by Tara Moss
Okay, breathe, Pandora. Breathe.
‘Have you been bitten? Should I call 911?’ I asked.
Laurie finally spoke. ‘What . . . was that?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ But he didn’t seem capable of telling anyone anything just yet. ‘Maybe we should get you to a hospital,’ I suggested and moved towards a phone on the wall.
He shook his head emphatically, and reached out a hand. ‘No. No, no, my partner is waiting for me. I’ll just go home.’
‘I thought you said you were pulling an all-nighter? Do you want me to call your partner for you? Let them know . . .’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No. I’m fine.’
‘That’s crazy. How long were you in that sack?’
‘What sack?’
‘The sack I just cut you out of . . . with all the spiders . . .’ It sounded crazy to say it, and Laurie’s confused reaction made it seem even crazier.
He touched his fingertips to his forehead. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said, seeming deeply confused. ‘I opened that package, and then . . . I don’t know.’
The package.
I looked around me. There was little sign of the extraordinary struggle that had just taken place. A few mannequins were knocked over, and the scissors and some scraps of textile had slid on to the floor. I noticed the green and black parcel on the ground, opened and upturned. Black tissue was torn open. Amazingly, the pile of sticky webbing was shrivelling and jerking across the floor where we’d left it. The spiders that had swarmed out of it were crawling away into the shadows, and the cocoon itself was . . . disappearing? The whole mass was shrinking up like burning paper.
I was totally baffled. My mouth hung open. (It seemed to be doing a lot of that lately.)
‘I think I’ll go home,’ Laurie said behind me. ‘I’m fine.’
I shook my head. ‘You can’t possibly be fine. I really think —’
‘My partner is waiting for me. I’ll call him. He’ll come pick me up. He’s not far away,’ he said.
I was tempted to wait until his partner arrived, but I began to get the not-so-subtle feeling that Laurie just wanted me out of there, so I took the hint. I finally backed down. I dusted off Celia’s coat and took my things – including my umbrella – and, after a few last words, left the workshop. If there was one thing I had learned after a lifetime of seeing impossible things, it was that when you saw something clearly supernatural it was best not to insist on talking about it with people who didn’t want to discuss it, didn’t understand it, or flat out denied it. That was a one-way ticket to unwanted psychiatric attention. Incredibly, there was no sign of the spiders or the shredded webbing when I closed the door behind me. It had literally shrivelled into nothing.
Shakily, I made my way down the stairs and out on to the dark streets of the Garment District. My adrenaline was still pumping hard.
What on earth do I do now? How can I not tell anyone?
It had stopped raining, I noticed.
‘You’ve been asking after me,’ a voice said, and I stopped.
The voice was unfamiliar, with an accent I couldn’t place.
I turned, prepared for almost anything after what I’d just seen. A woman was leaning in the mouth of the narrow alley next to the Smith & Co studio entrance. I recognised her. She was tall, swathed head to toe in black, and she had a perfectly chic jet-black bob cut sharp at her high cheekbones, the geometrical fringe framing large, penetrating eyes and a mouth that was small and dark. She had a face like Louise Brooks in the 1920s.
This was the woman from the subway station. The woman who had followed me.
‘Pardon?’ I replied.
I hadn’t been asking around about her, but I was beginning to think that perhaps I should have been. There was an intensity to her presence that was unnatural. It disturbed me, just as it had the two times I’d noticed her before. As she approached, something cold twisted in my belly, and I found myself on high alert again. The tall woman moved to the edge of the alley, the streetlights casting harsh shadows on her face. Though her features were classically beautiful, they were set with unhappiness. I saw faint lines etched into the delicate skin straight as an arrow from her left temple across her cheek to her feminine jaw. But these faint lines did not rivet me. It was something else. As she neared, I saw that her mouth was cruel, despite its even, attractive shape. The wide, dark eyes glinted with bitterness, and her features combined like a beautiful, but warped painting. Louise Brooks on broken celluloid.
I wanted to turn and walk away, even run, but I held fast. This was the third time I’d encountered her. There was a reason.
‘You are Pandora English,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I replied, surprised, and not at all liking the sound of my name on her lips. I gripped my umbrella and satchel. What did I have with me? My phone, subway ticket, map, book, a few cosmetics, hairspray, rice, notepad, pen. The coldness in my belly was so strong it actually hurt, like I’d swallowed dry ice. I was in danger. That much was clear. I struggled with my instinct to run.
‘You’ve been asking around about me,’ she said again.
‘I’m a journalist,’ I said by way of response. I wasn’t sure why she thought I was asking about her.
‘I’ve been asking around about you, too,’ she went on. ‘Though I can hardly believe you’d come in such a pathetic form.’
Pathetic? I furrowed my brow. That kind of rudeness was a bit unnecessary, wasn’t it?
I was just thinking up a suitable comeback when movement drew my attention to her shoulder. I watched with a sinking sensation as thick, insect-like legs appeared, followed by the bulbous body of an arachnid. It was a tarantula, and it crawled slowly across the fabric of the woman’s top and came to sit on the edge of her collar, watching me just as the other one had done.
Wait. Was that the same spider?
‘Why did you take it home? My little spy?’ the tall woman asked me.
The tarantula. It was hers.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied.
‘Oh, I think you do. Did you think you could watch me? Did you think you could tap into the hive mind and spy on me? As I could spy on you?’
I may have gawked a little at this. I struggled for a suitable response. The hive mind?
The strange woman looked me up and down. She must have caught my expression of bewilderment, because she cocked her head, her perfect bob falling in a sharp line across one cheek. ‘I think they are wrong about you.’ She folded her arms. ‘You? The Seventh? I don’t believe it.’ She chuckled then. It was a joyless sound that sent icy shivers through me.
The Seventh. There was that title again. Celia had been trying to explain its importance to me, in her way. Her ways were a bit mysterious though and seemed to involve telling me things when she felt I needed to know. There was something important about the fact that it had been one hundred and fifty years since the last Seventh. And the Seventh held a very important role. I had powers. But what exactly? Celia said it would all reveal itself in time, but right now I felt like I needed to know a whole lot more.
I did my best to stand tall. ‘What business is it of yours if I am the Seventh?’
I kept my eyes on her, and she took another step forward. I realised then that her movements were wrong. For a moment I could fool my eyes into believing that what I saw was normal. But there was something disproportionate about the way she moved. Her legs were too long. The black clothing she was wearing appeared flowing and elegant, but it was disguising something. It wasn’t the cut of the garment that created the oddness of movement. It was as if her joints were actually in the wrong places. I gripped my umbrella, thinking I might soon need it to defend myself. With my other hand I fished around in my satchel.
The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘I won’t let you get in the way,’ she said with a low-voiced anger. ‘Laurie Smith was mine. He deserves my wrath.’
A
s if in slow motion, the sweeping knits that covered her oddly statuesque form fell back, and revealed the most hideous, confusing anatomy I’d ever seen. Legs – not human legs, but sleek black spider legs – darted out towards me. Even in the harsh shadows of the alley I could see that she didn’t have a torso – not a human one, anyway. She appeared to have a round, distended black belly and several legs . . . six legs, to be exact. Six spidery legs. And now those legs reached out to me.
Oh!
A scream escaped me, and I leapt backwards just in time to stay out of the reach of those horrible extremities. I popped open the umbrella with a quick click and began wielding it like a shield, while with my other hand I found the cool cylinder of hairspray in my bag. I pointed it at her face and depressed the button as if it were mace, causing a cloud of faux lavender to stream into the air. It was a sad excuse for a weapon, to say the least.
One of the sharp ends of the spider legs pierced through the umbrella and narrowly missed my leg. I threw the empty hairspray can at the woman, heard it bounce, and then chucked the open umbrella.
Time to run!
I hit W36th Street fast and passed two older men in business suits and wool coats. They must have heard my scream, and they asked if I was okay.
‘Just run!’ I yelled without bothering to turn around. ‘Run!’
I ran full tilt down the rain-slicked sidewalk and ploughed into a middle-aged woman carrying her shopping. She let out a shocked gasp and her bags hit the ground, potatoes spilling on the sidewalk. Sorry! I thought, but didn’t stop to help her. I just held my satchel close to my body and kept running as fast as I could.
I didn’t pause to look back.
By the time I placed my subway ticket in the turnstile of the first subway station I found, the rain had returned and I was soaked to the bone. I had frozen, shaking hands. I’d not even stopped to look at my map, and I wasn’t sure how far I’d sprinted. I was so flustered that I boarded the first train I saw, before realising it was headed in the wrong direction.
I just managed to compose myself enough to transfer to the green line before I was off Manhattan Island and headed for Brooklyn.
You’re fine. Everything is fine now. Breathe . . .
The 6 train was still packed from the post-work rush when I boarded. Frankly I was relieved to be surrounded by strangers – normal, human strangers. I stood in the crush of people and wrestled with everything I’d just seen.
It seemed I had interrupted the tall woman with the spider on her shoulder. Interrupted her doing what exactly? Why did he deserve her wrath? Who was she? What was she? One thing was for certain. She’d known I was the Seventh and she didn’t like that very much. I had to get home and warn Celia. ‘Something is afoot.’ Something was afoot, indeed. And that something had eight limbs.
A spider woman, I kept thinking. There is a spider woman in New York.
‘Great-Aunt Celia, I’m home.’
I closed the door, dropped my satchel, hung up my coat, slipped my shoes off, and caught a brief glimpse of my harrowing reflection in the Edwardian mirror. My hair was plastered flat against my head, and my eyeliner had smudged into dark circles. I looked away.
‘Darling, you’ve had some excitement,’ my great-aunt said, and closed the book she was reading. She peered around the corner of her reading chair and took in my appearance.
Diplomatic as ever, she didn’t comment.
I walked over to her in a kind of daze. She was reclining in a blood red ensemble made up of a gloriously well-fitted jacket with exaggerated shoulders and tight sleeves, and a full, knee-length skirt. A large black button closed the jacket at the waist. She wore fine black fish-nets, and, of course, her veil. I wondered – and not for the first time – whether anything ever fazed her.
‘Celia, I saw something extraordinary tonight,’ I began. ‘Something I wouldn’t have believed possible only a short time ago.’
‘Good,’ she said.
Good?
‘Come. Sit.’ Freyja jumped down from the leather hassock and I took a seat. The albino cat circled my ankles, then sniffed and stared at me. I patted her. She seemed disturbed by some faint scent I’d brought home. ‘Young Pandora, it is good that you are coming to better realise the extent of what is possible,’ my great-aunt told me. ‘Arm yourself with an open mind, and you will not be blind like other mortals. It will serve you well.’
I nodded, thinking of Laurie Smith and how he didn’t seem to remember anything that had happened to him after he’d opened the mysterious green and black package. It was as if his mind had simply rejected it. In the last two months I had noticed people rejected Spektor in a similar way. Taxi drivers would tell me there was no such place. Jay Rockwell – roses guy – hadn’t ever heard of it and later remembered nothing of it. (Or me, as it happened.) Spektor didn’t exist because it couldn’t. The suburb was invisible to the closed mind.
‘Celia, I met a woman tonight. I know this will sound crazy, but she was human from her head to her chest, but the rest of her was like some kind of . . . spider. She had spider legs.’
In response Celia arched one eyebrow.
I recounted what I’d seen – the suspicious green and black parcel at Victor Mal’s studio and then at Smith & Co, the webbed cocoon suffocating Laurie Smith, the spiders, and the tall spider woman in the alley who I had seen twice before, and who gave me that awful, cold feeling in my belly.
My wise and beautiful great-aunt closed her eyes and nodded, absorbing my tale.
‘Do you know who she is?’ I asked eagerly.
Celia tilted her head and considered my words. ‘I think it’s time for a cup of tea, darling.’
I sat up. ‘Um, okay . . .’
Great-Aunt Celia rose elegantly from her chair, slipped her toes into her heeled slippers and sauntered into the kitchen. I dutifully followed behind. Freyja watched us both, disinterested, and then hopped back up on the hassock to steal my spot.
Celia’s kitchen was compact but well appointed. She boiled the water while I prepared some cups. She was quiet for a good ten minutes while she worked her magic (I don’t know how she always got her tea tasting so good) and finally she poured us both a cup and walked slowly back to her large, leather reading chair holding her cup and saucer. I followed with mine. She took her seat and Freyja jumped off the hassock again, with a slightly dissatisfied meow. My great-aunt clearly believed in the power of a good cup of tea, which made me wonder what she was preparing me for. I had to be patient when she was like this. There was no sense in pushing. She took a sip. I did the same. I felt the energising effect of the tea almost immediately. I waited. I took another sip. So did she. I felt I might burst with questions. She took another leisurely sip.
‘Well, Pandora,’ she finally began, just as I thought I might explode with impatience. ‘It sounds to me like the spider goddess has come to New York to settle some scores. The only real question is, which spider goddess is she?’ she mused.
‘There’s more than one spider goddess?’
‘Well, yes, but don’t trying telling any of them that. The gods and goddesses have a terrible egoism. Always have. They are always “the original”, “the greatest”, or “the most powerful”. I guess that’s why they call it a god complex.’ She leaned back, placed her empty cup on the arm of her chair and casually straightened the fall of her beautiful red skirt.
Only Great-Aunt Celia could talk of gods and goddesses so flippantly.
‘Let’s see . . . there are the weavers of the universe, the Hopi Spider Woman, the Navajo Spider Grandmother.’ Celia counted them off in the air with one slim hand. She stopped. ‘Did she seem grandmotherly to you?’ she asked me.
‘Grandmotherly?’ I thought of the woman’s cruel mouth, and that icy laugh. ‘Not at all. But then, you don’t seem great-aunt-ish,’ I remarked.
That was certainly true.
‘Of course I don’t, darling. Anyway, it doesn’t sound like the Navajo Spider Grandmother or the creators. T
hey are generally rather beneficent. Your spider woman was testy, wasn’t she?’
I nodded. ‘You could put it that way. I had the feeling she wanted to eat me.’
Why does everyone want to eat me?
I finished my cup of tea, and felt a torrent of adrenaline fill me. I went to place the empty cup and saucer on the floor, caught the disapproving look on my great-aunt’s face, and reconsidered. I delivered both of our cups and saucers to the kitchen sink. I was back in a flash, hoping Celia would feel compelled to continue our discussion without any further breaks.
‘Thank you, darling. Well, I hope this woman you encountered isn’t the Japanese spider goddess. Did she look Japanese at all?’
‘Not really, no.’ I pulled my feet up under me on the hassock and tried to remember everything I’d seen. ‘She had black hair cut in a bob, but . . . no she didn’t look or sound Japanese.’
‘Good.’
I had to ask. ‘Why? Who is the Japanese spider goddess?’
‘There were many female Tsuchigumo in Japan at one time – “ground spiders”, or “earth spiders”. But the Japanese spider goddess was really something. She was quite fierce. She lived in the Japanese Alps and preyed on travellers. As legend has it, the hero Raiko saw a skull fly into a cave one night while he was travelling with his servant. Or was it that the skull was flying out? It never seems clear. Anyway, he went to investigate and became ensnared in a sticky web. The weaver of the web appeared to be a comely woman – aren’t they always beautiful women in these stories?’ Celia remarked. ‘He struck her with his sword and the woman fled, and when the servant helped Raiko out of the web they found a giant spider on the floor of the cave, impaled through the stomach with Raiko’s sword. They split her belly open and the skulls of her many human victims tumbled out, as did her spider children, whom they killed one by one.’