The term “hunting” in this context for Kyle meant he wanted to find a “donor”—i.e., another individual who could feed his/her blood to him. He explained the various names they used: “thrall,” “Renfield,” or “donor.”
Renfield’s syndrome is an actual clinical term describing someone with an obsession for drinking blood. Renfield was a character from the 1931 Dracula film and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel of the same title. During the Viking Age, in Scandinavia, a “thrall” was considered a “serf or unfree servant” and viewed as the lowest member (based on class) in society. You could also call a “thrall” a person being controlled by a much more powerful source than him- or herself.
Kyle preferred the “thrall” term, never saying why. Yet, it was clear that the power and control aspect of this term appealed to him. Where Kyle Hulbert was concerned, and whether he realized it, everything had to be an over-the-top situation, or else it offered no stimulation for him. He drove through life at one hundred miles per hour all the time. When it came to acting out on the thoughts they had and the things they discussed and ultimately did, Clara, Mike, and Katie were like lambs; Kyle was a lion. He did what he said he’d do—and he did it with a great, big roar.
“Why . . . are you thirsty?” the girl asked Kyle as they stood in the club, loud music blaring, the darkness enveloping them.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
After agreeing they were both in the mood to go hunting, the girl pulled out a lance set.
Kyle thought: What the hell is she doing?
Then she pricked her finger as they stood there inside the club.
Kyle rolled his eyes. Come on, what the fuck!
After drawing blood from a finger, the girl offered it up to Kyle so he could have a drink. Looking around, with plenty of gothic characters talking and enjoying a night out, Kyle considered that the club now had the feel of a Halloween party. There was nothing serious about it. And here was this “chick” standing in front of him, offering her finger to “feed” on.
“What’s this?” Kyle asked, her bloody finger still in his face.
“Feed!” she said, sticking it closer to his mouth.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
It was then that Kyle realized the types of people he was standing around inside the club. He could see through them for the first time, he realized. How they all liked the mystique of the scene and the portrayal of being a vamp. Maybe one was an accountant by day or a waiter, but then he put on his costume at night and went out to fantasize and dress up. The club suddenly felt like a getaway. An escape for these people, Kyle surmised. For him, it was a lifestyle—it embodied who he was.
“My delusions were apparent to everyone except me (of course!),” Kyle later observed. “Insanity being what it is, I thought it was all perfectly real and perfectly natural. I, at no time, gave any thought to whether it was ‘really’ happening or not.”
That girl offering her finger “infuriated” Kyle. “I take my animal nature very seriously. I’ve put a lot of time into understanding it, understanding who I am. . . . For me, when I fed, there was blood. Lots of it. You’re not going to sit here and prick your finger and feed on a drop of blood!”
He was insulted by this gesture.
Kyle looked at the girl holding out her finger and said: “Look, honey, you wouldn’t enjoy a night with me.”
“Yeah, right,” she said smartly. Kyle could tell she didn’t believe him.
“Gather your friends around,” Kyle said. He addressed the entire group as they crowded around him, breaking into a soliloquy focused on the subject of all of them wearing disguises, costumes, explaining how this wasn’t who they truly were.
“It’s Halloween every night for you people,” Kyle said. He was upset that they did not take it as seriously as he did.
“Fuck off,” one of them said. The entire group didn’t appreciate Kyle’s frankness.
“You put on a mask, wear that shit, and go out and call yourselves vamps, goth?” Kyle laughed. He looked at each one of them. “Please!”
Kyle explained later: “I would never call myself ‘goth.’ You know, like I would never identify with saying, ‘I am a goth.’”
This life was Kyle’s identity. He was living out his destiny. He was a creature of the night. He believed this was what he was supposed to be doing.
Going home that night, Kyle considered his life and his new friends, Clara, Mike, and Katie. They would never pose as people they weren’t, Kyle felt. That was why they didn’t go with him to the club. They didn’t consider themselves vamps. Why put on a show? Kyle took note of this—especially Clara, who, out of all of them, leaned toward a tendency of maybe one day becoming a vamp.
What Kyle didn’t know then was that if it had become necessary for Clara to pose as a vampire to draw him deeper into her web, she would do it. But as their relationship went from friends to the puppet master controlling her puppet, Clara realized she didn’t need to do any of that. She had Kyle right where she wanted him, answering her beck and call, willing and quite capable of doing anything she asked. All Clara needed to do was continue to frost the cake—add more and more saccharine to her tale of woe as the days passed. And when the right time came, simply put a bullet in the chamber and ask Kyle to take the weapon and pull the trigger.
CHAPTER 19
BETWEEN SLEEP AND being totally awake, this was a part of his day that Kyle later said he enjoyed more than any other. Katie, Mike, and Clara were still asleep. Meanwhile, Kyle had heard—felt, rather—somebody “probing” outside the door into Clara’s dorm room.
And that was when he heard a voice.
“Get up. . . .”
It was subtle, but one he was used to.
“They’re out there and they’re looking for something—they must be looking for me,” Kyle recalled feeling on that night as he walked outside Clara’s dorm room to confront “the others.” It was the reason why he had gotten out of bed, grabbed his sword, and headed out the door to begin with.
The Enemy, Kyle believed, had been walking around outside, looking specifically for him. Yet, Kyle understood, they would not think twice about killing whomever he was with.
I cannot be around people who will get hurt, Kyle told himself.
There was going to be a “battle,” as Kyle saw it. Clara, Mike, and Katie, they didn’t deserve to get involved.
They don’t deserve to die.
Standing outside while most of the campus was sound asleep, Kyle Hulbert ran stealthily through the grass, both hands planted firmly on his sword. He knew better than to be walking around the campus of JMU with his sword in his hands. Still, he had it at the ready, under his trench coat. Kyle had trained many a day and night in the woods, with this very sword; he could holster it in a flash and take a swipe with the ease and accuracy of a ninja warrior, or so he believed.
Kyle was now “tracking” them, he claimed. He could decipher their “scent.” Not a smell, he was quick to clarify, but more of a psychic vibration—their minds. He could tell they were close by.
Telepathic energy.
The other side of this was that with Kyle’s loud and robust aura, he knew they would not have any trouble tracking and following him, either.
He felt surrounded.
Then he heard something across the way, closer to a wooded area on the edge of the parking lot near Clara’s dorm, a section of land and trees and brush separating the dorms from an apartment complex on the other side of the trees.
Kyle, unafraid to confront darkness, walked toward it.
There was less a chance of anyone becoming collateral damage over near where Kyle was headed, anyway. He thought about this as he sniffed his way toward the trouble. It was farther away, heading into a wooded area.
As soon as he reached the other side of the woods, near an apartment complex, “They surrounded me and the fight was immediate.”
But also short-lived, Kyle said.
As
the battle ensued and several bad vamps encircled Kyle and went after him, he lashed out with his sword and scared many of them away—this, however, occurred as the main vampire stayed to fight. This was the vamp that wanted Kyle’s soul.
Kyle wasn’t prepared to give it up, however.
They struggled, Kyle said—all of this a memory for him that was as clear and lucid as if it had happened the day before.
“If we are the accumulation of all of our experiences, and all of mine were false,” Kyle observed later, “what does that make me?”
During the struggle, Kyle lost control of his sword and so he reached down toward the ground in search of it. They were fighting inside what was a small construction site on the grounds of the apartment complex.
Reaching around like a blind man searching for his fallen cane, Kyle came up with a dowel, some sort of wooden stake.
(How convenient.)
So he picked it up and broke it in half, as he held off the vamp with his other hand.
“And then ... I staked him.”
Kyle said he drove the dowel directly through the vamp’s heart. Then he stood over the vampire, with that stake burrowed into the ground through his heart like a skewer, as “the others,” standing around in shock, scurried off.
“I looked down at him and said, ‘Fuck it. You ruined my sleep. Now you can stay out here for the sun to find you in the morning.’”
According to Kyle, the danger, that deadly threat, was now over. He’d killed the main vamp. Sent a direct message to the rest of them that he meant business. He was a force to be reckoned with. There’d be a price if any one of them decided to come after Kyle Hulbert.
Satisfied the others had fled, he walked back to the dorm and found Clara, Mike, and Katie still sound asleep.
So Kyle joined them.
“Look, to me this was real,” he said later. “I was there. It happened. I saw it as this—those vampires learned a valuable lesson that night. They cannot fuck with me. Coming around me when I am with friends is not the best idea.”
Morning came. The sun was up. Kyle and Clara awoke first.
“Let’s take a walk down to the store, Kyle,” Clara suggested. “We’ll get some food and something to drink.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Kyle thought back to the previous night, about how he had killed that vampire, as genuine a memory as that juicy steak Clara had bought him inside the JMU cafeteria.
As soon as they got outside and started walking, Kyle said, “that was when we saw the fire trucks.”
Which was where reality had always seemed to find a way to reinforce the paranoid delusions Kyle was experiencing during those days.
They trekked through the wooded area. The fire trucks were parked, fighting a small fire, exactly where Kyle had recalled having that battle with the vampires the previous night.
Shit, he thought as they came upon the scene, I left him out here.
“What I thought was, obviously the sun came up, he burned up, and his body caught the damn apartment building on fire,” Kyle said later.
“Listen, Clara, I have to be straight with you,” Kyle said, turning to Clara as they stood watching the fire being put out.
“What is it?”
Kyle explained the situation from the night before, how he had staked a vampire and he was now afraid that the vampire’s body had caught fire from the sun’s rays and ignited the building.
Clara didn’t flinch.
“I staked that fucker right there,” Kyle said, pointing. He was certain of it.
“You were protecting me, Kyle,” Clara said, immediately falling into the role of damsel in distress. She’d seen an opportunity and grabbed hold of it.
“Yeah. I brought the fight out here because I didn’t want you guys involved.”
Clara blushed. She was beside herself. Kyle had protected her, just like she had thought he would.
“My dad,” Clara said, “he once tried to poison a lemon and give it to me.”
“No shit.”
“Meat too. He’s tried to poison meat and give it to me.”
Clara took the drink she had in her hand and told Kyle she wanted to show him something. They were almost back to the dorm. Here were two people, both of whom dressed like characters out of a late-1800s English Dickensian scene. Black cloaks and capes, wooden walking staffs and wide-brimmed hats. It was as if they were on the set of the film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Kyle even said later that kids would heckle them, scream out of the windows as they walked by: “Freaks!”
“What?” Kyle asked Clara.
Clara placed her hand above the rim of the drink. She said something to herself with her eyes closed while waving her hand over the drink.
“Take a sip,” she said to Kyle after coming out of what seemed to be a spell.
Kyle did what he was told.
It tasted like blood.
“I’ll teach you someday how I did that,” Clara said.
She’s a witch, Kyle thought. She cast a spell over the drink and turned it into blood.
“And I’ll protect you,” Kyle answered.
CHAPTER 20
AS CLARA BEGAN to get to know Kyle and consider him a major player within the Underworld, she figured she had found the perfect weapon. Clara started to phone Kyle every day now. Each time, she would ladle on, heavier and heavier, her “feel sorry for me” rhetoric.
“Clara would call the house where he lived in Maryland [Brandy’s] almost daily to speak with him,” said one law enforcement source. “Clara and Kyle started to talk all the time.”
There was even some sexual interaction between them now, whenever they got together, yet it never went very far.
With Kyle and Patrick, Clara had options. This was important to her. Yet, she had found in Kyle someone entirely dedicated and focused on her fantasies. That tale Kyle had told Clara about the vampire and the fire certainly fed into Clara’s belief that she’d found the right candidate for the job she’d had in mind. Kyle was smart, she knew, but not quite as smart as she was. By now, Clara was plying Kyle with the right amount of stories regarding her supposed tortured life at home. She felt that a rage-fueled intensity already present within Kyle increased with each tale she told him—all of which now aimed directly at the OG.
“We got close very quickly,” Kyle later said. “I considered her my most dear friend and sister as well.”
“I ever tell you about the blisters on his tongue,” Clara told Kyle one night over the phone.
“The what?”
She explained, saying how she and the OG were sitting down to dinner one night back a year or so ago. She had eaten more than he had that night. So she asked what was going on. Why didn’t he want to touch his food?
The OG stuck out his tongue. It was covered with large boils or blisters.
“What the hell?” she asked.
The OG became enraged: “I have an infection!” The way he said it came out in a tone that meant Clara should have known this already.
“How did you get that?”
“You enacted a downfall curse on me,” Clara claimed the OG said to her.
“I thought he was going insane,” Clara explained to Kyle.
It was precedence: Clara was establishing a character for her father within the context of her relationship with Kyle. Building the OG up, brick by brick, to be a monster.
It was the death threats that began to bother Kyle more than anything. The thought of Clara’s father hovering over her while she slept, maybe contemplating killing her, or preparing to sexually abuse her (as Clara had told him many times), ate at Kyle like acid bubbling on steel. He could literally sit back and see (in visions) the OG standing inside the kitchen preparing Clara’s food and putting poison into it.
Kyle went to a friend one day, an older gentleman he knew and sometimes stayed with, looking for guidance.
“Is it possible?” Kyle asked him, referring to the notion that Dr. Schwartz, a well-respected scientist, cou
ld do such a thing.
“Hell yeah, it’s possible. If he’s a scientist, he has access to all sorts of chemicals that he could use to kill her.”
“Shit . . .”
“But listen, Kyle, if this is true, what she says, you need to go to the police and explain to them what’s happening inside that home. That’s the only way to handle this.”
“Thanks, man.”
When he left his friend’s home, Kyle thought, If I do that, I tip off the OG to what we’re doing . . . and then he kills Clara sooner.
No cops, Kyle decided.
“The voices were telling me to handle it myself,” Kyle recalled.
Clara had no idea who she was twisting and turning and shaping by what she was telling him: Kyle was more volatile than anyone around him knew. These memories and/or “delusions” (whatever we want to call them) were controlling Kyle’s every move, every thought. There lived a little, tortured and conflicted boy inside his head. Kyle later explained that he had memories, like that vampire fight, of violently murdering “regular” people. They were so real and vivid, he believed he had committed these crimes; at the time, there was nothing anyone could do to convince him otherwise. (Even today, you can hear it in his voice as he explains it all, that he still believes some of the events took place, even if he knows they did not.)
“Some would later call Clara psychotic,” Kyle said, chuckling respectfully. “I never believed any of that. I lived it. I grew up with those kinds of people around me in psychiatric hospitals and group homes. I did not see any of that in her.”
Clara had an uncanny way of getting people—classmates at JMU, friends and acquaintances—to “project a forlorn kindness that one can pick up on,” Kyle figured out many years later, when he had time to reflect on all that had happened. “It’s the type of thing that provokes a primitive reaction within a person and the desire to reach out and help and comfort.”
People around Clara generally felt sorry for her. She was able to draw that emotion out of some, massage it and truly work it to her advantage. Mike and—possibly—Katie had heard it all before. In some ways, they were tired of it; and now, with Katie living in Mike’s bedroom at his parents’ house, they were focused on themselves, anyway.
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