Raymond Proctor Navarro was born in 1938 in San Antonio, Texas, and lived fifty-four years as a lineman for the city power system and, from 1968, as a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro. He was the third of the four children of the newspaper compositor and slayer Juan Navarro, The Hollow Ford, and the army engineer's wife and slayer Harriet Proctor, The Fort Sam Engineer, and Juan was both his father and his mentor. The family book knows Raymond as The Wild Bell and classes him as a Spy, a hunter who goes quietly into other people's houses and lives, watches without being seen and carries away what he has learned rather than what he has killed. His craft was Record Tracing, the art of finding a creature through the paper it leaves behind, the deeds, the meter books, the burial registers and the unpaid bills, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He never married and had no children. He died in 1992 of a fever caught in a plague house, aged fifty-four. He stood in the Proctor bloodline through his mother and in the Navarro house through his father, and the cousins of both thought of him, when they thought of him at all, as the brother who always turned up a day before the trouble.
The best story of his working life is about a meter. In the spring of 1969 he was sent out as a lineman's mate to a street on the south side where a house had been reported as having no electricity, and he put his head over the fence of the back yard and noticed, in the yard, an electric meter with its disc turning. It should not have been. The house had been dead empty for eleven years. The tenant, a Mrs Ybarra, had been buried in 1958, and the title had passed into a probate that no one had finished, and the account at the power company had been closed. He wrote down the number of the meter. He went back to the depot and found, in a drawer of the billing office, a card with the name of a dead woman, and a pencil note in a clerk's hand that said that the account was being paid in cash, every month, by a man who did not give his name. He found it in about forty minutes. A Navarro cousin, to whom he mentioned it that evening, wrote it down in the Ledger as the quickest piece of tracing that the House had seen in a generation.
Record Tracing was a craft that his father and mother, between them, had put into his hands. Juan, who had been a printer and had an old compositor's belief in the written word, taught him to read a newspaper morgue, a county deed book and a parish register, and the neat, dull, endlessly informative handwriting of the municipal clerk. Harriet, the army engineer's wife, who had trained in the base workshop at Fort Sam Houston, taught him to take a meter apart, to read a blueprint and to find the one wire in a building that went where it should not. Together they made a spy. A creature that lives in a city must have a roof, a door, a lamp and water, and each of them leaves a line in a ledger somewhere. A hunter who knows the ledgers can find it from a chair. Raymond, who liked chairs and hated sitting in them, would spend a morning in the courthouse with a stack of dusty books and the afternoon at the top of a pole, and he said that the two jobs were a single trade, which was to find out where the current went.
He was called in October 1968, at thirty. He had been a lineman for nine years. HemisFair, the world's fair, had opened that spring on the old neighbourhood at the edge of downtown, and the whole city had been rewired for it, and crews were working on the old houses around the grounds as the fair people bought them out. He was sent with a crew to cut the supply to a boarding house on the south side, a tall old wooden house with a gallery, that was to be pulled down. The landlord had said that the last tenant was a sleeper, a man who took the room by the month and was never seen to leave it. Raymond went up the stair to knock. The door was ajar. In the back bedroom, a man lay on the bed, on his back, with his hands folded, in a good suit, as though he had been laid out by a mother, and in the room around him, on the dresser, the sill, the table and the floor, stood a hundred and forty candles, each burned to the socket. There was no smell. There was no dust, and there was no sign of any living thing having entered the room for years. The sleeper's mouth was open. He was not dead, and had not, so far as Raymond could judge, ever been alive since the first candle was lit. He sat down on the stair. He sat there for an hour, and then he took out his notebook and began to count the candles.
His father came to him the same evening. It was not an accident. Juan Navarro, who had heard the call of the sleeper from a cousin at the courthouse, and who had been waiting in the Westside kitchen for four hours with a cup of tea, put his hand on his son's shoulder and said that he had been called, and that the family had a use for the sort of man who counts candles. Raymond said that he had always known. His mother said, from the sink, that she would put the stakes in the shed. He was thirty, a tall, thin, dark, quiet man with a large nose and a very small notebook, and he was a hunter from that night. The cousins, who liked to give a name that fitted, called him The Wild Bell, which Juan explained, over the kitchen table, as the bell that rings when no one has pulled the rope, because that was how Raymond came to a place, before anyone had thought of sending for him.
The work that followed was long, patient, careful and mostly dull, and he preferred it that way. For twenty-four years he held two jobs, as a lineman for the city by day and as the Navarros' Spy by the other part of the clock. He found a creature in a locked house on the east side by the water bills. He found another by the rail tickets it had bought, and another by a pawn ticket for a coat. He read, for four years in the evenings, every death certificate in the county for the eighteen-nineties, looking for the names that did not lie still, and made a card index, in his own hand, of three thousand names. It is still in the Navarro book. He worked with his father in the yard on the ditches, when the older man's chest permitted, and sat with him through the three years of the long illness. The Vietnam years passed. His brothers Wendell and James took trades and lived quietly, James in Houston with his wife Mildred, who fed him whenever he passed, and Wendell in San Antonio. His sister Mary, who was married to a cook, kept a table for him on the south side. His father died in 1972, and the three copies of the sheets of the ditches, with the order of the locks, went to him, and he kept his at the back of the shed in a tin with a lid.
His mother died in 1976, and he lived on in the Westside house alone. The work changed. The oil bust of the middle eighties emptied the city's offices and the boarding houses of the south side, and a good many creatures that had lived on the trade of the roughnecks went hungry, and moved, and left, in the process, a great deal of paper. He worked double shifts. He went on being, by every account, the most reliable man on the line crew, and in a city where the power was cut in the heat of every August he climbed, by the cousins' count, more than thirty thousand poles. His cousin Jose Navarro, who rode horses for the House, died in 1988, and another, Lloyd Kalteyer, the diner cook who fed the hunters, died in 1989 of a fall, and in both years Raymond went to the funeral and took notes.
In the summer of 1992 a fever broke out in a tenement on the south side, and the neighbours called it the flu. Raymond, who had read the water bills, knew better. It was a plague house, as the House called it, a place where a creature had fed on a whole household for weeks, and the fever of the dying was the part of its work that the neighbours could see. There were children upstairs. He went in without a mask, with a lantern, and brought out three of them in two trips, and then a fourth, an old woman, who died on the pavement. He was well for ten days. Then the fever took him, as it had taken the others, and he was dead within the week, at fifty-four, in the County hospital, with his sister Mary, who had come in her whites, at the bedside. His notebook was in his shirt pocket, and the last entry gave the number of a meter.
Raymond Proctor Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as The Wild Bell, the lineman who found the dead by the meter books and who went into a plague house for four children without a mask. In the Slayerverse he stands for the spies of the old houses, the patient and unglamorous hunters who knew that the creature that hides in a city is always on somebody's paper, and who sat in a chair with a card index until it showed them where.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
