Laura Kelly Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Laura Kelly Faulkner was born in 2000 in Denver, Colorado, and is living today in Denver, where she works as a school administrator, the person who keeps the timetable, the register and the front office of a large public high school. She is a woman of the House of Faulkner and of the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but she was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. She is the elder daughter of the oil-field roughneck Mark Kowalski Faulkner and of the pharmacy technician Crystal Kelly, who were married in 1997, the granddaughter of the slayer Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, and the niece of the slayer Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, The Slow Bell, and the sister of Beatrice Faulkner. The family remembers her as the cousin who always knows which door is locked and who has the key, and who has turned an old household habit of order into a career. A school, Laura says, is the most heavily defended building that she knows, and not one person in it has ever noticed. There are cameras, door codes, sign-in sheets, a fire plan with a map by every classroom and a drill, three times a year, in which five hundred teenagers walk out into a car park in an orderly line and are counted. She is the person who does the counting. She works in an office with a long counter and a window onto the front hall, where from seven in the morning she checks in the late, the sick and the visitors, keeps the attendance, answers the telephone and makes the thousand small decisions that decide whether a school day runs. It is a great deal of work for a woman of twenty-six, and she is good at it, in a way that her grandmother Beatrice Kowalski, who was a librarian, and her mother, who dispenses medicine by the milligram, would both recognise. She takes a set of facts, writes them down in the right place and makes sure that nobody is missing. She was born in the winter of 2000, in the first week of February, in a snowstorm, at a hospital in south Denver, and her father drove her mother there in the family van, at a steady twenty miles an hour, straight from a rig-floor hitch that had run over, along a road that the plough had not yet reached. He had come in off the plains in his work clothes. Crystal, who was twenty-five and small, sturdy and brisk, held the baby in a hospital blanket and told her husband that he smelled of diesel and that he was not to touch her until he had washed. He washed. The child was named Laura for a great-aunt on the Kelly side and Kelly for her mother, and was the first grandchild of The Pale Scythe, who came to the hospital with a bunch of supermarket tulips and stood at the foot of the bed with his hat in his hands, saying that she was a very fine baby, and who went home and, according to his wife, sat in the kitchen for an hour without speaking. She grew up in the house on the south side of the city that her parents had bought in 1999, with a porch swing, a lilac hedge in the front and a long back garden, and in the company of an aunt, her father's sister Lorraine, who came to supper every Sunday and who was, in the opinion of a small girl, the most interesting woman in Colorado. Lorraine was a vampire slayer, and Laura was told, at sixteen, in the garden, on a warm evening in June, by her father, who spoke in short pieces and looked at his shoes. He said that the Faulkners had a family business, that his sister had been in it since before the girl was born, that he himself had never been, and that she and her sister need not be. Laura listened, as she listens now, to the end. She asked a single question, which was whether there was a list of the people involved, and when her father said that there was, in a book, she said, with the satisfaction of a person at the beginning of a project, that she would very much like to see how it was kept. She was shown the Colorado pages of the Red Ledger in the spring of 2017, at her aunt's kitchen table, and the thing she noticed was the handwriting. There were four hands in it, over eighty years, and one of them, in a firm blue upright script, had a habit of crossing its sevens. She asked who it was, and was told that it was her grandmother, who had kept it, with a librarian's eye, for forty years. She went home and began, that evening, to tidy the family's address book. It was an act of reverence, and her father, who watched her do it, said nothing. By the summer she had a spreadsheet. By the autumn, with the permission of her aunt, she had a second, locked, and she has kept it ever since, in the manner of the Ledger's unhunting women, as a private concordance of who is where, who has moved and who has not been heard of in a year. It is not a hunter's task, and she has never described it as one. She says that someone has to know where the cousins live. She finished school in 2018 and took a degree at the state university in the city, a long, rather unglamorous course in education and public administration, in which she worked in the evenings at the front desk of a middle school. She had a good head for it, a clear, steady hand and a gift for sitting at the centre of a lot of unhappy people and making each of them feel that they had been heard. In the spring of 2020, in the second half of her second year, the pandemic closed the university and the school, and she spent the following twelve months at the kitchen table in her parents' house, with her sister, in a mask, learning online. It was a strange year. Her father, laid off by the collapse of the oil price, spent it at home, learning from his sister, by telephone, to cook. Her mother went on working at the pharmacy counter with a plastic visor and a very long queue. Laura took on, with the full seriousness of nineteen, the running of the household: the shopping, the schedule, the bills and the list on the refrigerator of which grandparent had been telephoned on which day. She telephoned her grandfather, who was in his eighties, every evening for fifteen months. He said that she had a voice for the work. She finished her degree in 2022 and went to work in the office of a school on the west side of the city, as a registrar, and in 2024 was promoted to administrator of a larger one, a post that she holds today. The school stands near a railway line, and on the first morning she noticed that the old bell, the one that hung in the tower, was rung by hand, on the quarter hour, by the caretaker. She asked him to continue. She has a way of preserving what is plain and useful, and of leaving alone what is old. The Ledger has never asked her for anything beyond a few small favours, a list of a family's new address, a quiet word with a landlord and, once, in the autumn of 2023, a school record that proved that a certain boy had been enrolled under a certain name in a certain year. She found it in twenty minutes, said that it was in the wrong drawer and did not ask why it mattered. She is twenty-six, a tall, fair, neat, brown-eyed young woman with her father's height and her mother's briskness, a lanyard that she wears all day and a pair of sensible shoes. She lives in a small house of her own in the Baker neighbourhood of Denver, with a cat, a garden in boxes and a bookshelf in alphabetical order. She is engaged to nobody, runs a half marathon every spring and has a fixed rule, which is that she answers every message within the day. On Sundays she goes to her parents' house for dinner, where her sister, when she is not on shift in Portland, comes on a video call, and where her father, who is fifty-three and has a good deal to say, if one waits, carves the meat. Her aunt Lorraine, who has been known to take her aside afterwards, treats her with a kind of grave gratitude, and calls her, in a phrase that she has never quite explained, the bookkeeper of the family's good luck. Laura Kelly Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the Denver registrar who kept the cousins' addresses and the school's door, the granddaughter of The Pale Scythe who took the family's habit of care and made it a profession of order. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the clerks, the counters and the keepers of the lists, who showed that a name entered in the right place and a door that is locked at the right hour are among the oldest defences that the Ledger has ever had.