Rafe Proctor solved his first case before he had ever drawn a stake. He was born in 1494 at Whalley, in the Ribble valley of Lancashire, the youngest of the five children of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, and grew up in the house beside the abbey where his father's Red Ledger and his mother's law books shared a shelf. His father was the vampire slayer known as The Mended Rose, Hugh Faulkner's son, raised on the Red Ledger and the longbow; his mother, The White Bride, was Walter Proctor's daughter, schooled in law and in the harder arts. Of his siblings, Tristram Proctor was born in 1487, Edmund Faulkner in 1488, Robert Proctor in 1490 and Idonea Faulkner in 1491. He took his mother's name, in the family's usual way, and inherited her temperament: a slow, watchful mind with a habit of noticing what other people had stopped looking at. As a boy he could tell you which cart had passed the gate in the night by the ruts.
He was bound as a mason's apprentice at fourteen, in 1508, and the trade suited him. A mason's apprentice went where the stone went, to church towers, barn gables, abbey walls and manor cellars, and looked at buildings from the inside and out. Rafe learned how floors are laid over voids, how a wall thickens where a stair has been blocked, how a chimney breast conceals a cupboard. He learned to measure a room by pacing it, and to remember its measurements for years. His master thought him quiet and a little strange, a boy who sat in the finished chapel after the others had gone. In fact he was doing what he would do all his life, which was to work out where something could hide.
In 1513, at nineteen, he marched to Flodden with the Whalley men, as every northern parish sent its share. He carried a bill and, for the first time, saw what an organised body of men looked like from the inside: the watches, the rolls, the billeting lists, the way a camp of thousands ran on the discipline of small counted things. It was a revelation to him, and less because of the battle than the paperwork. He came home convinced that a hunt should be run like a camp, and that most vampires were taken not by courage but by a failure of procedure on the other side. In 1514 he married Rohese Barlow, a fishwife of Padiham, whom he had met on the road home; he was twenty, she twenty-one, and they took a house by the Calder. She left a horn lantern burning in the window whenever he was out at night, and the household treated the light as part of its furniture.
His calling came in 1517, in a stable. Rafe had been sent to look at a cracked lintel on a farm above Whalley, and slept the night in the loft because of a storm. Some time before dawn the horses began to scream, a sound he never forgot, and he came down the ladder in his shirt to find the stalls in uproar and the groom on the straw, cold and quite dead, with no mark on him but a pair of small punctures under the jaw. What he did next was the whole of his method in miniature. He did not run and did not shout; he closed the stable door, counted the horses, noted which were quiet and which were frantic, looked at the door of each stall and at the floor, and only then began to work out where the thing had gone. It had not left. It was in the hayloft above him. His mother, Isabel Proctor, came the next day at his message and became his mentor, as she had been her other children's, and told him that he had already done the first half of the work.
Under her teaching the calling took the form the ledgers call Procedural Trapping. Rafe did not out-fight vampires; he out-arranged them. He studied a creature's habits as a magistrate studies a suspect, its hours, its doorways, the houses it favoured and the thresholds it could not or would not cross, and then built the night in advance, with each exit closed and each approach observed, so that when it came it had nowhere to go. He worked with a small kit: a matchlock pistol of Low Countries make, which he could not use quickly but which stopped a running thing in a way no bow could; hawthorn stakes, cut and seasoned by his own hand; and a sealed ledger, bound in oiled leather, in which he wrote every observation of every night. He was patient to a degree that unnerved his colleagues. He once waited eleven nights on a church roof in Colne, in February, for a single arrival, and took it in a moment on the twelfth. His methods earned him the alias by which the ledgers know him, The Patient Lantern, half for the lamp in his wife's window and half for his own temper.
The ledger entries for his years of work are unusually full, since he was the sort of man who put down the weather. Over nearly twenty years he took thirty-one vampires along the Calder and Ribble, the Pendle country and the edge of the moors, a modest figure beside some of his relatives but achieved with very few injuries, none of them to the people in his care. His brother-in-law by marriage, Fulk Rishton, the mason husband of his sister Idonea, built two of the stone-lined hiding places that held his papers. On the Proctor side of the family his mother's rivals, the Lancastrian cousins, were quick to point out that his tally was less than theirs; he replied that the ledger recorded vampires taken and not vampires attempted, and pointed to a margin in which the White Ledger, whose rules he followed, disagreed with the Red on the count of a single Whalley hunt. It was one of the mildest contests of the rivalry, and he took a quiet pleasure in it.
His sons were born in 1517 and 1518, Edward Proctor and Thomas Proctor. Both became slayers, and both learned the craft at his table, from the sealed ledger and the way he taught them to walk into a room and wait before touching anything. He was a strict father and a loving one, and the boys, who worshipped him, cannot have known what it cost him to send them out. Their mother Rohese, who kept the lantern, died in the hard winter of 1534, and Rafe was not the same afterwards. He had taken a wound on a hunt some years before, a deep tear in the side that never properly closed, and it opened again that spring and ran through the year. Isabel, his own mother, had died in 1518; his sister Idonea nursed him for a time.
In the autumn of 1536, with the northern country rising over the abbeys, he died at home in Padiham, of the old wound, at the age of forty-two. The lantern was burning in the window when they laid him out, and his sons kept it lit for a year. The sealed ledger passed to Edward. Rafe's method survived him in the training of the White Ledger's younger hunters, and the name of the procedure is still used. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the hunter who waited.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
