The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  FOUR

  AROOSTOOK COUNTY HOSPITAL, PRESENT DAY

  Smoke swirls in two down spots of light in the examination room. By now, the wrist restraints are undone and the prisoner sits with the gurney adjusted upright, like a chair, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. Two butts, burned down to the filters, sit squashed at the bottom of a bedpan on the gurney between them. Luke leans back in his chair and coughs, his throat rough from the smoke, and his head cottony, as though he’s been partaking of a narcotic all night.

  A one-knuckle rap sounds at the door and Luke is on his feet quicker than a squirrel can run up a tree, because he knows that’s the mandatory, perfunctory knock a hospital worker gives before stepping into an examination room. He blocks the door with his body, allowing it to open only about an inch.

  Judy’s cold eye, distorted by the lens of her glasses, sizes him up. “Morgue called. The body just came in. Joe wants you to call the medical examiner.”

  “It’s late. Tell Joe there’s no reason to call the medical examiner now. It can certainly wait until morning.”

  The nurse folds her arms. “He also wanted me to ask about his prisoner. Is she ready to go or isn’t she?”

  This is a test, he realizes. He’s always thought of himself as an honest person, and yet he can’t bring himself to let her go just yet. “No, he can’t take her yet.”

  Judy stares so hard that it feels like it could go right through him. “Why not? There isn’t a scratch on her.”

  A lie springs nimbly to mind. “She became agitated. I had to sedate her. I need to make sure she doesn’t have an adverse reaction to the sedative.” The nurse sighs audibly, as though she knows—doesn’t suspect but knows—that he is doing something disgusting to the body of the unconscious girl. “Just leave me alone, Judy. Tell Joe I’ll call him when she’s stabilized.” He pushes the door shut in her face.

  Lanny pushes ash around the bedpan with her burning cigarette, deliberately not making eye contact with him. “Jonathan’s here. Now you don’t have to take my word for it,” she says, tapping ash into the bedpan and motioning to the door with her head. “Go down to the morgue. Take a look for yourself.”

  Luke shifts uncomfortably on the stool. “So there’s a dead man in the morgue—all that proves is that you really did kill a man tonight.”

  “No, there’s something else. Let me show you,” she says, pushing aside the cap sleeve of the hospital gown to reveal a small line drawing on the white underside of her upper arm. He leans in to look more closely and sees that it’s a crude tattoo done in black ink, the outline of a heraldic shield with a reptilian figure inside. “You’ll see on Jonathan’s arm, in this spot—”

  “The same tattoo?”

  “No,” she says, giving the tattoo a swipe with her thumb. “But it’s the same size and it was done by the same person, so it will look similar, like it was done with pins dipped in ink, because it was. His looks like two comets circling each other, with the tails extended.”

  “What does it mean? The comets?” Luke asks.

  “Damned if I know,” she replies, rearranging the gown and bedding. “Just go look at Jonathan, and then tell me if you don’t believe me.”

  After he ties her up again—inefficiently, with rarely used straps kept on hand for unruly patients—Luke Findley rises from the stool. He slips through the swinging doors, checking first to make sure no one sees him leave. The hospital is still dark and quiet, with only faint movement in the distant pools of light illuminating the nurses’ station down the hall. His shoes squeak against the clean linoleum floor as he hurries down the staircase, heading north through a basement corridor that leads to the morgue.

  The whole way his nerves jangle. If someone stops him and asks what he’s doing out of the ER, why he’s going to the morgue, he’ll just tell them … His mind goes blank. Luke has never been a good liar. He sees himself as a fundamentally honest person, for whatever good that has done him. Despite his honesty and his fear of getting caught, though, he has agreed to the prisoner’s outlandish suggestion because he is curious as to whether this dead person is the most beautiful man ever put on the planet and what the most beautiful man would look like.

  He pushes open the heavy swinging door to the morgue. Luke hears music—the evening morgue attendant, a young man named Marcus, likes to have the radio playing at all times—but sees no one. His desk shows signs of occupation (the lamp glows brightly, papers are strewn about, a gum wrapper, an uncapped pen), but no Marcus.

  The morgue is small, in keeping with the town’s modest needs. There is a refrigerated examination room farther back, but the bodies are stored in four cold vaults in the wall just past the entryway. Luke takes a deep breath and reaches for one of the latches, big and heavy like the latches on old-fashioned frozen food trucks.

  In the first vault he finds the body of an elderly woman, unknown to him, which means she probably came from one of the towns farther out in the county. The woman’s short, thick body and white hair make him think of his mother, and for a moment he’s brought back to the last lucid conversation they had. He’d sat at her bedside in the intensive care unit while her unfocused eyes searched in his direction and her hand sought his out for comfort. “I’m sorry you had to come home to take care of us,” she’d said to him, his mother who never apologized because she never allowed herself to do anything that needed excusing. “Maybe we stayed on the farm a little too long. But your father, he wouldn’t give it up …” She stopped herself, unable to be disloyal to the old man so stubborn that he had hobbled out to the barn to milk the cows the morning of the day he died. “I’m sorry for what it did to your family …” Luke recalls trying to explain that his marriage was already coming apart long before he moved his family back to St. Andrew, but his mother wouldn’t hear any of it. “You never wanted to stay in St. Andrew, from when you were little. You can’t be happy here now. Once I’m gone, don’t let yourself get stuck here. You go and find a new life.” She started crying and kept trying to squeeze his hand, slipping into unconsciousness a few hours later.

  It takes Luke a minute to realize the vault is still open and that he’s been standing there so long a chill has settled in his chest. It’s as if he can hear his mother’s voice in his head. He shivers and slides the tray back into the locker, then stands another minute until he remembers why he came to the morgue in the first place.

  He finds a black body bag in the second vault and, with a grunt of exertion, pulls the tray out. The zipper slides down with a satisfying tearing sound, like the unpeeling of Velcro.

  Luke opens the bag and stares. He’s seen many dead people over the years, and death does nothing to enhance appearance. Depending on how they died, the deceased may be bloated. There may be bruising or discoloration or they may be pale and bluing. There is always the unmistakable lack of animation to the features. This man’s face is nearly white and spotted with flecks of dark, wet leaves. His black hair is plastered to his forehead, his eyes closed. It doesn’t matter. Luke could stare at him all night. He is exquisite, even in death. He is breathtakingly, achingly beautiful.

  Luke is about to push the tray back into the wall when he remembers the tattoo. He looks over his shoulder first in case Marcus might have returned, and then hurries, unzipping the bag farther and rearranging the clothing, to get to the dead man’s upper arm. And there it is, as Lanny had said it would be, two interlocked spheres with tails trailing off in opposite directions, and the dots look similar, in size, in the hand-done quality, down to the slight wobble of the line.

  Retracing his steps through the empty halls to the emergency ward, Luke struggles with the jumble of thoughts, mostly questions. They are like matter and antimatter, canceling each other out, two truths that cannot both exist. He knows what he saw in the emergency room when the girl cut herself: it cannot have happened, and yet it did. He had touched that very spot on her torso, before and after the slash, so he knows there was no trick. But what he saw coul
dn’t have happened, not as he saw it.

  Unless she is telling the truth. And now there is a handsome man in the morgue, and the tattoos … It all leaves him with the feeling that he needs to listen, to go along for a change. But he’s stubborn because he’s a man of science; he is not about to chuck everything he knows to be fact. He is, however, curious to learn more.

  The doctor bursts through the door to the examination room in the darkened ER—his energy and nervousness in his chest like fireflies in a jar—to find the prisoner huddled on the gurney, caught in the downward shaft of light and the whirling motes of smoke. She could be an excommunicated angel, Luke thinks, her wings clipped.

  Lanny looks at him hungrily. “So, did you see him? Wasn’t he everything I said he’d be?”

  Luke nods. Beauty like that is its own kind of narcotic. He rubs his face, takes a deep breath.

  “So now you understand,” Lanny says solemnly. “And if you believe me, Luke, help me. Untie me,” she says, arching her back and holding out the restraints, her sweet child’s face turned up to him. “I need you to help me escape.”

  FIVE

  ST. ANDREW, 1811

  Perhaps Jonathan and I would both have been better off if I had been born male. I’d rather have let our friendship continue and always have Jonathan in that way. We’d have spent our entire lives within the confines of that tiny village; I’d never have gotten into the trouble I did, never have suffered this terrible ordeal put upon both of us. Our lives would have been so small, but full and rewarding and complete, and I would have been happy with that.

  But I was a girl, and for all my wishing there was no changing that. Ahead of me loomed the mysterious transition from girl to woman, as unfathomable to me as a magic trick. Whose example was I to follow? My mother, Theresa, wouldn’t be able to give me the kind of guidance I craved—she was too demure and quiet for my tastes; I did not want to be like her. I wanted more. I wanted to marry Jonathan, for instance, and it didn’t seem as though my mother would be able to teach me to be the type of woman who could make Jonathan her own.

  There were secrets, it seemed, that not every woman was allowed to know. Luckily, there was a woman in town who did, a woman about whom things were said, whose name prompted a smile from the men (if their wives were not nearby). She was a woman unlike any other in the village and I had to figure a way to get her to share her secrets with me.

  On a well-worn path, hidden in the shadow of the blacksmith’s forge, was a small cottage. If it was noticed at all, you might think it an outbuilding or a toolshed for the smithy, a place to store pig iron. It was far too ramshackle and tiny to be a house, yet it didn’t appear to be abandoned and the path to the front door grew more worn with time. Certainly no more than one person could live there, and customary law against solitary living still prevailed at the dawn of the nineteenth century in our bleak Puritan outpost (for Puritans we were, make no mistake about that; the fathers of the town had grown up in the Massachusetts territories and were accustomed to blending religion with governance). However, in this northernmost reach of what would become the state of Maine, the sole reason for the edict against solitary living was that of necessity: it was unthinkable that one person alone could perform the multitude of tasks it took to get by in this harsh environment. By contrast, in a more strictly Puritan town, no one was allowed to live alone because, in solitude, one might stray. One might do ungodly things. The edict against solitary living allowed for the policing of one’s neighbors, but the citizens of St. Andrew valued their independence and guarded their privacy a shade more fiercely.

  Someone did in fact live alone in that tiny house, a woman on the outer limit of her childbearing years, beautiful still, though faded. She rarely went out, but whenever she did venture onto the street in daylight, the townspeople gave her a wide berth. The men would contrive not to let their eyes meet hers, and the women would pull their long skirts aside. Some would glare outright at her.

  But at night, it was a different story. Under the cover of darkness she had regular visitors. Men—one at a time, more rarely a pair—would scurry up the path and knock politely on the aged door. If no one answered the knock, the visitor knew to take a seat on the step and wait, his back to the door, pretending not to hear whatever sounds came from within. Eventually, the sounds from the cottage would fade into murmurs of conversation, then silence, and within a minute the front door would open for the waiting visitor.

  Those who knew of her existence called her Magdalena. It was the name she’d given herself when she arrived in town seven years earlier. No one questioned the odd appellation at the time. She arrived with a small group of travelers from the French Canadian territory, and when they moved on, she stayed. She said she was a widow and had decided to relocate to more southerly climates, that is, if the towns-people of St. Andrew would let her stay.

  The blacksmith offered to convert his old shed into a tidy little abode and the good women of the village helped her to settle in, bringing her whatever precious scraps they could spare: a wobbly stool, an extra bit of tea, an old blanket. Husbands were sent over with firewood and kindling. When asked what she would do to support herself—needlework, spinning, weaving, perhaps? Was she a midwife, skilled with healing and nursing?—she merely smiled demurely and dropped her head as if to say, “Me? What skills could I have? My husband treated me like a porcelain doll. How should a poor unskilled widow make her way in the world?” The good wives walked away puzzled, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads, not knowing what to say except that God would provide for all his children, including this innocent woman who seemed to think boundless charity was to be found in this rugged, lonely town.

  As it turned out, she did not have to depend on charity. Mysteriously, sustenance appeared at her doorstep, unbidden. A crock of sweet butter, a bushel of potatoes, a jug of milk. Firewood piled outside the back door. And money—she was one of the few people in town who had actual coin, would count it out at the provisioner’s when she ordered her supplies. And what curious supplies: bottles of gin, tobacco. Neighbors noticed a lantern burning late, through the one window of her tiny cottage—did she stay up all night smoking tobacco and drinking gin?

  In the end, it was the axmen who gave her away, the lumberjacks who worked for Charles St. Andrew a year at a time and lived far from their wives. Men like this are capable of sniffing out women like Magdalena from across a town, across a valley if the wind is right and they are desperate enough. First one, then another, then each of them in turn found their way to Magdalena’s doorstep once the sun went down. Not that the axmen were her only customers: they paid in coin, after all, not in eggs and cured ham. But through the axmen her reputation was spilled across town, like tainted water emptied from a rain barrel, and the ire was raised of many a good wife. Still Magdalena said nothing. Not while the sun was up. Not even when she was insulted to her face by an indignant spouse.

  The wives, enjoined by the pastor, organized a movement to have her ejected from town. Her presence was the first sign of sinful city living to sprout up in St. Andrew, the sort of thing the settlers were trying to escape. Pastor Gilbert went to Charles St. Andrew, as he was the employer of the axmen, those customers who could be openly complained about.

  Sympathetic as he was to the pastor’s request, Charles pointed out that there was another side to Magdalena’s services that the townsfolk were overlooking. The axmen were acting on completely natural urges—to which the pastor grudgingly agreed—separated by many miles from their legal spouses. Without Magdalena’s services, what might the axmen get up to? Her presence actually made the town safer for its wives and daughters.

  So an uneasy truce was struck between the whore and the virtuous womenfolk and had held for seven long years. In times of trouble and illness, she contributed her part, whether they liked it or not: she would tend to the sick and dying, feed the destitute traveler, slip coins in the church donation box when no one was around to see her enter. I couldn
’t help but think she must long for a small measure of female companionship, though she respectfully kept to herself and sought no discourse with the townswomen.

  Magdalena’s actual circumstances were a mystery to many children. We saw that our mothers avoided this puzzling figure. Most of the younger children believed her to be a witch or a supernatural creature of some kind. I remembered their taunting cries, the occasional handful of pebbles flung in her direction. Not by me—even at a tender age, I knew there was something compelling about her. By all rights, I should never have met her. My mother was not judgmental, but women such as she did not associate with prostitutes, nor would her daughters. And yet I did.

  It happened during a long sermon one Sunday. I excused myself and slipped out to the privy. But instead of hurrying back to the balcony and to my father’s side, I dawdled outside in the warmth of a beautiful early summer day. I meandered to Tinky Talbot’s barn to look on the new litter of piglets, pink with black splotches, whirled with thin, coarse hair. I petted their curious snouts, listened to their gentle grunts.

  Then I looked sideways down the path—it was the closest I had ever been to the mysterious singular cottage—and I saw Magdalena sitting in a chair on the narrow window box of a porch, a long, blackened pipe clenched between her teeth. She, too, was enjoying the sun, wrapped in a quilt, her hair scandalously loose around her shoulders. The parts of her not covered by the quilt were slender and delicate, the birdlike bones of her clavicle visible under papery skin. She had no powders on her face, just a trace of lampblack smudged at the corner of her eyes, a ghost of stain on her lips.

  She was unlike the other women in town. You could tell as much by her very attitude: sitting by herself in the sunlight, enjoying her own company, and not apologizing for being idle. I was drawn to her immediately, though I was also frightened by her. There was something wicked about her. She didn’t attend services, after all; here she was enjoying her Sunday, whereas everyone else in town was inside the church or the congregation hall.