The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  Luke and the nurse attend to the woman strapped to the gurney. He hefts a pair of scissors. “I’m going to have to cut your shirt away,” he warns her.

  “You might as well. It’s ruined,” she says in a soft voice with an accent Luke can’t place. The shirt is obviously expensive. It’s the kind of clothing you see in fashion magazines and that you would never find someone wearing in St. Andrew.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” Luke says, small talk to loosen her up.

  She studies his face, evaluating whether to trust him—or so Luke assumes. “I was born here, actually. That was a long time ago.”

  Luke snorts. “A long time ago for you, maybe. If you were born here, I’d know you. I’ve lived in this area almost my entire life. What’s your name?”

  She doesn’t fall for his little trick. “You don’t know me,” she says flatly.

  For a few minutes there’s only the sound of wet fabric being cut and it is hard going, the scissors’ tiny beak moving sluggishly through the sodden material. After it’s done, Luke stands back to let Judy swab the girl with gauze soaked in warm water. The bloody red streaks dissolve, revealing a pale, thin chest without a scratch on it. The nurse drops the forceps holding the gauze into a metal pan noisily and hustles out of the examination room as though she knew all along that they’d find nothing, and yet again, Luke has proven his incompetence.

  He averts his eyes as he drapes a paper sheet over the girl’s naked torso.

  “I’d have told you I wasn’t hurt if you’d asked,” she says to Luke in a low whisper.

  “You didn’t tell the sheriff, though,” Luke says, reaching for a stool.

  “No. But I’d have told you.” She nods at the doctor. “Do you have a cigarette? I’m dying for a smoke.”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t have any. I don’t smoke,” Luke replies.

  The girl looks at him, those ice blue eyes scanning his face. “You gave them up a while ago, but you started again. Not that I blame you, given everything you’ve been through lately. But you have a couple of cigarettes in your lab coat, if I’m not mistaken.”

  His hand goes to the pocket, out of instinct, and he feels the papery touch of the cigarettes right where he had left them. Was that a lucky guess, or did she see them in his pocket?

  And what did she mean by given everything you’ve been through lately? She’s just pretending to read his mind, trying to get inside his head like any clever girl who finds herself in a fix would do. He has been wearing his troubles on his face lately. He just hasn’t seen a way to fix his life yet; his problems are interconnected, all stacked up. He’d have to know how to fix all of them to take care of even one.

  “There’s no smoking in the building, and in case you’ve forgotten, you’re strapped to a gurney.” Luke clicks the top of his pen and reaches for a clipboard. “We’re a little shorthanded tonight, so I’m going to need to get some information from you for the hospital records. Name?”

  She regards the clipboard warily. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Why? Are you a runaway? Is that why you don’t want to give me your name?” He studies her: she’s tense, guarded, but under control. He’s been around patients involved in accidental deaths and they’re usually hysterical—crying, shaking, screaming. This young woman is trembling slightly under the paper sheet and she jiggles her legs nervously, but by her face Luke can tell she’s in shock.

  He feels, too, that she is warming toward him; he senses a chemistry between them, as though she is willing him to ask her about the terrible thing that happened in the forest. “Do you want to tell me what went on tonight?” he asks, rolling closer to the gurney. “Were you hitchhiking? Maybe you got picked up by someone, the guy in the woods … He attacks you, you defend yourself?”

  She sighs and presses back into the pillow, staring at the ceiling. “It was nothing like that. We knew each other. We came to town together. He”—she stops, choking on the words—“he asked me to help him die.”

  “Euthanasia? Was he already dying? Cancer?” Luke is skeptical. The ones looking to kill themselves usually pick something quiet and surefire: poison, pills, an idling car engine and a length of garden hose. They don’t ask to be stabbed to death. If this friend really wanted to die, he could have just sat under the stars all night until he froze.

  He glances at the woman, trembling under the paper sheet. “Let me get a hospital gown and a blanket for you. You must be cold.”

  “Thank you,” she says, dropping her gaze.

  He comes back with a much-laundered flannel gown edged in pink and a pilling acrylic blanket, baby blue. Maternity colors. He looks down at her hands, bound to the gurney with nylon strap restraints. “Here, we’ll do this one hand at a time,” Luke says, undoing the restraint on the hand closest to the side table where the examination tools are laid out: forceps, bloodied scissors, scalpel.

  Quick as a rabbit, she lunges for the scalpel, her slender hand closing around it. She points it at him, wild eyed, her nostrils pink and flaring.

  “Take it easy,” Luke says, stepping backward off the stool, out of her arm’s reach. “There’s a deputy just down the hall. If I call for him, it’s over, you know? You can’t get both of us with that little knife. So why don’t you put down the scalpel—”

  “Don’t call him,” she says, but her arm is still outstretched. “I need you to listen to me.”

  “I’m listening.” The gurney is between Luke and the door. She can cut her other hand free in the time it takes him to make it across the room.

  “I need your help. I can’t let him arrest me. You have to help me escape.”

  “Escape?” Suddenly, Luke isn’t worried that the young woman with the scalpel will hurt him. He’s feeling embarrassed for having let his guard down, allowing her to get the drop on him. “Are you out of your mind? I’m not going to help you escape.”

  “Listen to me—”

  “You killed someone tonight. You said so yourself.”

  “It wasn’t murder. He wanted to die, I told you that.”

  “And he came here to die because he grew up here, too?”

  “Yes,” she says, a little relieved.

  “Then tell me who he is. Maybe I know him …”

  She shakes her head. “I told you—you don’t know us. Nobody here knows us.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. Maybe some of your relatives …” Luke’s obstinacy comes out when he gets angry.

  “My family hasn’t lived in St. Andrews for a long, long time.” She sounds tired. Then she snaps, “You think you know, do you? Okay—my name is McIlvrae. Do you know that name? And the man in the woods? His name is St. Andrew.”

  “St. Andrew, like the town?” Luke asks.

  “Exactly, like the town,” she replies almost smugly.

  Luke feels funny bubbles percolating behind his eyes. Not recognition, exactly … where has he seen that name, McIlvrae? He knows he has seen it or heard it somewhere, but that knowledge is just out of reach.

  “There hasn’t been a St. Andrew in this town for, oh, at least a hundred years,” Luke says, matter-of-fact, stung at being upbraided by a girl pretending to have been born here, lying about a meaningless fact that won’t do her a bit of good. “Since the Civil War. Or so I’ve been told.”

  She jabs the scalpel at him to get his attention. “Look—it’s not like I’m dangerous. If you help me get away, I’m not going to hurt anyone else.” She speaks to him as though he’s the one being unreasonable. “Let me show you something.”

  Then, with no warning, she points the scalpel at herself and cuts into her chest. A long, broad line that catches her left breast and runs all the way to the rib area under her right breast. Luke is frozen in place for a moment as the line blooms red across her white skin. Blood oozes from the cut, pulpy red tissue starting to peep from the opening.

  “Oh my god!” he says. What the hell is wrong with this girl—is she crazy? Does she have some kind of death wi
sh? He snaps out of his baffled inertia and starts toward the gurney.

  “Stay back!” she says, jabbing the scalpel at him again. “Just watch. Look.”

  She lifts her chest, arms outstretched, as though to give him a better view, but Luke can see fine, only he can’t believe what he is seeing. The two sides of the cut are creeping toward each other like the tendrils of a plant, rejoining, knitting together. The cut has stopped bleeding and is starting to heal. Through it, the girl’s breathing is rough but she betrays no sign of pain.

  Luke can’t be sure his feet are on the floor. He is watching the impossible—the impossible! What is he supposed to think? Has he gone crazy, or is he dreaming, asleep on the couch in the doctors’ lounge? Whatever he’s seen, his mind refuses to accept it and starts to shut down.

  “What the hell—,” he says, barely a whisper. Now he is breathing again, his chest heaving up and down, his face flushing. He feels like he is going to vomit.

  “Don’t call for the policeman. I’ll explain it to you, I swear, just don’t yell for help. Okay?”

  As Luke sways on his feet, it strikes him that the ER has fallen silent. Is there even anyone around to hear him if he did call out? Where is Judy, where is the deputy? It’s as if Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother drifted into the ward and cast a spell, putting everyone to sleep. Outside the door to the examination room, it’s dark, lights dimmed as usual for the night shift. The habitual noises—the far-off laugh track of a television program, the metallic ticking from inside the soda vending machine—have disappeared. There is no whir from a floor buffer wending its way laboriously down the empty halls. It’s just Luke and his patient and the muffled sound of the wind beating against the side of the hospital, trying to get in.

  “What was that? How did you do that?” Luke asks, unable to keep the horror from his voice. He slides back onto the stool to keep from dropping to the floor. “What are you?”

  The last question seems to hit her like a punch to the sternum. She hangs her head, flossy blond curls covering her face. “That—that’s the one thing I can’t tell you. I don’t know what I am anymore. I have no idea.”

  This is impossible. Things like this don’t happen. There is no explanation—what, is she a mutant? Made of synthetic self-healing materials? Is she some kind of monster?

  And yet she looks normal, the doctor thinks, as his heart rate picks up again and blood pounds in his ears. The linoleum tiles start to sway underfoot.

  “We came back—he and I—because we missed the place. We knew everything here would be different—everyone would be gone—but we missed what we once had,” the young woman says wistfully, staring past the doctor, speaking to no one in particular.

  The feeling he had when he first saw her this evening—the tingle, the buzz—arcs between them, thin and electric. He wants to know. “Okay,” he says, shakily, hands on his knees. “This is crazy—but go ahead. I’m listening.”

  She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes momentarily, like she is about to dive underwater. And then she begins.

  TWO

  MAINE TERRITORY, 1809

  I’ll start at the beginning, because that is the part that makes sense to me and which I’ve inscribed in my memory, afraid that otherwise it will be lost in the course of my journey, in the endless unraveling of time.

  My first clear, vivid memory of Jonathan St. Andrew is of a bright Sunday morning in church. He was sitting at the end of his family’s box at the front of the congregation hall. He was fourteen years old at the time and already as tall as any man in the village. Nearly as tall as his father, Charles, the man who had founded our little settlement. Charles St. Andrew was once a dashing militia captain, I was told, but at the time was middle-aged, with a patrician’s soft belly.

  Jonathan wasn’t paying attention to the service, but then again, probably few of us in attendance were. A Sunday service could be counted on to run for four hours—up to eight if the minister fancied himself an elocutionist—so who could honestly say they remained fixed on the preacher’s every word? Jonathan’s mother, Ruth, perhaps, who sat next to him on the plain, upright bench. She came from a line of Boston theologians and would give Pastor Gilbert a good dressing-down if she felt his service wasn’t rigorous enough. Souls were at stake, and no doubt she felt the souls in this isolated wilderness town, far from civilizing influences, were at particular risk. Gilbert was no fanatic, however, and four hours was generally his limit, so we all knew we would be released soon to the glory of a beautiful afternoon.

  Watching Jonathan was a favorite pastime of the girls in the village, but on that particular Sunday it was Jonathan who was the one watching—he made no secret of staring at Tenebraes Poirier. His gaze hadn’t wavered from her for a good ten minutes, his sly brown eyes fixated on Tenebraes’s lovely face and her swanlike neck, but mostly on her bosom, pressing against the tight calico of her bodice with every breath. Apparently it didn’t matter to him that Tenebraes was several years his senior and had been betrothed to Matthew Comstock since she was six.

  Was it love? I wondered as I watched him from high up in the loft, where my father and I sat with the other poor families. That Sunday it was just me and my father, the balance of my family at the Catholic church on the other side of town, practicing the faith of my mother, who came from an Acadian colony to the northeast. Resting my cheek against my forearm, I watched Jonathan intently, as only a lovesick young girl will do. At one point, Jonathan looked as though he was ill, swallowing with difficulty and finally turning away from Tenebraes, who seemed oblivious to the effect she was having on the town’s favorite son.

  If Jonathan was in love with Tenebraes, then I might as well throw myself from the balcony of the congregation hall in full sight of everyone in town. Because I knew with absolute clarity at age twelve that I loved Jonathan with all my heart and that if I could not spend my life with him, I might as well be dead. I sat next to my father through the end of the service, my heart hammering in my throat, tears welling behind my eyes even though I told myself I was a ninny to get carried away over something that was probably meaningless.

  When the service ended, my father, Kieran, took my hand and led me down the stairs to join our neighbors on the common green. This was the reward for sitting through the service: the opportunity to talk to your neighbors, to have some relief after six days of hard, tedious work. For some, it was the only contact they’d had outside their family in a week, the only chance to hear the latest news and any bits of gossip. I stood behind my father as he spoke to a couple of our neighbors, peeking from behind him to find Jonathan, hoping he would not be with Tenebraes. He was standing behind his parents, alone, staring stonily into the backs of their heads. He clearly wished to leave, but he might as well have wished for snow in July: socializing after services typically lasted for at least an hour, more if the weather was as pleasant as it was that day, and the stalwarts would practically have to be carried away. His father was doubly encumbered because there were plenty of men in town who saw Sundays as an opportunity to speak to the man who was their landlord or in a position to improve their fortune in some way. Poor Charles St. Andrew; I didn’t realize till many years later the burden he had to endure.

  Where did I find the courage to do what I did next? Maybe it was desperation and the determination not to lose Jonathan to Tenebraes that compelled me to slip away from my father. Once I was sure he hadn’t noticed my absence, I made haste across the lawn, toward Jonathan, weaving between the knots of adults talking. I was a tiny thing at that age, easily hidden from my father’s view by the voluminous skirts of the ladies, until I went up to Jonathan.

  “Jonathan. Jonathan St. Andrew,” I said but my voice came out as a squeak.

  Those beautiful dark eyes looked on me and me alone for the first time and my heart did a little flip. “Yes? What do you want?”

  What did I want? Now that I had his attention, I had no idea what to say.

  “You’re one of the McI
lvraes, aren’t you?” Jonathan said, suspiciously. “Nevin is your brother.”

  My cheeks colored as I remembered the incident. Why hadn’t I thought of the incident before I came over? Last spring, Nevin had ambushed Jonathan outside the provisioner’s store and bloodied his nose before adults pulled them apart. Nevin had an abiding hatred of Jonathan, for reasons unknown to all but Nevin. My father apologized to Charles St. Andrew for what was seen as nothing more than the sort of skirmish boys get into routinely, nothing sinister attached to it. What neither father knew was that Nevin would undoubtedly kill Jonathan if he ever saw the chance.

  “What do you want? Is this one of Nevin’s tricks?”

  I blinked at him. “I—I have something I wish to ask you.” But I couldn’t speak in the presence of all these adults. It was only a matter of time before Jonathan’s parents realized there was a girl in their midst, and they would wonder what the devil Kieran McIlvrae’s oldest daughter was doing, if indeed the McIlvrae children harbored some strange intent toward their son.

  I took his hand in both of mine. “Come with me.” I led him through the crowd, back into the empty vestibule of the church, and, for reasons I will never know, he obeyed me. Strangely, no one noticed our exit, no one cried out to stop us from going off together by ourselves. No one broke away to chaperone us. It was as though fate conspired, too, for Jonathan and I to have our first moment together.

  We went into the cloakroom with its cool slate floor and darkened recess. The sound of voices seemed a long way off, only murmurs and snippets of talk drifting in from the common. Jonathan fidgeted, confused.

  “So—what is it you wish to tell me?” he asked, an edge of impatience in his tone.

  I had intended to ask him about Tenebraes. I wanted to ask him about all the girls in the village and which ones he cared for and if he had been promised to one of them. But I couldn’t; these questions choked in my throat and brought me to the edge of tears.