The fulling mills of Rochdale stood along the River Roch like a row of drumming hearts, and the boy who was born there in 1534 grew up hearing them through every wall. Adrian Faulkner came into the world in a town of woollen kerseys and coarse cloths, of pack trains climbing the Pennine passes toward Yorkshire, and of a parish church set high on a hill above the smoke. His father, Oliver Faulkner, was a fletcher, as many Faulkners were, a maker of arrows in an age when every able man was still bound by law to practise at the butts. His mother was Ellen Wentworth, a brewster of some local fame whose ale was praised in three parishes. What the town did not know, because Ellen took care that it should not, was that she was also a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, known within the family as The Swift Warden.
Adrian's childhood was a household of contrasts. By day the house smelled of goose-feather and hot glue from his father's bench and of malt from his mother's copper, and the children were expected to help with both. By night Ellen was often gone, and the boy learned early that a woman who could be found stirring a mash tun at noon might be crossing the moor at midnight. He had one brother, Fulk Faulkner, born in 1536 and quieter than himself, a boy who preferred sheep to people and who would in time find his living on the fells. The two shared a bed in the loft and a great deal of childish conspiracy, and later in life Adrian would say that he learned more about vigilance from listening to Fulk's breathing in the dark than from any lesson.
He grew up through the years of the great religious changes. He was two when the Pilgrimage of Grace unsettled the north, and a boy of six when the abbeys near Rochdale and Whalley were surrendered to the crown. The old ways went hard: in the parish church the images were pulled down under Edward, and set up again under Mary, and a boy who served at the altar learned early how loudly a saint's plaster head can ring on a stone floor. Adrian made his own peace with this by learning a trade. At fourteen he was apprenticed as a fuller to a master on the Roch, where the work was heavy and wet. He learned to work the great wooden stocks, to mix the fuller's earth, to stretch cloth on the tenters and to judge by touch when a piece had felted enough. He earned a sturdy build from it, broad shoulders and a slow, wide stride, and a reputation for being calm in a crisis.
The calling came in 1558. He was twenty-four and had been a master fuller for a year when the change of monarch, Mary's death and Elizabeth's accession, set the whole country talking. The news of Elizabeth was still fresh when the winter came in early and a neighbour, a weaver named in the ledger only as a man from Featherstall Lane, died of a fever and was buried in the parish yard. Three nights later the man came back. He stood in the lane outside his own house, grey as tallow and dressed in his burial shroud, and would not come indoors when his wife begged him. She ran for the Faulkners. It was Adrian who went out into the sleet and stood facing the thing that had been his neighbour, and who understood in that moment, as the family later put it, that the calling had found him. The ledger entry is short and unsparing. He was not brave, it says, but he did not leave.
Ellen Wentworth was his mentor, and she trained him with the exacting economy of a woman who had learned it herself in the dark. She taught him the crafts of the ordinary slayer: how to read tracks on wet ground, how to keep the wind in his face, how to sleep lightly and wake armed. His archetype was the Hunter, patient and methodical, and his craft, Dusk Patrol, grew from the mill's own habits. He learned to walk the lanes and riverbank at the hour when the mills fell quiet and the town slid from working light to lamplight, because it was in that thin hour that most of the things he hunted came to the edge of the houses. He walked the same circuit each evening, slow and unhurried, and it made him seem harmless. By the end of the first year the mill hands had begun calling him The Fallow Otter, from the brown of his cloak and the way he slipped along the riverbank without a sound, and the name was taken up by the family.
His gear was plain. He carried a matchlock pistol, a heavy, smoky weapon of the sort that was still a novelty in a country of bowmen, and he used it for the rare occasions when a thing had to be stopped at a distance. Its cord had to be kept lit, which made it a nuisance in the rain, and Adrian kept a small horn box for the slow-match tucked into his coat. The real work was done with hawthorn stakes, cut in winter, seasoned above the mill hearth and pointed with a fuller's shears. He was suspicious of clever weapons and kept his kit modest. The White Ledger of the Proctors, whose hunters on the Yorkshire side of the hills he sometimes met, dismissed his methods as slow. He dismissed theirs as showy, and the two parties kept a courteous distance and a careful tally.
The rising of the northern earls in 1569 troubled the Pennine country badly. The earls of Westmorland and Northumberland rose for the old religion, and for a season the roads were thick with riders, rumours and soldiers, and the townspeople of Rochdale did not know which side to fear. Adrian was thirty-five and busy with his hunts, for a country in uproar is a country in which the dead go unwatched. He walked his patrols on nights when the lanes were full of men on horseback, and once, according to the ledger, took a vampire in the very shadow of a picket-fire while the soldiers dozed not fifty yards away. Afterwards he said only that armies were good cover.
He never married and left no children. The ledger notes that he had once been fond of a girl from Milnrow, but that a fuller who is also a hunter is a poor bargain, and he let the matter drop. His family was his mother, his brother, and the town itself. Ellen Wentworth died in 1570 and his father Oliver in 1569, and after that Adrian was, in effect, the head of the Rochdale Faulkners. He kept the ledger accurately, kept his patrols, and kept his mill. In 1586 he took a fever that came up the valley in a wet summer and died at the age of fifty-two, working almost to the end. In the long history of the Slayerverse, Adrian is remembered as the fuller who turned an evening walk into a craft.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
