Caleb Bartlett Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Red Latch. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Caleb Bartlett Faulkner set type by day and read the dark by night. Born in 1758 at Salem Town, Massachusetts, he was a printer by trade and a vampire slayer by calling, a member of the Lancastrian house that kept the Red Ledger, and a descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. The ledger knows him as The Red Latch, and the name fits a man who spent his life closing doors on the dead. He was thirty-nine when he died, and he never married and left no children, but the record he left in print and in the ledger is unusually full for a hunter of his short career. He was the second child of the blacksmith Caleb Bartlett, born in 1729, and Patience Faulkner, born in 1724, a dairywoman who was also a slayer called The Wild Yoke. His elder sister was Sarah Bartlett Faulkner, born in 1757, who stayed in the family's dairy. Although he was born in Salem Town, where the family had briefly lived while his father worked at a shipyard forge, he grew up mostly in the hill country around Worcester, and it was there, in the family's hill pastures that the old people still called the fells, that he learned to walk quietly, to shoot straight and to keep his mouth shut. His mother taught him the first two. His father, who wanted a son with a trade that did not involve fire, insisted on the third. Salem in the 1750s was a busy seaport of about four thousand people, with wharves stacked with salt fish, molasses and West Indian rum, and a memory of its witch trials that the townspeople preferred to discuss in low voices or not at all. It was also a good place for a boy to learn the newspaper trade. At fourteen Caleb was bound apprentice to a printer, and he spent seven years in a shop that smelled of lampblack, linseed oil and wet paper, working a wooden hand press with a heavy bar, dampening sheets, inking forms with leather balls and setting type from a case that he learned to read upside down and backward. The shop turned out almanacs, broadsides, sermons and a weekly paper, and it taught him accuracy, patience and a permanent stain under the fingernails. It also taught him that a story, once set, could be reproduced in any number, and that people believed what they saw in print far more than what they heard said. The war ran through his twenties. The printing trade in Massachusetts was politicised almost overnight: printers who leaned the wrong way found their presses smashed or their type scattered, and those who leaned the right way found themselves in demand for handbills, muster rolls and public notices. Caleb printed patriotic broadsides and militia orders and, in what spare hours he had, took his place in the muster, though his bad eyesight kept him from the regular line. He moved from Salem to smaller shops in the county and eventually, by the mid 1780s, opened his own small press in Salem Town. He never became rich. Paper was dear, credit was slow, and the only currency that reliably cleared the accounts was a kind of favour that printers traded with one another. His calling came in 1788, after a wake. A neighbour, an elderly sailmaker, had died in the house on a February evening and been laid out in the front room according to custom, with candles at head and foot and the mourners sitting up through the night with cake and cider. Sometime in the small hours, when the talk had died away, the dead man sat up. There was a scream, then silence, then a rush for the door, and in the confusion Caleb, thirty years old and half-asleep in a corner, was the only person who moved towards the corpse rather than away from it. He knew, with a clarity that surprised him, what he was looking at and what to do. The thing did not last long. He had not a weapon but a heavy candlestick from the mantel and a hand that seemed to know where it was going, and the neighbours who returned with lanterns found the sailmaker as he ought to have been, and Caleb sitting on the floor with wax on his coat. He had no mentor, but he had his mother's example, at least in memory, since she had died in 1784, and he had the Red Ledger's older accounts, which his sister forwarded to him from the dairy. His archetype, in the ledger's terms, was the Hunter, and his craft, Beacon Reading, was the sort of discipline a printer might invent. It consisted of interpreting the signs left behind: a lit window that should have been dark, a lantern set on a wall, a lamp hung in a tree, a fire on a headland with no one near it. He learned to read light as he had learned to read type, in reversed and mirrored form, and he could tell from the position of a single candle in a cottage window whether a household was expecting its dead or hiding from them. Coastal Massachusetts, with its lookouts and signal fires, gave the craft plenty of material. His gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, moulded in his father's old bullet mould. He hunted the North Shore for nine years, between Salem, Newburyport and the Merrimack, and his entries in the Red Ledger are frequent, precise and unusually well written. Printers, it turned out, made good recorders. Each of his tallies gives the date, the place, the state of the moon and the tide, and a short description of the light that had first drawn him. The entries are typeset in feeling if not in fact, and later keepers of the ledger used them as models for how a hunter ought to write. He also took care with his mother's memory. Of the Proctors, he said little, except once, in a letter to Sarah, in which he remarked that the White Ledger's men seemed to come by their numbers more easily than the Lancastrians did, and that he would like to see them try to reckon the Guest, which had never been accounted for on either side. In the summer of 1797 a fever broke out in a crowded lodging house by the Salem waterfront. The town's physicians called it a putrid fever, and one of Caleb's contacts reported that the sick were not merely sick. He went in with a bandana tied over his face, and he did what had to be done, and he came out with a fever of his own. He died a few days later, in 1797, aged thirty-nine, of a fever caught in a plague house. His sister buried him at Worcester. In the Slayerverse, Caleb Bartlett Faulkner is remembered as the printer who read the beacons, the Red Latch, a hunter whose ledger entries are still admired for their exactness.