Nobody in Marblehead thought it strange that the schoolmistress walked out along the shore road at dusk with a long rifle over her arm, because by then most of the town's men had gone to sea or to war and the women had taken over whatever needed doing. Naomi Lord Faulkner, born in 1757 at Marblehead, Massachusetts, was a schoolteacher by trade and a vampire slayer by calling, a member of the Lancastrian house that kept the Red Ledger, and a descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. In the ledger she is known as The Fallow Drover, a name she earned from her habit of moving through empty ground at the end of the day, herding the dark ahead of her the way a drover herds cattle off a field.
Marblehead in her childhood was a fishing port of narrow lanes, salt-stained shingles and granite outcrops, built so tightly on its rocky peninsula that a house might have its back door in another family's front yard. It was a town of cod, of schooners bound for the Grand Banks, of widows, and of a plain-spoken, rowdy independence that both Boston and Salem regarded with a degree of alarm. Naomi's father, Samuel Putnam Faulkner, born in 1730, was a blacksmith, and his forge stood near the harbour, where the ringing of the hammer competed with gulls and the cries of the fish-flakes. He shod horses and made ships' ironwork, anchors, chain plates, hooks and nails, and he taught his daughter early that a piece of iron would say when it was ready if one only watched its colour. Her mother, Deborah Lord, born in 1733, was a herbalist who kept a garden of physic plants in the lee of a stone wall and dispensed remedies to half the neighbourhood. Naomi's younger brother Obadiah Faulkner, born in 1760, was as sturdy as she was slight, and in time became a slayer as well, though of a different temperament.
She learned to read at a dame school and went on quickly, and by her late teens was teaching the younger children of the neighbourhood in a room over a sailmaker's loft. Schoolteaching in Massachusetts at that time was a modest but respectable trade for a woman, paid partly in coin and partly in board, and Naomi was thorough at it. She taught letters from the primer and the psalter, arithmetic from a battered ciphering book, and, on the sly, the names of the constellations, which she had from her father's habit of watching the sky for weather. She kept a switch on her desk, hardly used, and a reputation for fairness that outlasted her.
The war began to reach her family in her late teens. Marblehead's fishermen formed some of the most famous regiments of the Continental Army, and the town lost sons in numbers it could hardly bear. In 1778, after a long illness that kept her in bed for nearly two months in the winter, she woke one morning to find her own hands steadier than they had ever been. She could thread a needle by candlelight without a tremor, and when she held out her hand over the bedcover she could see that it did not move at all. She was twenty-one. It was the calling, and it came upon her quietly, without any of the drama of the older family stories, and it was her mother who understood it first, from the way her daughter looked at the window that evening. There was no mentor waiting, no senior hunter in the family close enough to take her on. She taught herself, with the help of her father's account of the Red Ledger and the practical instruction of her brother, who had begun to learn the same ground.
Her craft was what the ledger called Dusk Patrol, a discipline of walking the same ground at the same hour until the smallest change in it announced itself. She would take a route, along the shore road, up through the burying ground, out along the causeway, and return by the fish flakes, timing it to the falling light, and after a few weeks of this she could tell a stone that had been shifted, a gull that had been startled, or a dog that refused to pass a particular gate. Her archetype, in the ledger's terms, was the Spy, one who watched and listened and reported. Her gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, poured by her father into moulds he had cut himself, and she carried it in the crook of her arm as though it were a schoolbook.
In 1780 she married Reuben Endicott, a circuit preacher, and the wedding was the sort of practical alliance the era's hunters favoured: he rode a wide circuit through the North Shore and the inland parishes, and his travels gave her news of places she could not reach, while her house gave him a fixed point to return to. Reuben was tall, courteous and rather absent-minded, and what he understood of her second life he understood by degrees. Their first child, Joshua Endicott Faulkner, was born in 1782, and Deborah Faulkner Endicott followed in 1786. Both children took the Faulkner name in some form, in the family's custom, and neither showed the calling, but Naomi raised them to keep the shutters closed at night, and to be able to tell a real caller from a false one.
She kept the school going through the war years and after, with a growing number of pupils, and gradually the school itself became a screen. A schoolmistress who knew every family on the peninsula, and who was told by the children what had been seen in the night, was in a splendid position to notice unusual absences. On more than one occasion a child mentioned, in passing, that the man who lodged on the far side of the cove did not come to meeting or eat with his landlady, and Naomi went to look. Her tally in the Red Ledger runs to a modest but steady number of entries in the 1780s and 1790s, mostly along the coast between Marblehead and Ipswich, and she was known to her fellow hunters as someone who did more with less noise than almost anyone in the house.
Her marriage was long, and her husband died in 1830, seven years after her. Their son Joshua died in 1829, and Deborah lived on until 1863. Naomi herself died in 1823, of a fall from a horse, at the age of sixty-six, on a country road she had ridden a hundred times. She was returning from a visit to a former pupil when the animal shied at something in the hedge, and the family, who knew her habits, took some comfort in the fact that she had died on her own ground and not in the dark.
In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the schoolteacher who patrolled the dusk, a Spy of the Red Ledger, and as proof that a calling did not need thunder to be real.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
