Daniel Faulkner Cole

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Long Tally. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Daniel Faulkner Cole was born in 1774 in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the Connecticut River valley, and he lived forty-three years as a farmer and, in the last ten of them, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls him The Long Tally, a name that refers to the very long columns of entries he is said to have written in the Ledger in a short space of time. He was a Spy in the Faulkner sense, a hunter who worked by watching, listening and reading small signs, and his method, which he called Beacon Reading, was a way of interpreting the lights that burned in windows along a road. He died in 1817 in a fall from a roof during a chase, unmarried and childless. His father, Ephraim Faulkner Cole, was born in 1749 and died in 1796. He kept a store in Springfield, a tall clapboard building on the main street with a counter of plain pine and a stove that warmed half the town in winter. His mother, Keziah Woodbury, born in 1743 and dead in 1798, was a farmer's wife from the Woodbury family, which produced several Proctor-side and Faulkner-side hunters through its marriages. Neither parent was a slayer, though the store was a listening post as good as any hunter's, and Ephraim had a habit of passing word of strangers and odd happenings to the Faulkner cousins in Marblehead. Daniel had one brother, Jacob Cole, born in 1776, who did not take up the work and who became a carpenter. Springfield in Daniel's boyhood was a market town on a river, and it carried the marks of the war that had just ended. The Continental Army had set up an armoury there in 1777, a cluster of buildings on the hill that stored muskets, powder and cannon and that would later grow into the great national armoury. The boy was ten when the war ended, and the hill above his town was already full of gun carriages and barracks. He heard the talk of the armourers and gunsmiths and learned as a child how a musket lock was made, which would matter later. He was also thirteen in the winter of 1786 and 1787, when Daniel Shays and a few thousand angry farmers of western Massachusetts marched on the Springfield arsenal, demanding relief from debt and taxes. The militia fired on them in the snow, four rebels were killed and the rebellion broke up. The boy watched from a hillside and never forgot it, and he said afterwards that it was the night he learned how quickly a crowd could become a danger. He was a farmer by inclination. The Cole family held a few dozen acres on the fertile river flats, where the soil was black and the hay grew tall, and Daniel worked them with his father and then on his own. He kept cattle, grew corn, rye and onions, cut hay for the market and kept a good orchard. The work was hard, but it left his evenings free and his mind open, and he read widely, from the almanacs and newspapers to the Bible and Pope's Essay on Man. He had a sharp eye and a dry wit, and he was known in town as a man who noticed things. The calling came late, in 1807, when he was thirty-three, in an inn yard. A guest arrived at dusk at a tavern on the Boston road and asked the landlord for lodging, but when the landlord invited him across the threshold he would not step over it. He stood in the yard with his hat in his hand, talking pleasantly about the weather and the roads and the price of oats, and not moving an inch. Daniel, who was in the yard tending his horse, saw the landlord's puzzlement and understood, in a flash, what he was looking at. He did not speak. He went to the stable, fetched his cousin's old fowling piece, loaded it with a silver button he kept on his watch chain, and waited. The Ledger records the outcome in four lines. It was the beginning of a short and intense career. His craft, Beacon Reading, grew from that night. Travelling in the dark along the Boston Post Road, he noticed that the lights in windows told a story. A lamp that burned all night in a house where everyone should have been asleep, a window that stayed dark when the family was known to be awake, or a candle moved from room to room at an odd hour, were signs that something was wrong. Daniel mapped them in his head and on paper, and over a few years he built a picture of a whole district that was more accurate than anything a constable could have made. He used it to find nests of vampires in the river towns, and his Ledger entries, which were written in a cramped hand with a column for every light, ran to such length that his Faulkner cousins nicknamed him The Long Tally. His gear was a revolving pistol, one of the first made up by a Springfield armourer to his own order, and silver-cast shot. It was a clumsy thing, heavy and prone to misfires, but it gave him six chances instead of one, and he never regretted the cost. He never married. The farm took his days and the hunting his nights, and he said that a wife deserved a man who came home before dawn. He lived on the Cole land with his brother Jacob, the carpenter, not far away, and the neighbours' children remembered him as a thin, watchful man who brought them apples and never stayed long at table. In 1817, at the age of forty-three, he died in a fall from a roof during a chase. He had followed a vampire across the rooftops of a mill district after midnight, slipped on wet shingles and fallen four storeys to the yard below. The thing he was chasing was found and destroyed the following night by his cousins. The Faulkner family buried him in the Springfield cemetery, and his brother Jacob added a line to the Ledger recording that the tally stood, at the end, at more than thirty. Daniel Faulkner Cole is remembered in the Faulkner line as The Long Tally, the farmer who became a hunter of light and shadow. In the Slayerverse he is held up as a model of the watcher, whose discipline was to see what others overlooked.