I looked at the fashion model and reassured myself she wasn’t dead.

She was a stunning blonde, heavily made up, and she sat in the centre of a large, white-walled and brightly lit studio that smelled of fresh paint and cosmetics, and faintly of burning lights. She had something of the skinniness, the eerily perfect skin. Maybe it was something in the eyes that made me wonder? But no . . . The sun was up. She was definitely alive, I decided.

It was the second time I’d come to that conclusion in as many hours.

‘Get what’s-her-name to hurry up and bring that coffee over here.’

The photographer spoke, breaking me from my analysis. He was a lithe and aloof man, dressed in fashionable jeans and a skin-tight T-shirt. He was so skinny I’d wondered about him, too.

He was speaking to me. What’s-her-name. Well, technically he hadn’t spoken to me, but spoken to his assistant about me. All day, neither of them had really acknowledged my existence, let alone spoken directly to me, but this was not a particularly new experience.

My name’s Pandora English. I’m not rich, famous or powerful, and, as I’ve discovered, people don’t tend to talk to you in New York unless you are one of those three things. I’m from a small, unfashionable place called Gretchenville (population 3999 with my recent, unprecedented departure). When I was growing up I never imagined I would end up in New York, let alone on a photo shoot for a fashion magazine – the kind of magazine I’d spent years perusing as a girl.

So here I was watching my first real fashion shoot. And, to my surprise, it wasn’t all that exciting. Go figure.

I found I was less interested in the designer fashion and expensive makeup and all the things I’d coveted in my unglamorous hometown, and more in whether the people around me were human. My recent experiences in New York had made me wonder about such things. In the past few months, a whole lot had changed for me. I’d moved from my small town, got my first job in publishing, been on my first real date, and met some undead folks. The latter had been particularly eye-opening. Life and death, and the states in between, were a whole lot more complicated than I ever could have imagined. And considering what my late father had called my ‘overactive imagination’, that was really saying something.

‘Hello? Coffee?’ The photographer spoke in a quick, impatient voice.

I walked up to him, balancing the tray of hot drinks I’d been sent to fetch from a cafe on the cold SoHo street outside. ‘Um, here is your coffee,’ I said and smiled nervously, holding out the tray.

The assistant only turned his head my way momentarily, he was too busy holding up a big silver reflective disc at an uncomfortable angle. The photographer was back to clicking the shutter of his camera busily.

Again, I looked over at the model he was photographing in the apex of lights. There were so many lights pointed at her that I wasn’t sure how she kept her eyes open. Every couple of seconds she changed her expression ever so slightly – from sultry to pouting, and then back to sultry again. The process seemed kind of mechanical. It wasn’t how it looked in the magazines.

I looked down at my hands. They were bare and they looked a tad blue. It was winter in New York and it had been literally freezing outside. My tightly wrapped wool scarf had fallen free of one shoulder, exposing my cold neck, which took happily to the heat of the overblown lights around me. I looked forward to a sip of the nice hot tea I’d ordered for myself. A hand reached out and snatched one of the coffees. It was the photographer. He took a sip and frowned. ‘Is this a non-fat latte?’ he demanded to no one in particular, though I was standing right there.

If there is one thing I have learned about the fashion industry in the past two months, it is that no one drinks full fat milk. Also, they have some perplexing issue with carbohydrates, which, as far as I know, are in most foods anyway. They seem to believe that full fat milk and carbohydrates are the big bad. If only they knew about the big bad things I knew about.

‘Yes, it is non-fat,’ I confirmed, and resisted reminding him of my name. It wasn’t that hard to remember, after all, considering it happened to be the same name as the magazine paying his bill. This shoot was for Pandora, the glossy fashion mag I worked for.

How I came to be hired by Pandora magazine is an odd story. I came to New York at the invitation of my great-aunt Celia, and, well . . . she’s kind of different. She has an uncanny knack for knowing things – like when there is an opening for an assistant at a fashion magazine, and just what I should wear to get the job. Don’t ask me how. She just knows things. It’s something that runs in the family, I’m discovering.

‘Just one more shot,’ the photographer said, after a sip of coffee.

At this, the model cast her eyes to the ground and raised an eyebrow. I was the only one who saw her expression, or detected her resigned sigh. I knew why she was impatient. We’d heard that line from the photographer at least three times in the past hour, and the fetching of fresh coffee didn’t really denote an end to the shoot, either. The sun would be going down soon and I probably wasn’t the only one eager to get home to a warm bath and a hot meal. The model would doubtless be feeling the same, only in a slightly more transformed way, as she was wearing something called a ‘transformative knit’.

When I’d landed in New York, vampire chic was all the rage – a little too much the rage, if you ask me. Next season is apparently all about ‘transformative knits’. Knitwear is the new black. Especially black knitwear, I guess.

The flawless model before me was swathed in knitwear, and layered with brightly coloured enamel jewellery, some of the pieces quite large. The tight-fitting knitwear garments apparently ‘subtly shape the figure’. Which was interesting, because they had chosen a model with a perfectly proportioned figure in no danger of needing any kind of shaping or transforming. The fashion world was a very strange place.

‘Peppermint. Great,’ the photographer’s assistant muttered, and snatched my tea from the tray.

‘Oh, that’s actually mine —’ I began, but he was already across the room with it. I gave a little resigned sigh of my own.

The photographer took another sip of his drink and cast a glance towards a large computer screen he had set up on a wheeled cart. He was shooting on a digital camera, and the images he’d taken were blown up on the monitor. He squinted at the screen, and muttered something to his assistant, who scrolled through some images. A little square zoomed in to magnify parts of the image, and the assistant manipulated it to fall on the model’s face, making each miniscule pore and slick of makeup jump out in jarring high definition. Then, with a couple of clicks, he smoothed a wrinkle I hadn’t even noticed she had. Incredible.

‘Let’s change. All this black is too . . . black. We need some colour for the cover shot. What about the Sandy Chow samples? Did they arrive?’

‘No,’ the stylist said. She was loitering around the screen as well, staring at the magnified images as if they held the key to the meaning of life. ‘They’ve had some mega-crisis. We only have the Smith & Co, Helmsworth, Mal and this stuff. The Victor Mal has some colour panels.’

‘Too eighties,’ the photographer said.

‘Could I have my coffee please?’ The model’s voice had a slight whine. ‘The extra large?’ Clearly she wasn’t happy to be working overtime.

I stepped further into the circle of lights to pass her the over-sized drink. ‘Here you go. I’m sure the shoot is nearly over,’ I said quietly as a form of encouragement, but her frown stayed firmly in place. Mind you, she looked pretty good with a pout. Perhaps that was why she used it so often.

I stepped away with the empty tray, and seconds later there was a small cry.

‘Ohhhh!’

The fashion model scurried backwards across the floor on her hands and the balls of her feet, her face contorted in shock. Had she burned her lip on her coffee? No. The drink remained untouched on the floor of the studio. Strange.

‘A spider!’ someone yelled from behind me.

I spotted the animal and nearly dropped the tray I was holding. It was a spider, true enough. But it was not just any spider. It was a very large, fat and hairy spider.

I stood transfixed, as it seemed, did the rest of the studio. I’d heard that Manhattan had cockroaches the size of rats and rats the size of cats, but spiders the size of . . . that?

‘Is that a . . . tarantula?’ I asked. In New York? In the winter? ‘No. It can’t be. Maybe a wolf spider? Or . . .’

‘I’m outta here,’ the model cried and shot to her feet. She pulled off the clingy knit top and ran across the studio towards the tiny changing area in only a bra and black capri pants. In record time she was out of the rest of her wardrobe. I’d never seen someone undress so fast. The makeup artist was standing on a chair, mumbling something unintelligible. The model ignored her. She changed quickly into her own street clothes and made for the exit at high speed.

The door slammed behind her.

‘Um, is there a pet shop nearby or anything?’ I asked, but no one was really listening. The photographer and his assistant were backed up against the wall of the studio, and the wardrobe stylist was retreating slowly across the room, holding a sweater like a matador. They were all struck mute by the large spider moving slowly across the stark white floor. It was plump and hairy and as big as my palm. It paused and shifted sideways, then stopped again. Maybe it liked the lights?

‘I’ll get it,’ I finally said. I bent down and gently placed the cardboard coffee tray on the floor. Moving slowly, I took the model’s oversized cup and poured the liquid out on to the floor. (No one would care about the mess, I figured.) Holding the empty styrofoam cup, I crept forward slowly. ‘Come here little buddy . . .’ I called out to the spider in a sing-song voice.

‘Kill it!’ the photographer shrieked in a high voice.

‘No, I’ll just . . .’ I began.

And there it was in front of me, less than a foot away. I felt its eight tiny black eyes on me and I felt something else, too. This spider was aware of me. Not just aware of the changes in light and movement, and the presence of a person approaching, but aware of me. It seemed ridiculous, but I felt some kind of strange connection with the spider. Not a friendly connection, per se, but a connection. And my gut felt funny – a bit cold like it sometimes did.

I often have what you might call odd ‘feelings’. Sometimes I know things I have no normal or scientifically explainable way of knowing. When I was growing up my father had always reprimanded me for my ‘overactive imagination’ when I’d suggested I could foresee things, intuit truths, sense the magical or speak to the departed. Until recently I’d assumed he was right but my great-aunt told me that this is a ‘gift’ of mine. She claims I am ‘genetically predisposed to extrasensory perception and sensitivity to the supernatural’, and that my mother was similarly gifted, and her mother before her. It’s a gift of the Lucasta women. And I was the Seventh. Whatever that meant. It was news to me.

I still don’t completely understand the feelings I get, and I am not confident about distinguishing them from normal feelings, but there it is. Great-Aunt Celia thinks my feelings are something I should listen to.

So, I had a weird feeling about this big spider and, as it stared at me with its eight little beady eyes, it seemed perhaps the feeling was mutual. ‘Now just stay still, okay, pal?’ I managed. I waited for it to rear up aggressively and bare its fangs, but it just sat there, staring at me. I brought the cup close, and it shifted sideways slightly. ‘Easy now . . .’ And just like that, I placed the big cup over it at an angle and scooped it inside with the discarded cardboard tray. I kept one hand on top of the container, as any spider that size could easily flip over the styrofoam and scurry off. Soon I had a flat piece of cardboard covering the opening. ‘Give me some of that tape, please,’ I said, and the photographer’s assistant reanimated before my eyes. He threw me a roll of black gaffer tape, still keeping his distance.

‘Don’t let it out . . .’ he squeaked.

‘It’s just a spider,’ I said. ‘It’s not dangerous.’

I guessed that it was indeed a tarantula. I’d never seen a real one up close, but I’d read about them in my late mother’s many books back home. Tarantulas looked impressive and had big fangs that could give a pretty good bite, but their venom was meant for much smaller prey, and was not deadly to humans. Tarantulas were usually found in tropical and subtropical climates. So this one must have escaped from a pet shop or private collection somewhere nearby and wandered in looking for shelter or heat. Our little staring contest had left quite an impression on me, but I supposed a stray tarantula was likely to make an impression on anyone.

‘It’s not going anywhere,’ I assured the room and held up the cup sideways so the spider wasn’t bunched up at the bottom. I felt its legs scratching at the styrofoam as it moved from side to side. I’d taped the cardboard across the top. It would hold.

There was an audible, collective sigh.

‘Oh my god!’ I heard the makeup artist say as she got down from her chair.

I stood in the centre of the studio for a while holding the cup, and waiting for instructions, but no one spoke.

‘So,’ I finally said. ‘Does this mean the shoot is over?’

I stepped out into the cool darkness of the SoHo street with my leather satchel over my shoulder and my scarf pulled tight around my neck. In my right hand I held a coffee cup with a live tarantula in it; not quite the souvenir I expected from my first photo shoot. The studio wasn’t very far from the office of Pandora magazine, so I knew the area without having to reference my creased map of New York. I would take the subway at Spring Street and get home to my great-aunt’s place. That hot bath could not come too soon.

I took a couple of steps on to the pavement and noticed that someone was waiting for me.

A long black car was parked at the kerb and a formidably tall man stood before it like a bodyguard, his feet shoulder-width apart, his hands neatly folded. The sun had just set, yet he still wore dark sunglasses and, though the sidewalk was chaotic with pedestrians, he seemed eerily serene and motionless among them. If he was breathing, I couldn’t tell.

‘Hello, Vlad,’ I said. I did not expect a response. This was my Great-Aunt Celia’s chauffeur. He never spoke, or if he did, he didn’t speak around me. I hadn’t asked for his services, and yet here he was. My great-aunt must have sent him. She did that sometimes.

Guess I won’t be taking the subway.

Vlad smoothly opened the door for me and I slid into the back seat of the car, placed my satchel at my feet, and the cup in my lap. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

We soon began the drive uptown, hitting traffic on Madison Avenue. We crawled past the Guggenheim Museum at a walking pace and, after driving through the Upper East Side, we took the route through Central Park that I always enjoyed. In this monumental city of concrete and steel, it still impressed and surprised me to find the magnificent green of Central Park waiting. And then the little-used single lane road wound its way through the shadows and disappeared into a tunnel filled with fog – the tunnel that led to Spektor, the Manhattan suburb that didn’t appear on any map.

The car slowed and Vlad pulled up to the kerb at the front of my great-aunt’s large Victorian mansion at Number One Addams Avenue. Dr Edmund Barrett, the infamous scientist and psychical researcher, built the mansion in the 1880s and it took up most of a small city block at the heart of Spektor. I’d never seen a building like it. It seemed narrow and stretched up, with a series of stone arches, turrets and spikes pointing to the sky. It was five storeys tall, with heavily embellished window arches placed in twos and threes across the front. A perceptive person would notice that the windows on the middle floors were boarded up from the inside. The building remained impressive despite the slightly abandoned air that all of Spektor seemed to share. It possessed an eerie beauty.

Vlad opened the door for me and I stepped into the wintry dusk. The mist on the street was faint compared with the thick wall of fog we’d driven through in the tunnel.

‘Thank you, Vlad,’ I said, and strode up to the iron gates of the building with my tummy rumbling. I put my key in the heavy front door and turned the lock. ‘Okay, open up,’ I mumbled under my breath, and the enormous door permitted me to enter. I slid inside and felt the familiar tomb-like coolness of the air in the high-ceilinged lobby. The heavy door closed behind me with a small puff of dust, and with the flick of a switch the dark space came to life under the blinking illumination of a very old chandelier.

‘Oh, now. Look at that,’ I muttered and shook my head.

High above me, the large chandelier was askew again. Last week, I’d made an attempt to fix it, but already the old fixture was back to its former position. Cobwebs had even begun to re-form between the dusty crystals. I shook my head again. Despite the apparent futility of it, I wanted to clean the place up again for my great-aunt. She did so much for me, the least I could do was dust a few cobwebs.

The lobby was decorated with majestic tilework and gilded wall sconces, now both in a state of disrepair. A circular staircase snaked up towards the sealed wooden door of a mezzanine floor, and an old lift sat in a cage of elaborate ironwork, including spiked fleurs-de-lis – one of which was missing. Not a month ago I’d used that missing fleur-de-lis to stab a vampire . . . sorry, Sanguine (vampire is a very negative term, apparently), hence my new-found paranoia about the undead. My staking attempt had been a literal and metaphorical mess, however. In direct contrast to the rules of all the novels I’d ever read, my undead aggressor survived the staking, and I’d had to scrub the lobby floor of blood until it was clean enough to perform heart surgery on. Which is almost what I’d done, come to think of it. Despite all that, the lobby looked just how I’d first seen it when I’d arrived in Spektor almost two months before – a bit like a crypt, yet, in its way, a magnificent space.

But now was not the time to dwell.

After dark I had friends within these walls, but also enemies. Some of my . . . well, housemates, were not terribly pleased with my presence. Especially since the staking incident. With that in mind, I removed a rice bag from my satchel and held it in my hand, ready for use. Those enemies of mine were much more affected by what was in that bag than by any karate move I might produce. Or my new-found tarantula, for that matter.

I hurried across the tiles.

‘S-s-h-r-a-a-a-ak . . .’

I paused for only a moment. I’d often heard sounds like that, as if the building was settling. But I’d never heard a building settle quite like this one. By some trick of acoustics, the strange noise sounded like it came from beneath the floor. With little delay, I traversed the lobby, jumped in the old rattling lift, and began my ascent to the penthouse. I silently watched the other floors pass, keeping an eye out for movement on the landings.

When I arrived home to Great-Aunt Celia’s penthouse I knocked on the midnight blue doors before I entered. This was one of her rules. After a moment I used my key to let myself in. ‘Hi, Great-Aunt Celia. I’m home,’ I called out. I hung up my coat on the mirrored Edwardian hatstand, and slipped off my flat shoes.

Celia was the reason I was in New York. She was my mother’s mother’s sister and one of only two living relatives I had. (The other was my Aunt Georgia in Gretchenville – my late father’s older sister, and I’d lived with her for eight years after my parents were killed.) I’d never met Celia before I moved to New York, but I had gratefully accepted her offer to have me stay. Who wouldn’t trade Gretchenville for Manhattan? Leaving my stifling little hometown was an exciting and much needed change. At the time, of course, I’d had no idea just how much of a change it would be.

Great-Aunt Celia’s elegant penthouse was quite unlike any other place I’d seen. The floors were polished wood and the domed ceilings were crowned with a sparkling chandelier at the highest point. The large main lounge room, which I now looked upon, was lined with rows of impressive bookcases filled with tomes to make an antiquarian weep with envy. Glass-fronted sideboards housed curious artefacts, objets d’art, exotic plants and antiques – a Venus flytrap, a carved tusk, a fertility statue, a tiny art deco nymph, fading photographs and art prints, and strange butterflies and moths displayed in small glass domes. Everything seemed both beautiful and intriguing. In keeping with the era of the mansion, the penthouse rooms were elegantly appointed with polished and carved furniture from Victorian and Edwardian times, mixed with some art deco touches. Yet, unlike the rest of the building, there were no cobwebs, no wear and tear, no dust. Celia’s rooms were immaculate. Tonight the curtains were open over the tall, arched windows, letting in the faint bluish light of a waxing gibbous moon. The famous Manhattan skyline was visible in the distance through a faint fog, the Empire State Building a black silhouette speckled by lit windows.

It still astounded me to know I was really in New York, the city I’d always dreamed of.

‘Darling, how was the photo shoot?’ came the familiar voice.

My great-aunt was in her usual spot, reclining under the halo of her reading lamp in the little alcove to one side of her palatial lounge room. Her shoes were off and her feet were up on the hassock, ankles crossed elegantly. I could see the thin casing of her black silk stockings, and the little seam across her manicured toes. Great-Aunt Celia was an impeccably stylish woman, as one would expect of a former designer to the Hollywood stars. Lined up next to her chair was a pair of fluffy heeled slippers decorated with ostrich feathers. This was one great-aunt who would never, ever own pressure stockings and sensible shoes.

Celia placed a long feather in the pages of her book to mark her place, and rested it on the wide arm of her leather chair. She shifted and faced me. She was, as always, a vision of pale 1940s glamour – high cheekbones, arched brows, alabaster skin and red lips, her dark hair set in movie-star waves beneath an omnipresent black widow’s veil that fell delicately to her chin. She had a slim, hourglass figure built for the couture of her day and tonight she wore a black silk dress with a waist-cinching leather belt. Decades after the death of her photographer husband, Roger, the widow’s veil seemed an eccentric habit. It suited her, I thought. The thin mesh only partially obscured her peculiarly youthful beauty – peculiar because she was, in fact, at least eighty years old.

There was much I didn’t know about my great-aunt.

‘Now, what have you got there?’ she said, eyeing the styrofoam cup. ‘It’s not like you to bring home a takeaway coffee.’

Celia was a staunch tea drinker.

‘Oh, it’s not coffee.’ I felt the creature inside the cup shift. ‘It’s kind of a weird story actually . . .’

‘A weird story? I always have time for one of those,’ my great-aunt quipped, and smiled from beneath her veil. She took her silk stocking clad feet off the hassock, inviting me to sit with her.

I left my satchel at the door and popped the bag of rice back inside. I wouldn’t need it now that I was safely ensconced in Celia’s penthouse. The others who lived here were not invited into the penthouse, and could not enter.

‘It was the strangest thing, Great-Aunt Celia,’ I explained as I perched on the edge of the hassock. ‘The knitwear shoot was going on forever, and I’d just been sent on yet another coffee run, and when I got back there was this spider in the middle of the studio. The model bolted immediately, and no one else did a thing. You should have seen the photographer and his assistant, completely frozen with fear. The makeup artist was on a chair . . .’

The corners of Celia’s mouth turned up slightly.

‘It’s a tarantula, I think. Quite odd considering tarantulas aren’t native to the area,’ I said.

‘Odd indeed,’ she agreed.

‘Well, I just emptied this cup and popped the spider inside,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t leave it there and I didn’t know what else to do. So, here I am with a tarantula, or whatever it is.’

‘Were you not afraid?’ she asked me.

I frowned. ‘I guess not. I’ve never seen a big spider like that before but I’d read about tarantulas and I just . . . acted on instinct.’

This seemed to please Celia. ‘Good. You should trust your instincts more.’ She nodded to herself. ‘And how was the shoot? Did you take note of which knitwear labels they were using?’

‘I didn’t think to check,’ I said, trying to remember the names. Perhaps Celia would be displeased that I wasn’t as interested in designs as she was, despite the fact that I was attempting to start my writing career at a fashion magazine. Some fashionista I was.

‘That’s okay, darling. So . . .’ She grinned slightly. ‘What would you like to do with it? You haven’t brought it home for dinner or something like that?’

I gaped. ‘The spider?’

‘Fried tarantula is a delicacy in Cambodia. It’s apparently quite delicious, though I’ve never tried it.’ She paused, watching the blood drain from my face, and then leaned forward to pat my knee. ‘But I am only pulling your leg, darling. Of course we won’t eat it.’

I took a moment to recover from her wicked sense of humour.

‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ I said. ‘I just couldn’t leave it there. They were going to kill it, and that wasn’t right. And I can’t leave it on the street outside. It’s winter. It will freeze to death.’ I paused. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to look up pet shops in SoHo. It must have escaped from one of them.’

‘You do have a great deal of compassion, Pandora. I can’t think of a lot of young women who would care what happened to a spider on the winter streets of New York, so long as . . .’ She looked at the cup in my lap. ‘So long as they didn’t have to hold it,’ she finished.

‘My mother said that spiders are misunderstood.’

‘Indeed they are.’ She paused. ‘We’ll put it in a jar for now, if you like. And maybe Harold will be able to get us a nice spider cage, or whatever such creatures are meant to be housed in.’

Harold owned the nearby grocer in Spektor. He was an odd fellow – very nice, but peculiar. ‘A vivarium is what people keep them in, I think. But I don’t think I’ll have the spider long enough to need one.’

I’d heard that people kept tarantulas as pets, but honestly I couldn’t imagine why. It wasn’t quite the same as having a dog or cat.

There was a noise and we both looked up. ‘Oh, there you are,’ Celia said. Right on cue, Celia’s cat had arrived. She was named after a Norse goddess who was often depicted in a glorious chariot pulled by cats. She was pure white – an albino – with eyes the colour of pink opals. Sometimes she liked to sneak into my room at night for a cuddle. Strangely, though, this evening she stopped several feet away from me and sat with her ears back.

‘Hi, Freyja. Hi, kitty,’ I said in a sing-song voice.

She let out a low feline growl.

‘I don’t think she likes your new friend,’ Celia remarked.

Friend? I thought of that odd moment on the studio floor – the moment of connection. It wasn’t friendly contact. It was something else. Some sense of recognition, perhaps? I had no idea what it might mean, or if it was indeed only my imagination, but I tried to trust my gut feeling the way Celia had been teaching me.

My great-aunt leaned forward. ‘Do you think it knew who you were? That it was trying to tell you something?’

I blinked. ‘The spider, you mean? That’s crazy.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, of course it is. Crazy.’