MY LIFE IN HORROR: DO OR DIE BY KIT POWER

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.
 
Do Or Die

It’s Christmas, 2019. I’m more than old enough to know better, and yet here we are.
 
My board game habit has gotten moderately out of control in the last 18 months, the discovery that my daughter liked to play and was able to grasp very advanced rules sets with little difficulty leading me to revisit Kickstarter like a crackhead returning to an old dealer after a long absence. Kickstarter being what it is, some of the titles I backed in that initial burst of enthusiasm have yet to arrive, but enough have that storage has become an issue, and at a fast enough rate that the bottom of my kid’s enthusiasm for learning yet another new game was found substantially before the boxes stopped arriving.
 
It’s a classic bit of parental over enthusiasm, in other words - hardly a hanging offence, but frustrating both on it’s own terms and as a representation of a deeper immaturity on my part; I was just so excited at the thought of endless blissful weekends spent bent over dice, cards and gigantic boards, not even thinking through the likelihood that  a) learning new games constantly can generate fatigue after a while and b) the kid might actually want to do other things, from time to time.
 
So, no Legendary expansions on my Santa list this time, and my sole purchase for her was RoboRally, which she fell in love with last year when we played the original at a friends house. Got Concept for the family, because the missus likes that one. And, yes, okay, Atlantis Rising for me. I’m not made of stone.
 
Anyhow.
 
A couple of years back, my missus managed to score a copy of Lost Valley Of The Dinosaurs for me, which was a huge treat, and it was a pleasure to discover that while it was certainly luck based to a degree you simply wouldn’t allow in modern game design, it did have that wonderful quality of generating stories - moments or strings of coincidence that would stay with you, and invoke joy.
 
And, Christ, I was so tired when I made my Christmas list this year. The truth is I don’t really want anything; except more time to write, and that’s not something you can put under a tree. So I threw together half a dozen DVDs, vinyl titles, CDs, and books and called it good.
 
I swear, I don’t remember putting the game on there, or why. I know I did, but…
 
And in between writing the list and the big day, I find myself in the vicinity of some second hand books, and end up picking up a King title in hardback, the re-read of which becomes my  Christmas treat; total comfort food, reading with no thought of a review or essay to follow, just wrapping the story around me like a comfort blanket and snuggling in.
 
And then the big day comes, and in amongst the parcels for me is a suspiciously large box. I’m honestly mystified. And then, as the wrapping paper parts under my hands and I read the words Escape From Colditz…
 
It’s the late 80’s. I am yet to turn ten years old. And I am playing at Ben’s House.
 
Ben is Alice’s son, and her and my mother have been friends since we were both 2 years old; which means, functionally, Ben and I have been friends that long, too.
 
The nature of that friendship remains mysterious to me to this day. We were friends, of that I have no doubt. I liked him, and enjoyed his company, and he mine. We never had a huge amount in common; he was physical, practical and well built, I was small, bookish, and lived, then as now, largely in my own head. For all that, though, we rubbed along well enough together. Part of that was a sense of shared heritage. Both our mothers were very rooted in a kind of New Age Paganism that crossed over with 2nd Wave Feminism, and as a result of that, we’d both been brought up on a diet of Winnie The Pooh, Tolkien, Beatrix Potter, Wind In The Willows, and so on. I don’t know at what age a TV was finally allowed into Ben’s home, but I know it was later than mine, and he filled that entertainment gap with books and physical activities.
 
On the other hand, he was allowed cap guns to play with, and I never was, so, you know. Swings and roundabouts.
 
It was a common feature of my trips to his house (and it only occurs to me as I write that it seems like it always went that way; I can't remember Ben ever sleeping over at my house) that we’d go out to play, which in his case meant to roam far and wide across the countryside surrounding the village he lived in. And I was okay with that, but it was never something I’d have chosen to do under my own steam; as a kid, the outside was something I had to pass through to get to a friend's house, or endure as part of the slow torture of a weekend dog walk.
 
But Ben, man, he loved it.
 
Kid had a fishing rod. Like, age 10 or 11, he had a rod. His mum didn’t fish, and nor did Don, his stepdad (a wonderful man - tall, big grey beard, bushy eyebrows, wonderful rich deep voice, gentle manner, he’d often do storytelling at the local library), but Ben had a rod and taught himself. As we went down to the stream, he showed me the scar on his hand where he’d caught the hook on a prior occasion, and we took turns casting the line as he explained how the lure worked, the spinner that would catch the sunlight and look to the fish like the belly of a small fish in distress; prey, in other words.
 
We spent an afternoon down there, caught the same small salmon a couple of times which we let go, and then had to leave - almost certainly because I fucked up a casting and the line caught in a tree. I can’t swear to it, but that feels right; certainly the kind of goofball shit I am still capable of on a bad day.
 
He had knives, too; multiple. Pen knives, hunting knives, one ‘commando’ knife with a black rubber coated blade to protect the metal from rust, and a hollow handle with a sewing kit/fishing line and waterproof matches. Kid was obsessed with waterproof matches, showing me how they worked by holding the head of the match in his mouth before striking it to prove it worked.
 
One time, he built a bomb.
 
He’d filled it with a combination of flammable materials he’d stolen from the garage. I genuinely can’t recall everything he said was in the glass jar with the metal lid, except they were all combustible fluids. I want to say there were terps, some lighter fluid, but I'm not sure what else. Quite a cocktail, anyway. And he’d drilled a hole in the top of the jar, in order to have a fuse - some cloth he’d been soaking in, shit, I can’t remember, something else flammable.
 
We took that one down to the field near the stream, and buried the jar up to the lid (my memory is there was a convenient rabbit hole that had done most of the work for us, but who the hell knows, this far out?). I had visions of a huge explosion, a gout of earth thrown up in the air, like out of a war movie or the A-Team. In the event, it was a huge anticlimax - the fuse burned out but the content didn’t catch, though Ben reported to me, after he’d gone back to inspect the unexploded device over my strident protests, that vapour had formed inside the jar, which should have ignited. I was just relieved he hadn’t lost an eye going back to inspect the damn thing. Thinking on it now, it’s probably a lack of oxygen in the jar that prevented ignition.
 
Probably just as well.
 
When we turned, oh, I dunno, eleven or twelve, something like that, our mothers decided that we should undergo a rite of passage ritual, to mark our passage to adulthood. I clearly remember thinking that it was transparently too early, that ritual or no, I was still a good 40 or 50 years away from anything resembling adulthood (and lo, it has proven to be so), but also that it sounded like a fun adventure, so we went for it. We were to camp out overnight on Dartmoor, with Don acting as guardian, undergo a 24 hour fast (Ben wasn’t wild about that, he always liked his food, but I wasn’t bothered - I had an uncomfortable relationship with eating, back then, and 24 hours without actually held a kind of appeal). Of the event itself I remember very little. It was cold, I think, and I feel like it rained overnight, but that may just be an ur-memory of the sound of  rain on canvas, which in my mind is the sound of camping. We had some chat with Don, and went off on our own for an hour or two for some half arsed vision quest nonsense. I spent most of it halfway up a tree I’d climbed. Which wasn’t a bad way to spend time. Afterwards, there was a feast, and both Ben and I were given silver rings as signs of our transition. We’d both lost those rings within a month, in testament to the boys we still were.
 
The only thing I do remember clearly from that trip, I remember very clearly indeed; an image with a quality so stark it feels hyperreal, hallucinatory. While Don set up the tent, the clouds were dark and roiling in the direction I looked. Whether or not there was lightning, I don't recall, but the cold air had that prickly quality you sometimes get before a storm. And then I saw a pair of wild horses - one black, one brown - galloping across the hillside, along the ridge above the dip in which our tent sat. They were magnificent, huge, powerful, their muscles rippling under fur that seemed to gleam in the light, the sound of the hooves audible even over the rising wind. Their manes rippled as the wind caught them, and their heads tossed as they whinnied and ran on, wild, free, towards the storm.
 
It’s one of the most amazing things these eyes have ever seen.
 
Anyway.
 
As you’ve probably guessed, Ben had a copy of Escape From Colditz - the original version, which featured not the german eagle but swastikas on the back of the escape and security cards, in stark red, black and white.
 
I was captivated by the game. The sheer scale of it, for starters - the board came on four pieces, each as big as a usual board, which fit together like a jigsaw, creating what the extensive game manual assured us was a reasonably accurate floor plan of the infamous castle. There were all the rooms the prisoners had access to, tunnels, guard houses, indicators to show which walls could be scaled, and how much rope you’d need to do so - even a staff car in the courtyard.
 
The game itself was sufficiently complex that it couldn’t be played out of the box, as Monopoly or Sorry! Might. But we didn’t know that, so we just played it, making up our own rules, taking it in turns to play the Germans or the escapees. Our basic disregard for the rules gave more of an edge to the prisoners than the guards, I think, but not straightforwardly so; and in any case, I can’t recall that we ever actually finished a game, so it scarcely mattered. The point was, I loved it, and thought of it often when I wasn’t there, and I was never allowed to borrow it.
 
Ben and I drifted apart once we came of age and were no longer living at home. It was that odd period when the internet and mobile phones hadn’t quite fully arrived, and it was still possible to lose touch with someone via a kind of neutral drift and just not making the effort; a skill I developed into a talent as a teenager and young adult, for a variety of utterly banal reasons relating to mental health. It was mutual; he never made an effort to get in touch with me, either, and that was fine. Like I say, the friendship was odd; it was real, but it was never remotely intense, and truth to tell, when we were apart I certainly thought of Colditz more than Ben.
 
And then, a few years ago, mum told me Ben had passed away. In his sleep, as far as anyone could tell, in his 30’s. He had no wife, or girlfriend. His body wasn't found for a few days. No known history of drug use, excessive drinking, and no signs of that with the body. Just… gone.
 
Alice never recovered. She’s now in assisted living; dementia. Don still lives in the house they’d all shared, in that same North Devon village.
 
And on Christmas day, in 2019, I open - at last - my very own copy of Escape From Colditz, along with a wave of emotion that has a surprising strength and ferocity.
 
Life comes at you fast, I think. And I smile.
 
KP
18/1/20
 
PS - We played Colditz a couple of times, but it turns out, a game where one of you has the job of stopping the others from winning isn’t actually a lot of fun - at least not for our family. The gameplay design is really good - when you’re the escapee, you spend every turn trying to work out how to make the best of the roll you get, and you can spend a lot of time getting all your pieces in position to make an escape attempt. Similarly, playing the guards, you have good but not perfect knowledge, and if the players coordinate attempts, you have to be very lucky to stop them all. In short, the mechanics do a very good job of capturing the themes and subject matter - maybe a little too good. I will certainly play it again, but probably not with the kid.
 
Oh, and the King novel I was rereading on the day I opened my copy of Escape From Colditz was, of course, Needful Things.
 
Because when it’s real life, the metaphors don’t have to be remotely subtle.
 
KP