“If only it were that simple,” Kyle said later, explaining how he wished his visions and hallucinations could be clarified by saying he took LSD. “Believe it or not, contrary to popular belief, I am not a fan of drugs. I don’t have anything morally against them.... My life and my mind, I realized, were screwed up enough without me adding to it with drugs.”
Here’s where a difficult part of Kyle’s story begins, however. Kyle Hulbert feels strongly that these hallucinations are genuine visions of real beings and actual events—for him, they are not illusions or delusions. He believes there were times in his life when he would enter into a world of cartoons and exist with certain characters and then exit and enter into another world, where faeries flew and sprinkled magic dust.
It sounds dramatic, unreal, and even surreal. Maybe not worth the time to explore. You want to brush it off by shooing your hands, saying, “That’s crazy, dude!” Yet, for the person experiencing it, if we are to believe Kyle Hulbert and what he now says, it is as real as any memory any human being has had.
Kyle said that as a child, before he even knew that Seelie Court, a fantasy world where faeries invite humans to help along their fantastical quests, existed, he was going there, visiting with Seelie Court characters. He was part of this world.
Seelie Court is an online sensation, same as Magic and Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a mythical place with good guys and gals, as well as bad guys and gals. It’s that age-old narrative of good versus evil, repackaged another way, set in a fantasy world where Fae (faeries) have existed “since the beginning of time.”1
Kyle said he knew of this place since he was five years old. When he later found books about Seelie Court and those other worlds like it, he realized, “Oh, my God, I’ve been through this. It’s not like I had been exposed to folklore and mythology and just came up with it. My own experience reinforced stories I had read later. This is why I think it was real.”
CHAPTER 13
WITHIN KYLE’S MAGICAL worlds of faeries and gods, goddesses, good and bad people (including vampires out to get him), Clara Schwartz saw an opening. Though they had not known each other long by this point, Clara did not have to work hard to get Kyle on her side. Every time she opened her mouth and talked about her life, her beliefs, her past, Kyle took it in as though following along as Clara spread crumbs over the forest floor behind her. Clara spoke; Kyle inhaled.
Clara realized this reaction almost immediately.
“Clara was intelligent enough and perceptive enough to see my flaws,” Kyle observed years later, “to see that she could exploit them to her advantage, and she was egotistical enough to not only try, but try, succeed, and then believe she’d get away with it. . . .”
Kyle’s feelings regarding violence toward women began to play a role in his life with Clara. Because on the one hand, Kyle stated emphatically with a rather stoic, reserved tone, “I don’t like it (violence toward females).” And it was clear he thought about his answer before uttering a word. On the other side, however, he added, there needed to be some clarification about something that was important to him: “If, for example, I was ever attacked by a woman, and I felt like my life was in danger, I would treat a woman no different than I would treat a man [in a fight]. Aside from that, speaking of the actual concept (men hurting women), I don’t like it.”
One of the reasons, Kyle went on to note, revolved around the idea that “most people who perpetrate violence against women, their egos tell them that they are superior. And to show they are superior, they physically abuse a woman.”
This was a vital part of Kyle’s life: having an advantage—the absolute pecking order of there always being a king or queen and his/her minions; there had to be a leader and his/her followers. Kyle was quick to claim that he had weighed in on this at different levels at different times of his life. He maintained that he was in no way a born leader (king), but that the mandate of it all was something he respected greatly.
Which was right where Clara fit.
It was not long after they met that nineteen-year-old Clara Schwartz, this new and fascinating friend Kyle had buddied up to, began opening up to him more personally, describing intimate details about her life she claimed to have not shared with anyone else. Kyle and Clara weren’t lovers. For Kyle and Clara, the connection went much deeper.
Part of Kyle’s empathy for a woman in peril, or anyone being abused by a person in a superior position—an authority figure—stemmed from the fact that Kyle claimed to have been “sexually abused when [he] was twelve.” He had a strong need to explain this.
This abuse, according to Kyle, had a monumental effect on the rest of his life (as one might expect) and how it eventually played out. Kyle also claimed he shared this secret with Clara very early into their friendship. He said that it just came out one day while they were sitting and talking. He sensed that Clara had issues with people violating her, not necessarily in the same way, though. Kyle felt as he spoke about his past that Clara wanted to say something, share a heavy burden with him that she had been living with. Even more than that, Kyle made it clear to Clara that he had strong feelings against people who sexually abused others.
“I’ve had a rough childhood,” Kyle said one day. He liked to share this about himself with people he cared for. There was a sense of freedom in just stating it, allowing the words to leave his mind and body.
Clara nodded. “Tell me.”
He wasn’t prepared to open up and talk details about the sexual abuse just yet, but Kyle told Clara how he had been savagely bullied in school.
Clara could relate to that, of course. Back in high school, where her daily life centered on people making fun of her and calling her names, Kyle explained, Clara had been bullied because of the way she dressed, looked, and acted—everything about her.
“I don’t even like the idea of people like that,” Kyle told Clara. They were still on the topic of bullying.
For Kyle, his memories, a lot of them (he said), have been heavily influenced by him looking back at his life later on, viewed in hindsight. As a caveat, he added, memory was something for him that has become one of the key pieces of his story, of his history, really. He has memories, to this day, he said, he cannot explain.
“Pre-2000 through 2001,” Kyle commented, “before meeting Clara and Mike and Katie, I can recall only because I read about it later, or someone has told me. My psychiatrist says I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
As they talked, Kyle was incensed to hear something else from Clara.
“Death threats,” she explained.
“Death threats?” Kyle asked. “What do you mean?”
“Yeah . . . and you’ll never guess who!”
CHAPTER 14
CLARA WAS LATHERING it on heavily as the end of October approached. Leaning on her new friend, Kyle Hulbert, sharing with him the supposed “abuse” she claimed to be subjected to at home on an almost-daily basis. In Kyle, Clara had found someone who seemed to understand what she was going through. Mike and Katie had heard a lot of this from Clara already. Mike usually shook his head and told himself, Here we go again ; Katie listened because she and Clara were BFFs. Kyle now was a fresh set of ears for Clara.
“My honest analysis of Clara and that abuse,” Kyle said later, “was that there was some form of abuse going on. . . . I mean it could be as minor as he smacked her across the face because he was irritated with her, or whatever.” Yet, “smacking” your daughter across the face would hardly be considered “minor.”
Whatever type of abuse—if any—was going on inside Clara’s house, Kyle noticed that within Clara’s mostly protected, small world at JMU and home, it mainly affected Clara’s “magnificent ego” more than anything else that he could see. She wasn’t necessarily touched by it all in a declaration of “My life is ruined.” She hadn’t turned to drugs or alcohol to cope. She seemed to accept it—and yet she couldn’t let it go and wanted something for having gone through it.
Revenge.
“And this is coming from someone,” Kyle recalled, “who will admit to . . . Look, I am a narcissist. I love myself. And so for me to tell you that Clara Schwartz had an ego that rivaled mine, that should say something.”
There was an attraction there for Kyle with regard to Clara. It was more intellectual than sexual, although Kyle admitted later that he and Clara gave the sexual aspect of their relationship a go of it. They’d kiss and “do things,” but it just wasn’t there, Kyle said. He was attracted to a certain type of female—and Clara did not fit into that mold.
“At the time, I was not the person I am today,” Kyle said later, trying to explain his relationship with Clara and his overall outlook on females during those days, including his new girlfriend, Brandy, of whom he was seeing more and more. “I had a girlfriend and I was unfaithful. I never went all the way with Clara. It was there for us if we wanted to take it—and this sounds superficial—but it was halfhearted, at best. I was never pursuing Clara romantically. No, I had no interest in that realm with her.”
Kyle said his expectations and attitude toward females in general back then was “very shallow. I had a very specific ideal in what I wanted out of a relationship and a girl. Usually petite, hourglass figure, C cup, and a really nice ass.” He laughed. “I was very superficial.”
Clara was beginning to lay out for Kyle a fantasy world she had created. She took her time with this. It was a lot to absorb—even for someone like Kyle, who was very familiar with it all, to begin with. Within her circle of friends, including her boyfriend, Patrick House (and several others), Clara very carefully had constructed a make-believe world, with characters and rules and intricate plot lines she developed and instructed in person, in her journals, and online. It was, essentially, an RPG that they were all involved in. Now Clara had a new character in Kyle, someone, she could tell almost immediately, who took this stuff more seriously than anyone else she knew.
Kyle had spent some time with Patrick House, but not until many years later did he have an idea that Patrick and Clara were even dating. (Clara never talked about Patrick to Kyle in that manner.) Kyle liked Patrick. He found him to be “very well-versed in Renaissance culture.” Patrick was about six feet tall, with shoulder-length brown (reddish) hair. He filled the role of Renaissance musketeer to a tee, Kyle explained, as far as his haircut and “that little goatee” he kept. “He fit right in at the fair. He belonged there.” What’s more, Patrick, like Clara and the others, had a solid background in RPG.
Clara called her creation the “Underworld,” and her role as leader within that world was known as “Lord Chaos.” She’d sometimes go by the “Priestess of High Chaos.” The first time Kyle heard about it was a conversation he had with Clara during the first weekend he and the others all hung out with Clara at her JMU dorm. Columbus Day was coming up on Monday, October 8. Kyle, Katie, and Mike showed up at Clara’s dorm on October 6, a Saturday. Kyle had a court date on Tuesday to answer to that knife incident at the mall.2
“The Springtime War,” Clara explained to Kyle. They were heading toward the rec hall to get some dinner.
“Springtime what?” Kyle asked.
Clara explained. She detailed how she was the “embodiment of the Lord Chaos and wanted dead by all of the opposing factions.” Apparently, within the Underworld, Clara possessed special powers. There were “witch hunters” out to get her because the only way they could gain the power she had would be to kill Lord Chaos.
Generally, the way it worked: From her computer at JMU (a place she sometimes sat for hours and hours, day after day), Clara spoke to everyone in the game, initiating the plot line, facilitating a narrative of the Underworld through instant messaging that she had written out in a journal or talked over with them in person beforehand.
A chunk from a conversation she had with Patrick one night went like this:
I am the only one who has seen Death’s face, Clara instant messaged.
That is fine, as long as you can prove who you are . . . , Patrick responded. (Both of them were entirely in character.)
OK . . . the dragon’s claw?
Yup, let him hold it, he knows the imp that is inside it.
The only other thing that would prove it is . . . the Elder stone necklace I have.
He won’t accept that, the only reason he will accept the pendant, is because I gave it to you.
While they were playing the Underworld game, it was always clear and specific. There was hardly ever fluctuation between the Underworld and the real world, as the exchange between Patrick and Clara shows.
“Her goal was to gather a group of allies, so that when the Springtime War came, she could use her group to prevail,” Kyle said.
In prevailing, Lord Chaos could implement a new system of the way things were run. A new order, if you will.3
There was one issue here within all of this that perhaps nobody observed or talked about, with maybe the exception of Clara: Patrick, Mike, Clara, and Katie were perfectly capable of walking a fine line between fantasy and reality and stepping in and out of the Underworld. To them, it was an RPG, a way to kill time and postpone adulthood for as long as they possibly could. Maybe even an escape from their mundane, boring lives of being underachievers in a world that expected them to do great things with their lives. Clara probably used the game as a way to escape from the realities of home and the clear, unquestionable problems she had with her father.
For Kyle, however, as he listened to Clara, she spoke a language he not only understood and embraced, but he comprehended as truth. He honestly believed that parts of this world were real—and he could actually relate to what Clara described because he was then living inside it. Kyle, a vampire—the “good kind”—felt he knew exactly what Clara was going through.
“My own father,” Kyle explained later, “had said I never knew where the fantasy world ended and the real world began. I, at the time, was obsessed with my own apocalyptic visions, and her talk united perfectly with that, which made it so much easier for me to fall right into it—it was ideology.”
Clara had lifted elements from Norse mythology, particularly an age-old Norse word, “Ragnarök,” a term depicting a series of events from the future that include a “great battle,” where several major characters meet catastrophic death.
“Later, when I went back and studied Ragnarök,” Kyle said, “I realized that Clara had bastardized the Norse mythology and took elements from other things and tried to make it her own.”
Part of creating and scripting the Underworld for Clara was that it made her feel important. She was the center of the “faction.” If Clara died in real life or in the Underworld, the Underworld ended; and a new world, one that she also created, might be born out of the afterlife. That made her life on earth—her survival—more important than anyone else’s. In Kyle, his role in the Underworld became that of the protector, of course. Clara needed someone strong and powerful and mentally ready to take on the challenge of defending the most important player in the Underworld, Lord Chaos. Mike, Katie, even Patrick, none of them could take on this job the way Clara had long desired. Patrick, especially, routinely let Clara down and rarely had fulfilled his duties in the game. Clara was growing increasingly impatient with Patrick.
But here now was Kyle Hulbert. The prince had arrived to protect the princess. And Clara knew that Kyle, a kid who carried a 27-inch Shinobi (ninja) sword in a scabbard on his hip (or back), was the right man for the job she had in mind.
CHAPTER 15
KYLE SAID HE didn’t like to impose on people. He had an issue with people buying him things, doing favors for him out of the kindness of their hearts. It was born out of a life growing up in foster care. Within that environment, you learn to survive on your own and not count on others. It’s a survival mechanism. This produces within you a preconceived judgment about people, however. When someone steps forward to show a bit of kindness, for example, you question it. What do they want from me? you ponder.
&nbs
p; Kyle had been dating Brandy since they had met back at the Renaissance Festival. They liked each other. Brandy was good for Kyle. She was grounded and had somewhat of a plan for life. Kyle never brought her along when he went to hang out with Clara, Mike, and Katie—only because Brandy didn’t know them all that well, lived in another state, and had other friends and another lifestyle altogether.
“Listen, this is great,” Kyle said to Brandy one day. “Our relationship is going well.” Kyle was concerned that he lived in Virginia (or, rather, that was where he chose to be homeless). Brandy and her mom lived in Maryland. “I like you and I like where this is going . . . but ... I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to see you or when.” Kyle went on to explain that he was living, mostly, in a tent he carried with him and stayed with friends when they’d have him. He had no place in particular to call home at the moment. “I literally have my tent ... [on me] right now as we stand here, Brandy.” He was embarrassed. But Kyle said he was not someone who minced words or cared what people thought about him. He delivered his truth. You take it and do what you want with it, but the truth (as he believed it to be) was all Kyle had to his name.
“I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you, but I will try to get up to Maryland as much as possible,” Kyle explained. It was his way of telling Brandy it wasn’t going to work out any longer. Kyle knew that the relationship was doomed. There was no way for it to last through big gaps of time between seeing each other.
Brandy was working at the time. Kyle left and told her he’d be back.
That night, when he returned, Brandy’s mother was there.
“Apparently,” Kyle said later, “Brandy went and told her mother what I had told Brandy regarding my living conditions.”
Brandy’s mom approached Kyle: “What’s this I hear you’re living in a tent?”
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