Gervase Thorne Faulkner was born in 1666 in Newbury, Massachusetts, a town of salt marsh, tidal river and plain timber meeting-houses at the mouth of the Merrimack, and he died forty-six years later in a fever ward at the edge of the same colony. Between the two stood a working life as a cooper and, from the age of thirty-four, a vampire slayer whom the Red Ledger remembers by the alias The Fallow Lamp. He was a Faulkner by descent, a Thorne by his mother's blood, and something of a stranger in both houses, having lived his boyhood between two countries and his manhood in a third state of mind.
His father, Stuart Faulkner, was a chandler who had crossed to New England in the mid-1660s to see whether the family's Massachusetts kinsmen could supply tallow and fat more cheaply than the butchers of Lancashire, and had taken his wife Shona Thorne and his daughter Mercy with him. Shona, a dressmaker of the border-reiver House of Thorne, bore Gervase at Newbury in the hard winter, and the boy grew up for three years among people who spoke of Lancashire as a distant and uncertain place. The venture did not succeed. Stuart took the family home to Clitheroe while the boy was still small, and Gervase grew up in the Ribble valley with a sister seven years older and a strong impression of having once been somewhere else. His mother Shona died in 1682, when he was sixteen.
The following year he went back. It was a Faulkner custom, and one the Ledger has never explained, that a boy without a clear place in the family's trade might be sent to the far branch to find one, and Gervase went to Newbury at seventeen to be bound as an apprentice to a cooper who was a distant cousin. The crossing took eight weeks. He landed at Boston in a cold spring, walked north to Newbury with his tools in a sack, and set to work under a man who taught him to raise a barrel from staves, to shape a hoop in the steam and to test a cask with a candle held to the bunghole. Coopering was the essential trade of a port that shipped fish, rum, molasses, pork and salt, and the shop was never idle.
Newbury, and the towns of the Bay Colony generally, were places of a stern order. The meeting-house stood in the centre and the whole life of the parish moved around it: Sabbath sermons that ran three hours, town meetings that voted on fences and strayed pigs, a magistrate who could and did fine a man for idleness. Gervase, a lanky and quiet young man, sat under the minister with the rest, ate his hasty pudding and salt cod, and went home to a house that he shared with the cooper's family. He completed his indenture in 1687, at the age of twenty-one, and took a lease on a workshop by the river, a shed with a steam-box, a forge for hoops and a great stack of oak staves seasoning in the yard.
The years that followed included the worst one in the colony's memory. In 1692 the witchcraft panic that gripped the colony reached its height at Salem and at Andover, only a few miles inland from Newbury, and hardly a household in the county was untouched. Gervase, twenty-six, watched neighbours accuse neighbours across the meeting-house, saw a cousin's wife hauled away for questioning, and heard from the road the shouts of the crowd. He did not join in and he did not speak against it, for a man who spoke against it was likely to be next. He knew already, in the private way of the Faulkners, that the dead were dangerous, and he could not bring himself to believe that the frightened girls of Salem had found them. What he thought, he wrote in a letter to his sister, was that the colony had built a gallows for the wrong things and would need it later for the right ones.
His calling came in 1700, after a storm. A gale out of the north-east lashed the coast for two days in early autumn, drove three vessels onto the shoals off Plum Island and left a ship, a battered trading brig, washed up on the mud below Newbury with her sails in ribbons. The townsfolk ran down to the shore with lanterns and found her deck strewn with gear and her hatches open, a full crew aboard and not one living man among them. The bodies were laid out in a barn. Gervase, called to the barn to measure them for casks, as the town had no coffin-maker to spare, saw that they were pale as fish and had not a drop of blood in them, and that in the dark of the hold something was still moving. He took a fowler's long rifle from a neighbour's wall, loaded it with the only shot at hand, which happened to be silver melted from a pewter chain, and went down the ladder. When he came up, the thing in the hold was dead and he was, in the Ledger's phrase, called.
He trained himself, for he had no mentor, and he built his craft out of his trade. A cooper knew how to fit an object so that it held; he applied the same instinct to a snare. His craft, known as Night Trapping, consisted of setting concealed traps of hoops, weighted nets and sprung iron bands in the paths that a vampire used, then luring it to the place with a lamp. The lamp itself, a fallow-coloured horn lantern with a dim yellow flame, gave him his alias. Vampires of the salt-marsh, he found, went to a light as a moth does, and the man who held it stood well back. His gear was the long rifle, an accurate German-made piece with a rifled bore, and the shot he cast himself from silver, in a bullet mould, after the fashion of the Ledger's old prescription.
He hunted the coast between Newbury and Portsmouth for a decade, mostly in the dead of winter when the harbours were empty and the roads were bare. He kept a tally in the Red Ledger's Massachusetts book, sixteen names in twelve years, entered in a cramped hand with the date, the place and the word taken. He wrote to his sister Mercy in Clitheroe about a third of what he did, and she, who could tell what he left out, never asked. He never married. The cooper's trade, the hunting and the distance from Lancashire left him little room, and he told a friend that he preferred to be alone with the work. He had no children. He was known in Newbury as a decent, close-mouthed craftsman whose casks did not leak and whose lamp could be seen burning late at the edge of the marsh.
In the winter of 1712, a fever broke out in a house on the waterfront, a crowded lodging for seamen, and the town's doctor asked for helpers. Gervase, who had no fear of illness that he could see, went in to carry the sick out and stayed to nurse them. He took the fever himself and died in a few days, at the age of forty-six, in the same house. The Ledger noted his last tally and recorded his death in the same line.
Gervase Thorne Faulkner is remembered in the Slayerverse as the New England branch's first true vampire slayer, the cooper who set traps for the dead, and the man whose lamp went out in a plague house rather than in a fight.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
