The Protector of Memories (The Veil of Death Book 1) (4 page)

Sam flinched in annoyance at the worn out joke but smiled when she heard the woman complaining about the state of Hope’s home.

“Hope it would not harm you if you were to live within cleanliness.” Faith exclaimed as she felt the stickiness underneath her feet.

“By the stars…” Hope laughed and hugged her sister. “Faith it is good to see you.”

Faith returned her sister’s embrace before stepping away to talk to the ghosts. “Please. Speak to me one at a time! I only have the boundaries of the mortal mind – your voices are but a scrambled mass of noise to me now!”

Sam’s heart sank;
great somebody else that Hope thinks she should save.

“Sam.” Hope called. “Meet my sister Faith!”

Sam’s heart sank deeper. She didn’t even know that Hope had a sister.

Faith’s phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. She answered it, “I cannot hear you…” she paused and walked over to the doors, opened them and listened again to the voice on the other end. “Yes.” She answered. “Yes. My name is Faith. Yes I know Charity. What! When? Where is she? Yes I’ll…” she paused, looked at Hope. “We will be there.”

She hung up the phone. “We need to get to a Hospital called St Mary’s. Charity needs us.”

∞

Fifteen minutes later and Sam remained on the pavement’s edge rubbing at her head. She flinched in pain at the bump that was appearing. One of the demonstrators had bashed Sam over the head with his banner as he tried to pull Hope out of the black cab.

Sam now wondered what the demonstrators would have done to Hope had they succeeded in dragging her into the mass of bodies. She ‘tutted’ in disgust at the mentality of people when they become a mob and kicking a pebble off of the pavement’s edge, another thought occurred to her;
will I see Hope again_?

“Ou!” she shouted and turned to confront whoever it was that had just pushed her off of the pavement but continued to step back until she was in the middle of the road.

The demonstrators were barging their way into the building and dragging out the drunken squatters.

DVD players, terracotta vats and barrels were being thrown out of the doors and onto the street.

Sam backed off even further.

People, who were not being forcibly dragged out, came running out. Their arms were filled with as much wine as they could carry. Police sirens rang out in the distance and she decided to return to the safety of her book shop which was up the road and on the next corner.

As Sam walked past the other local businesses, she collected up broken glass and wine cartons from the pavement and dumped them into the metal bin that she kept outside her book shop for such occasions.

She unlocked the shop’s door, pushed it open and flipped the sign to ‘open’.

The book shop had a large glass frontage and to take advantage of the natural lighting, Sam had placed some second-hand, battered up arm chairs and a long, wooden coffee table next to the window so that people could sit down and enjoy their experience of reading. Wooden book shelving – oak - ran the height and length of the three walls and six feet high book shelving took up most of the book shop’s floor space.

Sam had a wooden counter toward the back of the shop and behind this she had a fridge, kettle and an assortment of mugs. She put the kettle on, lit up a cigarette (an act of defiance at being told that she could not smoke in her own book shop) and blew out puffs of smoke rings into the air. This action triggered a memory of her maternal Nan who was always puffing on her long, thin, brown cigarettes.

“Me and you Nan,” she whispered.

Sam’s mother, who was only sixteen years old when she had had Sam, upped and left… no note, nothing. It had left a mark on Sam and she grew up blaming the world and everybody in it. She was always running away, bunking off of school, getting expelled, drinking, thieving - anything bad and she would do it.

“Strueth,” Sam whispered at the memory of her younger self. She had done anything to ensure that nobody liked her because she had worked out in her young mind that that would ultimately lead to abandonment. But when Sam was seventeen, she was told that her Nan had cancer and that was when she realised that the world owed her nothing and she owed her Nan everything. Sam never left her Nan’s side from that time onwards. On the ‘good’ days, Sam worked in the book shop alongside her Nan. On the ‘bad’ days she sat with her Nan and read to her all manner of stories. Seven years her Nan had battled with the cancer but in the end it had killed her.

Her Nan’s death had occurred fourteen years ago and Sam now thirty- eight years old looked around the book shop that she had inherited and realised that her life and her memories were sealed within the shelving, the books, the furniture and décor. This was Sam’s home and always would be.

She drank another coffee, smoked two more cigarettes and twelve minutes later concentrated her attentions onto what had happened to Hope.

“Faith, Hope and Charity,” Sam muttered and twiddled with the short spiky strands of her hair as she glanced over at her desk calendar;
1
st
of April. No! Hope wouldn’t do that? Would she?
Sam put her head into her hands; she can cope with unrequited love but not this.
Is it just one big April fool’s day joke? With me the biggest fool of all? Can I say enough is enough and walk away? But if I walk away… that would feel so wrong. Being with Hope feels right. It is as if I tread the very pathway that I should be treading_

“Aaah!” Sam yelled out into the shop – her thoughts were driving her crazy.

Tears sprung to her eyes, she wiped them away in frustration.
This is all that I do nowadays… cry
and as if to confirm this, her tears surfaced again as Sam recollected what Sarah and Nigel – the owners of the jewellery shop next door - had said to her yesterday; ‘The woman’s a waste of space. You’ll get hurt. She’s only after your money.’

Sam wiped her tears away.

“What do they know?” She questioned aloud and wished that they didn’t judge Hope so quickly… so harshly. If they bothered to get to know her then they would discover that beneath the drunkenness, Hope was a very intelligent, insightful, compassionate and selfless person.

Sam groaned at the memory of how that went down and began to wonder why she even put up with them. They always pushed home the fact they were her friends and yet they were by far the cruellest.

Using work as a distraction, she started to log the books that had been donated to her earlier on that morning. She was halfway through the stack when she read: The Claiming of the Children – and realised that she had twenty copies of this particular book.

Sam read the back cover;

‘… The Claiming of the Children is crafted and created to those of you who are bound to mortality. If you are the rightful owner of this book then within its words you will discover your true identity and from where you originate from’.

Realising that Hope would love this sort of story, Sam looked for an author’s name and when she couldn’t see one she looked for a publisher’s name. Flicking through the book’s pages she realised that there was no reference to a publisher, copyright, ISBN or price? There was nothing but the story itself.

She opened the book and read the first sentence and then the next… and the next.

Nurse Low looked up the moment she heard the sound of running footsteps and watched the two women as they approached the desk.

The woman with the unusual shot of white running through her hair started to speak but ignoring her completely, Nurse Low concentrated her attentions on the woman who was clearly drunk.

Faith waited.

Hope waited.

Faith tried again. “My name is Faith…” Faith paused to read the nurse’s name tag and added, “Nurse Low. As I have but explained. I am Faith and this is my sister, Hope. Charity, our sister, has been in a car accident. Is she alright? Can we see her?

Nurse Low sniffed aloud at the strong smell of alcohol that was permeating the air around her station;
these people really take the biscuit. If you’re going to pretend to be a relative of a Star then at least look the part_.

“Excuse me?” Faith said. “Our sister. Charity?”

“You need to show me some I.D.” Nurse Low said and quickly added. “Besides, Charity doesn’t have any sisters.”

Faith stared at the nurse. “Of course she has sisters. We are her sisters.”

Nurse Low has had enough. “I’m calling security. You are anybody and anybody wants to be somebody to Charity_”

“I am Faith,” Faith interrupted. “My concern is for my sister and not on what you believe me to be.”

“I don’t appre_.”

“Nurse Low.” Nurse Katherine Adams interjected. “Let me deal with this.” She glanced between the two women and said, “I am Nurse Katherine Adams. I was the one who telephoned Faith? Charity had your number written down as a point of contact?”

“I am Faith.” Faith said. “And this is my sister Hope.”

“Oh please.” Nurse Low said and made a snorting sound.

Katherine ignored her rudeness, looked to the main entrance doors, noticed a group of reporters charging their way toward them and insisted, “Follow me.” She ushered Faith and Hope into the lifts and then toward the private room that Charity was situated in.

When they eventually arrived into the room, Katherine observed very closely their behaviour and after a couple of minutes had passed it became obvious how close the woman were to other another. “I must apologise,” she explained. “For what must have seemed quite insensitive but necessary…” Katherine smiled and added. “I’ll be at the nurses’ station if you need anything.”

She made her way out of the room, closed the door and placed an urgent ‘beeper’ message to Mr Herringbone, the consultant surgeon, informing him that Charity had two visitors claiming to be her sisters.

∞

Faith and Hope stood either side of Charity’s bed.

They stared down at their sister whose head was swathed in bandages and her left arm was encased within a plaster.

“It looks worse than it is.” Charity mumbled beneath the bandages. “It is but my arm that was broken.” And she held up her arm to prove the point while looking at the damage that Mother Earth had done unto Faith and Hope.

Charity was about to tell them about Alastair Herringbone - her ‘prized possession’ - when in walked the man himself.

Mr Alastair Herringbone was a tall, thin man just over six feet; he was fifty-nine years old and possessed a long bony aquiline nose that protruded out from his equally long and bony face. His eyelids sagged over his narrow eyes. A white clinical overcoat covered a tailored grey suit, crisp white shirt and yellow tie.

“You are Charity’s relatives?” He asked and waved his hands about the room to rid the bad odour that had wafted under his nose. “I am Mr Herringbone… Alistair Herringbone.” Alistair said and noticed how tall the two women were - as with Charity, they also stood a couple of inches taller than he.

He looked down at Charity and shook his head to rid his mind of the dreadful image of her face before he had bandaged it up. In his line of work he has seen it all… or thought he had;
a rapidly ageing face? Now that was a new experience for him.

“I am Faith.” Faith said, introducing herself.

She looked into the man’s brown eyes and saw sparks of yellow, amber, blues and reds. This reminded her of the immortal who loved to manipulate the energies born from fire and heat. He would forge them with the scraps of debris that he collected from the Universe. “Are you the ‘Forger’?” Faith asked him but within the next breath, she spoke to the ghosts. “You need to talk to me one at a time.”

The schizophrenic -
Alastair thought as he glanced over the scabs that riddled the woman’s scalp but as far as he was concerned it was not her mind that he would be re-styling. He scrutinized her cheekbones, jaw line, eyelids, ears and neck and he could tell by her bone structure that in her younger days, she would have been as startlingly beautiful as Charity is… was_?

“Hope.” Hope said and held out her hand but lowered it when he declined to shake it.

The alcoholic
– Alastair thought and explained. “My hands are my tools.”

He scrutinized Hope’s face and realised that she would need far more work done to her skin. The years of alcohol abuse has taken its toll and Alastair made a mental note of the skin grafts needed before casting his eyes up and down the length of her body. He now wondered if there was actually any smooth skin left to be salvaged. With this thought in mind, he shrugged;
no matter. Skin can be obtained elsewhere
and focussing upon her bone structure, he realised that she too must have been a beauty in her younger days.

Alastair stared into the woman’s eyes and became captivated by the intensity of the colour within them; a rich emerald-green that he had never seen the like of before. He peered closer at the sight of tiny flecks of amber that seemed to flicker_.

“Alastair!” Charity snapped. “That is quite enough.”

He coughed - shook his head. “As is the obvious, Charity has broken her left-arm...” Alastair paused looked to his watch and added. “As to the injuries to her face...” he paused again, wondering if Charity had had the chance to discuss the importance of the situation.

“It’s okay Alastair. You can trust my sisters with the truth.”

He nodded.

“Well then. We are the only people who are aware that Charity has only broken her arm. We need to cover up the fact that Charity has aged… somewhat rapidly. Her critics will have a field day if they find out that the very creams and lotions that Charity promotes as being the ‘magic formula for youth and beauty’ is nothing but an illusion. Her reputation will be in ruins. Her celebrity status will be ripped from under her_.”

“Alastair. You have made your point!” Charity shouted and moved her hand away at the realisation that he was not holding it but… patting it!

She narrowed her eyes at the man who was treating her so differently now that her mortal flesh was old.

He smiled, patted the bed sheet and continued. “I have the ability to give back to Charity what Mother Nature has stolen from her… youth and beauty.”

Alastair frowned as he again recalled the image of Charity’s old and ugly face and thought now upon her body that was once flawlessly perfect and so dammed desirable that he never quite got enough of it.

“Alastair!” Charity snapped out his name. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He frowned down at Charity.

Alastair suffered her foul mouth because it was never her conversation that he sought within their sordid affair.

He gripped the bed sheet, smiled, adjusted his tie and continued to address the women. “Charity will be moved to my private clinic this evening. It is my intention to release a statement to the media tomorrow morning. I will state that Charity has suffered extensive injuries to her face.” He stopped talking in case anybody wanted to add anything – seemingly not, he continued. “Charity also explained that the two of you could benefit from my skills and expertise…” he held up his hands to stop the one called Faith from talking. “It’s okay. No thanks necessary. I am the best in the field of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction…” he paused. “But you probably already know this.” And he waited for them to acknowledge who he was.

It was Charity who broke the awkwardness of the moment. “Alastair. You must forgive my sisters and their… ignorance. They do not mix within our world.”

“And what world would that be?” Faith asked and added, “The world of deceit, illusions and lies. Have you not learnt from our own history?”

Charity narrowed her eyes at the sarcasm within Faith’s voice but answered not her sister’s question and asked her own instead. “Do you understand what it is that I ask from you? And why?”

“Yes Charity I do.” Faith said. “You want us to lie about the extent of your injuries so that Mr Herringbone can recreate the illusion of youth and beauty that goes no deeper than your skin.”

“Got it in one,” Charity said and then she reminded them, “The money that you both so willingly accepted came from the very fact that I represent youth and beauty. You were not so… picky then. Were you?”

Hope frowned at Charity’s sarcasm and told her, “I thank the stars that you managed to escape death.” She looked across at Mr Herringbone. “I have had quite enough face changes to last me this mortal life. I need not another one. But it is very kind that you use your skills to help those who need it the most.” And she took her hip-flask out from her denim jacket’s inner pocket and took a good hefty swig of the red wine.

“For fuck sake Hope!” Charity snapped.

Hope wiped her mouth. “You know why it is that I drink. To numb the pain that_”

“Shut up!” Charity shouted loudly into the room.

She looked to Alastair, lowered her voice and said. “Now do you understand why it is that I tell the world I have no family… no sisters?” She collapsed back unto the pillows;
Are they my sisters now that our Unity is severed?

Alastair’s beeper sounded.

“I will leave the three of you to discuss how you intend to handle the public and the media.”

He patted the top of Charity’s head and as he left the room he said. “I will sort out how we are going to get you moved from here without you being seen.”

Charity was seething at how ungrateful her sisters were behaving and as to Alistair’s behaviour she would have to deal with him later.

Settling her gaze onto Hope, she mimicked what her sister had just said to Alastair; “’It is very kind that you use your skills to help those who need it the most’.” And she looked at her sisters with disappointment, anger and betrayal. “I am trying to help you… but do you know what? Sod it. If that is the way you want to appear during your mortal lifetime then so be it. All that I ask is that you play the game and keep quiet for my sake.”

Hope took a step back at the sight of so much anger amassing in Charity’s auras. “Why are you so angry with us?” she asked in concern.

Charity leant back against the pillow, closed her eyes. “Leave me alone. I am tired,” and when she heard the sound of the door opening and closing, she was relieved that her sisters had done just that – left the room without expressing another word.

But suspicion crept into her mind.

“Why so… willing?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “What does it matter? Sisters…” she spat the word out with contempt. “How stupid have I been_.”

A pain shot through her head and pierced the depths of her thoughts.

She was swamped within a darkness of such weight and ferocity and now voices seared insidiously into her mind.

Charity waited until her mind had adjusted to the voices of the intruders but the longer she listened the angrier she became.
You ungrateful lot. You should be thanking me.
Her inner voice screamed over all other voices.
I released you from those rotting, decaying lumps of meat. You are as I once was, Immortal! And how do you thank me? By wailing
?

Her mind then plunged into darkness and just before she was thrown into a state of unconsciousness, Charity heard one voice over all others:

Drink the memories. Break the vessel. Return to the Void of Emptiness with the right of your claim.