Eugene Faulkner was born in 1946 in Denver, Colorado, and is living today in Denver, where he has worked for more than fifty years as an electrician and for forty-six of them as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Pale Scythe, and it classes him as a Hunter, a slayer of the plain tracking kind, who follows a creature by what it leaves behind and does not trouble himself with disguises or bargains. His craft is Quarry Reading, the art of learning from marks, habits and ruined places where a hunted thing has been and where it will go next. His gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He is the son of the newspaper compositor Charles Rogers and of the telephone operator and slayer Lorraine Faulkner Carter, The Slow Rook, who was also his mentor, and the younger brother of Mildred Rogers Faulkner. In 1970 he married the librarian Beatrice Kowalski, and they raised two children, Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, who is a slayer, and Mark Kowalski Faulkner, who is not.
He was born in the spring of 1946, a year after his father took a post on a Denver paper, in a brick house on a quiet street with a lilac hedge and a view, on clear days, of the front range of the Rockies. His parents had come over from Los Angeles in the year the war ended, with a hand-press, a trunk of type and a daughter of two, and his father, who set headlines at night, was home in the daytime, which Eugene remembered as the great luxury of his early childhood. The boy was grave and large-eyed, with his mother's patient look. He watched. At three he was found standing in the yard at dusk, looking at the lilac hedge, and when asked what he was looking at, said that there was a place where the dog would not go.
Denver in the fifties was a railroad and cattle city that was turning, a little uneasily, into an air-conditioned one. The old warehouse district around Larimer Street was a place of cheap hotels, pawnshops and bars, and the new suburbs to the south and west went up in orderly rows of brick ranch houses. Eugene grew up between them. He knew the alleys behind the hotels by the age of nine, because his father sometimes took him to the paper in the evening, and the pressroom was in a lane off Larimer, and he learned that a city is a set of back ways. His sister Mildred, who was three years older, was brisk and bookish and took charge of him. His mother, who was by then The Slow Rook, was often away on the family's work, and his father, who set the type of the Western pages, was the one who made breakfast.
His mother taught him, from the age of ten, what she called reading. She had come up through the telephone exchange and the washes of Los Angeles, and she had a way of looking at a patch of ground as a clerk looks at a ledger. On summer weekends she took him out along the Platte and the dry creeks, and set him to look at a line of tracks, a broken fence or a scatter of bird feathers and tell her what had happened. He was slow, and he was usually right. She said that it was the one thing that could not be taught faster than it could be learned. In 1966, when he was twenty, she handed him a case of silver rounds across the kitchen table, without a word, and he took it, and put it in a drawer, and for fourteen years did not touch it.
He did not think of himself as called. He thought of himself as a boy with a hobby and a heritage. He apprenticed at seventeen to an electrical contractor in the north of the city, learned the trade in the usual order, from conduit to panel to a journeyman's card, and was a good electrician. He liked it for the same reasons that his mother liked tracks. A wire runs from a place to a place, and when it fails the fault leaves a mark, and the work was to follow the mark. The war in Vietnam was at its height. He had an apprenticeship deferment, and then a high number in the lottery, and he said that for the whole of that time he knew exactly where he was in the order of things and did not enjoy it.
He married Beatrice Kowalski in 1970, in a Catholic church in Denver, to which his mother wore her best grey and his father, who had once sworn that he would never again set a line in six-point, composed the order of service himself. Beatrice was a young librarian from Phoenix who had come to Colorado for her degree. Their daughter Lorraine was born in 1971, named for her grandmother, and their son Mark in 1973. They lived in a small house on the north side, near the railroad, and Eugene wired half of the street.
The calling came in the winter of 1980, after a fire. It burned a whole lane of old wooden rooming houses behind Larimer Street in a single night in January, and the next morning the lane was a row of black stumps with one door standing in the middle of it, upright and unburned, with the frame gone to ash around it. The insurers sent for an electrician to certify that the wiring had not been the cause. Eugene, who was thirty-three, went down with his meter, and found that it had not. What he found was a thing that a wiring fault does not do. The fire had not spread from room to room. It had started at the ends of the lane and moved inward, and the door was standing because the fire had been told to go round it.
He read the ground. It was frozen, and covered with a hard crust of ash, and he stood in it for an hour and saw, as his mother had taught him, what the crust remembered, which was a track that went in at the door and did not come out. He took his meter back to the van. He sat for some time with his hands on the wheel. Then he drove to the house on the north side, took the case of silver rounds out of the drawer, and cleaned the pistol that he had bought and never fired, and drove back to the lane at dusk. It is not recorded what he found. The family book says only that on the following morning there was a body in the standing doorway, in the cold, and that the lane was never again used for anything but car parking.
His mother, who was living in Los Angeles and sixty-two, came up on the train. She stayed for a fortnight, in the room over the garage, and gave him, in thirteen days, everything that she had learned in forty years, which was mostly how to be slow. She died in 1984. He drove down to the funeral in the middle of a snowstorm, with his daughter beside him. He called the work Quarry Reading, in her words. The Ledger's western cousins called him The Pale Scythe, because he went through a thing without haste and left it cut, and because, they said, he looked like the winter.
He kept the electrician's job. He worked it through the decades of the oil bust, which hit Denver hard in the eighties, and through the attacks of September 2001, when the whole of the city fell silent, and he went on working into his sixties as an inspector. Beatrice, who had known the family's work since 1970 and had been the first person he told that winter, kept his notebooks in order and read them back to him. Beatrice died in 2011 after a long illness, and he nursed her through the last three years of it. His daughter Lorraine followed him into the work, and is a slayer in her own right. He is living today in Denver, in the house on the north side, with a lilac hedge that his mother planted a cutting of. He still goes out, a little slower, on winter mornings, to look at the ground.
Eugene Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Pale Scythe, the Denver electrician who followed a fire to its source and a track to its end, and who took fourteen years to believe that he was a hunter. In the Slayerverse he stands for the late-called and patient trackers of the Red Ledger, the quiet working men who learned their craft from their mothers and found it, one winter morning, waiting for them in the ash.
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