Alma Katsu - The Taker

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.

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.

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.