Gary Collins Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Swift Sieve. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

Gary Collins Proctor was born in 1991 at Jackson, Mississippi, and is living today in Jackson, where he works as a paramedic and, since 2013, as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Swift Sieve, a name for the fast shake that leaves the useful grains in the mesh, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by method, questions and written record, and who would sooner have the file than the fight. His craft is Procedural Trapping, the art of arranging a situation so that a creature, obeying its own habits one step at a time, finds itself somewhere it cannot leave, and his gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He was called in 2013, after a wake, when the mourners saw the dead man sit up. He is the elder child of the postal clerk Michael Collins and of the seamstress and slayer Renee Foster Proctor, The Grey Latch, who was his mentor, and the brother of the slayer Erin Proctor Collins. He has not married and has no children, and the work, as he puts it, takes the evenings that a wife would have a right to. He was born in the hot August of a year in which Jackson was building its first big shopping centres and arguing about all of them, in the old hospital near the capitol where his father had been born twenty-seven years earlier, and he was carried home to a small brick house on the north side with a porch light that was never switched off. Michael Collins, who had been at the sorting belt until two in the morning, arrived at the ward in his postal shirt with a stamp album under his arm, which he presented to the baby on the grounds that it was never too early to begin. Renee, who was twenty-one and had been a vampire slayer for four years, remarked that the child had her grandmother Wilma's frown. He was an alert, tow-headed, round-faced baby who watched the door. It was observed, before he was three, that he could tell who was on the porch by their step. His childhood was divided between two trades, and he had a view of both. In the afternoons he sat in the staff room at the main post office on Morris Avenue, in a corner among the date stamps and the dead-letter drawer, drinking milk and learning to sort. In the evenings he sat at the table while his mother pinned a hem and asked him questions. She would say the name of a street and ask him what had happened on it, or tell him that a customer had come in with a coat that did not fit and ask him what that told him. By ten he could look at the contents of a stranger's trolley in the supermarket and say that the man was newly widowed. At twelve he was asked, over supper, who had been at the door on a certain Tuesday and what they had worn, and he said, without looking up, that it was a man in a blue shirt with a tan on one hand where a ring had been. His father, who was serving the peas, said that he had delivered to that house for a week and had noticed nothing. Renee said that this was exactly why one of them was a postman. He did not take to the needle. At fifteen he took a first-aid course at the Red Cross hall, because a boy in his class had collapsed on the football field and nobody in the stand had known what to do, and he found, to his surprise, that he liked being useful in the first four minutes. In the autumn of 2005, when the storm that took New Orleans drove thousands of people up the interstate to the shelters of Jackson, he spent his fourteenth birthday week carrying water in a gymnasium on the south side and counting cots, and discovered that he could keep an exact tally of two hundred strangers' needs without a note. He said that the whole of emergency work was a form of sifting. A man is brought in with a dozen things wrong and the trick is to find the one that will kill him before the bus is out of the street. He was a certified emergency medical technician at nineteen and a paramedic by twenty-one, on an ambulance crew out of a station near the railroad yards, the youngest on the shift, and was nicknamed Sieve by a driver named Delroy, who had watched him go through the back of a van in forty seconds and come out with a diagnosis. The call came in the small hours of a Sunday in the spring of 2013, to a frame house in a street off Terry Road where a wake had been held. A woman of sixty-eight, the widow of a pipe-fitter named Mr Odom, rang to say that something was wrong with her husband, who had been laid out in the front room for two days and was supposed to be collected by the funeral home in the morning. Gary and Delroy went, at a little after one. They found the front room full of the mourners, who were standing along the walls in their good clothes, with the lamps on and the coffee going cold, and in the middle of the room, in a coffin that stood on trestles, the dead man was sitting up. His hands were folded. He had a gentle, courteous, faintly puzzled look. The women, who were afraid in the particular way of those who have just been told that they are right about something, said that he had sat up at the third verse of the hymn. Gary did not shout. He did what a paramedic is trained to do, which is to follow the form, and he did it aloud. He said that he would need to examine the gentleman. He said that the gentleman would first have to be seated on the chair, as the protocol required, and that no patient could be removed without a signature, and that there would be a refusal of transport to fill in, in triplicate, in the presence of a witness, who must be of age and who must be asked in. It was a creature's own habit, as he remembered afterwards, to follow a rule that has been put to it politely. The thing in the coffin, which wished to be accommodated and which, like all of its kind, had a respect for paper, sat on the chair. It gave its name and date of birth. It asked for the pen. Meanwhile Delroy, who had understood, quietly cleared the room, and Gary sent his mother a one-word message from the hall, and kept the form going by asking for the second signature and then for the third, and a witness, and a copy for the patient, and for four hours he did not put a hand on the creature. The witness arrived a little after five, in a grey cardigan and a headscarf, with a pincushion on her wrist, having driven down from Birmingham through the dark with the radio off. She was Renee Foster Proctor, and she had brought, in a flat basket, the thing that the form had been waiting for. The creature signed. The door, which she watched from the porch, was shut behind it by a son who had done exactly what he was taught, and his mother said afterwards that she had never been prouder, and that he should not have used the same pen. He has worked the craft ever since in the same manner, out of a station that does not know why its crews have an unusual number of late-night calls to houses with empty rooms. A paramedic is the one professional who enters a stranger's home at its worst moment, with permission and with a clipboard, and who writes down the time. Gary keeps two sets of records, the county's and his own. In the second he notes, on a card, anything that a sieve catches and the form does not: a patient who would not be touched, a call without an address, a person pronounced dead at night who was gone from a locked room by the morning. He has had, in thirteen years, forty-one cards of that kind, and has closed thirty-six of them. His method is the form. A creature must be invited, named and made to wait, and it must stand somewhere that has been given a number, and the steps are small and plausible and legal until the last one, when there is a single door in the room and a young man in a green uniform is standing beside it. The cousins in the Birmingham and Memphis chapters, who had expected a gunfighter, took to calling him The Swift Sieve because his cases went through quickly and left nothing behind. In the pandemic years he was on the road without a break, in a mask and a paper gown, taking people to hospitals that had no beds, and his mother, who in the same weeks was sewing masks, took to leaving a bag of them on his porch. He says that it was the only season of his life in which the dead and the living came through the same door, and that he learned a good deal about keeping to procedure when the procedure itself was being rewritten every week. He is thirty-five, a broad, fair, heavy-lidded, quiet man with his father's cowlick and his mother's way of looking at a hem before a face, and he lives in a rented house near the station with a dog named Stamp. He rings his sister on Thursdays. On the first Sunday of the month he has supper with his parents, and his father puts on the table, as he has done for a decade, a stamp album, which Gary is not permitted to say anything about. Gary Collins Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Swift Sieve, the paramedic who followed every form in the book and used the book to close a door on the dead. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Detectives of the White Ledger, the hunters who won by procedure and a steady voice, and who showed that a clipboard, a witness and a very long pause can hold a thing in a chair as firmly as any rope.