Mary Eaton Faulkner was born in 1781 in Wilmington, on the Brandywine, and she lived forty-two years as a boarding-house keeper and, for the last twelve of them, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls her The Still Yoke, a name she earned by the way she carried a heavy load, whether a tray of dishes or a wounded man, without a sound or a spill. She was a Hunter by temperament and her craft was Quarry Reading, the art of learning a vampire's habits from what it left behind. She died in 1823 in an ambush on a lonely road, and the Ledger records the night without adornment.
Her parents were both slayers. Her father, Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner, born in 1749 and dead in 1814, was a carpenter and the man the Ledger calls The Steady Lamp. Her mother, Betsey Eaton, born in 1752 and dead in 1801, was a dairywoman whom the Ledger names The Gentle Bell. The pair had raised their older child, Jacob Eaton Faulkner, born in 1777 in Salem, to be a printer, and were not at all sure what to make of a second child with a steadier hand and a colder eye. By the time Mary was born the family had moved from the Massachusetts coast to the Delaware, following the flour trade and the canal works, and she grew up in the canal towns and iron country of Pennsylvania, among bargemen, furnace hands and Quaker millers.
The country of her childhood was a new one. The iron plantations of eastern Pennsylvania, with their blast furnaces and forges, their charcoal burners' camps and their great stone ironmaster's houses, lay within a day's ride of Wilmington, and the rivers carried pig iron, flour and lumber to the Delaware. The canal era was beginning, with its locks, towpaths and mules, and the towns along the routes, Wilmington, Chester, Reading and Lancaster, grew quickly. It was a place of cheap labour and sudden rumours, where a stranger could vanish into the crowd and a sleeper in a furnace shed might never be missed. Her father's hunting took him into this world every night, and he took Mary in as soon as she could hold a lantern.
She was sixteen when her mother's health began to fail, and she took over the family's boarding house, a tall brick building on a canal basin where bargemen and travelling men took a bed and a hot supper. She ran it with a steady hand. She knew what each lodger ate, when he rose and when he came in, and she listened to their talk with the same unhurried attention she gave the soup. The work gave her a quality of quiet that struck everybody who met her. She moved about the house without sound, set down a plate without a clink and could tell from the footfall in the passage which lodger was climbing the stairs.
Her calling came late, in 1811, at the age of thirty. She had gone up to the loft of the meeting house chapel, where the parish records were kept, to fetch a register for the churchwarden, and found, in the burial column for the previous winter, a name written in a hand that nobody could read. It was not a foreign name, and it was not a bad hand; it was simply illegible, as if the pen had resisted the letters. She stood in the dusty loft for a long time holding the book, feeling the skin crawl on her arms. Then she went down to her father's house and told him what she had found. He looked at the page for a minute and said that he had been waiting for her to come to it.
Quarry Reading was the craft she developed in the years after. Her father had taught her to follow a vampire by sight and sound, but Mary learned to follow it by what it left behind: the way a sleeper lay, the temperature of a cellar, the pattern of dust on a stair, the absence of flies, the direction of a footprint in the ash of a hearth. She kept a notebook in which she recorded these traces in a neat, small hand, and she learned to read them as a tracker reads a trail. Her gear was silver-cast shot and a revolving pistol of the new kind, a rare piece that her father had ordered from a gunsmith in Philadelphia, and which she oiled every Sunday after church.
She worked without show. The boarding house was her cover and her observatory. A guest who did not eat, who kept the shutters closed all day or who paid in old coin was noted, and more than once a lodger left in the morning in a hurry because a landlady's polite questions had frightened him. Her father's death in 1814 left her the head of the house and the senior hunter of the Wilmington branch, and she took up the role with the same quiet. The Ledger records some thirty vampires in her name, most of them taken between 1815 and 1822, in the canal basins and iron villages along the Brandywine and the Schuylkill.
In the autumn of 1823 she travelled north to Salem to nurse her brother Jacob, who was dying of a fever, and she sat with him until the end. She returned to Pennsylvania in the last days of October. On a December night, on a lonely road between Wilmington and the furnace country, she was stopped by a party of men who had followed her from the canal, hired, the Faulkners later learned, by a vampire she had been tracking for a month. She killed two of them before the third shot her. She was forty-two. The boarding house was taken over by a cousin.
A small detail from the boarding house shows how she worked. She kept a slate by the kitchen door on which she chalked each lodger's habits in a private shorthand, such as whether he took salt, whether he slept with the window open and whether he ever asked for the lamp to be left burning. On the nights when she went out, she wiped the slate clean, so that nobody reading it could learn what she knew. Her niece, who later kept the house, found the slate after her death and could make nothing of it except that every entry ended in a small cross, which, in Mary's system, meant watched and found harmless.
Mary Eaton Faulkner is remembered as The Still Yoke, the landlady who read the dust on the stairs. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunter who worked with the patience of a housekeeper and the eye of a detective, and for whom the ordinary run of a boarding house was the best kind of surveillance.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
