The Spider Goddess Read online

  ‘I don’t have much time for you, darling, but I can always use the publicity. Pandora magazine, is it? You have fifteen minutes. Shoot.’

  I gathered he meant I should shoot him with my questions, so I proceeded. ‘Tell me what it is about knitwear that you love so much,’ I asked. As soon as the words left my lips I knew my question was a mistake. It was hardly an interesting way to begin. His eyes glazed over, and he turned to his work table.

  ‘Darling, it’s all about knitwear. This is New York, the knitwear capital.’

  Was it? Knitwear capital, I wrote on my pad.

  I noticed he had a way of saying ‘darling’ that made it clear you were not very darling. I positioned myself against the table to catch his eye, worried I might have already lost him. I’d have to work on my interviewing technique.

  ‘I can see you are very hands-on with your garments,’ I said. ‘Your work is beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t just design, I create,’ he informed me with what I took to be a haughty look. I dutifully took a note on my writing pad. Doesn’t design. Creates. Just then the receptionist marched back in with a parcel, hem swaying.

  ‘For you. Just arrived.’ She was a woman of few words. Considering she was addressing her employer, her tone seemed a bit hostile. She scowled as she passed the package to him. There was clearly some unresolved issue between them. Or was hostility in fashion? I didn’t know.

  Victor studied the parcel and turned it over in his hands, effectively ignoring her. Whatever it was, it was beautifully wrapped in ribbons and bows of jet black and emerald green. ‘I’m leaving for lunch,’ the receptionist informed him, and Victor nodded absently in response, evidently mesmerised by the box. The fashionably hostile receptionist closed the door behind her and we were alone again. Victor and I both stared at the box for a spell, before I realised how odd that was. It did seem rather magnetic, I thought. Strange.

  I quickly decided to jump in with another clumsy question. ‘How did you first become involved in design . . . uh, creation?’ I asked. I hadn’t done a lot of live interviewing in the past, and it sure showed. At my question he placed the captivating box on the work table and crossed his arms again. ‘When you were a kid, did you want to be a designer?’ I asked as a follow-up.

  ‘I have always wanted to create something beautiful,’ he replied flatly, as if I’d clicked the ‘frequently asked questions’ button and was getting a recording.

  This is excruciating. Now for the real questions, I thought.

  ‘Victor, I was wondering if you had heard about the recent disappearances of Sandy Chow and Richard Helmsworth? The three of you are considered to be among New York’s top knitwear designers. I was wondering if you had any theory on what had happened to Sandy and Richard?’

  This question took him off guard. He straightened.

  ‘You really can’t compare my creations to Sandy Chow’s, or that of Richard Helmsworth.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘They were hacks.’

  Interesting. I took a note: Hacks.

  ‘Really,’ he continued. ‘Everyone knows I am the best knitwear designer in the world. In fact, I’m probably the best there has ever been.’

  ‘You are the best knitwear designer ever?’ I repeated back. He rated himself better than Missoni? And Sonia Rykiel? Even I thought that seemed a rather overblown claim.

  ‘Well, darling, yes. It’s no boast. This is my area. I mean, I’ll leave the suits to Hugo Boss, but in knitwear, I am king.’

  My eyebrows went up. It seemed an incredible boast to make, but worse, he seemed genuinely not to care about what had happened to the other two designers. Could he really care so little? Or maybe he was hiding something?

  He seemed to sense my surprise.

  ‘Maybe they’re faking their deaths for publicity, or something,’ he concluded with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Together? I heard they didn’t get along.’

  ‘Well, how should I know?’ he responded. ‘Anyway, I must go. When is this coming out?’

  ‘The next issue of Pandora,’ I told him.

  He nodded and then folded his arms. Interview over. He clearly didn’t like being asked about the disappearances. There didn’t seem to be anything more I could get out of him, so I took the hint. I thanked him and led myself out. Well, I had a few quotes for Pepper’s feature, I supposed.

  A few quotes and nothing more.

  It was just past six in the evening when I knocked and entered the penthouse. Grateful for the rest ahead, I slipped off my shoes and hung Celia’s beautiful winter coat on the mirrored hatstand by the door. I caught a flash of my reflection in the small, oval mirror and did a double take. Was it my imagination, or had something indefinable changed in my appearance? Was it the look in my eyes? Increasingly, I had the impression that I was shedding the skin of my former life. Gretchenville was visibly falling off me.

  ‘I had the most bizarre day . . .’ I began, turning and walking into the lounge room. I thought of Skye’s bizarre and humiliating outburst, the strange feeling I’d had at the pet shop, and the woman I’d seen at the subway station. And to top things off, meeting the famous Victor Mal had been distinctly uninspiring. His boasts seemed like a new level of conceit. Or did everyone in this town talk like that? At times, the rest of Manhattan seemed stranger even than Spektor. Which was, admittedly, something of a statement.

  ‘ . . . Celia?’

  I noticed then that for once my great-aunt was not in her chair. Before long I heard the delicate click of her heels, and she came around the hallway corner with a compact in one hand and her deep red signature lipstick in another. My great-aunt wore emerald drop earrings, a wasp-waisted black satin knee-length dress with a matching emerald brooch, and, of course, her omnipresent widow’s veil. She looked particularly stunning, I thought.

  ‘Are you going out?’ I asked. She looked ready to attend a fine dinner or concert. Then again, I’d never seen her ‘dressed down’. I wondered if she even owned a T-shirt.

  ‘Perhaps later,’ she said. ‘But we have company right now.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes.’ She finished applying her lipstick. ‘Pandora, we have something to discuss.’

  My heart skipped. When Celia said we needed to discuss something it tended to be of grave importance. (So to speak.)

  ‘If it’s about the spider, I know. I shouldn’t have brought it here in the first place. I took it to a pet shop today. It’s gone now. We won’t be seeing it again. It’s in good hands.’ I turned to look at the empty vivarium on the shelf. ‘And we won’t be needing the castle, so I can take it back to Harold.’

  ‘Don’t worry about all that for now, Pandora.’ She stepped towards me and placed a cool hand on my arm. ‘Deus is here to see you.’

  My jaw dropped. All thoughts of the tarantula left me, all thoughts of Skye and Victor Mal, and everything else that had crowded my day.

  Deus . . .

  The Sanguine Deus was here tonight . . . to see me?

  ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for this,’ I blurted.

  ‘You are,’ Celia said calmly.

  My entire body came up in goose flesh. ‘Well . . . Do I need to . . .’ I stopped. ‘Should I arm myself with —’

  ‘Rice doesn’t work on older Sanguine,’ Celia said. ‘They usually outgrow the obsessive compulsive condition of their Fledgling years. I’ve already told you this. Don’t embarrass yourself by stuffing your pockets.’

  Gotcha. ‘And you know how I put on that crucifix that time, thinking you were —’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Celia said, beginning to sound unimpressed.

  I’d thought at one point that she was a vampire. After all, she looks pretty good for someone pushing ninety. Plus she wasn’t big on garlic or taking strolls in the sunshine.

  ‘Well, I remember you said something about how that crucifix wouldn’t work on any Sanguine, or something to that effect. Did you mean it wouldn’t have any effect because it was
a plastic Madonna eighties cross or because crosses don’t work at all?’

  Celia squinted and folded her arms. ‘The Material Girl crucifix is particularly useless, I’d be willing to guess,’ she responded, with some measure of sarcasm.

  ‘But is that because —’

  ‘It has much to do with the power of belief.’

  ‘It does? So if you believe deeply enough you can make a cross work?’ I had thoughts of anti-vampire seminars: ‘How to Make Belief Your Weapon!’

  ‘No, darling, if the Sanguine believes it deeply enough. Which I assure you is unlikely. That would have to be a lot of belief.’ I supposed she was right. ‘And think about it . . . If crucifixes – or indeed any two sticks placed at right angles – caused such a reaction, you have to ask yourself how any revenant rising from a grave could last even a second in the hallowed ground of a cemetery dotted with crucifix tombstones? Bram Stoker . . . Ridiculous.’

  I had wondered about that.

  ‘Now what are all these questions about?’ Celia demanded. ‘You know all this.’

  I don’t want him to eat me.

  ‘I can see you are panicking, but you really needn’t,’ she assured me. ‘Deus is an ally. I have told you this before. A lot of rumours about the Sanguine are purely propaganda – they are supposedly “demons”; a crucifix makes them burst into flames, et cetera, et cetera . . . all great reasons not to miss your Sunday sermon. I’ve seen Sanguine drink holy water for kicks. Put all that stuff out of your head.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘You’re not planning to greet our friend Deus with some sharpened stake or some such, are you? Because, really, you would make a less than ideal first impression.’

  I blanched. ‘No. No, of course not. I wouldn’t do anything like that.’ Unless he tries to hurt me. ‘I just don’t want to do the wrong thing . . . like wear something that could make him burst into flames.’

  ‘I assure you, Deus is not that flammable. Now run along and freshen up. He’ll see you shortly,’ she said, and walked into the kitchen, leaving me in a delicate cloud of her fine perfume.

  There was no further discussion to be had on the topic, that much was clear. In truth it wasn’t really Stoker’s tale I needed to get out of my head; it was my own run-ins with less than mannerly Sanguine. Nonetheless, it seemed that after hearing about him for two months, I was now going to meet the Sanguine responsible for Celia’s unique condition.

  I wondered if I was ready.

  Sometimes it seemed that Celia believed everything could be solved with fresh lipstick and a cup of tea.

  I emerged from my room to find her waiting with a beautiful silver tray with a pot of tea and two cups neatly arranged on it. Two, I noticed, not three. But of course Deus wouldn’t drink – tea.

  ‘Would you take this tray?’ she said, and I did as she asked.

  I’d changed into one of my favourite dresses. It was an amber colour that matched my eyes. Celia had once designed it for the movie star Lauren Bacall. It fitted perfectly. I thought it might be a little too dressed up, but something told me it would be rude to meet Deus in anything less than the best.

  ‘You look wonderful, darling Pandora. And I see you haven’t covered yourself in crucifixes. Good choice,’ Celia assured me. ‘Now don’t be anxious. He really is quite lovely, and very powerful. He could be a great ally for you.’

  Very powerful. Well, that was precisely why I was nervous about meeting him. That and the fact that he was immortal and probably had fangs like a tiger. Mostly, I’d found that fanged types wanted to eat me. And some of them felt it necessary to continually mention my virginity, which seemed rather impolite.

  (I didn’t even want to think about how they knew such things.)

  ‘Just one last question. How do I talk to him?’ I asked.

  ‘Talk to him like he is a man, Pandora. The Sanguine can be very powerful and they have a certain otherness, but it would be wrong to think they retain nothing of their human origins.’

  Otherness. The otherness being that they fed off humans?

  I thought of Athanasia with her teeth bared, and failed to see traces of her humanity. ‘Is there any special etiquette?’ I persisted. ‘Do I bow? Curtsy? Is it rude to shake hands or show the sole of my foot? Should I be alarmed if he sniffs me?’

  ‘Just don’t call him a vampire,’ Celia quipped in reply, and made a final adjustment to her black widow’s veil.

  Celia compared the ‘v’ word to that ‘n’ word Mark Twain recently had stripped from his novels, and rap stars sometimes still used in their songs. It was okay for a Sanguine to use it, perhaps, but it was unwise for a non-Sanguine to utter the term. I was sure I wouldn’t slip up.

  ‘This way,’ she instructed and, to my considerable surprise, my glamorous great-aunt led me towards her quarters. When I had first arrived she had been very specific that I was never to venture this way. So strict had her instructions been that in the event of a fire I would have been hard-pressed to do more than bang on her door.

  ‘You know, many of mankind’s most talented leaders, thinkers and artists have chosen the way of the Sanguine,’ Celia informed me in a calm, soothing voice, clearly trying to put me at ease. ‘Queen Victoria, Nietzsche, Michael Hutchence —’ she went on.

  ‘Queen Victoria? Nietzsche, the philosopher?’ I replied, disbelieving. It was perhaps inevitable that some well-known figures would have become undead, but Queen Victoria? Could it be?

  (Somehow INXS’s Michael Hutchence didn’t seem a stretch.)

  ‘Oh yes, the Widow of Windsor came to the Sanguine just before the end of her sixty-three-year reign. I suspect she wasn’t happy to just sign off after all that. She has something of a cult following now among those in the know. And I’m not sure why you’d find Nietzsche such a surprise. He was always fascinated with “vampirism”. What was his famous quote? “Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.”’

  Well, that did seem a bit dark.

  ‘Didn’t he die of . . .’ I thought for a moment.

  ‘Syphilis, they said it was,’ Celia told me.

  Ouch.

  She stopped at the end of the hall, just outside her door. ‘Most choose to fake their deaths. Well, in truth, they aren’t faking their deaths to become undead, but they must fake the manner of their deaths,’ she corrected herself. ‘Still syphilis seems an odd choice. I think he was going for “death by madness”. Nietzsche is a complicated character.’

  Celia was speaking of Nietzsche in the present tense. How peculiar.

  ‘Who else?’ I asked, deliberately stalling.

  ‘Let’s see . . . There are so many. Well, there’s Napoleon, Ludwig I of Bavaria, Marie Antoinette, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Aaliyah, Courtney Love —’

  ‘Wait, Kurt Cobain’s widow? The singer? But she is still alive,’ I protested.

  ‘Is she?’ Celia replied, and her words hung in the air for a while. ‘Well, perhaps that one is only a rumour,’ she finally conceded.

  ‘What about Bela Lugosi?’ I remembered him from the 1931 Dracula film that made him a horror legend.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Celia said.

  That seemed a bit cruel, what with him being buried wearing his vampire cape and everything. ‘And you don’t want to be Sanguine?’ I pressed.

  ‘No. Or I’d probably already be one.’

  ‘But you aren’t ageing.’ I was dying to know how she did it.

  ‘Well, thank you for saying so, darling,’ she said. ‘Okay, enough trivia. It’s time.’

  Oh boy.

  She slid a key smoothly into the lock and opened the door. For the first time, I was able to see beyond the door that had held such curiosity for me for months. The smell hit me first. The scent of frankincense was in the air. Frankincense and something else? The aroma was pleasant, if slightly cloying.

  The door opened into a sunken chamber. It appeared to be a small but plush sitting room with Persian rugs, heavy velve
t drapes and a stunning, carved sideboard on which several candles glowed in little silver holders. I saw two closed doors, one next to the sideboard and one at the far wall. There was no window. Two exquisitely carved wooden chairs with plush burgundy velvet seats were set out around a low circular table in the centre of the room. A velvet chaise lounge was pushed against one wall.

  ‘Watch your step.’

  There was a drop of three stone steps into the room. We walked down these, and Celia motioned to the carved, circular table. I placed the silver tea tray on it. I heard knocking and straightened abruptly. It wasn’t coming from any of the three doors. It was coming from behind me. I turned, and took in a shocked breath. I had considered my powers of observation to be good. Not so. How else could I have missed the enormous coffin behind me?

  Oh god, Deus is inside. He’s in the casket!

  The full-sized coffin sitting in the shadowy corner was of deep, polished mahogany.

  ‘Come in,’ Celia said cheerily, in a slightly raised voice. She turned to me. ‘He always knocks. Isn’t that just darling?’

  There was a slight creak, and one set of fingers appeared beneath the lip of the coffin’s lid. Someone . . . or something was pushing it open. I thought of horror movies with rotting zombies rising from their graves. I covered my mouth with my hand, looked away and shut my eyes. There was a shuffling sound, and further creaking, and finally I faced the creature I feared.

  ‘Deus, meet Pandora English. Pandora, meet Deus,’ Celia said.

  The creature before me wasn’t rotting. In fact, he looked rather well, if a little pale. (Understandable, considering the whole sunlight allergy thing.) Still, he had a darker complexion than I’d imagined and if I’d expected a tall Euro-vamp in a dinner suit and red-lined cape, I’d have been disappointed. He wore a very attractive skinny suit, as the fashion mags called it. He looked like he might be going to the same dinner party as Celia. Deus was a bit taller than me, perhaps five foot nine or ten, and he had dark, dramatic eyebrows and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen on a man. But of course he wasn’t a man, was he? He was a Sanguine. And he was at least a few hundred years old, from what I knew. How does one even have a conversation with someone with that much experience and power? How does someone have a conversation with a creature who has been hanging out in a casket?