Alma Katsu - The Taker

“No, I couldn’t, but thank you for your kind offer. What you’ve told me is sufficient,” I said, leaping from the chair and opening the door. “And please, do me the favor of not mentioning this to Adair if you should see him? When it comes to gifts, he is a difficult man to please. I do want to surprise him with the books.” The old professor looked faintly surprised himself as I bolted from his office.

Next, I went in search of a midwife.

She was hard to find. They were becoming scarcer in cities such as Boston; physicians had almost taken over the job of delivering babies, at least for those who could afford them. Nor was I looking for just any midwife. I needed one like those you’d find in the country, one who knew all about curing and healing with plants and such. The ones who, a hundred years earlier in this very same town, might have been called witches by their neighbors and met their deaths pressed beneath the board or hanged.

Street whores told me where to find the midwife, since she was the only help the prostitutes could afford to cure their clap or help with unwanted pregnancies. I felt a shiver run down my back when I crossed the threshold of this woman’s tiny room: it smelled of dust and pollen and old things kept close to rotting, not unlike the secret locked room in Adair’s attic.

“Sit down, dearie, and tell me why you’ve come,” she said, motioning to a stool on the other side of the hearth. She was an older woman with a hard, pragmatic cast at the center of her gaze, but an expression of understanding on her face.

“I need to know what this is, ma’am. Have you ever seen it before?” I took a handkerchief from my purse and opened it for her to see. The pinch of botanical I’d stolen had been roughed up in transit, separating into tiny stems and slivers of brittle, broken brown leaves. She held a leaf up to her eye, then crushed it between her fingers and sniffed.

“That is neem, my dear. Used for a great variety of illnesses. Not exactly common in these parts, though, and in this natural state, rarer still. Mostly you see it in tinctures and the like, watered down to its most diluted to make it go as far as possible. How’d you come across it?” she asked, matter-of-factly, as though she might be in the market to purchase some. Perhaps she thought that was why I’d sought her out. She dusted her hands over the fire and let the fragments of leaf fall into the flame.

“I’m afraid I cannot tell you,” I said as I pressed a coin into her hand. She shrugged but accepted it, tucking the money into her pocket. “Here is my second request. I have need of an item… I need you to fix something to bring on a very heavy sleep. Not necessarily a peaceful one. It must render the person unconscious as quickly as possible.”

The midwife gave me a long, silent look, wondering perhaps if I really meant that I wished to poison someone, for how else could you interpret that request? At last, she said, “It can’t be coming back to me, if the authorities are called into this matter for some reason.”

“You have my word.” I put five more coins into her hand, a small fortune. She looked from the coins to me, then closed her fingers around the gold.

In the carriage on the ride back to the mansion, I sat and peeled back the handkerchief from the lump the midwife had given me. The lump was stony hard and white, and though I didn’t know it at the time, deadly white phosphorus, probably purchased from a matchstick maker, who in turn had stolen it from her place of employment. The midwife had treated it gingerly, as though she didn’t like to handle it, and instructed me to grind it in a mortar and mix it in some wine or spirits, adding laudanum to help the concoction go down. “It’s very important to dilute it for medicinal effects. You could use laudanum alone, but it takes a while to be effective. Phos will do the trick quickly, but… if a body was to take this amount of phosphorus, the result would be bad indeed,” she said with an unmistakable look in her eye.

I’d already settled on a plan, a very dangerous plan, but as I took my leave, I could think only of the true Adair. My mind was full of pity for the unfortunate peasant boy, without even a grave because there was no corpse to give back to the earth. His handsome form was the possession of the man who had overtaken his body through the dark arts.

As for the last bits of the physic’s story-well, it was beyond me to know how much was true. Maybe he’d visited Adair’s family and left a tribute out of guilt or in thanks for giving him their son, for handing over such a fine body. Or maybe that part was a lie, told to make the story palatable and tragic, to influence the listener’s heart in his favor, to deflect suspicion. And the loss of his kingdom? A calculated risk… but maybe it was worth it, in the end, to gain a fine new vessel to hold his miserable old soul. But if I didn’t stop this terrible man, he would take the dearest thing in the world from me-Jonathan.

Handsome, strong, and able, with a fearsome manhood, the peasant’s body must have seemed like a godsend to the physic. But here in the new world, the peasant’s body had its limitations. Or rather, the limitations were with the face: it was disconcertingly exotic, olive toned, framed by wild, wiry hair. I saw it in the expressions of the Brahmins when they met Adair, by the wrinkle to their brows, mistrust flitting across their eyes. Here, among descendants of the British, Dutch, and Germans, who had never seen a Turk or an Arab and for whom the hair was not unlike that of their slaves, the peasant’s body was a liability. Now I understood Adair’s cold, appraising eye as he studied the beautiful but clubfooted scholar Tilde had fetched, and his hungry appreciation for Jonathan’s flawless beauty. He’d sent his hellhounds out into the world scouting for the perfect vessel; he even had Jude scouring the countryside for a replacement. But here in Boston, time had run out for Adair and he needed a new body, one that would be amenable to the tastes of the masters of this new environment.

He wanted Jonathan. He wanted to slip on Jonathan like a disguise. People were drawn to Jonathan like bees to sugar, dizzy and powerless with this unknowable attraction. Men wanted to befriend him, orbit him like planets around the sun. Women gave themselves up to him wholly-and none knew this better than I. They would forever crowd around him, open themselves up to him, not realizing that the spirit inside was evil and waiting to exploit them.

And because no one knew Adair’s secret, there was no one to stop him. No one except me.

I arrived at the mansion to find the household in an uproar. The servants were scurrying down the stairs like water rushing downhill, down to the cellar, hiding in storerooms, away from the ruckus coming from above. Fists pounded on doors, latches rattled. The muffled voices of Tilde, Dona, and Alejandro echoed from overhead.

“Adair, what is going on?”

“Let us in!”

I ran up the stairs to find the three huddled helplessly at the foot of the attic stairs, unwilling to interrupt whatever was happening beyond the closed door. We heard terrible noises: Uzra crying out, Adair roaring in response. We heard the flat sound of flesh striking flesh.

“What’s this about?” I demanded, whirling on Alejandro.

“Adair went looking for Uzra, that’s all I know.”

I thought of Adair’s story-the physic’s fury over things stolen from his table. “We must go up there! He’s hurting her.” I reached for the doorknob, but it refused to budge. He’d locked the door. “Get an ax, a sledgehammer, anything. We must break this door down!” I shouted but they only looked at me as though I’d lost my senses. “You don’t understand what he’s capable of-”