Lois Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Dry Beacon. Craft: Quiet Confrontation.

Lois Proctor was born in 1943 at Fort Worth, Texas, and lived seventy-three years as a diner waitress in the rail yards, banks and suburbs of north Texas and, from 1963, as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor. The family book knows her as The Dry Beacon, a name for a signal that gives light without any warmth, and it classes her as a Detective, a hunter who works by questions, records and patient attention, and who keeps a notebook where other hunters keep a rifle. Her craft was Quiet Confrontation, the art of telling a vampire, in a calm voice and a public room, that it has been seen, and her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She was called in 1963, in an inn yard, when a guest asked for lodging and would not cross the threshold. She was the only child of the cotton factor and slayer Norman Proctor, The Narrow Kestrel, and of the laundress Vera Milam. In 1963 she married the high school coach Edward Russell, and they raised two children, Vera Russell, a slayer, and Gary Proctor Russell, who was not called. She died in 2016 of a fall, aged seventy-three. She served the pie, took the order and watched the room, and the family remembers that she saw more from behind a counter than most hunters see from a rooftop. She was born in the spring of 1943, in a Fort Worth hospital near the stockyards, in the war years when the aircraft plant on the west side ran three shifts and the whole city smelled of packing houses and hot metal. Her father Norman, who had been rejected by the army on account of a punctured eardrum and was in no way sorry, was at his desk in the cotton office on the day and was told of her arrival by a runner. He came to the hospital, looked at the baby for some time and said that she was observing him. The family home was a frame house in Arlington, on a quiet street of new suburbs between the two cities, and she grew up in it, a tall, thin, dark-eyed girl with a plain face and a long, level gaze that unsettled teachers. Her mother, a freckled, patient woman from a farm in Johnson County, ran a laundry from the back porch and counted everything. Her father was away a good deal, and on Thursday evenings he vanished altogether. She was seventeen when he died. Norman was killed in the autumn of 1960, under a collapsed barn near Weatherford, on a night hunt that his daughter had not known he made, and she stood at the funeral at Arlington in a borrowed black coat, at the back, as he would have stood, counting the room. Her mother took her aside afterwards and put into her hand a worn pocket notebook, with a grey cloth cover and a pencil in the spine, and said that her father had meant her to have it when she was old enough to be careful. It held the names of nine people, the dates on which each had been seen in a public place and a short note on what had been said. At the back, in his small clear hand, was a single line: "Say the name. Say the date. Say that others know. Then wait." Lois read it that night, and again in the morning, and put it in the pocket of her uniform, where it stayed for fifty-six years. The uniform was that of a diner on the old highway between the two cities, where she had taken a job at sixteen, after school, for the tips. It was a long chrome counter with twelve stools, a pie case and a window that looked on the road, and it was run by a sour, kindly cook named Hank who had been a Marine, and who taught her to carry four plates on one arm and to forget what she had heard. She learned the rest without being taught. A waitress at a highway diner sees a great many people at the worst hour of the day, tired, hungry, lonely or in a hurry, and learns, in a year, to read them as a doctor reads a chart. She knew the salesmen who lied about their wives, the truckers who did not sleep, the couples who were running away and the boys on leave. She knew who tipped and who did not, who looked at the door and who did not look at all. She had, before she was twenty, the gift her father had spent his life acquiring, which was to be the one person in a room who was paying attention. She was called in October of 1963, in the yard of a travellers' inn near Arlington, six months after her wedding. She had gone out at dusk to take a pot of coffee to the night clerk, who was a friend, and as she crossed the cobbled yard behind the old stage-stop she saw a man at the gate with a leather bag. He asked the clerk for lodging. He was courteous and well dressed and perfectly pleasant, and the clerk said that they had a room, and held the door, and the man stood at the threshold, with the lamplight on his boots, and did not cross it. He did not say why. He smiled, and said that he would wait for the morning, and the clerk, who was young, shrugged and said that suited him. Lois, who had not moved, set the coffee pot down on the wall, took out her father's notebook and wrote the date. Then she walked up to the man, in the open yard, under the lamp, in her apron, and said in her ordinary voice that she knew what he was, that she knew the day he had come to the county and that two other people knew as well. It was not true. She stood still. The man looked at her for a long time, and bowed, and went down the road. It was the only time she lied to a vampire, she said, and the only time that she ever needed to. She told her husband that night. She laid the pistol on the kitchen table beside the salt and said that she had something to explain, and Edward, who had been married to her for six months, listened for an hour, and made the coffee. He was the best thing that ever happened to her, and she said so, in the family way, which was by mentioning it once, in passing, at his sixtieth birthday. Her mother Vera, who had known for fourteen years what her husband did, and had kept it to herself with a silence that she thought a virtue, knew what the notebook meant when Lois took it out, and said that she would see to the shirts. She worked the diner by day and the Ledger by night for fifty years. A Detective, in the White Ledger's sense, is a hunter who solves a thing before she fights it, and Lois worked through documents and questions: the register of a boarding house, a county deed, a funeral director's book, a waitress's remembered order. She was patient and exact, and she never hurried. When she was sure of a creature, she asked him to sit down in a public place, a hotel lobby, a bank, a Sunday-school picnic, and she said the name, the date and the number of people who knew, and then she waited. It was her father's art, and she carried it on to the letter. A good many left Texas on the next bus. A few, who stayed, she met afterward, in places where the question had been replaced by the pistol. She was careful in the Vietnam years, when the highways were full of boys on leave and strangers with a great deal of cash, and in the years of the oil bust, when every diner in the state served the unemployed at half price. In the last week of September 2001 she was working the lunch shift when the television above the pie case showed the second tower, and a stranger at the counter said, to no one, that it had come out of a clear sky. She looked at him for some time, and said that it hadn't, and put down his bill. Her daughter Vera Russell, born in 1966, came to the diner at ten, sat on a stool with a glass of milk and watched her mother, and was called, in her own turn, in 1989, when a foster-brother of the household, Danny Hollis, came back from the grave to finish a quarrel. Gary Proctor Russell, born in 1968, was never called and was entirely happy about it. She was equally fond of both. In 1998 she moved back with Edward to Austin, took a small brick house in Hyde Park, and, to nobody's surprise, found herself a counter within a week, at a diner on Lamar, where she worked two days a week for eighteen more years and kept the notebook in her apron. She died in the winter of 2016, aged seventy-three, of a fall, on the front step of that diner, going in for a Thursday shift. The step was wet and she was carrying a pie. Edward arrived within the hour. The notebook, the family found afterwards, held three hundred and four entries, one in her hand for every person she had told, in a public room, that they had been seen, and at the back, under her father's line, a second in her own. It read: "Be pleasant. They have the habit of expecting a fight." Lois Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Dry Beacon, the waitress who said a creature's name across a pie counter and waited for it to leave. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Detectives of the White Ledger, the hunters who watched, recorded and asked, and who showed that the most dangerous person in a crowded room may be the one carrying the coffee.