Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Slow Bell. Craft: Night Trapping.

Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner was born in 1971 at Denver, Colorado, and is living today in Denver, where she works as a hospital cook and, since 1997, as a vampire slayer of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Slow Bell, a name that sets her beside her grandmother, The Slow Rook, and recalls a bell that is rung once, late and carries a very long way, and it classes her as a Hunter, a slayer of the plain tracking kind, who follows a creature by what it leaves behind and does not trouble herself with disguises or bargains. Her craft is Night Trapping, the art of laying a snare along the route that a hunted thing must take in the hours of darkness and of closing it between the last light and the first, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was called in 1997, on a road at dusk, when the fear left the animals before it left the people. She is the elder child of the electrician and slayer Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, who was her mentor, and of the librarian Beatrice Kowalski, and the sister of Mark Kowalski Faulkner. In 1993 she married the line cook Michael Sullivan, and they have one son, Eugene Sullivan Faulkner, who is a slayer in his turn. She was named for her father's mother, Lorraine Faulkner Carter, who came over from Los Angeles on the train in the spring of 1971 to help at the birth, and who held the baby in the bedroom doorway of the little house on the north side and said that she had very large hands. She was born at night, in March, with the snow coming down on Larimer Street, a quiet, round, serious infant who watched the ceiling lamp as if it owed her something. Her mother, who ran the reference desk at the Denver public library, said that the child had taken in the whole of the catalogue by the age of two, and her father, who wired half the street, said that she was the only baby he had ever known who looked at a fuse box with respect. Her grandmother taught her the kitchen, over three weeks of Christmas visits, on a stool, with a wooden spoon. She was nine on the night of the fire, and remembered the morning after, when her father came in at six, sat at the kitchen table with his hands round a cup and looked for a long time at the lace curtain. He told her mother, who wrote it down. In the following weeks the porch light was kept on, the tool-room door was kept closed, and a long grey coat appeared on a peg in the hall that none of the children was allowed to touch. He began to go out at dusk with a flask and a torch and to come back at midnight smelling of cold ground. She watched him from the window. In the winter of 1984 she rode with him in the van to Los Angeles, in a snowstorm, for her grandmother's funeral, and he told her on the road, in a sentence, what his mother had done. She was thirteen. She said that she had worked it out some time before, and that it was nice to hear it said. She was no hunter at thirteen, and no one asked her to be. She was a large, steady, bookish girl with her mother's dark eyes and her father's silence, and a gift for the kitchen. At fifteen she took a Saturday job at a diner on Colfax, in the pantry, peeling onions, and at sixteen she was on the line. She took a certificate at a culinary programme in 1989 and went to work in the kitchen of a large Denver hospital, where she remained, with two short intervals, for thirty-seven years. She was the head cook on the day shift by 2005, a tall, powerful, unhurried woman in checked trousers and a hairnet, with a way of tasting a stockpot that made the dietitians stand back. She met Michael Sullivan in the January of 1992, in a long tent of food stalls at the National Western Stock Show, where the hospital kitchen had been asked to cater for the veterans' luncheon and where he was working the grill for a barbecue outfit from Aurora. He was seventeen, an Irish-American Denver boy, a head shorter than she was, with red hair, a burn on the back of his hand and a cheerful, unflappable temperament, and they were put at adjoining ranges. By the fourth day he had asked her to supper, which she refused, and cooked her a steak. They were married the next year, in 1993, in the Catholic church where her parents had married, with her mother Beatrice, who remarked on his age, in tears and her father, who did not, in a tie. She was twenty-two and he was eighteen, and in the matter of who was in charge of the household the family has never been in doubt. Eugene Sullivan Faulkner was born in 1996, in the autumn, and it was the following year, when the baby was ten months old and she had gone back to the early shift, that she was called. She had driven down in the second week of the summer to see her mother's people near Phoenix, with the baby, by the long road through the mountains of New Mexico, and was coming back alone on a Sunday evening, on a two-lane highway north of Santa Fe, with the sun going down behind the mesa and the radio gone to static. She noticed that there was no bird on the wire, no cow at the fence and no dog on any porch, and that the cattle that had been grazing at the roadside that morning had gone through a broken gate and stood a mile off in the scrub, in the dusk, with their heads down. She stopped. A car stood in the lay-by ahead with its hood up and a family beside it, a man, a woman and two small children in the grey light, waiting for a tow. They were quite calm. They were not afraid. They were not, as it seemed to her, as she sat with the engine running, afraid of anything at all. She had been taught, without ever being told, that the animals knew first. She sat and counted. The animals had gone and the people had not, and the difference between them was the thing that she was looking at. She took the pistol that her father had given her at her wedding from the glove compartment, loaded it, got out and walked up to the family. She asked whether they needed help. The man said that they were fine and that he had a friend on the way. She said that she would wait with them, and sat down on the verge, and for forty minutes, in the dusk, with the first stars out and the cattle standing silent in the scrub, she talked about the weather and the road and Santa Fe, and watched the man's feet. There was no shadow. When the light finally went he turned to look at her, and she shot him, in the lay-by, with the family looking on, and the family, who were people and who were quite unharmed, said afterwards that they remembered nothing about the evening except a very large woman who had sat with them on the verge and talked about her mother. She rang her father from a motel at midnight. Eugene, who was fifty-one, met her on the road at Raton the next day in the van, with a thermos, and for a week took her through what he knew, which was mostly how to be slow. Her mother Beatrice went with her to the first night out, in the autumn of 1997, and held the thermos. Night Trapping, as she works it, is a cook's craft, a matter of mise en place. A creature, she found, is a creature of habit, of the hours between dusk and dawn, and of the routes that it must take to feed, to shelter and to travel, and those are knowable. She learned the sunsets, the moon and the roads of the eastern plains, and she learned to lay a trap along one of them in the afternoon, when the creature slept, with a line of road flares, a length of cord, a pair of lamps and a good deal of patience, so that when it came out at dusk to walk the line that it always walked, it would walk into a place from which there was only one way out. The cousins, in the Faulkner way, called her The Slow Bell, for the grandmother who had taught her father to be slow and for the patience that she shared with her. She raised Eugene in a house in the south of the city, among a good deal of cooking, and he was called in his turn. Her brother Mark, who is a roughneck in the oil field and has no interest in the work, says that she is the only person he knows who will cook a full dinner at four in the morning for a man she is about to shoot. Her mother died in 2011, after a long illness, and she sat with her through the last week. Her father, who is living, rings her on Sundays, and she is the one who sees that he eats. In September 2001 and again in the pandemic years the hospital kitchen did not close, and she cooked through both. She is fifty-five, a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired woman with a calm, wide face, a scar from a fryer on one forearm and a habit, in any kitchen, of reading the room. She still goes out at dusk, a little less often, with a flask and a map, and she keeps a notebook of the routes that she has trapped, with the date and the time and a single word. The word is the same on every page. It is Done. Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Slow Bell, the Denver cook who laid the table before the creature arrived and shut the door behind it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Hunters of the Red Ledger, the plain trackers and patient trappers who worked the roads in the dark, and who proved that a map, a thermos and a very steady hand can close a night as firmly as any gun.