Hob Proctor Thorne was born in 1842 in Maysville, Kentucky, and lived eighty-one years as a farmer and a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book knows him as The Fallow Yoke, a name that puts together the field left to rest and the harness that a patient ox wears, and describes a man who could stand a long time in one place and let the work come to him. He was a Broker, a hunter who works by terms and bargains, and his craft was Procedural Trapping, the building of snares out of the rules that a vampire itself obeys. He was the elder son of the boatman and slayer Callum Thorne, The Bitter Bridle, and of the shopkeeper Minnie Proctor Thorne, and he trained under his father. His younger brother was Henry Thorne Proctor. In 1865 he married Effie Bradford, and they raised two children, Alexander Thorne and Nettie Thorne, both of whom became slayers. He died in 1923 of a long illness, aged eighty-one, having buried his wife, his parents and his son.
The moment that made him a hunter came late, in 1876, at thirty-four, in the yard of an inn. He had known what his father was since he was a boy, and had ridden out with the hounds more than once, and had been asked, politely and then less politely, when he meant to be called. He said that he would know it when it came. It came on a wet evening in October, on the Maysville pike, at a crossroads inn called the Drover's Rest, where he had stopped to sell a pair of mules and was standing in the yard with a mug of cider, watching the ostler forking straw. A guest rode in, dismounted, handed his reins to the ostler and walked to the inn door. He asked the landlord, who was standing on the step, for lodging for the night. The landlord, a stout, absent-minded man, said that there were beds. The guest thanked him, and stood there, on the gravel, in the rain, with his boot a hand's breadth from the sill, and did not come in.
Hob watched it for some time. It was not a long time, perhaps a minute, but it was long enough to see three things. The man was not cold or ill. He was not shy. And he was waiting for something, with the exact, unworried patience of a person who knows the rule and is content to wait for it to be satisfied. The landlord, who had turned to speak to someone indoors, had not said the word. Hob, who was a farmer and had never in his life read a line of the old Thorne papers on the subject, felt the thing arrive in his head fully made. He understood that the guest could not cross until he was asked. He understood, too, that he, Hob, could ask him, in whatever words he chose, and that the choice of words would be the whole of the matter.
He crossed the yard. He said, pleasantly, that the landlord was a busy man, and that he himself held the lease of the stable range behind the house, which was true, for he had taken it that morning. He said that the stranger was welcome to a bed in the hay loft, at the stranger's own risk, as one gentleman to another, and that the matter of the main house could be decided in the morning. It was a proper invitation, in every particular of form. It was also a door to a place with no windows, one stair, and a loft floor sprinkled, that afternoon, with the dry oats and mustard seed that any prudent drover carried to keep the mice off his saddlebags. The guest, who had presumably been asked to cross a great many thresholds, bowed and went in.
Hob kept him there, without any violence whatever, for three hours, by means of the terms of the invitation, which he amended, politely, every quarter of an hour, and which the guest could not leave without a formal release. He was a broker. He bargained. It was dawn before the creature understood what it had been sold, and by then the pistol and the stakes in the saddlebag were at Hob's side and the sun was in the east window. He said afterwards that he had never been so frightened, and that he had never so clearly known what he was for. He rode home to Bourbon County that morning, and told his wife. Then he rode to Lexington and told his father.
Callum Thorne, who was sixty-two, and had hunted for forty-three years with hounds, a revolver and a bad temper, took the news with extraordinary composure. He said that he had been wondering what would be the shape of it. He said that it was not at all what he would have chosen, but that it was clearly right, and he sat his son down at the kitchen table behind the shop and taught him, over three days, what a man who works by terms needs to know. The Thornes had never been lawyers. They had been border reivers, who understood what a bond was worth and what happened to the man who broke it, and Callum had a store of it. He knew the old customs of hospitality, of threshold and gift and debt, the etiquette of the Border truce, and the long list of things that a dead man cannot do until he has been asked. He taught his son that a rule was a wall, and that a wall, properly measured, was a trap.
Hob was born at Maysville, in a rented room above a chandler's store on the landing, in the last week of the winter of 1842. It was the room in which his mother had been born, twenty-six years earlier, and she had insisted on it. Callum had been hired that spring by a company of Ohio River merchants to follow a quarry down the river, and he had taken his wife, who was expecting, and her sister Hannah, who was a midwife, as far as the landing of her childhood and left them there for a fortnight while he went after his man. The child was delivered by his aunt, with a great deal of tea. His mother said that she had wanted her first son to be born among the people who had known her own father. She took him back to Lexington in a basket, and he grew up in the house behind her shop, among hounds and ribbons, and learned his letters on the back of the account book.
The war took him out of Lexington at nineteen. He enlisted in a Union cavalry company in 1862, to the great disgust of his father, who regarded it as a waste of a good tracker, and spent three years as a troop sergeant of a regiment of Kentucky horse, chasing Morgan's raiders and guerrillas across the bluegrass country. He was a good sergeant. He was the man who could be relied on to set up a picket line, keep the accounts of the troop, find out what a prisoner wanted and give it to him in return for what the troop wanted. It was an education in terms.
He married Effie Bradford in 1865, at twenty-three, in the spring after his discharge. She was a Louisville girl, a farmer's daughter, small, brown-haired and quick, a year younger than he, who had met him at a church social in the last winter of the war. She was not a hunter and never wished to be. She was a farmer's wife by temperament, who took a practical view of most things, and who said, when she had been told, that she supposed it was no odder than some of the things that happened to cattle. He took a small farm in Bourbon County, off the Maysville pike, with a good barn and a poor house, and they raised tobacco, hay and a few horses. The farm was quiet. The Thornes of Kentucky had long used it as a place where a hunter could rest, and the old hound of the Reiver line lay in the yard.
Their children were born in the first years of the marriage. Alexander Thorne was born in 1867 and lived until 1900. Nettie Thorne was born in 1870 and lived until 1944. Both were called, in their turn, to be vampire slayers of the Thorne line, and he trained them in what he knew, which was the long, unhurried way of the broker. Alexander, who was like his grandfather, took the hounds. Nettie, who was a practical, dark, self-possessed girl, took the terms. He taught them together, at the kitchen table, in the winter evenings, with a pack of playing cards, a lamp and a long series of questions that began, in every case, with the words, What has he agreed to?
His mother died in 1887 and his father in 1896, and he stood at both graves with his hat in his hand and a look that was the image of his grandfather's. He took the last hound of the Reiver line home to the farm. His brother Henry, a plump, bookish man, took over the shop in Lexington, and the two of them, who were the best of friends, met every Sunday to talk over the accounts. His wife Effie died in 1898 after a long illness, at fifty-five, and was buried on the farm. Two years later his son Alexander died, at thirty-three, and Hob, who was fifty-eight, went out to the barn and stood there for some time among the horses.
He died in the spring of 1923, at eighty-one, of a long illness, in the farmhouse on the Maysville pike, with his daughter at his bedside. He was buried beside his wife, in the field he had called, for fifty years, the fallow one, and the old hound is said to have lain on the grave, in the rain, until it was carried away.
Hob Proctor Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The Fallow Yoke, the farmer of Bourbon County, the hunter who made the creature sign for its own trap. In the Slayerverse he stands for the brokers of the old border houses, the hunters who fought with terms, who never raised a hand where a word would do, and who were patient enough to wait for the rule.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
