The Kiss. Book 1 of Creation’s Song. Chapter 1.

I have only ever shown my novel to a few close friends, and whilst I have had positive feed back; they are close friends! So it is time to unzip my fly, and get some of my work out there and, (if people are kind enough to give it,) get some feedback.  If you wish to comment, then please do not hold back in any way. All I ask is complete honesty. I do not care how brutal it is. I am completely new to writing so hack away at it. I will not learn in any other way. With that said I hope it is not too bad and that you enjoy it.

Anyway without further delay here it is. This is the first chapter. It is called The Kiss, and is the first book from a high fantasy epic, called Creation’s Song. The chapter is around 2,500 words long.

When is a biscuit tin not a tin? When it is a box; Pandora’s box!

Chapter 1,  The biscuit tin.

There was no arcane firestorm.  There were no bolts of electric blue lightning loudly rending the air as universal forces battled to thwart the event; the two worlds simply came together, kissed, enfolded and for a short time became one.

At first the figures sat silently on their horses, eyeing me with a curious detachment, a settling  frost causing their  outline to sparkle in the moonlight like  statues on a winters morning.  Yet ‘statue’ implied solidity, and they were more fleeting than this.  Spectral would have been nearer the mark,  like an unwilling dream that was already on the edge of memory and fast fading.  That is how I first saw them.

A.K. May 1st 1896.

It wasn’t the fact that her  mother had spent the last years of her life in a mental hospital.  It mattered little that she had committed suicide. What really hurt, was that her  grandmother,  a woman who had effectively been her mother for the last thirty years had lied.

The biscuit tin had been in the last place she’d looked, in fact Jen hadn’t been looking at all, but had been clearing the house of the last of  her grandmothers things before it was sold.

The tin had been hidden in the cupboard below the stairs  behind a mountain of decaying newspapers that had literally been decades old, and that Jen had been trying to convince her grandmother to get rid of for years.

It had taken her over an hour to clear  the newspapers out , what with stopping rather too often to look at the dates and headlines that grew progressively older the further under the stairs she went.  In the end she had to force herself to stop reading and get on with it. It wasn’t a dig.

Jen hated digging, which was ironic really considering her profession. But then as she had to point out every time some idiot asked her if she had found Indiana Jones or the Lost Ark, she was an Anthropologist, a Cultural Anthropologist, not an archaeologist, and rarely did field work.  She had never found buried treasure, undiscovered tombs or dusted away sand from half-buried statues of pharaohs. For that matter she had never been to Egypt, she preferred to study the peoples of India and South America, insisting that more could be learned from the living than the dead.  Besides Egypt was crawling with archaeologists, all of them thinking they would be the next Howard Carter

Jen took a deep sigh.  Poor Mosey!

The call had come from the hospital a fortnight ago.  Rosemary Olivia Lea, Mosey to Jen; who had called her grandmother by that name since childhood, had had a heart attack brought on by a stroke.

‘Your grandmother is comfortable but somewhat confused.’  The ward sister had said.

‘She appears to be worrying that her house has burnt down along with both you and I think she said something about a tin; yes a biscuit tin.  If you could bring it with you to the hospital then it might help  calm her down.’

Jen had said that both she and the house were fine, and although she knew nothing about a biscuit tin, she would none the less try and find it and bring it with her. Of course  she never did find it, and by the time she arrived at the hospital  Mosey had unexpectedly had a second massive heart attack and died.  What with grief, organising her grandmother’s funeral and arranging for the house to be sold Jen hadn’t given the tin anymore thought.  Until now.  Now the old ladies confusion  was painfully clear. She hadn’t been worried about Jen or her house being burnt at all.  It was the tin.  She had wanted the tin destroyed before Jen could find it.  Well now it was too late! Jen picked up the letter again.

Dr. P. Lavender,

Priory Hospital,

The Priory,

Grafton Abbes,

Sussex.

21st July 1976.

The address was familiar, a secure mental hospital on the South Coast. The place  had been on the news recently, yet another casualty of Government cuts.  Jen continued to read.

Dear Mrs. Lea,

Further to our meeting, it is with much regret that I must give you written confirmation of your daughters death.  I am afraid that the inquest does confirm her death as suicide.  Please find enclosed  copies of the inquest report and your daughter’s death certificate.

My condolences to you and your family.

With deepest sympathy.

Dr. P. Lavender.

Jen looked at the death certificate again. Name: Bridget Anne Lea.  Date of death: First of  May nineteen-seventy-six.

There was no doubt, it was  her mother. And if this was her mother’s death certificate she couldn’t have died in a train crash in India in nineteen-seventy-two as Mosey had insisted upon for the last twenty years.

But why lie?   Jen could feel a knot of resentment begin eating into her stomach.  Mosey had no right, the woman had been her mother for Christ’s sake.

‘Don’t hate me.’   Suddenly Mosey’s memory was at Jen’s shoulder.

‘How do you know I had any control over whether you saw you’re mother or not?  She was in a  mental hospital. You don’t know how or why she got there, or why she killed herself.  You don’t even remember her!’

This was true.  Jen had  no memory of her mother at all.  But that wasn’t the point. She once again looked into the tin.. There were more envelopes, another dozen or so. She took  out the next one, opened it and  read.

Rose Cottage,

Drovers Lane,

Monkswell Village,

Devon.

June 20th 1972

Dearest Rosemary,

Please don’t dismiss this letter.  We have been friends for over thirty years now, and  despite how you feel you must trust me.  Don’t blame Bridget for what happened.   She would not hurt the children. You must believe me. Please get in touch!

Dorothy.

…hurt the children!. Unexpectedly Jen felt her stomach drop.    Pandora like she eyed the tin  suspiciously, then  swallowed hard and  took out another letter.

There were fourteen of them in all, each broadly the same in content as the first, with this Dorothy woman begging Mosey not to blame her daughter for what had happened to the children.  As Jen read each of the letter she noticed that the dates became further and further apart, with each of subsequent letter becoming more pleading than the last.  The last letter was dated April the third nineteen-seventy six,  around a month before her mother had actually died.  It was a complete contrast to the rest.

Rose Cottage,

Drovers Lane,

Monkswell Village,

Devon.

April 3rd 1976

Rosemary,

I have no doubt that as  you haven’t replied to any of my letters you are blaming me for what happened. Well  I can’t say I’m surprised, and  frankly I don’t give a damn.  Stop leaning on all that Papist rubbish and get a back-bone.   I say to you for the last time,  Bridget did not hurt the children!  (Fiercely underlined). Get off your backside and go to her before it’s too late, or are you going to be as blinked and weak as you’ve always been and put trust in a God that doesn’t exist?

Dorothy.

‘Ouch!’ thought Jen, but then to an extent she could sympathise.  Her grandmother could be extraordinarily stubborn, especially when cornered.  But that still didn’t’ answer the question; What, if anything, had her mother done to ‘The children.’?  It looked like Mosey believed her daughter had done something, but  not this Dorothy woman.  Why?

There was a last item left in the tin; a brown envelope.  It was spilt down one side and held together with a perished rubber band.  Jen lifted it out, pulled off the rubber band and opened the envelope. Photographs.  She looked at the first.  Its colours were badly faded, and had an overall yellow ‘seventies’ cast to them. It was a group picture of three women and a child, and looked to have been taken in front of a great iron fence or gate.

Two of the woman looked to be sisters, whilst the third and older woman was holding a child. The woman in the centre, one of the sisters, had her arms around the shoulders of her companions. She had a great fountain of brown chestnut hair, gypsy dark almond eyes, and a full balanced mouth spread into a great cheery grin.  Jen gasped. For a moment she thought she had been looking at herself, but then realised she was looking straight into the eyes of  her mother!

Jen then looked at the woman to her mother’s  left. This woman looked to be her mother’s older sister, but  Mosey had said that Bridget was her only child.  Then realisation dawned.  The  other woman was Mosey.  But what a shock.  It wasn’t that her grandmother was younger, thirty years younger for that matter, or  the fact that she looked so much like her daughter, with only a hint of grey encroaching her own shock of hair, no it was the look on her face, like her daughter she looked so; so alive!  Jen felt her cheek  warm as a tear spilled onto it.  In over twenty years she had never  seen her grandmother look that happy, never giving more than a  thin, sad smile, even on the happiest of occasions.

Jen wiped her eyes and turned  her attention to the right-hand figure.  This woman looked  considerably older than her companions.  She appeared to be holding a little girl of about two years old,  but it was difficult to tell as the child had its face turned away from the camera.  The woman Jen didn’t recognise at all; grey almost white hair bunned on her head and a stout walking stick which matched her stern headmistress like manner, giving the impression she was old before her time. She looked to be fighting to keep her dignity along with her hair in place, as the child, instead of behaving whilst the picture was taken, was attempting to scale the women’s shoulder like a climber  negotiating a particularly difficult crag.  One of its hands had already started to pull  on the women’s boulder like hair, threatening to dislodge it and send it cascading down the her irritated face.

That must be this Dorothy!  Thought Jen; and the child must be me!

Suddenly an unexplained feeling of unease emptied across her  stomach.

Jen turned the photograph over.  Smudged but still legible was a flowing black script;

Jennifer’s first picture.

Dorothy’s.

March ’72.

It was her grandmothers handwriting

Jen felt her heart jump. She had taken the picture?  She’d assumed she was the child struggling in the older woman’s arms, but then if she wasn’t the child who was?  The question skittered away into her conscience and was replaced by a new feeling.  At first Jen couldn’t place it, it  was so out of context, then she felt it bubbling upwards, growing in strength. It was… was… panic!

Suddenly Jen’s  heart was pounding.   There was a darkness in her mind now, a great black fog around the memory of the photograph.  A place where she couldn’t see, in fact a place where she didn’t dare looked. Her hands now shaking Jen turned to the next photograph.

It was  a wide angle shot of a pair of great iron gates between trees.  There were no people.  Quickly she turned to the next picture.  It was of  the Dorothy woman.  She was standing on the steps of what looked to be the entrance to a stately home. Jen discarded it and  flipped to the last photograph.

This picture was almost the same as the first, except  now there only two adults, Dorothy and Mosey, and each of them was holding a child.  Both children were sitting quietly,  both of them were dressed identically, and from beneath flowing locks of curly red-brown hair beamed  two identical faces. Suddenly Jen was there, it had been raining, she had been splashing about in the puddles in her  bright new yellow wellingtons. There had been a shout, she had almost dropped Mosey’s camera in the puddle. Struggling in the old ladies arms had been her, her….

‘Oh Christ!’

The hairs that until now had been standing up on the back of her neck suddenly  tore down her spine, her stomach tipping after them.

Deep, deep, deep within the black fog  something stirred.

‘No, that’s impossible!’ screamed Jen suddenly. ‘It’s a  trick,  two photographs stuck together,  I can’t have had a sister, I would’ve remembered.’ Jen threw her hand to her mouth, choking off a sob and screwing her eyes shut. In the back of her mind a deep black maw loomed.  She took a  shuddering breath.  ‘Mosey would have told me.’  She muttered, but as soon as she spoke she knew it wasn’t’ true. Instantly the reply was in her mind.

‘Yes, but she didn’t!  And she lied to you about your mother as well.’

Suddenly emotion after emotion crashed into her, sending already confused  thoughts into a great writhing mass.  Jen fell  back into the chair and took several deep breaths,  trying to close her mind to the  maelstrom of thoughts that was pouring into her head and threatening to overwhelm her.    Something terrible had happened to her sister, to her twin sister, a sister she had somehow known she had always had, and that something looked to  have been orchestrated by her mother.  Jen could feel herself panic as she struggled through the darkness of her mind, desperate to find a way out. Suddenly she saw an image. No not an image a thought; not even a thought, a dream,  The Dream. The dream that on remembered occasions she knew she had been having all her life.   She was in that horrible twisted  wood again, endlessly searching , all the while  filled with a terrible emptiness and  longing.   She found herself  by the lake again. She had been here many times before, the wood had taken many forms over the years, but the lake was always the same. She had come to look into the water, always hoping to see her reflection looking back, but she never did.  Jen edged slowly towards the lake-edge, knowing that this time, this time, she was sure to see a face, and not her face, but the face of her sister.  She leaned  out of the water, but  there was no face, only a pair of unblinking deep blue within blue eyes, and now, unable to stop herself, the lean became a fall and she  fell slowly into  the lake,  the icy waters  closing over her head..

Jen snapped her eyes open.  She was still sitting  at the table.  The dream was still there lingering in her mind.  She had dreamed of those eyes before, but never like that, and even  as she tried to recall them they faded and were gone.  Yet in her mind there was something still residual, as if she were trying to remember to remember.

Suddenly she  was over-taken  by a trembling elation. The longing, the emptiness of nearly thirty years was still there, but now it had a form, substance.  Steadily the emotional turmoil quietened and was still.  A sister,  she still had her sister!

‘Still had?’ said a voice gently.   ‘What of your mother, the hospital, Dorothy’s letters, and Mosey’s efforts to hide it all.’ The memory paused…’You don’t know where your sister is.’ There was a longer pause.  ‘What if she’s dead?’

‘She’s not!’ said Jen out loud.

There was no hesitation, but Jen knew she hadn’t  spat the answer in panic,  she simply knew it to be true. Regardless of the  overwhelming evidence she could feel certainties granite like presence.  It was as if she had always known.  But if that was the case, why did she have absolutely no memory of her sister at all?  Not a thing, only a shadow in her mind that until now had been  shapeless.

Jen picked up  the photographs and looked at them thoughtfully.

If her sister was alive then where was she?  With Mosey dead and her mother long dead, how could she find her?   This Dorothy woman, could she help?  Would she help?  Could she still be alive? Jen looked at the back of the  picture again.  ‘Jennifer’s first picture, Dorothy’s,  72’  In the photograph the woman looked as if she could be anywhere between sixty and seventy. If she were still alive she had to be at least eighty.

Jen looked once again at one of her letters.

Rose Cottage, Drovers Lane,  Monkswell Village, Devon.