Norma Proctor Thorne

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Thorne), known as The Long Lantern. Craft: Seal and Sanction.

The family book gives Norma Proctor Thorne one name for the field and a plainer one for the kitchen. In the field she was The Long Lantern, a Detective of the White Ledger, whose craft was Seal and Sanction and whose gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. At home she was the girl who kept the boarding house by the depot, and she was both of those things at once for exactly four years, which is the whole of her career as a vampire slayer. She was born in 1921 in Phoenix, Arizona, and died in 1949, aged twenty-eight, in an ambush on a lonely road. She was the daughter of the telegraph operator Alexander Proctor Thorne and the seamstress Adriana Navarro, and the younger sister of James Proctor Thorne, who was not called. In 1941 she married the streetcar conductor Lloyd Stone, and they had one child, Adriana Proctor, born in 1944, who became a nurse. Norma was called in 1945, on a lonely road, when a coach arrived with a driver and no passengers. She belonged to the House of Thorne and to the Proctor bloodline, which keeps the White Ledger, and she was by training and temper the most careful hunter of her generation. She was born in Phoenix on a railway posting. In the late summer of 1921 the Southern Pacific operator at the Phoenix depot died at his key of a stroke, and the company, which was short of men who could take a hundred words a minute and be trusted with a cipher, sent Alexander Proctor Thorne down from Oakland on a relief assignment of a few months, with his wife, who was expecting, and a four-year-old son. They took a furnished room by the tracks. It was a hot, loud, dusty town of twenty-odd thousand people at the end of the long irrigation canals, with the Salt River Valley laid out in cotton and citrus around it, and in the second week of September, in a heat that made the sounder sticky, a telegram arrived on Alexander's own wire from San Antonio, where the creek had come up over the downtown streets and drowned a good part of the Westside. Adriana's people were there. Alexander spent the night taking the news of the flood off the line and sending his own, and Norma arrived in the small hours, with the water still rising a thousand miles away. The family has always told it that she was born in the week of the flood, and that she was early for it. The assignment ended in the spring, and they went back to the Bay with the baby on a Pullman shelf. She grew up in Oakland and Alameda, in rented houses near the Southern Pacific mole, with a brother four years older and a mother whose workroom was the front window. She was a small, dark, intent child who sat under the cutting table and sorted the pins. Adriana kept a book of newspaper clippings in a flour sack, which she had inherited from her own father, and the child learned to read from it. She had her father's way of waiting to be told and her mother's way of noticing the thing that did not fit, and the two together made her, as the family said, a child who looked at the back of every page. Her grandmother taught her the craft, and she taught it by post. Harriet Bartlett, The Grey Quill, was a Kentucky laundress of the White Ledger who had lifted wax seals with a warm knife for sixty years, and who had decided, on the evidence of a birthday letter written by a girl of eleven, that her granddaughter had the hand for it. She sent, in the following years, a long series of envelopes, each sealed with a different wax. She enclosed no instructions, only a note that said to open it without breaking anything. The first took Norma a week. By fourteen she could lift a seal, read what was under it and lay it back so that the owner would not have known, and by sixteen she could do it with a lamp, with the owner in the next room. Harriet wrote that this was only the lesser half, and that the greater half was the sanction, the knowing of whom to ask for leave and in what words, so that the door that you had to go through was opened to you by the person who owned it. It was a discipline of manners as much as of hands. Norma, who had a quiet manner, took to it as another girl takes to the piano. The Depression years were hard on a telegraph operator's family, though not so hard as on farmers, and Adriana's sewing carried the household through the winters of 1932 and 1933. Norma left school at seventeen, in 1938, and typed and filed for a shipping agent on the Oakland estuary, among bills of lading and manifests, and learned from them what a document is when someone wishes to lie in it. In the spring of 1939 she took her savings, a loan from her father and a letter from his old chief at the Southern Pacific, and went back to Phoenix, where she had begun, to take the lease of a boarding house on a side street near the depot. It had eleven rooms and a porch. She was eighteen. The railway men who lodged there said that they had never been so well fed or so well watched. She met Lloyd Stone in the autumn of 1940, on the Van Buren car, and they were married in 1941 in a small church downtown, with her father giving her away and her mother, who had made the dress, standing in the vestibule with pins in her mouth in case of a hem. She had said nothing to him, in the year of their courtship, about the Ledger. She had said only that she liked a man who called the stops clearly. He took the boarding house on with her, and the cars, and the rest of it, and Adriana Proctor was born in the front bedroom in the heat of 1944, in the war years, when the little town on the canals had become a great training ground for pilots and the city was full of young men in uniform who wanted a room. Norma kept the house full. She wrote every lodger's name in a book. She wrote, beside it, in another hand, that of her mother's clippings, any word that she had heard of any stranger. She was called in the spring of 1945, on a lonely road, at night. She had borrowed a car to go out to Tempe to see a cousin of her husband's, and was coming back by the old Mesa road, between the canals and the desert, when a coach came towards her out of the dark, an old-fashioned thing, black, with a driver on the box and the lamps lit, and no passengers. She stopped. She sat with the engine running and watched it pass, and she saw that the horses made no sound, and that the driver did not turn his head. She noted the time, the mile and the colour of the lamps, and she wrote it all down on the back of an envelope under the dome light, and it was only when she had finished that she found that her hands were quite steady. She said afterwards that it was the envelope that had told her what she was. A woman who stops her car in the dark to make notes is not in the usual way afraid. She told her husband in the summer, and her father in the autumn, and wrote to her grandmother, who replied at once, in a hand that was a little less firm than it had been, to say that she had been waiting twenty years for that letter. Harriet died in a car accident that same year, in the winter, and Norma was her only pupil. The Ledger called her The Long Lantern, in part for the lamp in the boarding house window, which her husband trimmed every evening, and in part for her habit of working at length, in a narrow circle of light, over one problem. She was a Detective. The Proctors use the word for the hunters who go by questions, documents and comparison, and who will sit with a bundle of papers for a week rather than go through a door unprepared. She worked on the strangers who came to the lodging houses and depots of the desert towns, and who were never quite what their papers said. A man who paid a fortnight in advance and did not use the bed. A woman with a trunk that arrived by freight and was never claimed. She read their letters, with a warm knife and a steady hand, and sent the copies to the Ledger's western chapter in a code that her brother, at a key in San Francisco, passed on. In the four years that were left to her she took, by the family's count, seven creatures, in Phoenix, in Tucson and in the railway towns, each of them on the authority of a document that she had read and a door that had been opened to her by its rightful keeper. She never broke a seal in the course of her work. It was the only boast that she was ever heard to make. In the spring of 1949, at dusk, Norma went out alone to look at a ranch house in the hills east of the city, where a lodger of hers had said that a man of the wrong sort was said to be sheltering, and on the road home she was ambushed. It was a lonely stretch, with no house in sight and the saguaros black against the last of the light. She had a pistol and a case of rounds, and she used them. She was found in the morning by a cattleman, in the front seat of her borrowed car, and on the seat beside her was a clear and exact account of the whole affair, in her own hand, in an envelope that had been sealed, with the seal unbroken. She was twenty-eight. The cousin from New Orleans who read it, the carpenter Norman Thorne, wrote that he had never seen a plainer statement or a braver one. Her husband took off his cap on the step of his bus, and her mother, in San Antonio, went to the machine and finished a wedding dress. Norma Proctor Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the long, steady lamp in the window of the boarding house by the depot, the hunter who never broke a seal. In the Slayerverse she stands for the patient detectives of the White Ledger, who went by documents and by leave, who wrote down what they had seen before they let themselves be afraid of it, and who proved that a careful account, left sealed on the seat of a car, can outlast the person who wrote it.