Wallace Thorne

Slayer of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Wallace Thorne was born in 1733 in the country that would later be called Nashville, Tennessee, though when he was a child the bluffs above the Cumberland had no such name and no permanent white settlement at all. He belonged to the House of Thorne, the Northumbrian border reivers turned Appalachian mountain hunters, and he became a vampire slayer in 1761 under the alias The Sure Falcon. He worked as a boatman for most of his life, poling and steering flatboats and keelboats on the rivers of the western country. He is remembered in the Faulkner and Proctor records chiefly as the father of Alan Thorne, who in 1805 married Lydia Proctor and carried the Thorne name into the Yorkist line. He died in 1806 at seventy-three. The House of Thorne had crossed the Atlantic with a deep memory of the Northumbrian marches, that lawless strip between England and Scotland where families lived by cattle, kinship and the ability to vanish overnight. The Thornes had been reivers there, raiding across the border and sheltering in peel towers, the small fortified houses that farmers built against exactly such neighbours. Somewhere in the reiving centuries they had learned that the dark held things worse than a rival clan, and they had turned their old skills of hiding, watching and moving by night to a new purpose. In America they went south along the great valley roads and up into the mountains, and by Wallace's boyhood they were a scattered family of long hunters and river men who trusted each other and almost nobody else. His youth was spent on water. The Cumberland and the Tennessee were the highways of the interior, and a boy who could handle a pole and read a current could earn his keep by fifteen. Wallace worked the rivers between the Long Hunters' camps and the trading posts, carrying salt, hides, lead and whiskey. It was a trade of mud, cold and sudden violence. Snags tore the bottoms out of boats, and the banks were watched by people who wanted what a boat carried. He learned to sleep in snatches, to read weather in the colour of the sky, and to keep a rifle dry when everything else was soaked. He was a lean, weathered man with a hawk's nose and a habit of going silent when other men were talking, and the nickname Falcon was given to him by the boatmen before the Thornes gave it official standing. The frontier of his lifetime was crowded and unsettled. Settlers pushed into the Watauga country in the years before the Revolution, building cabins and forts along the creeks, and the Cumberland settlements followed at the end of the 1770s, with all the hardship of a first winter in hard country. Wallace was in his forties by then, and he worked as a guide and boatman for the parties who came downriver. The Revolution reached the mountains in the form of Overmountain Men and militia companies, but for the Thornes the war was one problem among several. The dark did not pause for treaties, and the scattered farms on the western waters were an easy feeding ground. His calling came in 1761, after a winter fever that took everyone in a household except one. He had stopped at a riverside cabin to trade and found the family in the grip of a sickness that ran through them in four days. He nursed them as best he could and buried them himself in the frozen ground, all but the youngest, a girl who lived. It was while he was keeping watch through the last night that he understood what had actually come into that cabin, and that the fever had been only the visible part of it. Something had fed on the household slowly, and had nearly finished its work when he arrived. He stood at the door with his rifle and did what the Thornes had done for generations. He waited. It came at dawn, and he killed it. From that night he was a slayer, though the Thorne kin later remarked that he had come to it late, at twenty-eight, and had no mentor to shape him. What he had instead was the family's peculiar inheritance, which he turned into a craft called Peel-Tower Watch. The idea was old and simple. A peel tower was built so that a few people could hold ground against many by seeing early and choosing where to fight. Wallace applied the same logic to a cabin, a river bend or a cave mouth. He would pick a defensible spot with a long view, prepare it with care, and let the hunt come to him. His long rifle and silver-cast shot did the rest. Boatmen up and down the Cumberland learned to tie up near his camps, without quite knowing why they slept better there. He took a wife in the country, though the records of the Thorne house do not name her and the family tradition is content to leave it so. The one child of that union was Alan Thorne, born in 1769, whom Wallace raised on the river and in the woods and taught to watch. Alan was a serious boy who watched everything and said little, and he grew into a slayer of his own. The father took particular care over the boy's training, walking him through a dozen abandoned cabins and drawing lines in the dirt to show where the dark would come from. He did not raise his voice, and he was not a man who praised, but Alan later said that a nod from his father across a fire was worth more than most men's speeches. The wider slayer world knew Wallace mostly by rumour. The Faulkners of Kentucky heard of a Thorne on the Cumberland who could hold a cabin against anything, and the Proctors of Tennessee, whose line ran through the same country, counted him a useful neighbour who never took a side in the ledger contest. When his son married Lydia Proctor in 1805, Wallace, then seventy-two and bent from a lifetime in boats, attended the wedding in a clean coat and gave the couple a rifle that had been in the Thorne family since the Northumbrian days. It was, by every account, the only formal gift he ever gave. He died in 1806, less than a year after the wedding, of what the old people called the sweating sickness, aged seventy-three. Alan buried him on a bluff above the river he had worked all his life. In the Slayerverse, the House of Thorne remembers him as the boatman who carried the peel-tower idea into a new country, and the Proctor line remembers him as the father-in-law who gave their house a mountain hunter.