Norman Proctor Lister

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wary Wren. Craft: Witness Reading.

The schoolmaster of the river landings kept two sets of books, and only one of them was ever shown to the parents. Norman Proctor Lister, born in 1689 at Wilmington, Pennsylvania, taught reading, ciphering and a little Latin to the children of Quaker farmers and rivermen for most of his adult life, and for the last twenty-eight years of it he was also the vampire slayer known in the White Ledger as The Wary Wren. He was a Proctor by his mother's line and a Lister by his father's, and the double name he carried, which the Pennsylvania family settled on early, records the custom by which the Proctor surname so often passed through the women. He was the youngest of three sons of Norman Lister, a cooper, and Susannah Proctor, a Quaker weaver who had taken the family across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania in the 1680s, when Penn's colony was scarcely a decade old and the Delaware was still lined with Swedish and Dutch cabins. Susannah was also the vampire slayer called The Quaker Lantern, though her youngest son knew this only obliquely as a boy: he knew she went out on certain nights with a shaded lamp, that his father built barrels in the shop and pretended not to notice, and that she gave good advice about strangers. The Listers lived on the Christina river, where the cooperage supplied the flour barrels, tar casks and herring kegs that the landings shipped down to Philadelphia and the West Indies. Norman grew up in a house full of sawdust, iron hoops and the smell of oak, and in the sounds of a river town: sloops warping in on the tide, ferrymen shouting, the bell of the meeting at noon. His brothers were Joseph Proctor Lister, born in 1673 and long since a smith by the time Norman was old enough to remember, and Amos Proctor, born in 1680, who took up the family calling and became a slayer himself. The Quaker household shaped him more than the coopering trade did. Friends' schooling was plain but sound: reading from the Bible and Fox's Journal, a fair hand, arithmetic, and the discipline of holding one's peace until one had something worth saying. He was slight, dark-haired, with an alert head and a way of tilting it to one side when he listened, and it was that tilt, rather than any birdlike feature, that the family said first gave rise to the name of the Wren. He went as an usher to the schoolmaster at Wilmington, took over the little schoolhouse in his twenties, and by the time he married he had thirty scholars in a good winter and a reputation for the two things Pennsylvania parents prized: patience and no nonsense. In 1713 he married Susan Bowen, a seamstress from Lancaster, in the plain manner of Friends, and his two children, Amos Lister, born in 1715, and Mary Lister, born in 1717, were born into a house where the schoolroom and the parlour were the same room. The calling came in 1720, and it came out of a family quarrel. The details were never fully written down, but the White Ledger's margin says that after a quarrel over a boundary and a debt, a brother returned from the grave to finish it. Norman was thirty-one. He fought the thing off in a farm lane in the dark with a fence rail and a lantern, and the next morning he found that he could no longer hear a story without hearing what was wrong in it. That was the beginning of his craft, Witness Reading: the ability to sit across from a frightened neighbour and know, from the order of their words, what they had actually seen and what they had merely decided to have seen. Where other slayers tracked by prints and blood, he tracked by testimony. A farmer would tell him that a cow had strayed, and Norman, listening, would understand that the farmer had spent three nights sleeping in the byre, and why. He had no mentor, which is unusual in the ledgers, and he learned largely by error. His brother Amos Proctor, the slayer of the family, was away in the back country at the time, and Susannah had died in 1704. So he read what his mother had left, a small book of watchwords and remedies, and he taught himself the rifle from a hunter on the Brandywine. His gear was the long rifle of the Pennsylvania frontier, with its slow twist and its long, patient barrel, loaded with silver-cast shot, which he cast himself over the schoolroom stove after the last child had left, a task that filled the room with an odd smell his scholars sometimes remarked on. He carried the rifle in a greatcoat altered by his wife, who sewed deep pockets for the shot, and he told the district that his night errands were for the meeting's poor. The methods of the Wary Wren were quiet. He preferred to hear four or five accounts of a death or a disappearance and lay them side by side before setting foot in the place. In the winter of 1722 he was asked by a miller near the Brandywine why his hired men had begun to leave in the night. He spent three days in the mill kitchen listening to the miller's wife, the carters and the boy who swept, and concluded that they were all describing the same man, coming to the door at the same hour, with a courtesy that struck each of them as wrong. The vampire had been lodging in the loft above the wheel-pit for a month. Lister took it there at dawn with a single shot, and entered it in the White Ledger with the note that the miller's wife had done nine parts in ten of the work. He counted witnesses among his fellow hunters as surely as rifles. It was an ordinary thing for him to bring some difficult account to Amos Proctor, whom he loved and did not always understand, and to be told he was overthinking it, and to be right. His domestic life was cut short. Susan Bowen died in 1724, only four years after his calling, and he was left with the two children, aged nine and seven. He kept the schoolroom open the next morning. Mary, who was to become a slayer, was raised in the world of his night work in a way that Amos, who was a placid boy and not a slayer, never was, and Norman taught them both the same catechism: that a fact was a fact whether it was convenient or not. When his daughter was old enough he began to teach her to listen, sitting up with her over the kitchen table and playing a game of his own devising in which a story was told to her by a visitor and she had to say where it had been altered. She got better at it than he was. Of the rivalry with the Faulkners he spoke little. Pennsylvania was far from Lancashire, and the family's Red Ledger cousins were a name in a letter rather than a person in the next pew, but Norman kept the old grievance about Towton with the mild, correct attitude of a man who believed it was for the record and not for revenge. He recorded that the Faulkners had counted a certain hunt in New England twice, and he wrote a courteous note, and he received a courteous reply. He died in 1748, aged fifty-nine, thrown from a horse on a road he had ridden a thousand times, a fall that broke his neck and ended a life that had not been notable for haste. He was buried beside Susan in the Friends' ground. The schoolhouse passed to a younger master, and the rifle went to Mary, who carried it for two more years before her own death in 1750, and Amos Lister lived on until 1788. In the White Ledger his tally is small, but it is notable for having no error in it, and in the Slayerverse the Wary Wren remains the model of the slayer who won by listening: a schoolmaster who taught the family that every haunted place has a witness, and that the witness, if you wait long enough, will tell you what you need.