“Yeah. . . .” Kyle didn’t want to explain, but he liked Brandy’s mother. She was real, as he later put it. Down-to-earth. She accepted people for who they were—not for what the world expected them to be. “I live in a tent. I don’t have a real job, to speak of. I’m trying.”
Inside, Kyle was telling himself: Please, no charity here. Please, please, please don’t offer me anything.
“I’m really big on self-suff iciency,” Kyle added. He didn’t want a handout.
Brandy’s mom said, “Look, Kyle, I believe everyone deserves a chance. And you, clearly, if anybody needs a chance, you clearly do. So you are going to come live with me!”
She wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“Okay . . . I guess if you want to give me a place next to your heater, I can toss a blanket on the floor for a few days. I don’t want to be in a position to rely on anyone. I don’t want to be a burden. I do not want to be a freeloader.”
Kyle knew he could take care of himself. Sleeping in a tent was not a big deal.
“That’s fine, but you will sleep on the couch.... I am going to help you get a job. And you are going to make something of yourself !”
Kyle moved in.
CHAPTER 16
“WHAT DO YOU WANT ?” Clara asked. Kyle was standing in the cafeteria at JMU, looking at the menu board. It was Tuesday, October 9, 2001. Kyle, Mike, and Katie had just come from Kyle’s court date. Clara had invited them to her dorm and said they could stay the night if they wanted. Kyle was feeling particularly manic and impulsive after court. He wasn’t telling anyone, but he had sensed that “the others,” who were out to get him—the bad vamps—were close by. It was one of the reasons why he’d made sure not to leave that morning without strapping his sword to his side; and why he definitely didn’t want to go back to Brandy’s house for the night. The last thing Kyle ever wanted was for Brandy and her mother to be put in harm’s way.
“Nothing, I’m good,” Kyle said.
“Kyle, come on, what do you want?”
“Nothing.” Kyle had looked at the menu board and craved a steak. But since he didn’t have the money for it, he said he wasn’t hungry.
“I’m buying, Kyle,” Clara said. “It’s okay. What do you want?”
He thought about it.
Clara picked up on Kyle’s indecision. “You like steak?”
“Yeah, I like steak.”
“Well, how do you want it?” Clara asked.
Kyle looked at her and laughed. “Bloody, of course!”
“I should have known.”
Clara bought it for him.
By now, Kyle had met the “OG” a few times. (“OG” translated to Old Guy or Old Geezer, depending on who you asked, which was how Clara described her father to her friends and in her journals—“OG” was also one of the main bad guys in the Underworld.) There was one time when Kyle and Clara decided the night before that they were going to hang out with Mike and Katie the following day. So Kyle stayed at Mike’s and got Mike to drive him over and pick up Clara at the secluded Schwartz farmhouse.
Kyle knocked on the door.
The OG answered.
“Ah, is Clara home?” Kyle asked. He sensed the trepidation (“and judgment”) on the OG’s face. Kyle didn’t like the look of this guy. He’d had a biased opinion of the OG to begin with, based on all the details Clara had shared about her life inside the house. By now, Kyle believed Clara was being abused (psychologically and sexually) by the OG. Clara continuously shared the details whenever they talked. “He gave me a really dirty look after he opened the door. It was a look I was used to by then.”
In all fairness, Dr. Robert Schwartz didn’t approve of what he saw. Here was another one of Clara’s friends dressed in all black, that gaze of despair in his eyes, on his face, along with a feeling of guile that oozed from his pores. Back then, Kyle took on the persona of a vampire rather effortlessly: ashen, chalk-white skin, cheekbones visible and pointed, as if he were malnourished (one psychological report claimed Kyle had an eating disorder on top of everything else), the long black trench coat, black shirt (sometimes a pentagon symbol on the front), and black pants. These were the only clothes Kyle had to his name then, and thus his hygiene suffered greatly. Based on appearances alone (and come on, what father would not judge a book?), Kyle was not the boy you wanted to see at your door, picking up your daughter.
“I knew he was a guy who was telling himself, after looking at me, ‘Grab your children and finger your cross, because he’s here to steal your kid’s soul,’” Kyle said about the OG.
THE REALITY OF the situation was that the polar opposite was true: Clara was working on Kyle’s soul, stealing from him the last bit of sanity—if any—the boy had left. And as far as Dr. Schwartz being some sort of hateful, bitter man who walked around with an angry chip on his shoulder waiting to explode on anyone who crossed him (a picture that Clara had spent years painting rather studiously), not everyone saw the guy under this light. Schwartz’s son, Jesse (Clara’s older brother), later said his father was a “confidante” whom Jesse could go to and “talk to” about his life and where it was going. Jesse described him as a good man, a great father, who was always there when any of the kids needed him. “He was just a person I could lean on and trust and value, not only in this father-son relationship but ... more of a friendship as he was a close friend to me.”
Jesse and Clara’s sister, Michelle, viewed Dr. Schwartz as “the most important and respected person” in her life. One of the “fondest memories” she had of her childhood, she later told the Associated Press, was a time when she and her dad danced around the house to the 1980s Cyndi Lauper megahit “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Both Jesse and Michelle would describe Schwartz in total contrast to what Clara had been saying, often noting that their father was a “simple family man,” who only wanted what was best for his kids. He liked to put on his blue jeans, plaid shirt, and boots—with his trusty dog trailing behind him, tail wagging, barking—and go out and tend to his goats and horses.
Dr. Schwartz was a guy who had earned numerous awards for his work on DNA sequencing. He’d graduated cum laude from Catholic University and later earned a doctorate from Stanford, going on to work at both Georgetown University and the University of Maryland. Dr. Robert Schwartz had the distinction, in fact, of being a primary member of a team that had put together what is the national database of DNA sequencing.
CLARA CAME DOWN the stairs and walked in between the OG and the doorway, brushing the OG off with a dirty gaze.
“Let’s go, Kyle.”
They took off with Mike and Katie.
The second time Kyle had the opportunity to meet Dr. Schwartz, Mike had driven Kyle to the farmhouse and dropped him off. Kyle and Clara had made plans to spend the day together. Kyle, however, did not realize that it was seven o’clock in the morning when he asked Mike to drive him over (he had been up all night). But what the hell, Kyle thought, he was there. So he might as well knock on the door.
Another knock and another dirty look from the OG, who said: “Come back in an hour. She’s not even up.”
Kyle went for a walk in the woods surrounding the farmhouse. He found a deer hunter’s tree stand and climbed up to get out of the cold and rain. After she awoke some time later, he and Clara went to one of her friends’ apartments across town. It was an ordinary day—more of the same. Clara bitching about the OG, making allegations that he was plotting to kill her, talking through her Underworld and how the game was coming along—and how her new hero, Kyle Hulbert, fit into it all.
CHAPTER 17
IN COURT, KYLE had been given community service for walking through the mall with a concealed weapon. He promised to be a good boy and was cut loose.
At eighteen, Kyle was the youngest within this group of Mike (who had recently turned twenty-one), Clara, and Katie.
“Thanks for that steak,” Kyle told Clara after dinner. “It was really good.”
They next all walked
over to a friend of Clara’s dorm room and watched a movie, The Wizard of Oz.
After the movie, they decided to sleep in Clara’s dorm. Kyle was feeling a bit antsy. He sensed something around him that he knew to be “the others.” Without sharing his delusions or feelings with the group, Kyle actually felt as if the bad vamps were closing in. He believed they were surrounding him or the building, just waiting for the right time of the night to strike.
Sitting on Clara’s bed, Kyle gripped his sword, making sure it was there.
Kyle later recalled what happened next as a “waking dream.” For him, it was as real as anything he had experienced throughout his life. Later, when he looked back at it, he knew it to be a hallucination, although you could tell it was still hard for Kyle to say it was not a real memory.
At the moment it all occurred, however, Kyle believed it was happening.
Katie, Mike, and Clara had dozed off. Kyle could see that they were sound asleep. As he was lying down, somewhere between that moment when sleep comes and actual REM occurs, he claimed he was startled completely awake by a noise outside the dorm room. So he got up; he walked over to the door. And it was then, standing in front of this closed door into Clara’s dorm room, Kyle said, he “smelled” them.
“The others.”
Kyle walked outside, gripping the sword attached to his hip.
“Mike, Katie, and Clara were inside,” Kyle explained. “This was going to happen. I knew it. I did not want them to end up as collateral damage.”
This meant a battle between Kyle and the others. There was going to be a vampire fight. Kyle knew it was game on.
But more than that, he said, he felt it.
“It fluctuated between vampires, supernatural entities ... but it always came down to the fact that something was after me,” Kyle explained when I spoke to him in 2013, a time when he could look more confidently back at this moment and understand it for what it was: a hallucination, dream, or made-up memory. “It’s the nature of insanity. You don’t recognize these things for what they are at the time. I look back now and cannot believe what I believed at the time. I can’t believe that was me. It’s a sad fact that it was.”
Still, even today, you ask Kyle about vampires and his answer is shocking: “I believe they’re real.”
Backing up for a moment, on that night when Mike, Katie, and Clara were sleeping, Kyle did not think he was a bona fide, actual vampire just yet. He reckoned that he was “aspiring to be an actual vampire—the undead type.” He drank blood and was into bloodletting and rarely went out in the sunlight, but he did not think he was all the way there—which explained to him why he could function during the daytime in sunlight.
Perhaps it was this battle between Kyle and “the others” that would be the crowning moment, when Kyle could consider himself a true vamp.
As Kyle was outside Clara’s dorm room in the fresh air of the very early-morning hours, clutching his sword, the aroma of vampires looking to kill him wafted through the crisp air. Smelling this, he knew one thing: “It was going to happen. . . .”
Then he heard a noise and knew it was time to run.
CHAPTER 18
LEESBURG, VIRGINIA—LOUDOUN COUNTY, in particular—has a history of horribly bloody violence. No, not the type of contemporary violence we see on the news these days—although the county does have its share, same as the rest of the planet. We’re talking about the mortar, shell, ball-and-bayonet type of Civil War brutality pitting “brother against brother” that much of the Northeast, the South, and the East Coast endured throughout its rather brief history. Loudoun County, especially at the time of the secession, was split down the middle, literally: the eastern and southern portions of the county going primarily with the South in their political and moral beliefs, while the north and west leaned staunchly toward being pro-Union. Just about everywhere you walk within the county, you step on a battlefield or place of historical Revolutionary and/or Civil War significance. This was where the colonies began to merge into one America, with states and political bodies governing a mass of people immigrating from all around the world. Thus, it became the middle battleground of what was the bloodiest war on record, a fight for the dignity and honor of every human being, no matter the color of his or her skin. All the big names have walked the streets of Loudoun County: Grant, Lincoln, Hooker, Hill, Stonewall, and many more.
This sort of nostalgia, especially where blood had been shed, interested Kyle Hulbert—although in an entirely different way. There was one night not long before the vampire battle outside Clara’s dorm that was about to get under way when Kyle got a ride into the city from a friend. Baltimore and Washington, DC, were less than an hour from Leesburg. In those cities, Kyle had learned, he could find anything his vampire heart desired.
On this night, it was late, around midnight—and Kyle needed a fix.
Not dope.
Or booze.
But blood.
Kyle took this aspect of his life intensely seriously then. He trolled “goth clubs,” as he called them, carefully prowling for the right “donor.”
“There were plenty of girls in those goth clubs that would allow me to drink their blood,” Kyle said. “They were not hard to find.”
Quality versus quantity, however, was an entirely different matter where Kyle saw it. Kyle desired clean girls. Some he had met “were smart enough to have their blood checked regularly and carry that paperwork with them.”
A must for him, he claimed. He would “not feed from any” female who did not have her blood checked and could not prove it.
Kyle talked about how he had been drinking blood since late 1999, when he had been introduced to it by a woman from California he had met online. They talked about it and she exposed him to the ritualistic nature of drinking blood and how to do it properly.
Kyle was infatuated with the process and ceremonial allure of it all. He was totally taken in by the darkness of the process and how taboo it was.
So he made plans to meet the woman.
“She was going to pay for me to come out there. I was really looking forward to it, but my girlfriend found out and”—he laughed—“screwed that up for me.”
After being introduced to it, Kyle began doing his own research online. He found a few clubs close by (Baltimore and DC) and started going periodically. One was Club Orpheus in downtown Baltimore, an establishment billing itself as “one of America’s oldest and wildest gothic-rock dance clubs.”
Perfect.
He walked in, roamed around, checking out the place. He found himself a girl who was into drinking blood and made a move.
THE THING TO keep in mind about all of this is that when Kyle Hulbert did something (anything), he held little back. Kyle went all in or he didn’t dabble. For example, he’d studied the body and the best parts of the body to extract blood from by cutting and sucking. He looked at blood charts and found a muscle group in the neck where the trapezoid meets the shoulder. When cut, this part of the body, Kyle claimed, bled perfectly for the task of sucking blood.
“That section of the neck bleeds well, but there are no real veins there. So when you bite down, or you cut it and drink while you’re fucking, it’s a really nice area. You need to make sure you don’t hit certain veins.” (He laughed after explaining this.)
The first time Kyle met a girl and swapped blood, Kyle said the experience was “very ritualistic. I used a knife. It was something leading up to sex—and was also a part of sex.”
After that first time, Kyle started drinking lots and lots of blood. He enjoyed it immensely and it fit with his gothic, dark, predatory outlook on life, and certainly his belief that he was an aspiring vampire.
It also fed into his unraveling mind of visions and dreams and belief that bad vamps were after him. Kyle was living within this world, and everything he did—all of his thoughts, for instance—focused on a culture of gloom and doom. He steered clear of the norm. He stayed away from common, everyday things most people d
id: post office, school, work, out to eat, a play, a movie. Every day was an adventure for Kyle. He needed constant stimulation. In one way, Kyle needed and thrived on anarchy and chaos—much like his new soul mate, Clara.
When it came to this part of what he called his “animal nature,” Kyle didn’t appreciate it when some of the girls made it out to be a cartoonish ceremony by saying all sorts of bizarre things that you’d expect to hear in a Hollywood film. That made it all unreal to Kyle. He didn’t need the fanfare and hype. Drinking someone’s blood wasn’t a game. He claimed not to be in it because he was engaging in some sort of fad. It was now a part of his life.
“My psychosis presented aberrant-thought processes,” Kyle said later, trying to understand his life in hindsight himself, “which I had no reason to question—because my reality was already aberrant. So it all rang with the truth in my mind.”
Kyle once met a girl who liked to talk “about the spirituality aspect of drinking blood, and I have to admit it was all kind of trite ... clichéd, tired.”
She was straddling him one night, both were naked, and she started to go through this seemingly scripted language, as if she were a satanic goddess overseeing a séance. It was all so fake and contrived. Kyle could only look on and think, I cannot believe she’s saying all this shit. Are you fucking serious?
“It was one of those things that when you hear someone say it in a situation like that, you know they’re just saying it because it sounds nice.”
ONCE AT ORPHEUS, Kyle had hooked up with some people whom he had never hung around before. They were not his “usual group,” which wasn’t around on that night.
“This group talked the talk, but didn’t walk the talk, you know what I’m saying? They portrayed themselves as vamps.”
It was really late into the night. Kyle approached one of the girls in the group he was attracted to and said: “Let’s go hunting.”
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