The harbour at Marblehead in the year 1676, when Denys Cooke was born there, was a cove of grey rock and salt-fish flakes on which some hundreds of fishermen and their families had made a town out of nothing but stubbornness. The houses stood at all angles on the ledges, wherever a foundation could be blasted into the granite, and the lanes between them were so narrow that a cart could not pass. The whole place smelled of drying cod, tar and low tide. Boys there learned to row before they learned to read, and many of them were dead before they were thirty, lost on the Grand Banks in the autumn gales. Denys was one of the exceptions, a boy who did not take to the water and whose parents, unusually, allowed it.
He turned to leather instead. A saddler and harness-maker in the neighbouring lanes took him as an apprentice in his early teens, and he spent seven years learning to cut hide, to rub in neat's-foot oil, to stitch with waxed thread and two needles at once, and to fit a tree to the back of a horse so that it would not gall. The trade in Marblehead was smaller than in an inland town, since fishermen do not ride, but the merchants who owned the fishing fleets kept horses, the militia kept horses, and the roads to Salem and Boston carried a steady traffic of riders. Denys also made the belts, straps, buckets and sea-boots that the fishing families needed, and by the time he was twenty-one he was earning his living from an assortment of leather work that kept his hands cracked and stained a permanent brown.
He was sixteen in the summer of 1692, when the witchcraft panic that gripped the colony reached its height. Salem Village lay only a few miles inland and Andover, where trials and accusations multiplied through the autumn, was not much farther. Marblehead itself sent accused women to the jail and had its own share of suspicion, for a fishing town full of widows and rumours was fertile ground. Denys remembered the fear for the rest of his life: the constable riding through, the neighbours who stopped speaking, the old woman at the end of the lane who was taken away in the night. He never spoke of it lightly. What he learned from it was a horror of accusation, of the ease with which a whole community will agree that a neighbour is a monster, and this later shaped how he responded when he met people who knew that some monsters were real.
That meeting came through his marriage. In 1701 Denys married Hannah Faulkner, who was born in 1678 and had been left a widow, young, by a farmer whose fields lay a few miles inland. She was the daughter of the Faulkner family of Andover, and the kinswoman of a household that kept a red-covered ledger and talked about a tally of vampires taken since the Wars of the Roses. She kept the Faulkner name after her first husband's death, as the family often did, and she made it clear to Denys that the children of a second marriage would bear it too. He agreed at once. The name Faulkner was worth more to her than his own, and it did not trouble him in the least; he was a saddler, and he had never expected to hand a name to a dynasty.
The house they made in Marblehead was a plain two-storey frame building with a leather shop on the ground floor and a kitchen behind it, and in the loft above hung whatever hides were curing. Hannah ran the household with precision. She kept the accounts for the shop, she taught the children their letters, and she made sure that the family's other business was kept out of sight. It was Denys who noticed first that visitors from Andover came at night and that the horses they rode were sometimes lathered as though they had been pushed to the limit. He asked what was going on and was told the truth, in stages, over the course of a winter. He listened. He did not scoff, and he did not run to the minister. He said he had seen enough of what fear could do to a town, and if there was a real enemy behind the stories, he wanted to understand it.
They had four children. Denys Faulkner, born in 1702, was named for his father and grew into a slayer, a lean and watchful young man who took his tally in the harbour towns and inland farms until his death in 1742. Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke followed in 1704, a middle child who carried both names and neither calling, and who lived as a quiet tradesman until 1746. Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, also became a slayer and outlived his brother by many years, dying in 1768 after a long career with the militia. The youngest, Hezekiah Cooke, born in 1719 when his mother was forty-one, was never a slayer either and took his father's name and his father's trade, and it was Hezekiah who kept the saddler's shop going until his death in 1789.
Denys made himself useful to the hunters in the ways that a leather worker can. He built holsters and shot-pouches for pistols and long guns, he made sheaths that hid a stake or a blade beneath a coat, and he mended harness at all hours for riders who did not want questions asked. He put a false bottom in one saddlebag so that a hunter travelling to Boston could carry a hawthorn stake and a small vial of silver filings through a militia checkpoint. He also, and this was the part the family remembered, taught his stepchildren nothing at all of the trade of killing, only how to ride and how to lace a boot. He held that a slayer needed a father who could talk about something else. When Denys Faulkner came home shaken from a hunt at Ipswich, his father sat with him in the shop and gave him a piece of scrap leather to cut, and said nothing until the boy was ready.
The Cooke house was on the whole a peaceful one, and the rivalry with the Proctors touched it only lightly. Occasionally a letter came from Pennsylvania or Yorkshire, some cool report of a Proctor tally that had outrun a Faulkner one, and Hannah would read it aloud at supper with a dry comment. Denys found the whole business faintly comic, two families a thousand miles apart keeping score over a vampire that had escaped from a battle two centuries before. He told his sons, though, that a tally kept honestly was a decent thing, and that they should never enter a name in the Red Ledger that they had not seen fall.
In the winter of 1736 he caught a cough while delivering harness to a farm on the north road, and it settled in his chest and did not lift. He died in the spring, at sixty, in his own bed, with Hannah beside him. The saddle-maker's tools went to Hezekiah, and the house stayed in the family for generations. Hannah lived until 1751, and she often remarked that the man she had married for his steadiness had turned out to be the steadiest thing in the whole ledger. In the Slayerverse family records Denys Cooke appears as one of the outsiders who married into the Faulkner line and was never a hunter himself, but whose stitching held the hunters together.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
