Alice Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Silent Beacon. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

Alice Faulkner was born in 1866 in Los Angeles, California, and lived sixty-two years as a schoolteacher and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. The family book knows her as The Silent Beacon, a name she earned on the long evening rounds of the harbour at San Pedro, and it classes her as a Soldier, which in the Faulkner sense means a hunter who meets the enemy directly and relies on discipline, order and the fixed habits of a patrol. Her craft was Dusk Patrol, the regular circuit walked at the hour when the light fails, and her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was the younger daughter of the printer Joseph Knight and of the milliner and slayer Abigail Jewett Faulkner, The Long Quill, and the sister of the slayer Abigail Knight. In 1887 she married the dockworker Andrew Carter, and they raised two sons, Andrew Carter Faulkner and Joseph Carter, both of whom became slayers. She died in 1928 of old age, aged sixty-two. She was born in Los Angeles by an accident of the family's travelling. In the winter of 1866 a sister of Joseph Knight's, who had married a stationer on Main Street, was left a widow with a shop and a great many debts, and Abigail, who was five months gone with her second child and in no mood to be told what she could not do, took the elder girl and went out from Newburyport by rail and steamer to New York, across the isthmus at Panama by the little railway, and up the Pacific coast to San Pedro, to settle the estate. She had not expected to be confined there. The baby arrived in the spring, in a room above the stationery shop, in a town of some five thousand people, a sun-baked, unpaved place of adobe, vineyards, sheep and bad water. She was christened in a Methodist chapel, at which her mother, who thought the minister long-winded, looked at her watch twice. Joseph, who was lame and had the case to mind, stayed in Massachusetts and was sent a lock of hair. They were home by the summer of 1867, in time for her mother's calling, and Alice grew up in Newburyport among the lamp tables, the hat forms and the smell of ink. She was a plain, stubborn, quiet girl, with a habit of finishing a task before she would answer a question, and she was so silent at her father's case that he called her his mouse. She learned her letters at the press, and set her first line of type at six. It was in the nature of the household that she knew from earliest childhood what the cards in the back of the shop were for. She also knew, because her mother had told her in the plainest terms at the age of twelve, that she was to stay out of the matter until she was asked. She was a very obedient child in this respect. She was also, it was noticed, the only child in the street who could be got to sit through a whole evening on the back step without fidgeting. Her father died in 1883, at his case, of a stroke, and the next year she took what was the usual course of a Newburyport girl with a good hand and no dowry. She trained as a teacher. It was her sister Abigail who found the place. A cousin of the Ledger in the Los Angeles district, who had written that the harbour towns of the south coast were in want of both schoolteachers and watchful women, offered a post at the school at Wilmington, on the edge of the tideflats behind San Pedro. She took the cars west in the autumn of 1884, with a trunk, a carpetbag and her mother's blessing, across a continent that was now crossed by three railroads, and arrived in the harbour district on a blowing evening, in the dry, salt, eucalyptus smell of a coast that she was to hold in affection for the rest of her life. She was called in 1885, in the spring, when a night watch turned up the same corpse three mornings running. It was in the lumber yard at the foot of the San Pedro wharf. The watchman, an old sailor, found a dead sailor laid out on a stack of redwood on a Monday morning, and sent for the constable, who took the body away to the undertaker. On Tuesday it was there again. On Wednesday, at dawn, it was there again, and the watchman, who was a sensible man, handed in his lantern and said that he would rather be a lunatic than a coward. Alice, who had been walking the yard every evening since Christmas because it was on her way to the school and because she liked the quiet, was told the story at supper by the landlady and did not sleep. On the Thursday evening she went down to the wharf at dusk, and sat on a cask, and waited. She was alone. At three in the morning something got up out of the stack and looked at her, and she understood, in a clean, cold, perfectly clear moment, that she had been waiting for it all her life. She did nothing that night but watch. She went home at dawn, and wrote to her mother, and got an answer in nine days. Abigail Jewett Faulkner, who had sat down at the bench in Newburyport and read the letter twice, wrote back in her small upright hand that the thing in the lumber yard was a hunter's quarry and not a teacher's, that it would not go away if ignored, and that her daughter was to do exactly what she was told. She sent, by the next mail, a long list of instructions, a packet of silver-tipped stakes that she had turned on the lathe in the shop, and her own revolver, wrapped in a hat. It was her first lesson, and the longest. Alice followed it to the letter. She walked the yard at dusk, at the same hour every evening, for eleven weeks, and learned the enemy's habits. At the twelfth week she was ready. It was in this way that she learned Dusk Patrol. The craft is older than the Faulkners, and is nothing more than the walking of a regular circuit, at the same hour, by the same route, until whatever comes to watch the walker has shown itself, but Alice, as a Soldier, made it a discipline. She drew her circuit in chalk on the schoolroom floor. She walked it on the tideflats and along the wharves, through the lumber yards and past the canneries, at the hour when the lamps were lit and the last of the light was going out of the harbour, and in time the dockworkers along the front knew her step. She did not speak to them. She was known by the pistol that she carried under her shawl and by her silence, and they gave her, in the harbour way, her name. The Silent Beacon was the school mistress who walked the wharf at dusk and whom nothing troubled. She had her first kill that autumn, in the lumber yard, and her tenth within two years. The dockworker who came to know her was a steady, slow-spoken young man named Andrew Carter, who worked the lumber schooners and had been on the wharf that Monday morning when the watchman handed in his lantern. He met her on the wharf in the third week of her vigil, looked at the pistol and said that he supposed it was a matter for a stevedore's wife. She said that she was a schoolteacher. He said that he had met a good many stevedores' wives who could say as much. He did not ask again. He took to leaving a lantern on the end of the third piling, lit, at dusk, and it was the first light that she ever walked toward. In the winter of 1886 she and her sister went east together to the bedside in Newburyport, where their mother was dying, and Alice was there at the last, with the lamp lit in the window. She came back in the spring, and in 1887 she and Andrew were married in Wilmington, in the little church by the schoolhouse. Their sons came in the first years. Andrew Carter Faulkner was born in 1888 and Joseph Carter in 1889, and both were called, in their turn, to the work. Alice taught them the walk. They lived in a frame house on the edge of Wilmington, and from there she was sent, as the Ledger's western cousins grew in number, to the suburbs that were springing up inland on the old ranchos. She walked the dry, bright streets of Pasadena and Redlands at dusk, with the orange groves running up to the foot of the mountains, and taught her sons how to keep a circuit on a dirt road and a lamp on a hill. When the harbour was deepened after 1900 and a generation of new shipyards was built along the San Pedro channel, the boys walked their rounds on the wharves in the Great War, building hulls by day and keeping the docks at dusk. The influenza came to Los Angeles in the autumn of 1918 and filled the schools with empty benches. She went to the wards in San Pedro as a nurse's aide, and the boys, who had by then a great deal of experience, walked the night rounds. She taught for the last time in the spring of 1920. Andrew died in 1926, of a bad heart, on the porch of the house in Wilmington, and she followed him two years later, at sixty-two, of old age, after a last patrol that she had insisted on taking in the evening. Alice Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Silent Beacon, the schoolmistress of the Pacific harbours who walked the docks at dusk. In the Slayerverse she stands for the soldiers of the Red Ledger's western chapter, the ones who held the long coast with a pistol, a lantern and a fixed hour, and who proved that the most dependable weapon against a creature of the night is a person who turns up at the same place, at the same time, every evening of her life.