This was a rare occasion for Clara these days, to leave the dorm and actually show herself in public.
The waitress asked what they wanted.
“Steaks,” Clara said, smiling and raising her eyebrows.
They toasted to themselves as they waited to eat. This was nice. Four friends, double-dating, celebrating their birthdays. Clara had been drilling Patrick with the idea that she wanted him to do her a major favor that involved violence against her father. She hadn’t given up on this. Patrick was playing along like the sly, slick tough guy he had built himself to be in the world he and Mike shared. All of it fell under the banner of a fantasy game Clara had created. Clara hated Christians. She believed they would take over the world. She was planning a war in which she and all of her warriors would revolt and fight against them. It would start when Clara, the leader of this fantasy world, died.
“Katie is to be my successor,” Clara said. “She will take the world’s throne.”
With a shake of his head and a roll of his eyes, Mike would always watch and listen. Katie bought into it all, following along with Clara—whether serious or not—all the way.
The waitress soon brought the food. As she placed it down on the table, Katie thought she heard Clara say something to Patrick.
“When are you going to help do something about my father?”
“I need to see him once more,” Patrick said. “Before Christmas . . .”
Clara cut into her steak while the waitress stood by.
“This is rare! Fucking raw,” Clara barked bitterly. There was a sense of entitlement in her voice, as there always had been. Many later agreed with this observation: Clara believed she was owed something from the world, due to her tortured life at home. Her family, she had always said, had loads of money and she wanted—shit, she deserved!—her rightful share of it. How dare someone serve her a raw steak!
“Ma’am, would you like me to take it back?” the waitress asked.
“Uh . . . yeah!”
The waitress brought back a second steak.
“This is not what I ordered,” Clara said again. “It’s fucking rare!”
The steak went back and the waitress brought a third. She placed it in front of Clara and waited for her response.
Clara cut a piece, took a bite, and spit it out on the table.
“This is bullshit.”
The waitress walked away, likely shaking her head in disgust.
Clara slid her plate across to Patrick.
“Taste it.”
“What?”
“Cut a piece and eat it.”
Patrick did as he was told.
“Nasty,” he said. “Something’s wrong with it. I think it’s a drug specifically targeted to assassins.”
“This steak has been poisoned,” Clara whispered to Mike, Katie, and Patrick, leaning over the booth table, gathering them around.
Mike tried a piece. He didn’t find anything wrong with it.
“Yeah . . . and what I need to find out is how my father got in touch with this cook and was able to pull it off.”
After the others finished eating—Clara had not touched her steak again—Clara explained that she believed assassins or demons had somehow gotten inside the kitchen and poisoned her steak. Her father, of course, was one of them.
“We should go now,” Clara said.
“What about dessert?” someone asked.
Clara suggested the TGI Fridays across the street for dessert.
It’s important to note that at no time that night were any of them in character or involved in any narrative revolving around that “world” Clara had created. It was a night out, talking and being kids.
Clara tugged at Patrick’s arm as they made their way across the street. She said: “When do you plan on killing my father?”
Patrick didn’t know how to respond to this. He wanted to placate Clara, play along with her and her little fantasy game. According to Patrick later, he never intended to carry out any of Clara’s so-called “plans.”
There had to come a point where Patrick asked himself how serious Clara was. Clara certainly sounded on this night as though her request was not part of the game; she truly wanted Patrick to kill her father.
“Look,” he said, the others unable to hear him, “when the time is right, it will happen.”
Patrick longed for her to forget about it. He hoped she was kidding around.
CHAPTER 10
THAT WEEK AFTER the festival, Kyle called Mike—and, according to Kyle’s recollection, a best friendship was born. They hung out at Mike’s place. Katie was there. Kyle suggested that he, Katie, and Mike meet up with Brandy, the girl Kyle had met at the festival. Kyle had called Brandy and made a date with her. Kyle said he needed to blow off some steam. He had a court appearance coming up on October 8.
“Shit yeah,” Mike said.
Katie agreed.
They drove up to Maryland, where Brandy lived. Along the way, Mike told Kyle a story about Clara browsing through a weapons catalogue one day at his place. Clara was fascinated with knives, Mike told Kyle. She had picked out several. One, in fact, she told Mike she was buying specifically for Patrick as a gift.
Kyle smiled. The more he heard about Clara, the more he liked the way she thought.
Brandy was the “cheerleader type,” Kyle said. Very clean-cut. A nice girl. She had a bird, an African gray parrot named Bizzy, or, as Kyle called him, a “malicious fucker.” That first time Kyle showed up at Brandy’s house, she and her mother went into the kitchen to fetch some soft drinks while he and Katie and Mike waited in the living room. Kyle walked over to Bizzy.
The bird looked up at Kyle and said, “Pretty bird ... pretty bird.”
“Get a load of this shit,” Kyle said to the others. Then, to the bird, “You are such a pretty bird.”
“Cracker?” the bird said.
Kyle saw a box of crackers on the table. He picked one up.
“Cracker . . . cracker!”
He put the cracker up to the cage.
“And, shit you not,” Kyle said, “he bit my finger just at the same time, like in a movie, Brandy’s mother yelled from the kitchen, ‘Oh, by the way, don’t try to feed the bird—he bites!’”
Bizzy laughed.
They all went out that night and had a good time. But Kyle was more interested in Mike, Katie, and Clara—even though she wasn’t there that night. He liked Brandy, saw a future for them, but there was something in this trio of new friends that intrigued him. More than that, they were interested in him—especially his vampire lifestyle. Kyle considered himself a bona fide vampire and they all found this fascinating. Kyle was the type to go off by himself to the clubs in search of “donors” (women to trade blood sucking and sex with). He walked the earth at this period in his life, Kyle said, with the absolute belief that there were good and bad vampires roaming around, some of whom were searching for him. Mike, Katie, and Clara would ask him questions about his lifestyle. This made Kyle feel important, looked up to.
A force.
A protector.
A role, effectively, he adored.
CLARA WAS EXTREMELY adept at “not being noticed,” Kyle realized as he got to know her more intimately over the course of that fall. She never spoke very loud, talking almost in a whisper. She also had a bit of a lisp or speech impediment, where she had trouble pronouncing the letter R. All of this, however, fascinated Kyle, who observed, “She was very direct in her mannerisms.”
“I ever tell you about September eleventh,” Clara told Kyle one night.
Kyle knew all he needed to know about that devastating day. He never thought too much about it.
“I did that,” Clara told Kyle.
He was confused. “Um, you did what, exactly?”
“I have a list of the chemicals used in making the planes crash. Lord Chaos might have been responsible.”
It seemed Clara was taking responsibility for the terror attacks of 9/11.
“You’ll have to tell me more about this Lord Chaos,” Kyle responded, ignoring the absolutely ignorant comment Clara had made about 9/11.
“All I knew then,” Kyle said later, “was that ‘Lord Chaos’ was Clara’s nickname.”
Assertive. That was Clara. No, she was not the leader of the group, but Clara was the focus, the center, and the core. Hence the “Lord” and not “Lady” of her title.
Or at least she believed she was.
“I’m an outcast at home, and a prisoner,” Clara told Kyle. Immediately, in those days after the festival, as soon as Kyle started hanging out with Mike, Katie, and Clara, Clara opened up about her home life to Kyle, telling him any chance she got how much she despised her father. On this day, she and Kyle were alone at Mike’s parents’ house, hanging out, talking. Mike and Katie were off by themselves having sex.
“They liked to have sex in front of us,” Kyle said. “And when they did, we just walked away.”
Kyle wanted to know more about Clara. “How so?” he asked, referring to Clara’s home life and how much of an outcast she felt within the family unit. So far, Clara was hitting all the right bells for Kyle. It seemed she could be talking about his life.
“Well, even my brother and sister blame me for my mom’s death.”
“That’s horrible.”
“This is why I like staying at JMU. It keeps me away from home. Allows me to escape that place. It keeps me free.”
This, Kyle said, hit him the hardest. As he heard the details of what Clara described as blatant “abuse by her father,” Kyle was appalled by what Clara had experienced, but he could also relate to how sheltered and overly burdened she felt living there, as though she didn’t belong. Kyle had never felt like he fit anywhere. Roaming from foster home to foster home, psych hospital to lockup, Kyle was a kid who had never found his roots or a foundation—same as Clara was now suggesting she had gone through most of her life. They clicked immediately. A bond was being forged between them.
“Like at school,” Clara said, talking about how hard high school was for her, “I felt like a troll. Kids gnawed at me.”
Kyle found himself in an awkward position within this new group of friends. “I didn’t try to be the leader,” he later recalled. “But when it came to Mike and me, especially, he was always looking to me for ‘Where do we go from here?’ type of advice. You know, ‘What do we do today?’ With Clara, it was almost as if as we were getting to know each other, she knew so much about me already.”
Whereas Clara was a bit more curious and self-reliant, not ever needing to be led or told what to do or how to think, she was trying to figure out Kyle as much as he was trying to figure her out and what she wanted from him.
There was a difference, however: If the inch-thick psychological reports of his life from this time period were accurate, Kyle was a paranoid schizophrenic, suffering from delusions of grandeur and severe, animated, and genuine (to him) visions (hallucinations). Whereas Clara came across as a spoiled, smart little girl who had an overbearing father and a problematic home life of abuse and emotional attacks (if we believe her)—issues she belabored without backing them up with any tangible evidence other than her own words and accusations.
Clara understood her situation, could deal with it, and showed no signs, gave no warnings, of being mentally incapacitated. Furthermore, Clara knew how to arrive at a common ground and to build a rapport with Kyle, using his mental instabilities to her advantage. This was never clearer than in the way she began to associate with Kyle and go to him with issues about her home and problems with her father. And it’s important to say here: There was not one report ever written about this so-called abuse Clara would talk about routinely.
When they went off on those walks as Katie and Mike had sex, Clara would hold Kyle’s hand. Make like she was interested in him sexually and emotionally.
It all gave Kyle a false sense of power—a position that Kyle had grown accustomed to. Inside those hospitals and facilities, and even some of the foster homes he had lived in, kids would go to him, Kyle explained, because he didn’t care so much about image or what people thought. He was his own person, and people accepted and gravitated toward that strong personality.
“Example? When I was in school—I mean like seven or eight years old. There was this bubble around me. When people came around me, they quieted down. Took notice. Then the whispers would begin. ‘There’s that crazy kid who threw the desk at the teacher.’ It was so stupid. Because I was on medication and placed in hospitals, I must be sick!”
Those were the times when no one wanted to hang around Kyle. He had a terrible go of making friends. But then one day, it all clicked for him. Kids flocked to him. They wanted to be near him. But it wasn’t genuine, Kyle felt. It seemed rooted in a keep-your-enemies-close thing and more of an interest in his psychosis than actual friendship.
“I said, ‘Fuck all of you!’ I stopped caring what people thought. And the damnedest thing happened—they all wanted to be my friends.”
And now, within a few weeks of knowing her, Kyle had a new best friend, Clara Jane Schwartz, who basically acted the same way those kids back in his childhood had. Clara, who seemed to be a lonely, old-fashioned, goth girl, asked all the right questions of Kyle to keep him interested, to keep him thinking they had this core connection between them.
Clara had plans for Kyle Hulbert, however—only he didn’t know it just yet.
CHAPTER 11
ONE AFTERNOON, KYLE took a call from Mike. Kyle was staying with a friend and would alternate his welcome there with shelters and living in his tent in the woods. The one thing Kyle always kept close by was his cell phone, now a direct line to his new group of friends.
“I got a letter from my shrink,” Mike explained.
“What’s up?”
“He says he thinks ‘I’m vulnerable to psychosis that could develop into schizophrenia,’ among other things. He claims there are ‘aspects’ of my ‘thinking that are not based in reality.’”
“No kidding,” Kyle said. He was very familiar with that sort of analysis. He had heard it himself all his life. “What are you gonna do?”
Mike said he didn’t care.
“I never heard about that letter again,” Kyle said.
That afternoon, Kyle rode his bike, which a friend had given him, to the Potomac Mills shopping center in Woodbridge, Virginia, your typical suburban-American corporate mall. He was hanging out by himself, waiting for Clara and his new group of friends to meet him later on that night. Mike, who had become Kyle’s taxi just about everywhere Kyle wanted to go, said he couldn’t get away until the evening. That was fine with Kyle. If there was one thing Kyle didn’t have trouble with, it was finding something to do or making new acquaintances. It was a quiet day. The mall would be fun.
Or so Kyle thought.
As Kyle walked around in a common area of the mall, a security guard approached Kyle on his left side. Kyle had a knife strapped to his side on the right. He was wearing sunglasses and his signature black trench coat—a look he would become known for, along with his Kikwear “Extreme” pants, those over-the-top baggy jeans that funnel out and are double in size at the bottom of the leg, with lots of pockets and places to stash things. The emo and alt kids liked to wear these types of clothes; though Kyle said, “Look, I liked wearing black pants. I liked Kikwear. I liked my trench coat. I didn’t wear this stuff to be emo or alt, or even a vampire. It was just how I dressed.” Save for the shotgun, Kyle looked like he belonged on the set of the Matrix films. He even wore his dark sunglasses during the day and at night. (“My eyes are very sensitive to light,” he claimed later, seemingly having an answer for everything.) “That’s why I wore sunglasses all the time. Looking good in them was a plus!” he added, not bashful about flexing his inability to express a smidgen of humility.
Kyle also had a backpack over his shoulder. So he was likely being profiled, as were others walking around that mall on that day, based solely on appea
rance. Security watched kids. Security guards in malls profiled. It is, as they say, what it is.
“Excuse me,” the security guard said, walking up on Kyle, staring at the knife Kyle had strapped to his belt.
“Yeah?”
“That’s a concealed weapon.”
“Come on,” Kyle said. “No, it’s not concealed.”
Security called police and Kyle was arrested.
Kyle said he had made a point to make sure his coat did not cover the weapon: “I know it’s a Virginia state law.”
Still, why even carry a knife?
“I liked it,” Kyle reckoned. “I carried a sword, too, but I did not have it that day.”
During his knife- and sword-carrying days, Kyle believed there were “people” after him—“the others,” he called them. He needed to be armed, in case that day came when he had to confront those rival vampires. And the idea that they were out there—even though they were not—was as real to Kyle Hulbert as the sky above, he later explained—same as the pet dragon that followed Kyle around wherever he went.
There was nobody who could have ever convinced him otherwise.
“And those weapons, I needed them,” Kyle explained. “They were out there. ‘The others.’ They were going to get me and anyone with me if I didn’t protect myself. I knew they were close by, too.”
How?
Why, Kyle said he could smell them, of course.
CHAPTER 12
HALLUCINATIONS ARE A major part of where Kyle Hulbert fits into the story of Clara Schwartz, Mike Pfohl, and Katie Inglis. Not drug-induced apparitions, as in an acid trip bringing about streetlamps that drip like a leaky faucet, plants that move on their own and speak, or the street rolling as you walk. The way Kyle explained it, the “hallucinations” he experienced—a word he claimed he was forced to use because it’s the only way most people will understand—weren’t anything like a scene from The Song Remains the Same, Led Zeppelin’s classic 1970s film that featured “trips” the boys in the band had gone on. No, Kyle said his trips were his reality.
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