Keziah Cutler Faulkner was born in 1789 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and lived forty-two years as a shopkeeper and, for the last twenty-two of them, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls her The Quiet Kestrel, after the small hawk that hangs motionless over a field before it stoops, and it is a fair portrait. She was a Hunter by type, and her craft was the Dusk Patrol, a discipline she had from her father and practised in the lanes of Worcester and the hill towns around it. She never married. She died in 1831 of a fever caught in a plague house, having gone in when nobody else would.
Her father, Obadiah Faulkner, was born in 1760 and died in 1823. He was a farmer and a slayer, whom the Ledger calls The Sable Rook, and he trained Keziah as his mentor from the year of her calling. Her mother, Charity Cutler, born in 1759 and dead in 1814, was a farmer's wife with a low opinion of speculation and a high opinion of hard work. Keziah's brother, Levi Cutler Faulkner, born in 1787, became a storekeeper and kept the family's locked ledger. The two children grew up in a farmhouse on the road out of Worcester, in a household where the boots were kept by the door, the lamps were trimmed early and the dog was never allowed to sleep outside.
Worcester in the 1790s was a county town of some two thousand people, with a courthouse on the common, a jail, a meeting house with a white steeple, a number of taverns and a growing reputation as a place where things were made. Its mills, small at first, were beginning to spin cotton, its tanneries and ironworks supplied the countryside, and the turnpikes that radiated from the town carried an increasing stream of wagons. The surrounding hills were dotted with farms, and the roads through them at night were dark, lonely and, on certain stretches, not entirely empty.
Her father took her out to the fields as a girl, and she took to it. She was a small, spare, dark-haired child with a steady eye and a dislike of chatter, and she learned what he had to teach as a matter of course. She learned to walk without sound, to stand without moving, to watch a road for an hour and to know what she had seen. By the time she was fourteen she could cross a frozen pond in her stockinged feet without a creak.
Her calling came in 1809, when she was twenty, in a stable. She had gone out to the livery barn behind a tavern on the turnpike to fetch her father's horse when the animals in the stalls began to scream, a high, rough, terrified sound that she had never heard a horse make, and ran, kicking at their doors. She found the groom lying in the straw, cold and white, with two small marks on his throat. She stood in the aisle with a lantern in her hand, unable to move, and understood at once what it was that her father had been hunting for twenty years. Then she heard, from the loft, a sound like a long, slow breath. She did not climb the ladder. She went to fetch him.
The Dusk Patrol, as she practised it, was the Faulkner method of the regular circuit walked at nightfall, adapted to the country. She rode rather than walked, on a small bay mare called Dunnock, and she covered a round of thirty miles that took in the turnpike, the farm roads and the hill villages, following a fixed route at a fixed hour. The regularity was the point. Anything new on the road, a strange coach, an unfamiliar rider, a dark window in a house that was usually lit, stood out at once. She wrote each evening's observations in a pocket book in a cramped hand, and at the end of the week she compared them. The Ledger credits her with some twenty vampires, most of them taken on the hill roads between 1810 and 1830. Her gear was silver-cast shot and a revolving pistol, made up by an armourer at Springfield, which she carried in a saddle holster.
By day, she kept a shop. In 1812 she took a lease on a building in the centre of Worcester, near the common, and opened a general store that sold cloth, thread, tea, sugar, hardware, candles, patent medicines and stationery. It was a modest, well-run place with a reputation for fair dealing and for a shopkeeper who noticed what people bought. A customer who came in for a half-pound of salt and a pound of candles, three nights running, and then asked for a pair of heavy shutter bolts, was a customer to be watched. The shop gave her a view of the town and the country that no amount of riding could have supplied, and more than one Worcester vampire was found by a line in her sales book.
Her father's death in 1823 was a great blow, and she took over the circuit entire. She was thirty-four, strong and self-possessed, and she held the hill country for eight more years. The work did not change, but she became quieter, more deliberate and more watchful. Her brother Levi, who kept his locked ledger in Longmeadow, sent her supplies, and she sent him notes.
The end came in the autumn of 1831, when a fever broke out in a tenement on the edge of the town. The neighbours called it plague, the doctors would not go in and the town fathers shut the door. Keziah went in. She had heard that two children were trapped inside, and she could not bring herself to walk by. She carried them out, one at a time, and nursed a dying woman for three days, and on the fourth she was taken ill herself. She died within the week, aged forty-two. The children lived.
A few particulars of her routine were remembered by the people who lived along it. She took the same tumbler of hot cider from a widow's kitchen window at the top of Mill Hill every evening in winter, and left the empty cup on the sill, so that the widow would know by the morning that the road had been quiet. She never carried a lantern, on the principle that a light blinds its bearer and announces him, and she was said to know every rut of her thirty miles by the feel of the mare's stride. Her pocket books, eleven of them, were found in a tin trunk after her death. The last entry, dated the night before she went into the tenement, reads in full: Road clear. Dunnock sound. Cold.
Keziah Cutler Faulkner is remembered as The Quiet Kestrel, the shopkeeper who rode the hill roads at dusk. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters whose courage was of the plain, persistent kind, expressed in a long habit of showing up.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
