Alexander Thorne was born in 1867 in Paducah, Kentucky, and lived thirty-three years as a cattle drover of the river landings and horse farms of his state and as a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book knows him as The Bitter Warden, a name that joins the sourness of a man who read every clause twice with the old office of the warden who holds a gate. He was a Detective, a hunter who works by evidence, inquiry and the reading of small irregularities, and his craft was Seal and Sanction, the discipline of finding out who had been given leave to enter a place and closing it against everyone else. He carried a pistol, silver-tipped stakes and a sealed ledger of his own. He was the elder child of the farmer and slayer Hob Proctor Thorne, The Fallow Yoke, and of the farmer's wife Effie Bradford, and he trained under his father. His sister was Nettie Thorne. In 1887 he married the laundress and slayer Harriet Bartlett, and they raised two sons, Joseph Proctor Thorne and Alexander Proctor Thorne, neither of whom hunted. He died in 1900 from a blow taken in a churchyard, aged thirty-three, and the Thornes are in the habit of saying that it was the only clause he ever failed to read.
He was born at Paducah because his mother had gone there to be confined. Effie was a Louisville girl with a horror of giving birth on a farm forty miles from a doctor, and in the winter of 1867 she took the packet down the Ohio to a Bradford aunt who lived above a chandler's store at the Paducah landing, where the Tennessee River comes in and the boats never stop. The child arrived in a north wind, a fortnight early, with the aunt's neighbour, a Methodist widow, holding the lamp. He was carried home to Bourbon County in March in a hamper on the seat of a hired wagon, and grew up off the Maysville pike, in a poor house beside a good barn, among tobacco, hay, horses and the last hound of the old Reiver line. He was a big, fair, slow-moving boy, unhurried in everything but his eating, and he was said to have looked at a problem for a full minute before he touched it, which his mother put down to the Bradfords and his father to the hound.
His father did not teach him to hunt at first. He taught him cattle. By fifteen Alexander was walking a string of steers from the Bourbon County farms to the landings at Maysville and Louisville, sleeping in the open and settling accounts with buyers who would happily have cheated a boy. A drover in that country did not drive far or fast. He moved stock along the pikes, through the river towns and across the fords, and he learned what every drover learns, which is that a man who can be trusted with another man's herd sees a great deal of the road. He learned the ferrymen and the ostlers and the landlords of the drovers' inns. He learned which stranger was asking about which farm. It was, without his knowing it, the apprenticeship of a Detective, and the old Thorne hound, who followed him to every landing for three summers, appeared to know more about it than he did.
He married young, in 1887, at twenty, and married a woman six years his elder. Harriet Bartlett was a laundress at Maysville, where she kept a wash-house on the landing with two tubs, a mangle and a copper, and took in the shirts of steamboat officers, drovers and the better sort of lodging-house. She was a brisk, sharp-faced, sunburned woman of twenty-six with arms like a stevedore's, and she met him in the yard of the wash-house one evening when he brought in a bundle of his father's shirts and she told him that one of them had been worn, for some hours, by a man with a very peculiar sort of sweat. She was a vampire slayer herself, although he had not known it, and the thing that she had noticed was the kind of stain that she was in the habit of noticing. They were married in the spring at the Maysville church, and his father, who had said very little all through the courtship, told him afterward that he had seen a good bargain made.
They took rooms over a chandler on the Maysville landing, near her wash-house, and Joseph Proctor Thorne was born there in 1888, the year Alexander was called. Alexander Proctor Thorne followed in 1892. Neither boy became a hunter. The Thornes counted Joseph a hopeful, sociable child, who grew into a storekeeper's clerk, and Alexander a quiet one who liked horses, and both were entered in the White Ledger under the name of Proctor, as Hob's middle name had entered the whole house. Harriet raised them among the copper and the mangle. She said that a wash-house was the safest place in a river town, because nobody looks at the woman who has her arms in the tub, and because a shirt, which could not be told a lie, would tell her what the man had been doing.
The calling came that same summer, in 1888, at a ford on the Licking River, where he was bringing a string of forty steers up to Cynthiana for the fall sales. The water was low, the steers crossed in a sullen line, and the boy with the rear of the herd came across at last, wet to the waist, with nothing more to say than that there was a traveller behind him who would not come out. Alexander rode back down to the bank. A man in a pale coat stood in the middle of the ford, knee-deep in the current, with his horse on the far side and his boots on the stones, looking at the farm that lay above the landing, which belonged to a widow named Pryor. He was not stuck. He was not ill. He had the look of a man who has been told that a door is open and has not yet been told that he may come through it. Alexander, who had lately been asked twice by his father what he intended to do with his life, sat his horse in the road and felt the whole matter arrive in his head, complete. He did not know the man. He did not need to. He understood that the stranger could not cross the bank without leave, that somebody had already given him half of it, and that the question worth asking was who.
He rode to the widow's house and found out, at the price of a cup of tea, that her tenant had said something careless from the porch to a man going by. He said nothing to her of what he knew. He went back to the ford at dusk with his father's pistol and a box of matches, and set the first seal of his career, which was a short note, in his own hand, on the widow's gate-post, withdrawing, in the ordinary words of a farm, whatever invitation might have been given. The man in the ford waited until dark and then went away downstream. Alexander rode home to Bourbon County, told his father, and was taught, over an entire winter, what the House of Thorne knew about permission.
Seal and Sanction, in his practice, was a kind of legal clerkship for the dead. He would ask who lived in a house, who had been in it, and what each of them had said at the door. He kept all of it in a sealed ledger bound in oilcloth, in which were entered the names of every household on his route, the terms on which they admitted strangers, and the small dates on which those terms had changed. He used it to close houses. A seal, in his hands, was a written refusal, posted and witnessed, which removed from a vampire the one thing it could not do without, and a sanction was the thing he gave back, in plain words, when a household wished to open its door again. He was said to have sealed, in twelve years, some four hundred houses between Maysville and Paducah. He also, it is said, took eighteen vampires, at the end of a pistol or a stake, when the ledger had told him where they would be.
His mother's death in 1898, after a long illness, was the heaviest blow of his life. He carried her coffin. He went out, the same night, to the barn, where his father had already gone, and the two of them stood among the horses for some time and did not speak. Two years afterward, in the spring of 1900, he followed a man from a river landing to a small country church on the Ohio shore, where a burial was to take place, and where the man, who had not been invited into the churchyard, had been asked to it in a note that no one could trace. Alexander came in by the lych-gate at dusk. He was struck from behind by something that he did not see, and the blow broke his neck against the stone of a tomb. He was found in the morning by the sexton, with the sealed ledger under his coat and the gate of the churchyard, which he had shut behind him, locked on the inside.
Hob, who was fifty-eight, brought him home to Bourbon County and buried him next to his mother, in the field that the family called fallow. Harriet, who had met the wagon at the landing and walked the last mile beside it, put on her black, went down to the landing and did the week's wash as usual. She lived on until 1945, hunting for another quarter of a century, and kept the sealed ledger in the copper house, where her sons, who had no calling, could read it if they wished and did not. The last entry, in his own hand, was an undated note that said only, Ask who asked him.
Alexander Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The Bitter Warden, the drover of the Ohio landings, the hunter who shut the door by writing it down. In the Slayerverse he stands for the clerks of the old border houses, the detectives who never doubted that a creature could be kept out with a word, and who paid the price of close attention on a summer evening in a country churchyard.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
