Shannon Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Shannon Proctor was born in 1992 at Houston, Texas, and is living today in Houston, where she works as a pharmacy technician among the shipping channel, oil offices and bayous of that city. She belongs to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but she is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she was never called. She has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own. She is the younger daughter of the shipyard welder Scott Proctor and of the secretary Lisa Perry, and the sister of Lisa Perry Proctor, born in 1990, who married Travis White in 2010. She has not married and has no children. The family remembers her as the pharmacist's hand of the Ledger, the one who knew which cousin was allergic to what, and who saw to it that nobody who came off a bad night was ever handed the wrong bottle. She was born in the same hospital as her sister, in the same week of the same month, at the end of a long Houston August in which the bayous ran low and the whole city smelled of hot asphalt and creosote. Her mother, who had worked to the last afternoon at a typewriter, was brought in at noon and had the baby by supper. Scott, who had been on a night shift at the yard, arrived in a flameproof jacket with a small bag of oranges, and stood at the end of the bed with the manner of a man who has been asked to inspect a weld and fears that it may be someone's child. The baby was named Shannon, for no reason that anyone has ever put in writing, and the family says only that Lisa had been reading a novel. She was a fair, round, quiet child who wanted to know where things went, and who by four had been found lining up the bottles of her grandmother Mildred's cough syrups on the kitchen windowsill in order of size. She grew up in the house in the east of the city with the workshop in the garage and the grey filing cabinet in the hall, in a street of pecan trees and oil-stained driveways within earshot of the freight yard. It was a household in which everything had a place and the place was written down, and she was never in doubt that in the eyes of her mother a lost sock was a clerical error. Her sister Lisa, who was two years older, was the one who typed. Shannon was the one who carried. She took the carbon copies from her mother's desk to the garage, and the finished hinges from the garage to her mother's desk, and in the tropical storm of June 2001, when the water rose over the bayou and came a foot up the hall, she was eight, and it was she who carried the binder of the master index upstairs under her jumper, because her mother was moving the filing cabinet, and who sat on the landing with it, in a life jacket that was too big, reading the index to herself by torchlight. She said afterwards that there had been a good many entries under Navarro and that she had liked the sound of them. She was told the truth at fifteen, in the autumn of 2007, over a plate of eggs, by both parents at once. Her father said nothing. Her mother laid out the whole matter in order, with the dates, and when she had done Shannon said that she supposed it explained the shorthand. She asked whether the Ledger kept a list of allergies. Lisa Perry, who had not expected the question, said that the Ledger kept a good many lists but she did not think that it had that one. Shannon said that it ought to. It was, her mother said later, the only time in the family's history that anyone had been told the secret of the White Ledger and had responded by proposing a new form. The form was the beginning of her life's work. She worked her way through high school in the pharmacy of a neighbourhood drugstore on the east side, a long, cool, fluorescent room with a counter and a bell, where an old Vietnamese pharmacist taught her to count tablets by fives with a spatula and to read a prescription as one reads a letter from a doctor who is in a hurry. She took her certificate as a pharmacy technician in 2012, at twenty, and went to work in a pharmacy near the ship channel that served the refinery workers, the longshoremen and the seamen's mission, a business that opened at six in the morning and that knew its customers by their shifts. It was a good place to learn. She learned that people do not tell their doctors the whole of what is wrong, but will tell a woman at a counter, and that the work of a technician is to see that the right thing is counted, labelled and handed over, the whole of it, a hundred times before lunch. She also learned what a pharmacy is, in the Ledger's sense, which is the place where the hunters go. A hunter who is hurt on a Saturday night wants a tetanus shot, an antibiotic and a roll of dressing, and does not want to explain the dog. She kept, from her first year, a list. It was a plain card file in a shoebox, in her own small hand, with a card for every cousin of the Gulf coast whom the Ledger could put a name to, and on each the same few facts: what they were allergic to, what they took, what their blood group was, who their doctor was and whether they would tell him anything. It was a medical record of the White Ledger, and it was kept in a drawer in the hall at her parents' house, under her mother's index, where nobody would think to look. She did not break a rule in making it. She would not hand a bottle across a counter to a person without a prescription, and says so, and has turned away, kindly, a cousin who rang at midnight to ask whether she could spare something. What she did was to know, and to ring the right pharmacist, or the right nurse, and say that a man in a grey coat would call in the morning, and that he was allergic to penicillin and would say that he was not. She was known in the chapter as the person to telephone before the doctor. The long years were quiet and she has not wished them otherwise. She was a volunteer at the shelter at the Astrodome in 2005, at thirteen, handing out cups of water to people from New Orleans who had come up the interstate with a plastic bag apiece. She carried boxes in the flood of 2017, when the rain stood over the city for four days and the hospital pharmacies could not be reached, and she carried the cousins' insulin from a refrigerator in the garage to three houses by boat, with her father at the oars. In the freeze of February 2021 she was at the counter for nineteen hours, making up the prescriptions of the city's elderly by candlelight with the pharmacist, and in the pandemic years, when the counter was behind a plastic screen and the queue ran out of the door, she was trained to give the vaccine, and gave it, at a folding table in the car park, to her father, her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law and four hundred and ten other people. She can also strike an arc, a skill that she learned at fourteen in her father's garage and has used twice, to repair a gate. She did not mention it to her mother. She is thirty-four, a short, fair, brisk, soft-spoken woman with a ponytail and a lanyard, and she lives in a flat in the east of the city, two streets from her parents, with a rubber plant and a fridge that is mostly labelled. She is godmother to nobody yet, as she points out, and aunt to a dog. Her sister Lisa rings on Sundays, from the island, with the Ledger's dictation still on the line. In the evening, when she has finished at the counter, she counts the drawer and writes the number on the slip, and she has not once, in fourteen years, been out by a single tablet. Shannon Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the pharmacist's hand of the White Ledger, the girl who carried the master index up the stairs in a flood and later kept the cousins' allergies on cards in a shoebox. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses, technicians and counter staff of the old houses who were never called, who got a hunter home in one piece and had the right dose waiting, and who showed that a hunt is won twice, once in the field and once at the counter on the morning after.