The Keeper Read online

  THE KEEPER: A Martial Arts Thriller. Copyright © 2009, 2013 by Natasha Mostert. First Edition published by Bantam Press/Transworld Publishers. Portable Magic Edition: 2013.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Jacket design by Stefan Coetzee/Asha Hossain

  Photograph by Paul Venning

  Model: Carlos Andrade

  Author photograph: by Mark Andreani © Natasha Mostert

  ISBN 978-1-909965-15-7

  www.natashamostert.com

  www.portablemagic.com

  PRAISE FOR THE KEEPER

  ‘Original and daring … a hybrid of Eric Lustbader’s groundbreaking The Ninja and Ann Rice’s The Vampire Lestat.’—Jon Land

  ‘Will grab your interest right from the start. A distinctive, fast-paced mystery that balances the occult with the latest technology. Excellent character building, a sense of history and an inventive plot make this paranormal tale stand out from the pack.’—Monsters and Critics

  ‘A stunning psychological thriller. Mostert has delivered another knockout treat.’—Daily Mail (London)

  ‘Brilliantly compelling and original. I read this book in one sitting.’—Robert Twigger (Angry White Pyjamas)

  ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.’—Harper’s Bazaar

  ‘This unusual, deftly written tale combines martial and healing arts with speculation about the life force known as chi, marrying modern science with mysticism, and steering clear of romantic clichés.’—The Times (London)

  ‘Intellectual Meets Paranormal. Mostert has a knack of blending science and the paranormal in interesting, ‘it-could-happen’ ways …The story, the science behind it, and its mysticism will leave readers thinking (and discussing) long after the story is over.’—Graffiti

  ‘Even more compelling than the players in this eerie tale is the talented author Natasha Mostert. An ambitious and gifted storyteller, her vivid imagination and compelling research dominate… a powerful and entertaining read that will intrigue you.’—Karla Mass. The Week’s Most Talked About Books

  I dedicate this book to Isabella and Tatyana:

  two little Keepers in the making

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I make use of both Chinese and Japanese martial-arts terms in this book. For ease of reference I have used the term ideogram for graphic symbols that are genuine ideograms, i.e. characters representing ideas, as well as for logograms, where the characters represent morphemes or words.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title page

  Copyright

  Praise for THE KEEPER

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  LIGHT

  Prologue

  THE KEEPER

  Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16

  Chapter 17 | Chapter 18

  CHI

  Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 | Chapter 24

  THE THIEF

  Chapter 25 | Chapter 26 | Chapter 27 | Chapter 28

  Chapter 29 | Chapter 30 | Chapter 31 | Chapter 32

  STEPPING OUT

  Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36

  Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40

  Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44

  Chapter 45 | Chapter 46 | Chapter 47 | Chapter 48

  Chapter 49 | Chapter 50 | Chapter 51 | Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  HEART

  Chapter 54 | Chapter 55 | Chapter 56 | Chapter 57 | Chapter 58 | Chapter 59

  DUST

  Epilogue

  On Writing THE KEEPER

  Photograph: In the Dojo

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Fighting for Peace

  Play THE KEEPER Game

  Also by Natasha Mostert

  Preview of DARK PRAYER

  Contact Natasha

  LIGHT

  ‘The love of beauty is a dangerous prayer.’

  —Adrian Ashton

  PROLOGUE

  Rosalia came into his life during his gap year. He had just finished school and hiking through Europe on his own felt like a great adventure. He was surrounded by beauty: soaring cathedrals, museums like jewel boxes, ethereal frescos, heroic sculpture. He was happy. It was a year in which time was suspended and reality kept at bay.

  But after ten months he was running out of money. Soon he would have to return to England and decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He had no idea what this decision would be, and the knowledge that such a defining moment awaited him made him feel emotionally exhausted.

  Palermo was to be the last stop on this journey. He arrived late in the afternoon but still in time to visit the city’s most famous tourist attraction.

  He drew his tongue over his dry lips; he was thirsty. On his way to the catacombs he had become lost. He did not speak Italian and had difficulty following the broken English of the shop owners he asked for directions. It all felt slightly nightmarish as he walked through Palermo’s alleyways, his legs becoming ever more tired and heavy. He looked straight up at the far sky above him;and it was a glazed, parched blue. There was no relief from the heat even though the tall houses on either side almost touched each other and threw deep shadows.

  In here it was cooler and very quiet. The tourist buses had all left. Even the hooded Capuchin monk who had taken his donation with listless fingers had disappeared. He was on his own: all alone with eight thousand mummies.

  The most surprising thing was that the bodies did not smell—there was no odour except for dust. He wondered if they had ever smelled. Perhaps when they were first placed inside their strainers and left to dry, there would have been a stench of rotting flesh. Even the porous limescale would not have been able to dampen down completely the fruity smell of human ooze. But after an eight-month stay in darkness, these corpses would have been taken from their cells, washed with vinegar and lime and exposed to open air: fresh as a housewife’s laundry.

  He looked down at the guidebook in his hands.

  In 1599, Capuchin monks discovered a way to preserve the dead, and Sicilians from all walks of life flocked to be buried here in the Catacombe dei Cappucini. The deceased often specified the clothes in which they wished to enter the afterlife and many stipulated that their garments were to be changed over time.

  His eyes travelled up the twenty-foot wall until it reached the vaulted ceiling. The mummies lined the wall in rows: monks, lawyers, shopkeepers, matrons and maids. Virgins with steel bands encircling their heads to indicate their untouched state. All were dressed, and many were standing, some with hands folded across their stomachs and a jolly slant to their heads. Others screamed silently with open mouths. Many had lost ears, or were missing jaws and hands, while others had defied the passage of time with more success; the caramel flesh truly mummified and the eyes cradled within dusty sockets. There were even mummies with ropes round their necks, but another glance at the guidebook told him that these were not the corpses of criminals but the remains of pious men. The ropes were not nooses, but symbols of penance, worn by the monks during their lifetime and carried with them into death.

 
; Death. As he walked slowly down the long, death-choked corridors he wondered at the ambiguity of this word. When did death take place? Did death come when the brain stopped? His father, a doctor, had told him the brain sometimes continued its electric dance for up to ten minutes after the heart had ceased to supply it with blood. The ‘master switch’ was what his father called the brain. The conductor. The commander-in-chief.

  But he remembered his grandmother’s death. His father had given permission for her organs to be harvested and she was to become what was known as a ‘beating heart cadaver’. On the day she was pronounced no longer alive, he remembered leaning kiss-close and marvelling at the colour of her skin. Her brain had flatlined, but she was hooked up to a respirator and her heart was beating. Inside her liver was a pulse. Her hands were warm and she would bleed if she were cut. This was his grandmother. They told him she was dead, but she looked alive.

  The practice of mummification was outlawed in 1881. But in 1920 an exception was made for three-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, nicknamed ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Her father, stricken with grief, begged a certain Dr Salofia to keep his daughter alive forever. Remarkably, Dr Salofia managed to defeat the process of decay. Rosalia is a marvel and looks like a pretty sleeping doll who might awaken at any moment. Dr Salofia’s secret died with him: no one knows the method he used to preserve the little girl.

  She was lying in a glass coffin in the chapel and her face was innocence itself: the nose pert, the mouth sweet, the cheeks infant-plump. Her ears were tiny shells, and long lashes feathered her closed eyelids. The soft pink bow on top of her head made her look vulnerable, as did the wispy tendrils of hair tumbling over her forehead.

  He stared at her, not quite believing how perfect she was.

  How could her father have borne to leave her here? Why preserve a three-year-old child and leave her to sleep under the gaze of a thousand leering scarecrows?

  A beam of late-afternoon sunlight fell through the tiny, leaded window and made it look as though a sheen of sweat was on her brow. And in that instant he suddenly had a clear understanding of how his future must look. Life-defining moments sometimes happened serendipitously. In that one moment—in that most unlikely of places—the course of his life was set.

  Rosalia was not about preserving the dead. Rosalia was about making a wish. A wish to stop time—a wish, in fact, for eternal life.

  Keep her alive forever. A father’s desperate plea. And clever, busy Dr Salofia with his chemicals and fluids and over-reaching genius had gone to work. But he was not a healer, he was a preserver. He had succeeded in keeping intact a perfect shell, but in the end that was all she was: a shell. The brain dead. The heart dead.

  Maybe the master switch was neither the brain nor the heart. Maybe the answer to life lay elsewhere…

  When he arrived back in England he enrolled in university to study medicine. His father was convinced he had played the deciding role in helping his son choose a profession, but that was not the truth. It was not his father who had been key, but a little girl with a pink bow in her hair.

  And now, every night before closing his eyes, he would think of darkness coming to the chapel of the Catacombe dei Cappucini and tiny Rosalia sleeping in her glass case, a thousand mummified bodies pressed close around her like an army of the dead. And it would remind him that the strongest desire of all was to live. To live forever.

  THE KEEPER

  ‘I think that when you tattoo somebody, something can happen. Not always. But something extreme can happen… You are physically opening up the body… And if you’re opening a person up, you’re letting something in. You can put information in.’

  —Alex Binnie, as quoted in Chris Wroblewski, Skin Shows: The Tattoo Bible

  CHAPTER ONE

  The net curtains inside the window lifted and the night air that entered the room was scented with the smell of exhaust fumes, chips fried in old oil, warm pavements and, incongruously, the perfume of roses.

  The man sitting in the deep armchair glanced out of the window as the curtain fluttered again. In the darkness outside, he could just see the rosebush drooping against the windowsill, and the sight of the creamy petals made him smile. Amy had worked hard in their small garden and it was beginning to show. The only thing left was to fix the crumbling brickwork of the outer wall. He had promised ages ago he’d take care of it, but for the past eight weeks every free moment he had was spent at the gym. But hadn’t it been worth it? Besides, now that the fight was behind him, he would have loads of time to tackle the outstanding chores round the house.

  He shifted in his chair, trying to ease himself into a position that would cause him the least discomfort. His entire body was sore. The muscles of his shoulders ached as though he had carried around bags of cement. Even after three days, his left leg still throbbed where Burke had kicked him in the thigh. Burke was a tough bastard. And sneaky—the referee had had to step in twice. But what a fight: he knew he would never have another one like it again.

  From the direction of the kitchen came the voices of Amy and Tom-Tom. It was long past Tom’s bedtime, but he and Amy were going easy on the little fellow: they were all feeling festive this week. He could hear his son’s voice as he excitedly described something he had seen in the park earlier in the day. Amy was laughing, and then came the sound of running water and the clatter of dishes.

  He smiled again. He usually did the washing-up but Amy was giving him the week off as a reward. ‘Just this week, mind,’ she had warned. ‘Don’t get too comfortable in that chair, O Victorious One.’

  ‘I think a win like that deserves two weeks of downtime, at least.’

  She pulled a face. ‘You defended yourself like a muppet in the fourth. Dropped your hands. No reward for that.’

  ‘True. So how about rewarding me for being sexy and handsome?’

  ‘One week,’ she said firmly.

  So he had four more days of the easy life left; he’d better make the most of it. He stretched out his hand for the television remote control. Amy had recorded the fight and he wanted to watch it again. It would be about the hundredth time, but what the hell, they didn’t make them any better than this.

  As he pointed the remote at the set, something descended in front of his eye—a shadow blurring his vision. He barely had time to register it when it disappeared. But then, a few moments later, there it was again—a darkness. He blinked and his vision cleared once more. Odd.

  A sound at the door made him turn his head. His son was waddling into the room, a fluffy green toy clutched to his chest.

  ‘Hey, little one. You want to watch the fight with Daddy?’

  But Tom was having none of it. ‘No.’ Without further ado, he pressed a small fat finger on the DVD’s eject button. ‘Tubbies.’

  ‘OK.’ He knew better than to argue. He watched as Tom placed his Teletubbies DVD in the player, the pudgy little hands working in a no-nonsense way he had to admire. The kid knew what he wanted.

  The screen filled with singing Tubbies. Truth to tell, he found the creatures bloody creepy. The identical pinched faces, the small, fixed smiles, the round eyes… ugh.

  As he reached out to pull Thomas on to his lap, a blackness moved across his eye again. It was the same shadow as before, but this time it lingered longer, as though a disc had been slid across his eyeball. It caught him by surprise.

  He touched his eyebrow. He blinked slowly, deliberately. When he opened his eye again, the disc had slid back to where it had come from and his vision was once more unimpaired. Weird. And scary. He did not like this.

  Thomas snuggled against him and after a while he felt himself relax. His son was growing up fast, but he still had that baby smell when he sniffed the back of his head. God certainly knew what he was about when he created that smell. One sniff and you were pretty much at the mercy of the little tykes.

  The red Tubby was giving a flower to the Tubby with the antenna on his head. The yellow Tubby was skipping from one leg to the other. Th
e purple Tubby… He couldn’t see the purple Tubby because the disc was moving across his eye again like an eclipse, blocking out the light.

  At the same time his body was suddenly gripped by a colossal energy drain. The drain seemed to emanate from his abdomen, as though all the energy in his body were sucked from a spot just below his navel. His breath left his lips in a surprised oof. Every organ in his body sagged. He tried to lift his arm, but he did not have the strength. He tried to move his head, but it was too heavy.

  At that moment he knew he was about to die. He did not see any tunnel. No bright lights in the distance. No heavenly voices beckoning. Just the terrible sense of vitality and life and power rushing from his body, as though there were a hole in his stomach with his life force gushing out of it like a blindingly bright geyser. He looked down as though he might actually be able to see the energy flowing from his body in an incandescent stream: white and fierce.

  ‘Aaah.’ His lips moved but the sound was tiny. His eyelids fluttered; the black sun was moving across his eyeball once more. And from far away he heard Thomas saying, ‘Daddy? Night-night?’

  • • •

  At that exact moment, two hundred miles away, a woman was asleep and dreaming. Her bedroom was filled with shadows but outside her open window the night sky was stained with the orange haze of city lights.

  The hinges of the window creaked. A breeze was blowing: it carried with it a wild, primordial smell from the vast river that flowed strong and cold somewhere out there in the darkness. Of all these things the woman was unaware. She had already walked deep, deep into her dream.

  A voice was urgently calling her name: it was her mother’s voice and it came from far away. She kept following the voice, her heart beating anxiously.

  In the distance was a pool of light. The light was weak—the kind of light you encountered in monasteries and old libraries—and indeed, when she reached it, she found herself in a room where the walls were covered with books. Suddenly it was deadly quiet. She could no longer hear her mother’s voice.