The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  When he puts down the hammer to wipe his forehead, he notices the stack of unanswered mail. On the top is a thick envelope from America and, out of reflex, he strains to read the address. It’s from a lawyer’s office in Boston, the one watching Adair’s house—or rather, Adair’s crypt. Luke flips through the stack quickly: there are seven letters with the same lawyer’s address, going back nearly a year. He opens his mouth to say something about it to Lanny when she rushes by, purse over her shoulder, hunting distractedly for her house key. “I’ve got a hairdresser’s appointment, but I should be back before the courier arrives. Shall I get lunch for us while I’m out? What would you like?”

  “Surprise me,” he says.

  Luke takes delight in how she’s fallen back into her routine—a sign that she hasn’t been immobilized by depression—and, in particular, how quickly she’s incorporated him into her life. He loves that they are so comfortable together. She’s given up smoking because he asked, because he can’t bear the sight of it even though he knows it poses no health risk to her. She shares everything with him: her favorite bakery, her favorite afternoon walk, the old men she chats with in the park. He is happy to do things for her, to take care of her, and in return she’s grateful for every consideration he shows her. Does he love her? He’s skeptical, truly skeptical, that love could happen so quickly, especially given who she is and what she has told him, but at the same time there’s the giddy sensation that’s overtaken him, a feeling he hasn’t had since his daughters were born.

  Once Lanny has left, he heads back upstairs in search of the next item to be repatriated. He must remember to leave Lanny to deal with the courier because Luke has an appointment later in the afternoon. He’s meeting the director of volunteer services at Mercy International, an organization that sends doctors into war zones and refugee camps, clinics for the homeless. It was the last organization that Jonathan worked for; someone had contacted Lanny shortly after she and Luke arrived from Quebec, looking for Jonathan. He’d given the organization her address as a way to get in touch with him during his absence, only he’d never returned and they wanted to know if Lanny knew where he was. She was speechless, momentarily, then collected her wits and said she knew another doctor who might want to donate his services, as long as he could remain in Paris. Luke is glad for the interview, glad that Lanny knows he won’t be happy if he can’t make use of his medical training, hopes that his rusty French will be good enough to tend to immigrants from Haiti and Morocco.

  Luke selects the next item to be shipped, a large tapestry that will go to a textile museum in Brussels. The tapestry has been rolled like a rug and is jammed against a barrister’s bookcase that has been packed with all manner of bric-a-brac. Half the glass faces on the bookshelf had been left up and an item falls from a shelf as Luke tries to wrestle the tapestry upright.

  He leans over, picks it up. It’s a small ball of chamois, and he recognizes by the way the chamois is wadded up—Lanny’s haphazard way of packing things—that there’s something inside the dusty old cloth. He peels it back carefully—who knows what fragile thing might be inside—to find a tiny metal object. A vial, to be precise, about the size of a child’s pinkie finger. Though it is mossy and dark with age, he can tell it’s as delicately wrought as a piece of jewelry. Fingers trembling, he tugs off the lid and pulls out the stopper. It’s dry.

  He sniffs the empty vial. His mind races: it may be dry but there are ways to analyze the residue. They could send it to a lab and find out the elixir’s ingredients, the proportions. They could try to make a batch and probably, after some trial and error, they would succeed. Re-creating the potion means he could be with Lanny forever. She wouldn’t be alone. And, of course, other people would be interested in immortality. They could sell it for ridiculous sums, dole it out on the tongues of their customers like communion wafers. Or they could be completely charitable—after all, how much money does anyone need?—and give it to great minds to study. Who knows what impact this could have for science and medicine? An elixir that regenerates wounded tissue could revolutionize the treatment of injury and disease.

  This could change everything. As would revealing Lanny’s condition to the world.

  And yet … Luke suspects that analysis of the residue would reveal nothing. Some things resist scrutiny, can’t be examined in the cold light of day. A tiny fraction of a percent of occurrences can’t be explained or reproduced. In his time as a medical student, he’d heard of a few, offered spontaneously by a sage old professor at the end of a lecture, whispered among the students as they filed out of the operating theater after a dissection. There are some physicians and medical researchers who dismiss such stories and would have you believe that life is mechanical, the body no more than a system of systems, like a house. That you will live as long as you eat this, drink that, follow these rules, as though they were a recipe for life; if you fix the plumbing or shore up the frame when they become damaged, because your body is only a vessel for carrying your consciousness.

  But Luke knows it’s not straightforward like that. Even if a surgeon were to search inside Lanny—and what a nightmare that would be, the body trying to close itself up even as the hands and instruments probed inside—he wouldn’t find what part of her had changed to make her eternal. Nor would bloodwork or biopsies or any amount of radiological scans. So, too, you could analyze the potion, give the recipe to a thousand chemists to have them re-create it, but Luke thinks not one would be able to duplicate the result. There is a force at work in Lanny, he can feel it—but whether it is spiritual or magical or chemical or some kind of energy, he has no idea. All he knows is that the grace that is Lanny’s existence, like faith and prayer, works better in solitude, protected from skepticism and the brute force of reason, and that, if the facts of her circumstances were made public, she might disintegrate into dust or evaporate like dew in sunlight. That’s probably why none of the others—these others Lanny told him of, Alejandro, Dona, and the diabolical Tilde—have gone public, Luke thinks.

  He rolls the vial between his fingers like a cigarette and then, quickly, places it under his heel and brings all his weight down on it. It folds as easily as if it were made of paper, squashed flat. He goes to the window, opens it, and throws the chip of metal as far as he can, over the rooftops of his neighbors, deliberately not following its trajectory with his eyes. Immediately, he feels relieved. Perhaps he should have spoken to Lanny before he destroyed the vial, but no—he knows what she would have said. It’s done.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While it should be readily apparent that The Taker is a work of the imagination, a measure of research went into it, especially regarding the history of the state of Maine. I drew on two volumes in particular: Maine in the Early Republic, edited by Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden (University Press of New England, 1988), and Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier 1760–1820, written by Alan Taylor (University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Any mistakes or inaccuracies are my own.

  It’s often said that a writer’s life is lonely and that we write in solitude, and while that’s mostly true, it would be impossible to make it to publication without relying on the help and good nature of many people along the way. I’d like to thank the readers of previous versions of this novel, including Dolores, Lisa, Randy, Linda, Jill, Kelley, and Kevin; my professors at Johns Hopkins, Tim Wendel, Richard Peabody, Elly Williams, David Everett, and Mark Farrington; Elyse Cheney and Jeff Kleinman for their early encouragement; and the wonderful organizers of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

  Enormous thanks go to Tricia Boczkowski, my editor at Gallery Books, for her editorial guidance and boundless good spirits in getting the novel to publication. Also, my thanks to everyone at Gallery for their efforts on my behalf.

  Tremendous and undying thanks to Kate Elton, my editor at Century, and her assistant Anna Jean Hughes, for their incredible enthusiasm and support for the novel.
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  Thanks are also due to Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, and Katherine West, foreign rights agents at the Intercontinental Literary Agency, and to the publishers of the foreign editions of The Taker, for their confidence in taking on this debut work: Giuseppe Strazzeri, publisher, and Fabrizio Cocco, editor, at Longanesi; Cristina Arminana at Mondadori; Katarzyna Rudzka at Proszynski Media; and EKSMO Publishing. Thanks, too, to Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists Agency for seeing promise in The Taker.

  My deepest thanks must go to Peter Steinberg, my agent, not only for his belief in the novel but for his deft editorial work, which took a wobbly story and transformed it into the novel you have in your hands today.

  Thanks to my family for putting up with my insanely writerly ways since I was a humorless little child.

  And of course, all my love to my husband, Bruce, who patiently allowed me to sock countless hours into this book and made all my dreams come true.

  A sneak peek at the highly anticipated follow-up to

  The Taker …

  THE RECKONING

  Coming Fall 2012 from Gallery Books

  Boston

  First came the noise outside his stone cell, louder than anything Adair had heard in a very long time. Then, as the noise grew closer, the shaking began, the ground reverberating underfoot as though someone were beating the skin of the earth with a big stick.

  In his time, Adair had experienced avalanches and monstrous storms, lightning strikes that had shaken the ground too, though not as steadily as this. He’d heard of volcanoes spewing hellfire and burning up villages as though they were tinder, and earthquakes tearing the ground apart, forming great chasms and sucking houses into the maw. Maybe this was an earthquake he was experiencing now, he thought, a force of nature finally come to free him.

  In this narrow niche in the wall in which he’d been sealed—his cell, as he’d come to think of it—Adair placed his hands on the thick stone walls that had not yielded in … how many years? He’d lost track, having no way to measure a day in continuous darkness. He even tried to command fate to tear down the damnable wall, though in his heart he knew this attempt would fail, as it had every time he’d tried, and besides, now he was weak. To his great surprise, fate, after being deaf to him for so long, now obeyed, and the hated stone wall fell away … only to reveal a concrete wall on the other side! Before Adair could bemoan his cursed luck, there was a horrendous tearing sound above, metal grinding on stone and timbers splitting, as the ceiling started to crash down on top of him and the wall fell around him—stone, lumber, brick, concrete, all.

  When Adair opened his eyes, he saw sunlight for the first time in ages. It stabbed his eyes so painfully that he thought they might’ve been torn apart by the sudden brightness. He came to consciousness buried in a mound of rubble, grainy clumps of plaster strung together by tufts of horsehair, splintered lathe, brick shattered into nuggets. Through the tangle, he saw the sky, a vast, welcome expanse of blue. The exterior wall of the house was gone, and he could see his way clear to the heavens. The air on his face was like a fresh, cool kiss.

  All his senses were flooded at once. Sight, sensation, sound. The taste of plaster dust on his tongue, of sweet air filling his mouth. He’d been kept from all this—from life—for how long? He’d been isolated in the dark, unable to move or to feel anything except the ground under his feet and the bricks in front of him… . The smothering darkness with which he’d struggled, the vast loneliness he’d felt in his prison, threatened to overwhelm him again, and it was only with great effort that he managed to push it away. He was free now and would rejoin the living. He would be around people, hear their voices, follow the flow of conversation, sopranos and tenors, the humorous and the dour; he would feel the skin of another person again, sweet and smooth to the touch, damp from excitement or fear. He was free to pursue all the pleasures and peculiarities of the human experience he’d missed for a precious, irretrievable length of time.

  And the first thing he wanted to do—he had to do—was get his hands on the woman who had taken all this away from him: Lanore.

  Fury came over him swiftly and absolutely, decades of frustration finding release at last. He wanted to shout her name, to rattle the heavens with a demand for justice. Bring the treacherous witch to me and I will make a gift to her of the special punishment reserved for traitors! He wanted to wrap his hands around her throat—now—and throttle the life out of her. But this was impossible; he could sense that she was not nearby.

  Still, the day would come, and he was sure that his anger was justified. Her betrayal of him had been calculated. He’d given her freedom above any of his other subjects because of his feelings for her, and she’d taken advantage of his generosity. And, more damning still, she’d betrayed him in favor of Jonathan, a man too self-absorbed to return her love. Adair had loved her but, apparently, his love had not been enough for her. For such a grave error in judgment, death did not seem an unreasonable punishment, and surely she had anticipated as much when she made her decision. But he wouldn’t end her life immediately. Though the satisfaction he’d derive would be intense, it would be far too fleeting to equal the amount of time she deserved to be tormented for her betrayal. He’d get greater satisfaction from extending her punishment, making her every day hellish and giving her plenty of time to regret her foolish decision. Thinking up ways to make her suffer struck him as deliciously enjoyable; her torture would bring him a daily dose of pleasure.

  Besides, it would by necessity be a pleasure deferred, because he was certain now that she was not close; and besides which, he was still not free, not completely. As much as Adair wanted to rise up and follow the air and the sunlight, the weight on top of him was too great. He had to wait to be dug out. He lay pinned by debris and listened to shouting voices and loud clinking in the distance, like a great many cannons being pulled into position. Perhaps there was a war on, Boston under attack.

  Eventually, someone began picking through the rubble, a lone man. He was dressed strangely, his head covered by an unusual helmet, plain as a mixing bowl and not like an infantryman’s helmet at all. It seemed a wretched eternity before the man was close enough for Adair to call to him in a low tone, so as not to draw anyone else in. The man followed Adair’s voice until he found him amid the wreckage and could start pulling the rocks away, shouting as he worked. “Holy cow! There’s somebody in here! Hang tight, fella, I’m almost there. I’ll have you out in a minute.” He was close, mere inches away, and reaching for a small device hanging from his belt when Adair squeezed one arm free and grabbed the man by the collar. Holding on to the dumbstruck man, Adair pulled himself out of the rubble.

  “Jesus Christ, son, how did you survive having a house fall on you? It must weigh a ton.” The helmeted man stopped speaking as he looked Adair over. It had to be the oddness of his dress, Adair figured, as he took in the strangeness of his rescuer’s attire. The man’s mouth hung open and his eyes popped behind dusty safety goggles while Adair brushed powder from his sleeves and his waistcoat and out of his long hair.

  “What year is it?” Adair asked, his voice raspy.

  “What do you mean, ‘What year is it’? You musta got hit on the head pretty hard if you don’t know what year it is,” the construction worker mumbled as he tried to make sense of what he saw. Plainly, a blow to the head wouldn’t explain the strange clothing, threadbare and torn. Adair recognized the man’s reaction to the unexplainable; he’d seen men struggle with mental dissonance when confronted with dueling realities before. He had only this second of hesitation in which to act.

  The helmeted man reached again for the handset hanging from his belt. “Look, you just sit tight, I gotta phone this in… . How did you get in here, anyway? We closed this site down a week ago. They never told us there were any damned historical reenactors here—”

  Adair’s hands found the man’s throat before he could finish his sentence and snapped his neck. Adair felt a twinge of remorse for killing a Samaritan who h
ad rescued him from the rubble, but circumstance called for it. He took the man’s pants and shirt, since fashion had obviously changed since his imprisonment in 1820, and left his own behind. Then, lacing up the too-large boots he’d taken from the laborer, Adair ran from the half-destroyed house, marveling at all the amazing things he saw as he ran. First there were the giant metal machines ringed around the mansion, tearing it apart like vultures with huge iron beaks. Then there were carriages of some kind moving quickly down the street, independent of any horses, the larger contraptions not even pulled by oxen. The streets and sidewalks were hard and seamless underfoot. No mud, no cobblestones. So much noise, though: horns and honks, people shouting unintelligibly, and music, though not one musician was visible. The jangle of the streets seemed to him to be pure bedlam, and Adair fought his mounting panic and eventually came upon an empty building, where he found the quietest corner and sat on the floor, his back to the wall and his eyes closed.

  He had to work to settle his mind before it was calm enough to latch on to the keening rising inside his brain, the signal that connected him to his creations. Early in his imprisonment, Adair had realized that the psychic bond with his minions was being defeated by the thick walls of his cell, and he couldn’t reach them. After that, he’d tried hard to not focus on the signal and made himself numb to it—it was either that or go crazy with frustration—but it came back to him now like a taste for sweets.

  Adair squeezed his brain, working it like a fist in the hope of making it spark into life again. At first, the signal was no more than an erratic niggling in the back of his mind, but it grew gradually stronger. He sat for about an hour, struggling to grasp the threads of feeling that disintegrated like cobwebs at the touch. Eventually, the feeling became firm like a string, firm enough to follow, and he took its firmness to mean one of his people was close. Adair followed the string on foot because he had no other means to transport himself, and miles later he knocked on the door of a house.