Gwen Proctor

Gwen Proctor was born in 1995 in San Antonio, Texas, and lives there today, working the night desk of the county emergency dispatch centre and, since 2011, serving as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and of the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Open Line, a name for the telephone that is always answered, and classes her as a Detective, a hunter who works by observation, record and question, and who solves a night before she fights it. Her craft is Ledger Recall, the trained memory for names, faces, dates and places that her mother carries and that she has carried since she was a girl, and her gear is a silver stake, a notebook and a headset. She is the only child of the county investigator and slayer Loretta Proctor, The Riverwalk Assessor, who was also her teacher, and of the insurance adjuster and slayer Todd Navarro, The Ash Scythe. Through her mother's line she descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and through her father she belongs to the House of Navarro, the Tejano families who guarded the San Antonio missions. She is the last name written, so far, at the foot of the Proctor side of one of the longest family trees in the Slayerverse.

She was born in a hospital on the Westside of San Antonio in the early summer of 1995, eight months after her parents' wedding at the mission church of San Jose, and her mother, who had worked the day before and went back the week after, said that she had been thorough about the timing. She was a big, loud, dark-haired baby, and then a big, loud, dark-haired child, with her mother's level eyes and her father's slow, rare smile. She was brought up between two houses. The first was her father's tall narrow house in King William, with the horse trailer in the lane and a cabinet of her grandfather Jose Navarro's notebooks, and the second was the house on the Southside where her grandparents Elena Navarro and Wendell Proctor lived, with a garage that smelled of aircraft oil and a kitchen that smelled of cumin and coffee.

Her grandfather Wendell was an Air Force mechanic who spent his career at Kelly field and who did not hunt, and he taught her, in the garage, the first thing she remembers learning, which was to write down a number the moment she heard it. He kept a ledger of his own, of torque settings and serial numbers, and he said that a mechanic who trusted his memory was a mechanic who was shortly to be corrected by gravity. She was six when she started her own notebook. It was a green one. It held the licence plates of every car on the street, in a round, careful hand, and her mother, who found it in her school bag, read it standing in the kitchen and said, in a voice that the child had not heard before, that it was very good.

Her mother trained her at the kitchen table, in the evenings, with a notebook and a map. Loretta, who had been called at fifteen in the doorway of a bank at dusk, was thorough and unsentimental and did not believe in teaching a thing she could not test. There were lessons on the faces in a crowd, on the order of the pages in a case file, on how to hear a lie in the first four words of a sentence and on how, at a street corner at dusk, to tell a person who was waiting from a person who was watching. Each lesson ended with an examination. By ten Gwen could describe, in order, every person in a restaurant after one look on the way to the table. By thirteen she could recite a week of her mother's telephone calls, and her mother, who had been doing the same thing all her working life, found that she was being corrected on details.

She was told what the family was on her twelfth birthday, in the garden at the house in King William, by her father, who had waited for her to ask, and who answered her, when she did, with a long silence and a hand laid flat on the nearest horse. Her parents were both slayers. So, she was told, was her uncle Travis, who was married to her father's kinswoman Melissa Navarro, and so had been the women of the Proctors for four hundred years. She asked whether she would be one. Her mother, standing in the kitchen door with her arms folded, said that she would be whatever she turned out to be, and that she would be told when she was called, and not before. Gwen said that she had been taking notes for six years, and her mother said that she had noticed.

She was called in the autumn of 2011, at sixteen, on the lower level of the Riverwalk. It was an evening in October, and she had gone down the steps by the Arneson theatre to meet a friend after a school football game, and found that the friend was not there and that there was, instead, a young man in a pale shirt sitting on a bench beneath a cypress, quite still, watching the river. It was a warm night and the Riverwalk was crowded. He was the only person in it who cast no reflection in the water of the shop windows. She noticed it first as a mistake in the picture, in the way that a girl who has been trained to notice a missing figure in a crowd would notice it, and then she noticed that he had noticed her noticing. He rose. He did not hurry. She walked, at the same pace, up a flight of steps and into a bright and loud restaurant, took a table by the kitchen, wrote his description in her notebook and telephoned her mother, who answered on the first ring, as she always did, and asked three questions, and said that she would be there in nine minutes.

Loretta was there in seven. They took him that night, in a service passage behind the restaurant, in a ring of kitchen staff who had been told, by Gwen, that there was a gas leak and that it would be wise to stand in the street. The man in the pale shirt had been working along the river for three weeks, taking what he wanted from people who were too drunk or too happy to remember. Gwen had his description, his habits, his route and the times of four earlier incidents in a notebook that she had begun, in a sixteen-year-old's hand, the previous Tuesday. Her mother, reading it by the light of the passage, said only that it was thorough. The family book records the evening as the first time that a Proctor has been called before the hunt began.

Ledger Recall, in her practice, is a matter of cross-reference. She can tell you the licence of a car she saw in 2014, the name of the waiter who served her in 2019 and the order in which the people left a room on a given night, and she has learned from her mother to turn the knowledge into a question. She takes a case apart on the kitchen table, as her mother taught her, with index cards, and she has the Proctor habit of putting the card that does not fit at the centre. Her father taught her to stand still, to breathe slowly and to wait for a frightened thing to settle. Between the two of them she has become a hunter who rarely arrives first and almost never arrives wrong.

She took a degree in criminal justice at the university in San Antonio, working nights at the dispatch desk to pay for it, and stayed. She is thirty-one, and works the night shift, from ten until six, with a headset, three screens and a thermos, answering the emergency line for the whole of Bexar County. It is, she says, the best listening post in the state, and it has given her more cases than any of the Proctors before her, for a call from a farmhouse at three in the morning in which the caller says that the dog has stopped barking is a call that she can answer in two ways. In the daylight hours she works the old cases with her mother, in the kitchen, and walks the missions with her father on Sundays. She lives in a small apartment in Southtown with a bookcase of notebooks and a dog called Sprocket.

Gwen Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Open Line, the girl who wrote a stranger down in a green notebook and was called before the hunt began. In the Slayerverse she stands for the youngest hunters of the White Ledger, the daughters and sons who inherit four hundred years of records and a quiet, accurate habit of attention, and who prove that the line from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor is still being kept, by a woman at a dispatch desk in San Antonio who answers every call.

Gwen Proctor was born in 1995 in San Antonio, Texas, and lives there today, working the night desk of the county emergency dispatch centre and, since 2011, serving as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and of the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Open Line, a name for the telephone that is always answered, and classes her as a Detective, a hunter who works by observation, record and question, and who solves a night before she fights it. Her craft is Ledger Recall, the trained memory for names, faces, dates and places that her mother carries and that she has carried since she was a girl, and her gear is a silver stake, a notebook and a headset. She is the only child of the county investigator and slayer Loretta Proctor, The Riverwalk Assessor, who was also her teacher, and of the insurance adjuster and slayer Todd Navarro, The Ash Scythe. Through her mother's line she descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and through her father she belongs to the House of Navarro, the Tejano families who guarded the San Antonio missions. She is the last name written, so far, at the foot of the Proctor side of one of the longest family trees in the Slayerverse.

She was born in a hospital on the Westside of San Antonio in the early summer of 1995, eight months after her parents' wedding at the mission church of San Jose, and her mother, who had worked the day before and went back the week after, said that she had been thorough about the timing. She was a big, loud, dark-haired baby, and then a big, loud, dark-haired child, with her mother's level eyes and her father's slow, rare smile. She was brought up between two houses. The first was her father's tall narrow house in King William, with the horse trailer in the lane and a cabinet of her grandfather Jose Navarro's notebooks, and the second was the house on the Southside where her grandparents Elena Navarro and Wendell Proctor lived, with a garage that smelled of aircraft oil and a kitchen that smelled of cumin and coffee.

Her grandfather Wendell was an Air Force mechanic who spent his career at Kelly field and who did not hunt, and he taught her, in the garage, the first thing she remembers learning, which was to write down a number the moment she heard it. He kept a ledger of his own, of torque settings and serial numbers, and he said that a mechanic who trusted his memory was a mechanic who was shortly to be corrected by gravity. She was six when she started her own notebook. It was a green one. It held the licence plates of every car on the street, in a round, careful hand, and her mother, who found it in her school bag, read it standing in the kitchen and said, in a voice that the child had not heard before, that it was very good.

Her mother trained her at the kitchen table, in the evenings, with a notebook and a map. Loretta, who had been called at fifteen in the doorway of a bank at dusk, was thorough and unsentimental and did not believe in teaching a thing she could not test. There were lessons on the faces in a crowd, on the order of the pages in a case file, on how to hear a lie in the first four words of a sentence and on how, at a street corner at dusk, to tell a person who was waiting from a person who was watching. Each lesson ended with an examination. By ten Gwen could describe, in order, every person in a restaurant after one look on the way to the table. By thirteen she could recite a week of her mother's telephone calls, and her mother, who had been doing the same thing all her working life, found that she was being corrected on details.

She was told what the family was on her twelfth birthday, in the garden at the house in King William, by her father, who had waited for her to ask, and who answered her, when she did, with a long silence and a hand laid flat on the nearest horse. Her parents were both slayers. So, she was told, was her uncle Travis, who was married to her father's kinswoman Melissa Navarro, and so had been the women of the Proctors for four hundred years. She asked whether she would be one. Her mother, standing in the kitchen door with her arms folded, said that she would be whatever she turned out to be, and that she would be told when she was called, and not before. Gwen said that she had been taking notes for six years, and her mother said that she had noticed.

She was called in the autumn of 2011, at sixteen, on the lower level of the Riverwalk. It was an evening in October, and she had gone down the steps by the Arneson theatre to meet a friend after a school football game, and found that the friend was not there and that there was, instead, a young man in a pale shirt sitting on a bench beneath a cypress, quite still, watching the river. It was a warm night and the Riverwalk was crowded. He was the only person in it who cast no reflection in the water of the shop windows. She noticed it first as a mistake in the picture, in the way that a girl who has been trained to notice a missing figure in a crowd would notice it, and then she noticed that he had noticed her noticing. He rose. He did not hurry. She walked, at the same pace, up a flight of steps and into a bright and loud restaurant, took a table by the kitchen, wrote his description in her notebook and telephoned her mother, who answered on the first ring, as she always did, and asked three questions, and said that she would be there in nine minutes.

Loretta was there in seven. They took him that night, in a service passage behind the restaurant, in a ring of kitchen staff who had been told, by Gwen, that there was a gas leak and that it would be wise to stand in the street. The man in the pale shirt had been working along the river for three weeks, taking what he wanted from people who were too drunk or too happy to remember. Gwen had his description, his habits, his route and the times of four earlier incidents in a notebook that she had begun, in a sixteen-year-old's hand, the previous Tuesday. Her mother, reading it by the light of the passage, said only that it was thorough. The family book records the evening as the first time that a Proctor has been called before the hunt began.

Ledger Recall, in her practice, is a matter of cross-reference. She can tell you the licence of a car she saw in 2014, the name of the waiter who served her in 2019 and the order in which the people left a room on a given night, and she has learned from her mother to turn the knowledge into a question. She takes a case apart on the kitchen table, as her mother taught her, with index cards, and she has the Proctor habit of putting the card that does not fit at the centre. Her father taught her to stand still, to breathe slowly and to wait for a frightened thing to settle. Between the two of them she has become a hunter who rarely arrives first and almost never arrives wrong.

She took a degree in criminal justice at the university in San Antonio, working nights at the dispatch desk to pay for it, and stayed. She is thirty-one, and works the night shift, from ten until six, with a headset, three screens and a thermos, answering the emergency line for the whole of Bexar County. It is, she says, the best listening post in the state, and it has given her more cases than any of the Proctors before her, for a call from a farmhouse at three in the morning in which the caller says that the dog has stopped barking is a call that she can answer in two ways. In the daylight hours she works the old cases with her mother, in the kitchen, and walks the missions with her father on Sundays. She lives in a small apartment in Southtown with a bookcase of notebooks and a dog called Sprocket.

Gwen Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Open Line, the girl who wrote a stranger down in a green notebook and was called before the hunt began. In the Slayerverse she stands for the youngest hunters of the White Ledger, the daughters and sons who inherit four hundred years of records and a quiet, accurate habit of attention, and who prove that the line from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor is still being kept, by a woman at a dispatch desk in San Antonio who answers every call.