A creature of the night, the old books say, can go nowhere that it has not been asked to go, and Travis Proctor has made a career of finding out who did the asking. He was born in 1974 at San Antonio, Texas, and is living today in San Antonio, where he works as an electrician and, since 2007, as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Lone Sieve, a name for the plain wire mesh that lets the fine things through and holds back the coarse, and it classes him as a Broker, a hunter who deals, who finds the person with the right to say yes or no and obtains it, and who would sooner settle a house than storm it. His craft is Seal and Sanction, the art of getting the lawful authority of a place to withdraw its welcome in writing and then closing every opening so that the withdrawal holds. His gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He was called in 2007, in a churchyard at night, when something answered the bell. He is the youngest son of the Air Force mechanic Wendell Proctor, who spent his career at the Kelly field and died in 2018, and of the laundry supervisor Elena Navarro, who died in 2002, and the brother of Dennis Navarro Proctor and of the slayer Loretta Proctor. In 1994 he married the schoolteacher and slayer Melissa Navarro, and they have one son, Darren Proctor, born in 1995, who was not called.
He was the late child, born eleven years after his brother and eight after his sister, in the middle of the Vietnam war's aftermath, to a house on the Southside near the end of the Kelly runway, where the transports came in over the roof every few minutes and the washing had to be brought in before the engines started. His father worked the engine shops from the day he was posted, in a cap and oil-black hands, and came home every evening at four. His mother ran the sorting room of a hotel laundry and brought home the smell of starch. Travis grew up in a house of noise and linen, with a sister who was a hunter by fifteen and a brother who was a lineman, and with a rule, which his mother had learned from her own mother and kept, that a child need not inherit a debt. He was told what the Proctors were at sixteen, in the kitchen, in a few plain sentences. He had worked it out some years before. When his mother gave him her own mother's small pocket ledger, with its last entry, dated the evening that Catalina Navarro was killed on the road home from the mission, which said that the plaza had been quiet, he read it twice at the kitchen table, and she let him keep it.
He spent a summer at fourteen carrying a ladder for his brother's friend, an electrician, and by eighteen he had signed as an apprentice. His sister-in-law Lisa Watson, the nurse, who ran a class for the Ledger's young cousins in the back room of a church on the south side every other Saturday, found him her best pupil, and said that he arrived early, took notes and never once asked her to repeat a thing. He was a journeyman by twenty-one.
He met Melissa Navarro in the autumn of 1993, at the fiesta of the Mission San José, where he was nineteen and had been sent by the contractor to string the lights in the parish hall. She was twenty-four, a tall, straight, brown-faced schoolteacher from Victoria in her good shoes, who was in charge of the keys. The hall needed a new breaker. She had the only key to the room that held it. He said that he would be glad to have it for ten minutes. She said that she would stand there and watch him use it, and she did, for the whole of the hour, with her arms folded and a look that he afterwards described as an inspection. When he had finished she said that it was the best work she had seen in the building, and gave him the key for the weekend. They were married in the autumn of 1994, in the mission church of her childhood, with her father Carlos Navarro walking her down the aisle in his best grey suit, and Elena Navarro in the second pew dabbing her eyes with a pressed linen handkerchief.
He was a husband and a tradesman for thirteen years before the Ledger came for him. Darren Proctor was born in the autumn of 1995 in Victoria, and was a cheerful, stolid, fair-haired boy who liked baseball and the hum of a school bus, and Travis, who spent the week in San Antonio on the jobs that paid and the weekend in the schoolteacher's house in Victoria, drove the hundred and twenty miles on Friday evening with the windows down. In September of 2001 he was on a ladder in a hotel on the river, with a drill in his hand, when someone turned on the radio, and he came down and stood on the floor with the other tradesmen and listened to the end, and then went back up the ladder, because the hotel's fire alarm still had to be finished.
The call came on a Thursday night in October of 2007. His firm had a contract on a Southside parish church, a handsome grey-stone building of the 1890s, to replace the old hand-rope on the bell tower with an electric striker, a small motor and a controller that rang the Angelus at six and noon and six. He was alone in the churchyard at ten at night with a meter and a ladder, testing the controller, and rang the bell once by the switch, to hear it. It was a thing that he had done a hundred times. The note went out across the yard and the dark rooftops and came back, as bells do, from the school wall. And then, from among the graves at the far end, something answered it. It was not an echo. It was a single clear stroke of another bell, a smaller and a cracked one, from a place where there was no bell and had been none since the church was built, and it was followed, in the interval before a man could draw breath, by the sound of a gate.
He did not run. He did what an electrician does at a fault, which is to isolate the circuit. He turned off the controller, stood the ladder against the wall, and waited. A man came out among the stones and stopped a few paces from the ladder, and in a pleasant voice said that the church was a long time silent, and that he had been glad of the bell. He had been, he said, a parishioner. Travis, who had never in his life heard a creature speak and had not known that it would sound so reasonable, asked him, in the dry tone of his father, who had asked him in. It is not recorded what the man answered. The Ledger notes that the churchyard had been sold by the parish in 1961 to a developer, that a crypt in it had been leased in the same year to a man who paid his rent in coin, and that Travis, who knew nothing of the Ledger's law of invitation but a good deal of the law of ownership, went the next morning to the diocesan office and asked, as a courtesy, who held the lease.
That was the whole of his craft, and he named it himself. He found the lessee's heir, a retired dentist in Corpus Christi who had never seen the crypt and would give anything to be rid of it. He had a notary draw up a paper, in which the heir withdrew in his own name, as the sole survivor of the lease, every permission that his father had ever given to any tenant. Then he went back to the churchyard on a Saturday afternoon, in daylight, with his sister Loretta and his wife, who had driven up from Victoria with a reata in the car, and sealed every opening of the crypt, the door, the vent, the drain and the old cable duct, with steel plate and silver solder, while Loretta stood at the gate with a notebook and Melissa stood on the steps with a rope. Nothing came out.
He was trained, in the next year, by the two women who were nearest to him, his wife, who had been a slayer for twenty-two years and who taught him to read the ground of a place, and his sister, who taught him to write a case down so that a stranger could follow it. He carries a tape, a meter, a notebook, a leather folder with a notary's stamp and a small stack of plain printed forms, which he has drawn up himself, and he goes to a house the way that his brother Dennis goes to a pole, with a ladder, a flask and an exact idea of who owns what. The cousins named him The Lone Sieve for his habit of working alone, and for the way that things, in his hands, are sorted.
His mother's death in 2002 broke something in his father that did not mend, and Wendell, who had never been a talker, was silent for sixteen years more, and died in 2018 in the house near the old runway, with Dennis at the foot of the bed and Travis at the head. Travis has kept the house, which he rewired from the meter out, and lives in it by himself during the week, going down to Victoria on Fridays to Melissa and the school and the long summer evenings. In the pandemic years he wired the extra wards in two hospitals, working through the nights, and he is fifty-one now, a stocky, sunburnt, slow-spoken man with his father's hands and a habit of checking every doorway he enters for its latch.
Travis Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Lone Sieve, the electrician who answered a bell in a churchyard and went to the courthouse in the morning. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Brokers of the White Ledger, the hunters who won by paper, permission and a steel plate, and who showed that a creature that was let in by a signature can be shut out by one.
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