Blood Games (22 page)

“I’m tired of playing your game,” Emory would protest.

Jim and Joanne would encourage Bart to leave Emory alone for a while. “Then he’d go off and play on his own and everything would be fine,” Jim recalled later. “But when they played together, Bart had to be in charge. The game had to be set up and run his way. Bart had to make the decisions. He was always the game master.”

Bart and D&D were a perfect match. Since he had been the first to learn the game and had introduced it to his friends, he became the dungeon master. As the games he conducted became more complicated, his group more experienced, Bart’s skills grew. And as other groups formed and the game spread, Bart gained a reputation as the master of dungeon masters.

That power and recognition filled a void in Bart’s life, Weldon Slayton thought.

By the time Bart was in high school, most of his fellow students and teachers thought him weird, off the wall. He seemed determined to set himself apart from others, to be different. “He made his claim by being odd,” said Slayton. “I think he just found it difficult to deal in the social area, especially where girls are concerned.” He never dated and didn’t even associate with girls. “He went around with guys who were loners,” Slayton said. “I always thought James was very lonely and the only way he could connect was by being really weird and running with other weird kids.”

Tall and thin, Bart often wore a camouflage military field jacket to school and carried a backpack filled with D&D paraphernalia. He had taken a strong interest in the military and martial arts, and in eleventh grade he began taking karate lessons after school in Danville. Rambo movies delighted him.

Despite Bart’s determination to be unconventional, outrageous, and unconcerned with authority, Weldon Slayton, who kept a relaxed atmosphere in his classes, found him to be obedient and respectful.

“I took no foolishness,” Slayton explained. “If I would say, ‘James, sit down,’ he would sit down. He never defied me. He never faced me down about anything. He didn’t argue.”

And there were times when Slayton found Bart to be uncommonly conventional. Whereas most of his other students simply called him Slayton, Bart always called him Mr. Slayton. Slayton was an instructor at the prestigious Governor’s School to which top high school students from around the state were sent for six weeks of summer study and activities each year. Bart was chosen to attend after he completed the eleventh grade. Slayton, who encouraged informality as a means of making students feel comfortable and accepted, offered Bart an opening.

“Why don’t you call me Weldon?” he said.

“I can’t,” said Bart, who went right on calling him Mr. Slayton, always keeping a formal distance between them.

The place where Bart felt most comfortable, creative, and accepted was where he was in control: in the D&D games over which he ruled.

By the time the regular players in Bart’s dungeon were in high school, they were such experienced participants and had moved into such advanced stages of play that the game had taken on a different cast. No longer were their characters going out on adventures to face mere monsters. They now were competing against each other in long-running, multileveled campaigns, scheming and plotting and conniving to destroy one another and seize the other’s treasure.

“Everybody’s character disliked everybody else’s,” Bart recalled years later. “It gave a comedic edge to the game. We used to joke, ‘You better shut your mouth or I’ll kill your character.’ ‘Yeah, I’d like to see you try it.’ We’d laugh when somebody was stepping in traps or falling in pits.

“You really want to win when you’re competing against each other. It’s a matter of prestige.

“It stimulated a lot of thought about the game, generated a lot of theory. It was hard to make it run smoothly. They would challenge every ruling I made.”

Although Joanne sometimes complained that Bart was spending too much time playing D&D when he should be studying, neither she nor Jim really knew much about the game, nor were they especially concerned about Bart and Emory playing it. They were pleased that Bart had an activity he could enjoy that also stimulated his fertile and creative mind.

Yet concern about D&D was growing among other parents around the country. On June 9, 1982, Pat Pulling of Montpelier, Virginia, came home to find her sixteen-year-old son, Bink, a straight-A honor student, dead on the front lawn. He had shot himself through the heart with his father’s handgun. Bink, an obsessed D&D player, left a note revealing that his soul no longer was his because another player had put the curse of a werewolf on him. Only four months later, Tony Gowin, an eighteen-year-old D&D zealot, walked into a hobby shop in Bardstown, Kentucky, to inquire about a D&D book he had ordered, got into an argument with the twenty-year-old clerk, and impaled her with a medieval broadsword, killing her.

So many teenage suicides and murders were being connected to D&D that Pat Pulling began a crusade against the game. She was joined by Dr. Thomas Radecki, an Illinois psychiatrist who headed the National Coalition on Television Violence and had studied several cases of teenage violence that he related to D&D.

By the fall of 1985, when Bart Upchurch, the most accomplished dungeon master in Caswell County, was beginning his senior year at Bartlett Yancey High, Pulling and Radecki had begun generating national attention. The popular TV show
60 Minutes
featured a segment on the dangers of D&D. An article appeared in
Newsweek.
Newspapers were writing about the possible perils of the game. Ministers were denouncing it as a doorway to the occult and Satanism. As many as fifty teenage murders and suicides had been tied to playing the game, and the number was growing monthly.

The company that was now producing the game, TSR Hobbies Inc., denied any proven links between the game and the rash of violence. Players who killed themselves or others had deeper problems from other causes, the company said. D&D, it claimed, was being made a scapegoat by parents seeking desperately to blame anything but themselves for their children’s actions. Millions of teenagers played the game every week without harming themselves or anybody else, the company pointed out. Still, in 1983, the company had added to the games a warning about players becoming too closely identified with their characters.

None of this controversy affected the most ardent D&D players in Caswell County, those in the dungeon over which Bart Upchurch was master. But their game had begun to go in a different direction. A new player had been added to the group. All of the players had known him for years, even had played D&D with him on occasion. But he had spent a year away from the county at a special school, where he had been master of his own dungeons. Now he was back and playing in Bart’s group. His name was Neal Henderson. He was smarter than Bart, and, to some minds, even weirder.

21

Caswell County never had seen the likes of Neal Henderson. He arrived in the county when he was nearly eight with his two-year-old sister, Heather, and his mother, Ann, who was fleeing a bad marriage. They moved into the small brick house of his maternal grandmother and step-grandfather, set far off the road on a sandy lane guarded by three green-sided tobacco barns, only a short distance from the spot where Abisha Slade’s slave Stephen accidentally created Bright Leaf tobacco.

Neal had been born only a few miles across the state line in Danville, where his parents had met. But before Neal was a year old, his father, Jerry, moved the family to Richmond, where he went to work for a major construction company. By the time Neal was six, his parents’ marriage was in trouble. Later, he still would carry vivid memories of their arguments.

“They didn’t like doing it in front of me,” he said. “I’d jump up, throw my hands in front of them, and try to stop them. I hated it.”

Ann Henderson left her husband after Neal finished the first grade. The separation was wrenching for Neal. “That was my dad,” he said years later. “I loved him to death, and he loved me to death. I was always with my dad.” His mother brought her children to North Carolina and moved in temporarily with her brother and his family in Chapel Hill. Neal missed his daddy and didn’t understand why he couldn’t be with him. “I remember being in Chapel Hill and Mom had to go to Richmond to see about the divorce and she wouldn’t take me. All I understood was that Mom was going to see Dad and I couldn’t go see him.”

Neal completed the second grade in Chapel Hill, and by the time he entered the third grade at Bartlett Yancey Elementary School he already had left behind a string of amazed teachers and school officials who never knew what to do with him.

His kindergarten teacher thought he should be at least in the second grade. His first-grade teacher succeeded in having him sent to the second grade, but he had to repeat it again after he moved to Chapel Hill. There his teacher kept pulling him out of class to be tested.

In the third and fourth grades in Caswell County, he was stymied, so far ahead of his classmates that he didn’t have to pay attention to any of the instruction and still could make perfect scores on any tests they took.

“I was bored,” he said later. “I read constantly. I can’t ever remember not reading. I think I was reading at three. I could just get a book, kick back, be happy.”

His reading was eclectic. He loved comic books, especially those about superheroes, and read them until he had memorized them. He even created his own comic books about a character he called Solar Boy, who performed amazing feats with bursts of solar energy. He discovered science fiction and fantasy and read whole series of several authors.

One day, soon after Neal began the fifth grade, Weldon Slayton, then teaching at Dillard Junior High School, got a call from Steve Williamson, director of special education.

“He said, ‘We’ve got this kid in the fifth grade and his mother is demanding we do something with him because he’s knocking the top out of every test we give him,’” Slayton recalled. “‘Do you think you could do anything with him?’”

Slayton, who was just beginning to teach gifted and talented students, was willing to try. Like the teachers who had encountered Neal before him, Slayton was amazed at the results of the tests Neal had taken. This fifth grader obviously was capable of high school work. His IQ had tested as high as 180, well into the range of genius. Slayton went to the elementary school and met with Neal and his mother.

“He was just a pudgy little kid who had a wonderful vocabulary and, I thought, found the world very amusing,” Slayton recalled.

Ann Henderson was worried about her son’s social development if he advanced into higher grades with older classmates, and Slayton worked out an arrangement in which Neal would spend mornings with him in his eighth-grade English and social studies classes, then return to the elementary school in the afternoon.

The other students in Slayton’s class looked upon Neal as an oddity. “They liked me,” he said. “But even in the GT class, I was still that smart kid. I’d run from the girls. They enjoyed chasing me. They thought I was just the cutest little thing. I enjoyed the attention.”

Slayton discovered that Neal had a mischievous sense of humor. He came into class one day to find Neal missing and the other students grinning. Then he heard a giggle coming from a cabinet. He opened it to find that his star student had crawled into it to hide from him.

Neal found Slayton’s classes to be different from anything he’d encountered. Slayton gave multiple assignments and left it to his students to figure out how to spend their time to accomplish them. For the first time, Neal was not bored in school.

“I enjoyed doing the work,” he recalled. “I was sometimes late with it. I could never focus my interest on any one thing. If something else interested me, I would go and study it for a while. But I would get the work done.”

“Neal procrastinated forever,” Slayton said. Yet, astoundingly, it didn’t seem to matter. Slayton recalled a time when he had scheduled a block of tests. Neal put off reading the material and still hadn’t gotten to it when the time came for the tests to begin.

“Let me have the tests,” Neal told him.

“Neal, you’ve got some time,” Slayton said. “Why don’t you take a couple today, then do the reading and take the others later.”

“Give me the tests,” Neal said.

He sat down and breezed through them. When he finished, he had scored higher than anybody in the class.

Slayton had never seen another student like him. “He just devoured books,” Slayton said. “He loved learning anything and everything.”

The following year, when Neal normally would have been in the sixth grade, Slayton went to teach at the high school. The decision was made to keep Neal in eighth-grade classes.

“I spent that year pretty well bored,” Neal recalled. “Just played the entire year. I did try to help the new teacher with her course work.”

The next year, when he was twelve, Neal went off to high school to again become one of Slayton’s kids. That year Neal was allowed to take the SAT college entrance exams with the gifted and talented members of the senior class. He scored higher than any of them.

In the next year, however, his life would take a fateful turn, though he didn’t realize it then. He’d heard two acquaintances his own age, Coy Odom and James Upchurch, talking about a new game they’d begun playing, Dungeons and Dragons. Intrigued, he got hold of the basic book and read it, then moved on to more advanced material.