Always a bit of a risky proposition, this. The encore you’re not sure anyone’s really asking for. Then again, if the chap who’s written 60 essays about the idiosyncratic works that messed him up as a kid for the sheer unhinged joy of it is starting to worry about coming over self-indulgent, probably best to acknowledge that particular horse has not just bolted, but fled to another country where it lives under an assumed identity, and has raised a family of foals with little if any idea of what Daddy Did In The War.


Anyhow. This whole project has been about jumping off a cliff, honestly; learning to write nonfiction, learning to write criticism and autobiography; sitting down at the keyboard and figuring out why I felt strongly enough about, say, One Flew Over The Cookoos Nest or the Escape From Colditz board game to commit an evening and a few thousand words to talking about it. And then there was the crowdfunder, and now this crowdfunder, and at the time of writing I don’t know if it’s been successful, because, for reasons that will become clear, I’m writing this a bit ahead of publication. Did it land? Will Volume II get a mass-market release and a limited edition pressing? Who knows? So far, so good, said the falling man; the view is so beautiful, all the way down.


Still. Thanks for coming this far, all of you who have.


And let me beg your indulgence as we take one last trip down memory lane.


It’s 1997, so I must be 19 years old, and my memory is that I'm in a WHSmiths, possibly Christmas shopping on a painful budget. But it’s me and a bookshop, so the odds of my not picking up something for myself are always pretty damn low.


They plummet to zero when I see the cover.


I have no familiarity with the author. But that is one hell of a title. And is there a Barker or King cover quote? Maybe. Something sure draws me in, enough to part with some incredibly limited discretionary spending budget from my Job Seekers Allowance. Interestingly, I remember no especial fear or trepidation; the author and narrative were both unknown to me, unlike some past entries where reputations proceeded. Anyway, I was a veteran, of IT, and The Wasp Factory, and Hellraiser; how bad could it get, really?


And so I dived straight in, with nary a thought to how deep, dark and cold things were about to get.


And it starts off so slow, oddly almost low-key. Sure, our narrator is a serial killer, but he’s in jail, at the end of his career, and I remember wondering if this was going to be one of those ‘told in reverse’ type deals, where we learn about the crimes via flashback, safe in the knowledge that it all ends in a cell… and then, almost immediately, it gets really fucking weird.


Turns out, our man has taught himself how to put himself into a coma, indistinguishable from death, and he can do it so successfully that he wakes up in the prison morgue. It’s an incredible piece of writing, describing the process from the inside, backing right up to the very edge of the supernatural, before taking a hard right into Silence Of The Lambs territory, as our narrator affects a bloody, daring escape.


And then, suddenly, we’re in New Orleans, and it’s like going from monochrome to technicolour as the palate and cast expand like the opening minutes of the big bang, and I have absolutely no idea what is going on but the author has my attention and I am here for it.


And then, while our man is cruising the quarter, looking for likely victims, he encounters a fellow predator.


There’s a moment when they meet - I’ve never forgotten it - where our narrator shakes hands and, in a gesture he tells us he’s used countless times as a way of gauging someone’s potential as a submissive victim, moves his hand down to briefly encircle the other man’s wrist… only this time, the shakee does the same thing.


I am doing the moment painfully insufficient justice, here, because Poppy Z Brite is a world-class horror author, brilliant at pretty much every aspect of novel writing, from characterisation to voice to description to plot to emotion. So, please, just trust me; it’s a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment for the ages, and nothing’s even happened yet.


But I remember feeling, with a moral certainty, that shit was about to go down.


I was very much not wrong.


Before it does, though, the novel cuts away, and we meet recently-split up Lucas and Tran. Lucas becomes an instantly totemic character, for 19-year-old me; when we meet him, he’s ranting and raving on a pirate radio station, angrily condemning straight people as ‘breeders’, with a persona called Lush Rimbaud. It quickly becomes apparent that he’s furious because he’s HIV positive (and this is why he’s split from Tran), and he’s determined to articulate that fury in a world where a plague that only seems to kill gay men is treated as something between a minor inconvenience and a blessing.


Lucas is not a good person. His anger often spills into outright violence, and during his darkest, most self-pitying moment, he comes perilously close to infecting Tran with his own blood; a fantastic example of toxic romanticism that has some eerie echos with the flowering relationship between the two killers, I have literally just realised as I type this. Nonetheless, this guy really spoke to me; responding to the brutal injustices life had dealt him with a defiant spit and fury that felt honestly come by, if a little indiscriminate in expression. Not the first time I’ve felt the pull of such a figure, of course, as you’ll be well aware, if you’ve come this far.


You know, I’m really not feeling so good.


Anyway.


And then there’s Tran, whose situation is less immediately mortal, but no less gut-wrenching; as we meet him, he’s in the process of becoming homeless, thrown out by his parents after they discover that he’s gay. A major part of the brutality comes from the matter-of-fact way Tran absorbs this; he’s always known if they found out, he’d be kicked to the kerb, and his stoicism in the face of the loss and ostracism is honestly kind of heartbreaking.


And then, I learn, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that Tran not only knows the NO-based killer but intends to throw himself at his mercy, imagining he might be able to stay with him, at least for a while.


It’s a brutal twist of the narrative knife, creating huge tension for the reader, an awful sense of impending doom, and inexorable pulling together of darkness and innocence that…


Oh.


Oh, yes, I see.


Sorry. I knew this was getting a bit risky. I’ve stayed too long. Pushed it too hard. Thanks for coming this far, but I’m going to have to leave it there. Sorry. I know it’s a bit abrupt, but I suspect it’ll be for the best.


It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for…

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.

Still, It Would Be Such A Lovely Ride
​
​

Let’s end with something short and sweet. The first short horror story I can remember reading.


Most of the recreational time at my father’s house was spent in front of screens, both big and small. In my day-to-day life in Devon, trips to the cinema were financially impossible; hell, as we’ve discussed before, TV didn’t actually enter my life until well into my seventh year. But at dad's house there were cinema trips (and theatre trips, though truthfully they made less of an impression), a big old colour TV with a VHS player, and my beloved ZX Spectrum. This last was, in the fullness of time, replaced by an Amiga 500, and I think if you’d asked me, I’d have told you I’d have been happy to sit and play that thing until the end of time, with just the odd breaks for eating, sleeping, and so forth.


Only, you know, not really. Turned out, somewhere around the fourth or fifth day, my mind would crave something different.


When the urge hit, I’d leave the ground floor bedroom that housed the Amega, and walk into the room next door. Which contained the piano, and, more importantly, two walls of bookcases.


I think I’ve mentioned earlier in this series that my father’s current house actually contains a room called ‘the small library’, and yes, that is to differentiate it from the main library one floor up. The set up in this house of my childhood was marginally less grand; still, though, there were a lot of books. I have fond memories of two paperback runs in particular; the minimalist black and white Iain Banks collection (yes, this is where I scored that fateful copy of The Wasp Factory), and the glorious Josh Kirby Discworld covers. In due course, I’d tear through both collections, and Jim Thompson, James Ellroy and Elmore Lenord besides, and I learned a lot from all of them.


But this particular day - I suspect I’m shy of ten years old - none of them jump out at me. Instead, I’m drawn to a pile of annual-sized books piled on their side. Asterix? Tintin? Something in that wheelhouse, I think.


And then, next to them, I see…


What is that? The cover says Venture, and it’s book-thick but the size is all wrong. Plus the cover - a colour image of an old, white man’s face surrounded by stars, under a title in yellow letters - Space is a lonely place, apparently, which, you know, probably that’s true - is paper thin, like on those Commando comics I sometimes saw in newsagents.


It is a comic, then? A space comic? I pick it up, carefully. The top left corner of the cover next to the spine has been torn, and the pages are yellowed with age. As I open it up and take a quick flick through, I register disappointment at the pages of small type text. ‘No comics, Harry’, I think, in Tom Baker’s voice from Genesis Of The Daleks. I turn back to the table of contents. Just what exactly is a Novelette, anyway? And how can a 128 page book possibly have room for three of them, plus short stories?


And then I read the story titles.


And on one of them, I feel The Pull.


It’s gotta be a horror story, surely; a title like that? And I’m sure my mind is also cross referencing Bruce Springsteen’s Downbound Train, a heartbreaking short story for the ages.


And so it is, at nine years old, that I read my first short horror. The author is Robert Bloch, and the title is That Hellbound Train.


And I’m captivated from the off.


It’s the voice, of course; colloquial, welcoming. I wouldn’t have recognised how quintessentially American it is, but the simplicity would have appealed; there’s a Just So quality to it that really pulls me in. And the efficiency of the storytelling is astonishing; by the time we’re turned the first page, we know Martin is, effectively, an orphan (father dead from a combination of drink and railroad tracks, momma run off, and Martin an escapee from the state home he was put in), in his early twenties, and has recently done time, it’s heavily implied as a result of committing petty theft in an effort to keep body and soul together. The telling is neither cold nor cloying; Martin is not unsympathetic, but his simple stoicism seems to transmit itself to the reader; or, at least, this reader. I’m caught up, that’s all; same way Terrence Dicks and Stephen King and John Christoper and all the greats will catch me up; my father’s house and library and TV and Amiga 500 are fading away, and I’m instead walking with Martin down a cold railroad track, wondering what’s next. And Martin is just considering signing up with the Salvation Army - anything for a warm set of clothes, at this point - when he hears a train coming; and from the wrong direction, given the hour.


We’ve already heard, in the opening paragraph of the story, that Martin’s father would sometimes sing a song about That Hellbound Train when in his cups, and how Martin would sometimes envisage the passengers, imagining what a fine bunch of fellows they must be; how nice it would be to hang with them, if not for the destination… and when the train pulls up, the brakes screaming with suspicious levels of menace, I knew exactly the same time as Martin what was going on.


The conversation that follows is glorious; the Devil is never named, referred to by Martin as ‘The Conductor’, and the verbal jousting delighted my child’s mind - especially the moment where Martin refers to the devil as a ‘used car salesmen’ before immediately apologising, seeing the hurt look on the conductor’s face. It’s brilliant, as is the Devil’s reason for turning up, namely Martin’s consideration of approaching the Salvation Army - ‘I’d hate to lose you after thinking of you as my own, all these years’, he says, wistfully. Initially, The Conductor initially merely offers Martin a lift, but eventually allows himself to be drawn into a bargain.


The layers, here. Martin frankly admits that he’s given this moment a lot of thought. The Devil jousts and feints and feigns, and I remember feeling this incredible push/pull, because Martin can’t be smart enough to have worked out an angle… can he? The Devil must surely have his measure… right?


And then Martin lays out his proposition.


Martin wants the ability to stop time. For him only, obviously. The world will continue to turn, time’s arrow will continue to fly forward… but not for Martin. Martin will remain, frozen forever, at the moment of his choosing.


And the Devil agrees. He hands Martin a pocket watch. Twist the stopper, says the Devil, and when the clock runs down, your moment will freeze.


My memory - treacherous thing, this far out, not something we can rely on, but - is that, delightedly, I’d seen it before Martin articulates the point - once he uses the watch, time, for him, freezes forever, and he’ll never have to ride The Train.


He’s made a deal with the Devil, and he’s already won.


Goddamn.


And does the Devil know it? As he turns his back, his voice is choked, and his shoulders shake with what could be sobbing.


I remember the thrill of this moment so, so clearly. I knew he had the devil beat, you see. It was simplicity itself, and my child mind delighted.


And, at the same time, I think I was just old enough to pick up on the ambiguity in the moment, in the Devil’s reaction.


Crying?


Or laughing?


We’re almost exactly halfway through the word count.


What follows is one of the most elegantly-told stories-of-a-life-lived I’ve ever encountered. With a purpose - in point of fact, that most American of purposes, as I reflect upon it, The Pursuit Of Happiness - Martin sets off to Chicago, where he becomes, as the narrator wryly notes, first a better class of panhandler, then, eventually, scores a job.


Employment secures a place of his own, a promotion secures a car, and a car allows for the possibility of taking ladies out on dates. And with child’s eyes, the contours of the story felt instinctive, a needle following a well-worn, familiar groove. It’s only now, with adult eyes, I see the shape of a way of life that must have seemed eternal to the post war generation, and yet turned out to be a chimaera - for many of that generation too, of course, but most assuredly for those of us that came after. It's a simple fate, destiny, utterly unremarkable; get a job, get a place, get a better job, get a girl, eventually meet the right girl, fall in love, get married, get a yet better place. It’s the circle of life; or, actually, the death spiral of capitalism, but here in good old 1953, whomst could have predicted?


I think it’s the moment that he has a child that I start to work out maybe he’s screwed up. I’m young enough that sex is effectively an abstract concept, but also steeped enough in the pop culture of the 80s that I understand it’s basically The Best Thing Ever. So the moment he doesn't pull the pin while consummating the love of his life, I suspect the first trickle of unease started to creep in for me. But when the kid turns up…


I saw it in my own parents, is the thing. My mum, and most especially my dad, who, in retrospect, clearly could barely wait for me to get to the point where I was capable of more-or-less rational conversation. I saw how both of them, in their own ways, centred my sister and I, and I understood that (again, pop culture playing its part) to be the natural order of things. Once you have a kid, I thought, you’re always going to want to see what happens next.


Interestingly, it turns out for our Martin that impulse only lasts until the boy is of age, at which point his concerns become once more about the material. The facets of the character that I’m sure the author intended to be, and saw as, weaknesses, rear their heads, and the moment with his mistress is cut short by the private detective and then the divorce lawyers, and once his wife has cleaned him out, it turns out the mistress is less enamoured than she might have led him to believe.


And that’s his last opportune moment; the slide from there is slow but sure. He makes back his money, but he’s too old to really enjoy it, and also too old to make the lifelong friends that might have provided the companionship he realises now is the real key to happiness. And anyway, it’s too late; he overdoes it trying to make friends at some holiday destination, and his body gives out.


There’s an amazing moment, right near the end of the story, where Martin finds himself outside, near the trainline, almost exactly back here he started, reaches for the watch… and then the stroke or heart attack that is to end him hits, and he has the chance to complete the action, and he realises the notion of forever in this state does not compare favourably with hell… and so he doesn’t.


And the train pulls up. And the Devil pops out.


And Martin has lost.


I felt crushed for him, but also like I’d encountered something approaching wisdom; how his pursuit of The Moment meant he actually completely lost track of Now, of being. That happiness, contentment, whatever such weasel words even mean, are both states that coexist with other feelings, impossible to isolate; but also that these terms actually describe a process, not a state, steady or otherwise.


So sure, I was sad for Martin, as he boarded the train and the Devil asked repeatedly for his watch back, but I also felt the tale had been just; and, at the end of the day, when you deal with the devil, you kinda do always lose, and probably you should, at that.


But Bloch, that bloody genius, had one final card to play.


As Martin finds himself in the pullman carriage, he looks around. At his fellow travellers. The gamblers. The womanisers. The drunks and dreamers. The sinners, all bound for the same dark destination, all determined to wring every last drop out of their journey.


And at that moment, Martin realises, at last, he’s found his moment. And he turns the key.


Amazingly, In the copy of Venture in which I first read the story, the text ends at that precise moment, with a rather bland notification to turn to page 183 for the rest. And it’s doubly odd because there’s just one paragraph to go, a couple of sentences, the Devil incensed - ‘we’ll never reach our destination now!’ - and Martin taking on the role of brakeman on That Hellbound Train, on its never ending journey to the underworld.


And really, what finer a place could there be to end My Life In Horror? My first short horror story. A meditation on life, and the living of it, and what we pursue, and what we win and lose in the pursuit. How we all face the same destiny, at some unknown but all-too-soon future moment.


And how a story, well told, can crystalise a moment in time.


These columns, and the two volumes of books that came out of them, are my Hellbound Train. My modest hope is that they live beyond me; a signal across generations. A faithful attempt to describe the contours of an fundamentally unremarkable life in a manner that commanded your attention for as long as I demanded it - and, sure, an attempt to scratch my name, however faintly, in the hard rock of human history.


I was here. We were here. We lived, and this is what it was like, to try and live, in this time and place.


This was My Life In Horror.


Thank you for choosing to share it with me.


KP
30/10/22

A short postscript from Jim Mcleod 

To think that My Life in Horror has been running for just short of ten years, is a treatment to Kit's brilliance as a writer and a friend, we have gone through hell and high water during the time we have been working together.  And throughout this time Kit has been the voice of reason, the guiding light that kept me from doing really stupid things, and one of the people most responsible for my growth as a human being.  I have changed beyond recognition, since Kit first reached out and asked if he could write a monthly column for Ginger Nuts of Horror.  And for that I thank him.  

It has been an honour and a privilege to host these articles, they are some of the finest pieces of genre writing you can ever hope to read.  

Thank you my friend, your friendship means more to me than you will ever know. 

 May the best you've ever seen Be the worst you'll ever see; May a moose ne'er leave yer girnal Wi' a teardrop in his e'e. May ye aye keep hale and hearty Till ye're auld enough tae dee, May ye aye be just as happy As I wish ye aye tae be.

Slàinte mhath my brother 

And I’ll never forget the way I feel right now… with you… no way…


I’m somewhere between 16 and 19.


I’m lying in his bed. It’s early afternoon and I haven’t been awake long. I have, blessedly, nothing to do, and nowhere to be. No college to go to, no parents to bug me, no flatmates to wind up or disappoint.


I’m free.


I stick on Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell II album and slide back under the thick, warm duvet, light up a Marlboro Red, and let the music wash over me.


Later, I’ll say to The Ghost's roommate (a kind and blameless man, to be clear - he didn’t know what was going on, and how could he? I didn’t either) how great it is to smoke a cigarette whilst listening to Meatloaf after a long sleep, and he’ll tip me a wink and grin and say something like ‘it’s even better if you’ve had a reason to wake up!’ and I’ll grin and nod back and work out his actual meaning about a day and a half later.


But that’s later. For now, I’m in that room, in that warm bed, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs, snuggled in the warmth of the sheets.


The Ghost is an early riser. I am, at this point in my life, not so much a night owl as a creature of chaos living a series of 28 - 30 hour days. There’s a mattress on the floor, my ‘official’ bed, but I’ll often share his, or else take his spot when his early start inevitably wakes me; preferring the firmness of his mattress, and the thickness of his duvet.


I remember the smell. In the room itself, it should be air freshener vs. cigarette ash, a titanic, whoever-wins-we-lose battle for the ages, but it isn't somehow; or at least not to me and my smoker's nose. I like it. And then there’s the smell of him on the sheets; soap and store own-brand deodorant with just the mildest undercurrent of his own odour.


This smell, too, I like. It’s a smell of comfort. Of safety.


Of love.


At this point, we’ve been together for somewhere between five and seven years. In this room, so much of my ultimately futile magical training will take place.


Hanging from the wardrobe door is an oil painting his brother made. It depicts the flying creature from the Donnington ‘94 Monsters Of Rock poster, complete with the circled, winged A symbol of that year’s headliner, Aerosmith. We’d attended that show together, camping out the night before. It was one of the best live shows of my life.


On my left, in the space where the fireplace used to be in this Victorian London house, is his altar. There is a chalice, a tarot card (The Magician, of course), other things I can’t recall, probably an owl ornament of some kind, and a bronze spearhead.


I grew up around altars. My mum had one. I, at this point, have one. It’s normal.


One evening, before or after this cigarette, this morning, we will be having one of our rambling conversations, and he will ask me about my night obsession, and I, full of teenage bullshit romanticism and faux darkness, will describe Night as containing ‘a wondrous savagery’.


The Ghost straightens up, becomes commanding. ‘Come here’. I’m in bed, in just my boxer shorts, or possibly nude (‘anyone who sleeps in clothes when they don’t have to is an idiot’, he’s always insisted) but I immediately go to him.


‘Turn around.’


I do. He takes my shoulders, pulling me back and down, so I’m sat on the edge of his bed, facing the wall, back to him. He moves away, rummages. I sit, looking forward, waiting. This is instruction, he’s in Telling Mode


(earlier, he’ll tell me about The Voice, the power to command - his gran had it, he explains, and it’s something he can do too; he’ll claim he used it on me when he caught me attempting to steal his cigarettes in my mum’s house, and I’ll believe him)


and so I wait.


His arm comes into view over my shoulder. He’s holding the arrowhead in his fist.


(it has Celtic designs on it. He claims it’s ancient, that he found it hiking on Dartmoor. I believe him)


He presses the tip to the centre of my chest, not hard. The cold, blunt, rounded point of metal rests at the top of my collarbone. Then, slowly but deliberately, the point moves down. It traces the central divide of my ribcage, then down to my stomach. He brings it to rest just above my belly button. He holds it there. Then he says okay.


His arm goes away. I turn around. As he replaces the arrowhead on the altar, he explains; that my statement had made him worry that I might be moving toward The Dark; that what just happened was a test; ‘nobody of The Dark would allow that, you’d have stopped me when it was clear where it was going, you wouldn’t have been able to help yourself’.


He asks me how I’d felt during the test. I told him the truth; that I felt calm, but at a heightened, elevated level; intense. He nods, smiles, happy.


I think we smoke. I ask him what would have happened if I had reacted, pulled away. He tells me our training would have trailed off gradually, and he’d have found a way to drift away from me. I accept this without further question.


In this room, he’ll lead me on many guided meditations, attempting to get me to astral project; the breakthrough proof he knows I’m craving, that will move the magic from something I desire and infer to something tangible. In this room, he’ll explain to me how lowering my inhibitions is crucial to my obtaining the openness I need to let go. In this room, under his verbal guidance, and the power of my own imagination, I’ll experience something agonisingly close to the things he’s described to me in vivid detail, only to find myself surrounded by a roaring, booming sound that starts me out of my trance. He’ll explain it was my heart; that I’d Travelled Within, as the meditation led me to, but I’d ended up inside a chamber of my heart, and the experience had overwhelmed me. He’ll tell me I’m really close to a breakthrough, though in reality, this is as near as I ever get.


In this room, he’ll tell me to masturbate in the bed on the floor, while he lies in his own bed.


He’ll tell me it’s part of the training. That sexual energy is a kind of magic, and masturbation is a way to channel it. He’ll advise me that there might be magical spells or rites I’ll be able to complete as part of sexual congress with my then-girlfriend, if I want - ‘you might be sitting face to face, fully inside her, but not moving’ I remember him saying, a stray fragment from conversations in The Room.


He’ll tell me, too, that my own sexual energy is potent, can affect the mood of others. One evening, after I’ve masturbated, lying on the mattress on the floor next to his bed, he’ll tell me about how he’d heard the man in the flat upstairs reinitiate sex with his girlfriend, triggered by my jerking it in the room below. I believe him. Later, I’ll try and deploy this power to get his flatmate to go to bed with his girlfriend so I can play on his PC, jerking off in the bathroom next to the living room where his flatmate and the computer are situated. I will be disappointed when it doesn’t work, and when I tell The Ghost, so is he.


In this room, he’ll give me instructions on how to masturbate better. He’s backed me into a rhetorical corner, by this point; there’s no logical reason for me to resist the lesson. It won’t be sexual for either one of us, and he’s concerned I might be hurting myself, wants to help.


As I present my erect penis to him, he explains that the skin is unusually tight and that I should  be gentle to avoid chafing. I can’t remember much of what he told me; I can mainly recall how my concentration was on breathing normally, treating the situation with casual indifference, no big deal. I do remember at one point his finger touches me, as he points out an area of particular sensitivity.


Two decades later, I’ll see the two women police officers exchange a glance at the moment I describe this, an unspoken communication passing between them.


In this room, we’ll have countless conversations. I’ll pour out my heart, my desires, my hopes, my fears. We’ll talk about things fantastic and mundane.


Among many other things - computer games and role-playing games, and music, and books - we'll talk about maturity and the age of consent.


He’ll patiently explain to me that it’s arbitrary; that different people mature, physically and emotionally, at different ages, so the law just draws a line because it has to be drawn somewhere, and that’s okay, because children do have to be protected against predators.


He really doesn’t like paedophiles.


In one of our conversations, he claims he, with some friends (the implication is magical friends, fellow shaman, but I can’t remember now if he ever made that explicit) castrated a paedophile once, in Ireland. I don’t remember if I asked if the man survived, or what his reply was. I suspect I didn’t ask. I suspect I just nodded at this obviously just turn of events.


Anyhow. Consent is important. Consent is key. Physical and emotional maturity might make a sexual relationship possible, but never without consent. Rapists must die.


How old, he asks me, must someone be before a sexual relationship can be considered?


I know it sounds like a copout, but I swear it’s the truth - I cannot remember what reply 16, or 17, or at the outside 18-year-old me gave.


But I do remember his answer.


Twelve years old. Not, in point of fact, because of physical or emotional considerations, it turns out (some girls start puberty as young as nine, he tells me, and I nod, believing him), but because ‘nobody under the age of twelve can be trusted to keep it secret’.


Yeah.


What about your childhood? It’s defective!


I was ten years old, I think, when I first met The Ghost.


I met him at a Live Roleplaying event put on by my local youth theatre group. He was attached by some means to a local troop, even though he was living in London at the time. I can’t remember, now, what his role was; he had a wizard character who was quite powerful and involved in that system, but was he any part of that first event? As I think more, I suspect not. Kez was, for sure, a bear of a man who had the job of guide for our party. And that event was the primary kids Vs the teenager theatre kids, and they massacred us in the final encounter.


Yeah, I think maybe The Ghost wasn’t at that event, but a later one.


Anyway, the LARP bug had well and truly bitten, and for the next ten years, attending LARP weekend events would be a significant part of my social calendar.


And The Ghost would take me.


It’s the summer of 1992. I am 14 years old.


Summerfest has loomed large in my imagination since I first heard the name; a vast event taking in thousands of attendants for a weekend of drinking, bonfires, and latex swords and silly costumes. It sounded like heaven, and The Ghost, possibly already dating my mother at this point, scores permission to take me. Due to a political and/or rules-based schism, a new group is formed, and so, for my first large event, I am attending not Summerfest, but The Gathering - the first event to hold this name.


In the long car journey from North Devon to the Derbyshire scout camp that hosts the event, I smoke my first cigarette.


I just ask him if I can have one, and he says yes. I smoke it like I know what I’m doing, but of course, I don’t, and when I confess at the end it was my first, he tells me he knew. I remember the feeling so clearly; a warmth in my cheeks, the flush of the forbidden, the comforting smell of tobacco smoke, now reborn as a taste, my mouth full of saliva.


“If you start to feel like you actually need them, cut back, and if you feel your breathing being affected, just stop,” is his sage advice. I nod. When I get home and tell Bev and Freddie, they'll both be delighted, and we’ll immediately form the village underage smokers club, sneaking cigarettes from the vending machine in the village pub - Marlboro Reds, same as Slash smoked.


…I want show you how to use it…


Either that trip, or the next one, we’ll become blood brothers.


We’ve been talking about it for months. He’s told me all about it; how we’re both old souls, who have shared many past lives together. ‘In many of those lives, we've been lovers. You can call me a dirty old man, I don’t care’ he says at one point, defiant.


I don’t say it. I don’t even think it.


I don’t want a physical relationship, but I do love him. It’s all the cliches you’d expect; he combines the best elements of my mates with all the advantages of being a Grown Up. Sure, access -  to cigarettes, whiskey, LARP events, concerts, plus a pretty mean music collection on cassette. But it’s not just that. It’s access to wisdom. The ghost knows stuff. He’s from the adult world, but not really of it; he tells me what my secret heart already knows; that all that grown-up bullshit is bullshit; magic is real, hidden just beneath the surface, and those of us that can do it, ah… the rules don’t have to apply to us. And of course, I’m not just a magician, but one of unusual power; there are just seven this generation that have the kind of power I do, and I haven’t been this powerful since I was Taliesin.


And he and I have known each other before. Life and life again, we find each other. Sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes one of each. Always friends, always together, often lovers.


And I feel it.


So we do the ceremony. Naked, at his insistence, we sit in the tent, facing each other, lit by candle flame. We use needles in our fingertips to draw the blood we mingle. ‘Normally, at the end, we’d have an open-mouthed kiss. To prove our trust in each other,’ he’d told me earlier, and I’d snorted before replying ‘yeah, that’s not going to happen’. We do embrace, naked, in the tent, blood brothers now, the ceremony completed again, ensuring the cycle will perpetuate, and we’ll be connected in the next life.


We sleep together, naked, in two sleeping bags zipped together. We smoke in the pitch dark, and he teaches me to read symbols in the glow of the ember.


…it’ll kill you right back…


It’s the summer after, 1993. Two amazing live shows in the space of a week - my beloved Guns N Roses, on the third leg of their mammoth Use Your Illusion tour, with The Cult as the main support band, and Metallica touring the black album (with Megadeth in tow) the following Saturday. I’m fifteen years old. I go to these shows with friends. The Ghost is not in attendance. I stay with my father, and I have an amazing time at both gigs.


In the week in between, The Ghost takes me to another show. Ugly Kid Joe, at The Island in Islington. Screaming Jets in support.


At the show, there is a group of girls, a similar age to me. I think they are beautiful. The conversation starts teasing, but they actually warm up to me after a while. I tell them The Ghost is my father, and that he lets me smoke. They’re venue regulars, and they flat-out do not believe Ugly Kid Joe are actually playing there. ‘They won’t show up, I mean, why would they?’, she insists.


But they do, and It Is Good.


After, we’re walking back. I remember - God, it’s wild, what comes back - passing a Burger King, the lights on, but the door locked. A leather-jacketed man rattles the door angrily, drawing wary glances from the staff inside. He turns to his companion, and with a tone of whining exasperation and an angry smile says ‘If they’d just had a little imagination…!’


On the way back, I talk about the girls a lot, excited. They really seemed to like me. I wonder if we could go back sometime. He demurs, saying the acts there are usually dance bands. I cool on the idea quickly, but not without regret. He laughs and says ‘anyway, you’re getting a bit ambitious for someone that hasn’t even painted the ceiling yet!’


I’m taken back to The Ghost's house. He lives with his parents in a block of flats. He explains that they’re not here, and they don’t know I’m staying. He explains that he won’t tell them, because his dad’s brother had a thing for boys, and so his parents were hypervigilant about that kind of thing.


I smile, laugh, nod.


We share a bed that night. Naked. We laugh and joke around. At one point, he pulls me onto his chest, so we’re lying face to face, me on top of him. ‘Come here!’, he says. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Because I want to control you!’ he says, still smiling.


Something in my stomach flips over.


I say something, and flee the bed. He immediately apologises, says it was a joke. He says my reaction was good, He says it was a test, and I’ve passed. He says that if I’d responded positively, he’d have known he was on for a love affair, rather than a magical trainee. ‘It’s a shame, though, I could have done with a love affair,’ he says, mock wistfully, and I laugh at his silliness.


And looking back on moments like this, knowing what I know now, for just a second, I can feel a glimpse of what it must have been like, for him. What he must have imagined, desperately hoped, was about to happen there. I don’t know if he really loved me - to be honest, I’m not sure he’s capable of love, in a way you or I would recognise - but I do believe that he believed that he loved me, and that his desire came from that love. It’s the only way I can make sense of his fetishisation of consent; though as I type that, of course, it’s possible it was nothing more than survival instinct, right? Consent makes the waters muddy, if it ever comes to that; gives shame as leverage, makes talking at all less likely.


Let’s face it, I was never supposed to write this down. You were never supposed to read it.


The next morning, the conversation ends up coming around to self-defence, a perennial obsession of mine at that age, in the final year of an unhappy school career. He says he can help with that. He holds a large cushion against the wall and instructs me to punch it.


Naked, of course. So he can properly see what my body is doing, how it moves. Boxers often train naked, he assures me.


I believe him.


… they’ll never let a night like tonight go to waste…


It’s the only way it’ll work, he tells me. We’re back in The Room.


The meditations are going nowhere; following the Big Heart moment, I can’t get close to that state again. I’m frustrated. So is he.


He insists the issue is sexual. By this stage, I have a girlfriend. In point of fact, he’s in my home, the night I lose my virginity, and the following morning, he sits on the end of the single bed we’re curled up in, beaming with pride. That she took this in her stride seemed inconsequential at the time, and seems nothing short of miraculous today.


Anyway.


I need to ‘really let go’. I can’t do that with her, but I can with him, because he’ll let me. He lays it out. ‘You can do whatever you want. If you want to touch me, you can. If you want me to touch you, I will. If you want to penetrate me, you can. If you want me to penetrate you, absolutely not.’ It will be safe, he insists. I need it, he is clear, and it’s the only way it’ll work.


And there’s simply no way.


The proposition is the opposite of appealing. I don’t want to ‘let go’, be out of control sexually. Why would I? Why would anyone? I’ve only been having sex for five minutes, but it’s already clear to me that the more attentive and responsive you are, the better for both of you. And anyway, it’s him, and as much as I love him there’s not a single remote spark of physical attraction.


Do I want the astral projection, that power, that proof? Sure… but, you know, not that much.


I’ve been unsparing in terms of showing you my credulity to this point, but I have to give myself a bit of credit, here; I was firmly in touch with my own desires, and, despite years of careful path laying and preparation and manipulation and lies; despite that enormous investment of time, and energy, and imagination, it all crashed against the solid wall of implacable Do Not Want, leaving not so much as a mark.


I don't know for sure where that selfish, unmovable core came from, but, obviously, I’m grateful.


There’s much more I could tell, but the hour grows late, and honestly, I don’t think he’s worth it. But I do need to share one further moment because it’s very, very instructive; and a big part of me finally writing this out is, as always, an attempt to answer a question. Unusually for this series, however, the question this time isn’t ‘why’, but ‘how’.


So.


…baby, we could talk all night…


It’s sometime between 2009 and 2010. I’m married, and settled, baby on the way or possibly recently arrived. And I get a phone call out of the blue from one of the old LARP crew that’s stayed in touch.


And he’s got questions for me about The Ghost.


Turns out, The Ghost has gotten cosied up with another family. This time, it’s a girl child he’s getting close to. The parents are concerned; the kid won’t talk.


And it’s at that moment, over twenty years after we first met, ten years after I stopped living with him in London, in the flat we shared and split the rent and ran D&D games and bickered like an old married couple as we drifted apart; as I became more and more aware of how regularly and pointlessly he lied, about everything; as any talk of magic and magical training faded before drying up entirely; ten fucking years after we parted, still on friendly terms, still Facebook friends, still the guy I thought of as my brother…


It’s that exact fucking moment, and not one second before, that the scales fall.


And, you know, I’ve gotten better at this writing gig, thanks in no small part to eight years at this particular coal face (thanks again, Jim), but, sorry, gang, I cannot fully put it into words what that moment did to me. Hell, real talk, what it’s still doing to me.


Because, all at once, it was so gobsmackingly obvious - what he’d really been, what he’d done, what I'd almost done -  that the overriding initial tide of emotion that hit me - before the shame, before the baffled anger, before the sorrow - was embarrassment.


‘You were a kid. You couldn’t have known. You’re not supposed to need to. That’s how it works.’ Well-meaning loved ones and counsellors. And of course, they’re not wrong… but it didn’t happen to them. It happened to me.


And I fucking should have known.


I should have. It was screamingly obvious. I mean, You’ve come this far, you know. And, not a clue; not as a kid (understandable), but also not as a grown ass, in-his-thirties-with-a-wife-and-career-and-kids adult; and that’s the part that’s still a little hard to swallow, some nights.


And then there’s the guilt.


As you’ll have gathered, I went to the police, the phone call from my friend ringing in my ears. The two officers were incredibly sympathetic and sensitive. I told as much of the story as I could remember - less than I’ve told tonight, as I’ve had more time, since, to think about it, and the events that surrounded it, to piece together at least some of the chronology - but enough.


A couple of weeks later, I get a phone call from another officer. They tell me they’re not pressing charges. They interviewed him, and he denied everything, and it’s word against word, and that’s it. They were tempted to go for it anyway, they said, because I was a compelling witness, but in the end they felt without a single piece of corroborating evidence there was no way forward.


I think about that a lot. About the fake secret I knew I was carrying, and the real secret I didn’t. How he hid in plain sight so well, I couldn’t see it until I found out I was neither the first, nor the last


Yeah, I think about that a lot, when I can’t help it.


The police said they’d keep my testimony on file; they’d made it clear to him that they had an eye on him, and he was no longer welcome at live role-playing events. ‘You came forward because you thought it might corroborate what was going on with someone else, but sadly it looks like it’s the other way around’ said the officer, on the phone; or something very like that, anyway.


And at some point came the twist of the knife I should have expected. The officer told me that The Ghost had denied it all, of course, and then; ‘he did say that he’d always thought of you as like a younger brother’.


Yeah. Yeah, me too, you fucker.


Me too.


Anyway.


Oh, he had at least one prior conviction for child sex offences, I learned that, too. That’s where the ‘not the first’ revelation came from. And if the stories his daughter told me are true - and I have no reason to disbelieve her - his father was also an abuser. I remember replaying the conversation in his parent’s flat, about the dodgy uncle.


Right there, in plain sight. Fucking hell.


I don’t know what happened with the family he was cosying up to, the child he’d clearly started working on. They were not people I knew or had direct contact with. I don’t have their names. I do know he vanished from social media days after I went to the cops, and my understanding is that he can no longer take part in UK LARP events, though I don’t know how they’d enforce that.


I suppose, technically, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Though my money’s on alive. Sure, he was starting to develop a middle-age spread by the time we parted company, but he was in pretty good shape. Maybe the smokes got him in the end, or will do soon; but I think, if he were gone, word would have gotten back to me by now. Hell, there’s even a part of me, a holdover from that believer kid, that thinks I’ll know, when it does finally happen.


Still, I hope he is dead, or dying. Not because the thought gives me any satisfaction - I’d say if it did, without shame, it just doesn’t - but for a simpler reason; once he’s dead, he can’t do it anymore.


Because that’s the weight of this thing that I can’t ever quite shift. I remember a friend actually saying to me ‘I don’t feel safe having him around my niece’ and thinking, hard, and replying ‘I don’t think he’d do anything intentionally to harm her’, and God help me, I meant it, and what the fuck does that say about me? I knew about everything you’ve read above, and I fucking said that. And, you know, not for nothing, but I went through an aggressive, ugly New Atheist phase, around 9/11, and somehow I was also carrying this entire doublethink about my ‘brother’ in my head that exact same time, and I dunno, you guys, I think maybe, in certain fundamental and important respects, I’m just not that bright.


…endless winters, and the dreams would freeze…


I don’t like knowing he’s still out there, and still a danger, that’s the beginning and end of it.


And I guess this is where we draw the lesson, right? And I think - I think - the lesson might be this; no secrets.


Or. no, that’s too proscriptive; too radical, even for the guy who wrote A Song For The End.


Okay, how about this? Interrogate your secrets; and, especially, the secrets others want you to keep.


Because it felt so plausible. That’s the thing. Because I was bright, and imaginative, and angry, and rebellious, and a kid. And because he knew just what to say. ‘You know if you’d been into football, it’d have been football’, a wise friend told me, and she was right, of course, but I couldn’t see how it was tailored for me, because it was tailored for me; such a perfect fit, I’d carry it long and far past the point I should have known better.


There's one last thing I’ve got to share, too, because it’s too perfectly macabre, and I’m a horror writer, but also, it’s a true thing, and it’s this: increasingly, I look like him.


I’ve got long hair (though mine is already thinner than his was, damn his eyes). I’ve got the glasses. Since lockdown and working from home, I’ve even started working on the belly, now I’m not cycling 40 miles a week in commute. And when the beard’s short, it’s okay, but I gotta tell you, lately, when it fills out, and I catch myself in the mirror… well.


Because I’m about the age he was when he met me.


And that’s when the sadness comes in.


What I think is, he was empty, in some fundamental way. Empty in a way that can't be fixed, can’t be filled. I don't think he was capable of love, as you or I would understand it.


But I was. I am.


And I loved him.


And that’s why nobody knew what was going on. Because I didn’t know what was going on. Because I trusted him, and I loved him, and so I knew the secrets he needed me to keep were good, were right.


I dunno. I’d hoped when I got to this point, I’d have something useful to say. I’d imagined there’d be something I could say to the parents and kids who don’t know they’ve invited a predator into their lives; some wisdom from what I lived through that might stop some kid from making bad choices, or help twitch the antenna of some well-meaning parent.


I really thought I’d get there.


Well, okay, how about this? My sister - who knew nothing of any of this until decades later - told my mum, at the time The Ghost was courting her, that, if he moved in, she’d run away. And mum broke off the relationship, though whether or not it was in response to that, I don’t know, and frankly don’t want to ask, at this distance.


But.


She didn’t know. Obviously.


But she knew something.


And who knows how this story plays out, if he’d moved in?


I’ll say this too, for whatever it’s worth, and if you’ve come this far, you may see this as a weakness or defect rather than a strength, and fine, whatever, but; I refuse to reject my capacity to love. Because love may have trapped me into lying for someone who didn’t have my best interests at heart… but it also saved me, over and over. And it’s still saving me, as I spend the rest of my life wrestling with the fact that the most important relationship to me, in my most formative years, was with a man who was a pathological liar with a sexual interest in children.


…does it get any better, can it get any worse?


I am acutely aware that, as I type this, there are people - children and adults alike - who are suffering at a level that renders what I’ve described as trivial. I say that neither to aggrandise or diminish my own story; merely to acknowledge reality. I wouldn’t wish what was done to me upon anyone, and I was profoundly lucky, and both these things are true.


Just… look out for each other, okay?


And okay, maybe, maybe...


Maybe we need to be even more fearless about expressing what we know to be true.


Because this is a dark time; maybe the darkest our species, and our planet, has endured since a big space rock did for the dinosaurs. Our kids, if they live at all, are going to live through cataclysms not merely outside of living memory, but actually unprecedented. And, as a father, I can relate on a cellular level to the desire to protect, to shield.


But.


I think, maybe, that’s not always the best way to go.


Because I think, maybe, that if we resist that urge, and instead speak painful truths, we’ll give those kids a fighting chance to be the beacons of hope we’re all desperately going to need, in the decades we’re cursed to face.


And, as an added bonus, we will, hopefully, leave them less vulnerable to those skilled, brilliant operators who will mix lies with truth, in service of appetites incomprehensible to those of us with souls. Because, while such people are blessedly rare, they do exist; and, left unchecked, they can do an awful lot of damage.


And I feel like that’s probably worth doing. Given where we are.


…objects in the rearview mirror may appear closer than they are…


Thanks for coming this far. Good luck out there.


KP
19/10/22


PS - There are a few - a vanishingly few, I suspect - who knew me back then and might come across this. Know that I’m okay, and also, respectfully, I don’t want to talk about it. If you know, you know. If not… let’s leave it here, okay? Thank you.