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*Title used for the US edition. UK edition is titled The Keeper.

A thief of light...

I have always been interested in the concept of chi — the vital energy, which forms the basis of traditional Chinese medicine and which is so prevalent in Oriental thought. I therefore decided to turn my villain into a brilliant scientist who is passionate about chi and who has devoted his life to the study of this mysterious life force. But Adrian Ashton is not just a genius, he is also a killer. He has mastered the secret of draining the chi of his victims and making it his own. It was great fun researching the world in which he lives and I enjoyed putting a twist to the vampire legend, creating a vampire for the twenty-first century: a thief of light.

My second source of inspiration was the world of martial arts. I am a kickboxer and I love nothing more than to spar with some very cool guys in the two London dojos where I train. For years I've wanted to write a book that draws on my knowledge of the fighting world. Furthermore, I have long been fascinated by the many myths and legends featuring battle-scarred men who are protected — or cursed — by beautiful, powerful women. And so I created the character of Mia Lockhart, a martial artist descended from a long line of Keepers: women who are both warriors and healers.

Tattoos, quantum physics, muscled men and chi: I started writing The Keeper: A Martial Arts Thriller* with a number of haphazard ideas in my head. Some of these ideas have been germinating for a while. When I researched the topic of 'remote viewing' for my previous book, Season of the Witch, I became interested in the concept of psi-space and read up on Hall Puthoff's work at Stanford Research Institute and his enthusiasm for the Zero Point Field. A chance reading of Lynne McTaggert's The Field, in which she offers a compelling argument for the concept of an interconnected universe, further inspired me, specifically her chapter on Fritz-Albert Popp and his research into biophotonics. Her second book, The Intention Experiment, was invaluable to my understanding of remote healing. My imagination was also kicked into overdrive by Robert O. Becker's intriguing book, The Body Electric, which deals with organ regeneration and biolectronics.

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* TO AVOID DUPLICATION PLEASE NOTE WHEN ORDERING FROM AMAZON OR A BOOK STORE: THE KEEPER: A MARTIAL ARTS THRILLER was first published in the US by Penguin under the title, KEEPER OF LIGHT AND DUST. It is the same book.

Prologue

Rosalia came into his life during his gap year. He had just finished high 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 frescoes, 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 his 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 direction. 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 odor 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 lime scale would not have been able to damp 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 traveled 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 around 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 physician, 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 marveling at the color of her skin. Her brain had flat-lined, 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 for ever. 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 it 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 for ever. A father's desperate plea. And clever, busy Dr. Salofia with his chemicals and fluids and overreaching 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 decide on 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 for ever.

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Click to enlarge

I was working on the final chapters of Keeper of Light and Dust when I broke my ankle. It happened while I was sparring with my kickboxing instructor and managed — much to the surprise of both of us — to sweep his leg out from underneath him. My ankle remained entangled with his and when we both hit the mat, it snapped. For the next eight weeks I would be Crutches Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Being able to laugh in a lopsided way at my misfortune could not take away from the fact that the fracture was painful, required surgery and would keep me from training for six months. Before this incident I've had other accidents as well — bruised ribs, a cracked nose and a broken little toe — but this was the first time a few uneasy questions started to drift into my mind. What was it that so attracted me to combat? Why do I like to punch and be punched? What kind of person does that make me?

I still don't have the answers. All I know is that when I am inside the dojo, I am happy, and acutely aware of my own vital energy. When I sat down to write Keeper I could therefore not think of a better milieu for a book that deals with the concept of chi. I know there will be readers to whom the idea of physically challenging someone — even in a controlled environment — is unacceptable and they may have difficulty understanding my characters and the world in which they live. I have complete respect for this point of view. But I think Joyce Carol Oates, in her book, On Boxing may have said it best:

'Of course it is primitive, too, as birth, death and erotic love might be said to be primitive and forces our reluctant acknowledgment that the most profound experiences of our lives are physical events - though we believe ourselves to be, and surely are, essentially spiritual beings.'

Natasha

Training with Carlos Andrade,
former WKA European Light-Heavyweight
Kickboxing Champion

My sparring partners:
Scott Poulton, Carlos Andrade,
Gideon Remfry, Dave Laurent

All photographs taken at KX Gym UK by David Dettmann
Click pictures to enlarge

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*Title used for the US edition. UK edition is titled The Keeper.

When I wrote my novel, Keeper of Light and Dust* I drew on my own experiences as a martial artist and what life in the dojo is all about. Shortly after finishing Keeper I happened to come across a BBC News article about a group of Afghan women who are being taught how to box. These ladies are sponsored by a peace organization that is endeavouring to make the women feel more empowered and in charge of their lives.

What I found especially poignant is that the gym in which they train is located in a football stadium, which was used in the past by the Taliban for public executions, including the killing of women.

I know how liberated I feel when I am in the dojo, and can only imagine how much more so it must be for these women who lead restrictive lives and who are still coming to terms with a terrible period in Afghan history. The photographs that accompany the article tell the story. One picture shows a girl, her hands encased in boxing gloves, an expression of utter delight on her face. Another picture is of two women sparring. One of them has her hair upswept and gathered with a comb and she looks beautiful and feminine, but also strong and determined. You look at these pictures and you sense the joy and energy in the room.

I immediately knew I wanted to be a part of this project in some way and have decided that some of the income I derive from Keeper of Light and Dust* will go toward funding 'CPAU Fighting for Peace'. I have also donated to this programme the 5,000 pounds prize money that was given to me when Season of the Witch won the 2009 World Book Day Award and hope this will inspire my readers to be generous despite tough times.

The organization responsible for the program is Cooperation for Peace and Unity, and the inspirational people in charge have ambitious hearts. Not only are they teaching the ladies to put on boxing gloves, but they are also instructing them in conflict resolution techniques. The aim is to provide the girls with the tools to contribute to creating a progressive culture in Afghanistan based on courageous collective decision-making. Any readers who would like to know more about 'Fighting for Peace' or how they can contribute, please visit CPAU: Fight for Peace.

Natasha

*Title used for the US edition. UK edition is titled The Keeper.

At the heart of my novel — like a golden pulse — lies the concept of chi.

Chi has never been clinically established inside a laboratory and it is not a concept used in Western medicine. In China, however, it is different. Chi lies at the heart of traditional Chinese medicine and the codified Chinese acupuncture studies go back two thousand years.

The concept of vital energy informs The Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine — the historical equivalent of the Western Corpus Hippocraticum.

Chi enters the body through acupuncture points and flows through twelve meridians and two midline collaterals and through paired yin and yang organs. The movement of chi builds up in wavelike movements, completing a cycle every twenty-four hours. In the early morning hours, chi is at its lowest ebb.

Although chi cannot be dissected under a microscope and does not fit the empirical model, many Western scientists have done experiments with acupuncture. Robert Becker, an American orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in biomedical electronics, found that there are electrical charges separate from the pulses of the body's nervous system, which correspond to the body's acupuncture meridians. Other scientists have proved that there are differences in the levels of potassium and sodium in acupuncture points compared to the surrounding tissue. Acupoints also exhibit lower skin resistance: these points conduct electrical current more efficiently. What's interesting is that this lower skin resistance is even measurable after death.

Chi and Reiki

In Keeper my heroine is a long distance Reiki practitioner who uses chi as a healing force to protect the fighters in her keep. The founder of Reiki is considered to be Usui Mikao (1865-1926) but it is worth remembering that the origin of healing through universal energy dates back before the time of Christ and Sammasambuddha. Fa gung — the transmission of chi through meditation — is a very old concept.

Chi and martial arts

I believe in chi myself and I also think that we are all subliminally aware of each other's chi and react to it intuitively. Some among us are blessed with strong chi, in others vital energy is blocked and may lead to malaise and depression.

There is no place where I am more aware of my own vital energy than when I am training in the dojo. Increasing your chi sensitivity is central to the discipline of martial arts. For a beautifully written exposition of this journey I highly recommend Kenji Tokitsu's Ki and the Way of the Martial Arts.

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*Title used for the US edition. UK edition is titled The Keeper.

In Keeper of Light and Dust*, my heroine ''steps out'' and visits a mystical place called The Retreat.

This is where she comes to practice the centuries old ritual of Fa gung and recharges her own energy — chi — to pass on to her charges.

'The Retreat was bathed in moonlight. There was a satisfying sense of solidity to the thick walls and the low sweeping eaves of the roof. The slab of stone surrounding the door was etched with symbols: earth, fire, water, metal and wood — the five gogyo symbols, which the Keeper shared with practitioners of Ninjitsu.'

From: Keeper of Light and Dust* by Natasha Mostert

'Stepping out' is my own term for an out-of-body experience. The sensation of leaving your body behind, travelling through a modified reality and then returning, is an old one: reports of OBEs go back thousands of years. But science only became interested in the phenomenon after Celia Green's first extensive scientific studies on the subject in 1968.

Since then, neurologists, using binaural beats to elicit theta brain wave frequencies or using sinusoidal wave pulses, have tried to induce OBE-like experiences on command. The Swiss researcher Olaf Blanke managed to elicit OBE states by stimulating the right temporal-parietal junction of the brain. But it wasn't until 2007 that Henrik Ehrsson performed the first experimental method that fitted a three-point definition of an OBE, inducing an out-of-body experience in healthy participants at the Institute of Neurology at the University College of London.

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*Title used for the US edition. UK edition is titled The Keeper.

In Keeper of Light and Dust*, my villain — a brilliant if psychotic man — believes the Zero Point Field to provide the scientific explanation for chi and its link to human consciousness: a viewpoint that sets him at odds with his peers in the field of science.

The Zero Point Field itself is not a controversial concept. It is simply empty space, like the space between the stars.

It is space with the lowest possible energy reading: almost nothing — only half a photon. But there are so many of these tiny electromagnetic fields that what people think of as an empty vacuum is really one infinitely large space filled with energy.

More controversial are the ideas that the Field act as a vast psi-space and that all living beings are plugged into this space, which allows us to interact and exchange our energy, even our consciousness. There are even those who believe that the Zero Point Field explains paranormal activities such as remote viewing and remote healing.

On a more practical note, theses have been posited suggesting that should it be possible to harness the energy of the Zero Point Field, that it will be enough to power up every car on the planet: the ultimate clean energy.

When I researched the topic of 'remote viewing' for my previous book, Season of the Witch, I became interested in the concept of psi-space and read up on Hall Puthoff's work at Stanford Research Institute and his enthusiasm for the Zero Point Field. A chance reading of Lynne McTaggert's The Field, in which she offers a compelling argument for the concept of an interconnected universe, further inspired me, specifically her chapter on Fritz-Albert Popp and his research into biophotonics. It is a book I can highly recommend.

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*Title used for the US edition. UK edition is titled The Keeper.