Silent Hill Will Always Help Me Remember A Remarkable Friend

My friend Kit Reed died on Sunday. She was a prolific, award-winning writer of speculative fiction. Her cluttered yellow house is now empty. I will no longer stop by for tea or make dumplings in her kitchen for Thanksgiving. Kit insisted on no memorials, finding even the prospect of friends meeting for a drink after her death too depressing. There is only one place I can go to mourn her: A street in Silent Hill.

On Facebook, Kit’s son John wrote that she was a “world-class interrupter”, and that is how I remember her. She was a woman who refused to not be seen or listened to, who laughed the loudest and made sure you were laughing too. When I was in town, she’d invite me out to the movies for a matinee, and her judgement on every movie was instantaneous and absolute. Tree of Life? Malick made precisely one good film in her estimation, and she didn’t need to see any of the others. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes? Weird and funny, but when are they gonna get to the part where the apes wear pants?

In 2012, I read on a fansite for Silent Hill that there was a street, Craig St, named after the pseudonym she used to write thrillers, Kit Craig. All the other streets in Silent Hill are named after horror writers and filmmakers — Craven Ave, Levin St, Shelley Rd. When I told her this, she gave me her usual no-nonsense response. She thought it was cool — she hadn’t played the game but liked games quite a bit. But she said the fansite that reported on the street used her birth name when explaining the reference, which she’d legally changed to Kit. She said she wasn’t going to show anyone until they fixed their error.

Yesterday, between texting my mum and reading obituaries, I tried to trace this bit of trivia to its origin. The name “Craig” is so common that it could probably reference a lot of different authors, but Silent Hill fans are resolute in their belief that it references Kit. The earliest reference to her I could find came from a 2005 fansite, The Book of Lost Memories. This factoid has has been repeated for so long now that it’s more or less accepted as fact by fans that Craig St is named for Kit. It’s been reproduced on wikis, on fansites, and YouTube videos, referencing her incorrect name almost every time.

The only things I know for sure about Craig St are what’s in the game itself. It’s in the resort area of Silent Hill, intersecting with Bachmann Rd and Weaver St. On it you’ll find Mec Burger, Annie’s Bar and the Indian Runner, a general store. In the videos I looked up, it’s foggy, dark and sharply polygonal. It’s bleak and sparse. It is as far from Kit’s bright red hair, bon mots and booming voice as you can get.

Before she died, Kit stopped speaking. She had a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer, and it seemed like overnight she went from someone who was pointedly alive to someone who was dying. A mute Kit was something I’d tried not to think about, and even before she died she wasn’t the woman I knew. The yellow house she’d lived in for as long as I could remember has already been emptied of her belongings. She’d had a concave mirror sculpture, and if you stood in a certain spot in her dining room, she’d shown me, your voice would echo. Every inch of wallspace on her first floor bathroom had a tiny, framed painting of ants recreating historical events. She’d always have a plate of cookies or something just baked to munch on while she asked you about school, work and your love life and offered unsolicited advice on all three. Kit published her last book on the same day she had a biopsy on the tumour that eventually killed her, and her last short story in the final week of her life. She wasn’t the kind of person who stopped, not even when her body started giving up on her.

In the Silent Hill series, people are drawn to the town because their grief gets twisted into obsession. These people can’t let go, and their desire to hang onto the things that simply won’t come back consumes them. Yesterday, lying in bed, I was struck with a desire to go to Craig St, just to see. But Kit is dead. She hated the euphemism “passed”, and I’m grateful I can just be blunt about it. She died in her sleep on Sunday, and there isn’t anywhere I can go to see her again. Instead I will, like her, write every day from nine am to noon. I will invite my friends over for tea. I will be a world-class interrupter. I won’t let death stop me.