Mark Fontenot Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Bright Lamp. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

He carried a lamp, in the end, because the hospital corridors at three in the morning were dark and because a nurse who carries one is believed. Mark Fontenot Faulkner was born in 1981 at New Orleans (Algiers), Louisiana, and died in 2006 of an old wound that never closed, aged twenty-five. He worked as a nurse and, from 1997, as a vampire slayer of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger, in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of modern New Orleans. The family book knows him as The Bright Lamp, and it classes him as a Soldier, a hunter of duty and drill, who holds a post, keeps a schedule and does not leave until relieved. His craft was Dusk Patrol, the discipline of walking the same fixed route at the same hour every evening until the creatures of a district learn that the line is held, and his gear was a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He was called in 1997, in an inn yard, when a guest asked for lodging and would not cross the threshold. He was the only son of the lineman and slayer Leonard Faulkner, The Lone Rook, who died before he was born, and of the laundry supervisor Frances Fontenot. In 2000 he married the court clerk Monica Haddad, and they had two daughters, Melissa Haddad Faulkner, born in 2003, and Wendy Faulkner, born in 2004, who is a slayer in her turn. He was born in the second week of September 1981, in the little house near the ferry landing at Algiers, six months after the churchyard in Gretna where his father was struck down, and the first thing that anyone remarked on was that he had the hands. They were large, square, fair-skinned hands, the Faulkner hands, which his mother recognised at once and which his aunt Ethel, who was holding a lamp because the power had failed in a squall, said would be good for a ladder. He was a big, fair, grave baby who did not cry. Ethel stood godmother in the church at Algiers, and took a close interest in him from that day, as she did in anything that her brother had left behind. He grew up on the west bank, in the house that smelled of starch and, on Sundays, of his mother's gumbo, among the women of the laundry floor, who made a pet of him, and the cousins who came by to see how he was getting on. He liked machines, and he liked, more than machines, people who were in trouble. At nine he carried a neighbour's groceries up three flights because she had broken her hip. At eleven he sat up all night with a sick dog next door. The calling came in the summer of 1997, when he was fifteen and was working weekends on his mother's laundry van, delivering linen to the hotels of the French Quarter. It was a Saturday evening in July, the light long and yellow, the heat standing in the streets like a wall. He had a bundle for a small courtyard inn on Dauphine Street, a place of green shutters and a fountain, with an arched carriage-way from the street into a flagged yard and a gas lamp burning in the arch, and he was at the desk with the clean sheets when a guest came to the gate. He was a tall, courteous man in an old-fashioned linen suit, and he stood at the mouth of the carriage-way, in the dusk, and asked the night porter whether there was a room. The porter said that there was. The man said that he would be very glad of it. He did not move. He stood with the toe of one shoe a hand's breadth from the threshold of the arch and said, a second time and with the same courtesy, that he would be very glad, and Mark, who was standing at the porter's elbow with a sheet in his arms and who had been brought up by a laundress to notice, saw that the porter, who was old and slow, had not understood that he was waiting to be asked in. He did not ask him in. It was the whole of what he did, and he did it without having been told. He took the lamp down from its hook in the arch, a heavy brass thing with a glass chimney that the inn kept for the hurricane season, and held it up in the carriage-way between himself and the man, and said, in the voice of a boy of fifteen who was frightened and did not mean to show it, that the inn was full. The man looked at the lamp. He looked for some time. Then he said that it was a pity, and went off down Dauphine Street, and the porter, who had heard nothing but a young man telling a guest that there was no room, thanked Mark and gave him a dollar. He took the van home and told his mother at the table. She listened to the end. Then she put down the iron and went to find the telephone, and he heard her say to Ethel, in her flat counting voice, that it had happened. Ethel took him in hand that winter, on Saturdays, in her house at Algiers, with her father's old notebook and the family's pistol, and she was a patient teacher and an exacting one. She taught him that a creature cannot be argued with and cannot be hurried, and that what was needed was a post. A hunter could not be everywhere. He had to be somewhere, at the same hour every day, in good order, so that anything that wished to pass would learn that the road was held. It was a soldier's lesson, and he took to it as to a uniform. He named his craft himself, Dusk Patrol, and the Ledger records that for nine years he walked, in the half hour after sunset, the same route in the Algiers streets, from the ferry landing to the old levee and back by the church, at a steady pace, with a lamp, and that in nine years no creature was ever recorded to have crossed it. His cousins called him The Bright Lamp. He liked the name, and he also liked to point out that a lamp is a thing that is carried to a place and set down. He met Monica Haddad in the summer of 1999, in a crowded club on Frenchmen Street, where her cousin's band was playing and where he had gone, at seventeen, in plain clothes, to walk a patrol of a different kind. She was twenty-one, a quick, neat, dark-haired court clerk with a good laugh and a habit of correcting spelling on a menu, and she asked him what he did. He said that he was a nursing student. It was nearly true. He had that month applied to the nursing school at the community college, and he was accepted in the autumn. They were married in 2000, in a church in Algiers, with Ethel standing up with the bridegroom and Frances, in a navy suit, sobbing into a pressed handkerchief, and Monica was told what the Faulkners were, on the evening before, on a bench under a live oak, by her future husband and his aunt. She said that she had been waiting for the catch. He qualified in 2002 and took a night post at a hospital in the city, on a surgical floor, among the lights and the machines, which he said was a place that suited a soldier because everything in it had a schedule. Melissa Haddad Faulkner was born in the spring of 2003 and Wendy Faulkner in the autumn of 2004, and he held them both in the corridor of the same hospital, in a green gown, with a lamp on a low bracket and a nurse at his elbow. He took them to the levee on Sunday afternoons, one on each arm, to watch the ships. In the last week of August 2005 the hurricane came up from the Gulf and the levees failed. He was on duty on the floor of the hospital on the night that the power went, and he stayed, as did all of the staff on his ward, for five days, in the heat, carrying patients by hand down the stairs, with a lamp, in the dark, because he had been taught that a nurse who carries one is believed. His wife and daughters, who had been sent away to Houston with the cousins while his mother stayed to close the laundry, did not hear from him for six days. On the sixth he came out by boat with the last of his patients and walked the Algiers levee at dusk, at the hour he always had, and the Ledger records that on one of those evenings, in the dark of the drowned neighbourhoods, he was struck in the side by something that had come out of the flooded streets in search of an easy night. He dressed the wound himself. He was a nurse, and he knew precisely what it was. It did not close. He lived fourteen months more, and worked for twelve of them, walking the route with a lamp and a hand pressed to his ribs. His aunt Ethel, who watched him as a woman watches a post that is about to fall, said nothing. His mother, who sorted what he brought home, sent for a doctor, and then for another. He died in November 2006, in the front room at Algiers, at twenty-five, with his wife beside him, and was buried next to his father in the Faulkner tomb, with a stone that his mother had washed herself. The lamp from the inn's hall, which the owner brought to the funeral, is in the house of his daughter Wendy. Mark Fontenot Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Bright Lamp, the nurse who held a post at dusk for nine years and who turned a creature from an inn door with nothing but a light and the word full. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Soldiers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who won by duty, drill and the plain refusal to leave a post, and who showed that a short life spent holding a line can keep a whole neighbourhood safe.