate for his size in other ways. He turned to me, unsmiling, and leaned against a giant wooden workbench that took up one whole side of the long room. As I made my way closer, he crossed his arms and lifted his chin by way of welcome. He was wearing a bright knit top with a startling V-neck, the type usually worn by women. He was so deeply tanned he made his fake-tanned receptionist look pale.

  ‘I’m Pandora English from Pandora magazine. Thank you for taking the time to see me,’ I said, averting my eyes from the cleft of his man-cleavage.