Kyle, though, was a different story. Clara realized quickly that she didn’t have to work as hard at it as she had with the others to convince him of her fantasies. Kyle was easy. All she had to do was tell him a story.
“I want my dad dead,” Clara said to Kyle. (“Look, she could have said, ‘I want him gone,’” Kyle recalled later, but it was clear to him what she meant and what she was asking, regardless of the words she chose to use.)
Kyle and Clara were sitting outside her dorm. Kyle could see his “gods” nearby, hovering around him and Clara.
“Yeah . . . ,” he said. “I’m not so sure. That’s like this big thing—not sure I am able to do that for you.”
“Well, file it away for a later time, then,” Kyle recalled Clara saying.
“Sure, later. . . .”
The seed had been planted.
CHAPTER 21
AS FAR AS her boyfriend, Patrick House, was concerned, Clara was growing increasingly less confident that he could help her in any way—although, she still wasn’t giving up on the possibility that Patrick could do the job. After all, having two candidates was a hell of a lot better than one.
Clara had met Patrick at the Celtic Festival in Leesburg back on June 9, 2001, four months before the Renaissance Festival (where she met Kyle).4 Patrick was friends with Mike, Katie, and another friend, and they introduced Patrick to Clara. By August, Clara and Patrick were officially dating.
In Patrick, Clara saw the shell of a boy she might be able to manipulate and mold into what she wanted, the only difference being, Patrick wasn’t as psychologically imbalanced as Kyle.
“I’m going to call you ‘Path,’” Clara had told Patrick soon after they met. She was referring to his character and role in the Underworld.
“Okay,” Patrick answered, playing along.
“And ‘Rowan, the bard’!” Clara added.
In the world of Magic, bards are lore-keepers and “great magic workers.” Some refer to them as “soul singers of healing.” From Clara’s authorial perspective, Patrick, an otherwise quiet and engaging boy, out for a good time perhaps, not taking things too seriously in life (nothing more), fit both of those roles rather soundly.
“What about Path?” Patrick asked. “What does Path do?”
“Path . . . ,” Clara said, explaining his role in the Underworld, “Path is an assassin.”
The way she explained it to Patrick, Clara was the DM, or dungeon master, of the Underworld. “She creates the game and decides the rules,” Patrick explained.
The characters in Clara’s make-believe world were created by the players and the DM. “And those characters created by the players are personalities that come and go. The ones created by the DM are personalities that are used when needed,” Patrick said. “CJ”—Clara Jane, as she liked to be referred to when not in her Lord Chaos role—“called the shots.”
“Lord Chaos’s father,” Clara told Patrick, “is named OG.”
Biophysicist Dr. Robert Schwartz, the founder of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, a man who had created the first online DNA database, had been boiled down into the Old Guy both within the Underworld and outside it. The guy had received a lifetime achievement award from his peers and Clara rarely even called him “father.” This was the epitome of disrespect.
As early as August, right after they started dating, CJ, in her Lord Chaos role, went to Path and gave him his first assignment. It’s clear here that Clara felt as though it was time to test Patrick—to see how far she was going to be able to take things with him.
“I need you to ‘tay’ OG,” Lord Chaos ordered.
“‘Tay’?”
“It’s a word I’ve developed for ‘kill.’”
Lord Chaos needed to have the OG killed. He was trying to strip her of her powers. He was after her soul.
This language CJ used within the Underworld, Patrick explained, was not something Clara used only during the times when they played the game. “It was more something that she used on a general basis.” Many others agreed with this statement.
Clara’s life was the Underworld; the Underworld was her life. She knew the difference between reality and fantasy, but she chose to exist (live) within the play world all the time. It was an easy escape for Clara and whatever she was hiding from, either within herself or out in the real world.
“And why does OG need to be killed?” Path asked.
Lord Chaos explained how the OG was trying to poison her. (“Among other things,” Patrick added later.)
Path thought about his orders.
“No,” Path said. He couldn’t do it at this time.
Weeks went by. Clara continued to push Path, explaining that his role in the Underworld was that of an assassin. If he didn’t kill the bad entities, well, he was not fulfilling his role very well. Path needed to do his job. He needed to protect Lord Chaos from the OG.
Patrick began to sense from Clara, his girlfriend, that this Underworld was something she was taking too far. There seemed to be no separation for Clara. Patrick was feeling a bit uneasy about it all. He understood the way RPG worked and enjoyed it. Clara, however, took it to another level entirely. She hardly ever broke character. She was always inside Lord Chaos’s world. As Patrick saw it then, Mike and Katie didn’t really have large roles in the game. Katie’s was a secondary character, “Auriel.” It was more about Path and Lord Chaos—and the OG’s demise, of course.
“I’ve come up with something,” Lord Chaos explained to Path one day. She sensed his trepidation.
“Yes?” Patrick said. He was in character.
“When you have met the OG the equivalent amount of times as the OG has attempted to kill me, you can then tay him.”
“What number is that?” Path asked.
“Eight,” Lord Chaos said.
After Lord Chaos had made this decision, Clara started to show Patrick journal entries she had written. Most of these writings were focused on the game, Patrick later said, and others pertained to Clara’s life in general. Yet, both had a way of juxtaposing with one another. There was a perpetual blurry line where the two met, as if Clara didn’t want anyone to know the difference. It was obvious this was her outlet, her release. The journals doubled as a diary in one respect, and her master plan for the Underworld in another. Clara wrote all the time. Maybe not daily, but there were hundreds upon hundreds of pages, from as far back as 1997 to her days at JMU. In one entry, undated, she talked about those friends in her life that were “annoying” her. She didn’t name them. She also hated with an intense zeal the friends that tried “to change” her. There was one girl who attempted to stop Clara from, she wrote, doing things I normally do & do things I don’t like. One of those “things” included hugging. This friend would hug Clara whenever she ran into her. Clara despised it, which probably said something about intimacy for Clara. Her “response” to her friend constantly trying to fix her was to do the opposite in order to piss off the girl. It showed, if only in a subtle way, how Clara rejected any type of criticism about her character and certainly despised anyone trying to get personally close to her. She wanted nothing to do with either.
One day with Path, Clara sat him down and took out her journal. She pointed to an entry involving an attempt on her life by the OG.
“It was a sexual reference,” Patrick later said. “It was a sexual attempt on her. . . .” It was one that Clara had fought off and won, apparently. And it was after that, she explained further, that the OG had tried to poison her.
“Wait a minute,” Patrick said. “Lord Chaos or Clara?” He wondered which entity the journal entry had been written about.
Clara looked down. She put on that somber face she was so good at: the pity, the sullen persona she had mastered. Then, speaking about herself in the third person, she said: “CJ.”
As time went on, Clara opened up to Patrick, he later claimed, about other things going on inside her home.
Patrick drove her home after a day out. They were
pulling up to the farmhouse when Clara brought something up. They had been discussing getting their own apartment or house with Katie and Mike and another friend.
“Money,” Patrick said. “A place is going to cost money.” He knew none of them had much. And money was the main reason why they couldn’t all move in together at that time.
“I’ll get an inheritance, you know, when the OG dies.”
“No kidding?”
“Yup. And I’ll be able to purchase property with that money.”
Patrick didn’t think much of this. Her father wasn’t old at fifty-seven years. What in the hell was she talking about?
Clara grew quiet. A look of total desolation came over her.
“What’s wrong?” Patrick asked. He had stopped the vehicle. They were sitting in the driveway of Clara’s home. She stared at the door to her house.
“I’m concerned . . . ,” she said.
“About what?”
“The OG is trying to cut me out of his will. I’m certain of it.”
Clara would express this concern to Patrick “two or three times,” he later recalled, over the course of that late summer and into early fall. She had a fear that when the OG died, she was going to be left holding an empty bag. As it stood, Clara had made a point to tell Katie and Mike and Patrick that if the inheritance was split fairly, she would receive a sum in the neighborhood of $400,000.
DURING THAT FALL semester at JMU, for the first time in all of her schooling, Clara’s grades took a free fall. Schoolwork had always come easy to Clara. In fact, when she was young, she’d “steal,” as she referred to it, her sister’s books (Clara was the youngest of the three Schwartz children) and study them, taking the tests at the end of each chapter. Her sister soon found out and corrected the tests. They realized that Clara, who was always “bored” with school because it was too easy, had been acing the tests.
As that summer ended, her journal entries from the past few years depict a girl who claimed not to have any direction within an adult world closing in around her; thus, she was obviously distracted enough to give up on her studies. What that distraction became, entirely, was utterly clear to everyone around her: Lord Chaos and the Underworld game.
Clara wrote in one entry, I hate society. I hate life. One of her reasons for this was that life, she wrote, hates me back with bitter passion.
She referred to “mankind” as being, by and large, “so fucking stupid.”
The game took her out of all that. She could create the perfect world. Clara’s attitude was dark and gloomy, an end-of-times view. She hated people (society) in an antisocial manner; yet she never saw herself as someone who should get help for those feelings. Clara didn’t see any point to engaging with people, with the exception of those within her circle.
One of Clara’s main reasons for hating life was that within the past seven-and-a-half years, she’d seen seventeen deaths. She broke them down in her journal, although her math didn’t add up: 11 friends, 3 family & friends, & 4 relatives. She was beside herself over the sad notion that two of her friends in recent years, she’d just found out, had “tumors as kids.” She mentioned how the “betrayal rate” among her friends was about eighty percent. Then she broke into a “why me?” rant. She wondered what was “so special” about her that she’d been subjected to “all these bad things.” She was upset that four of her “closest friends” had committed suicide over the past few years. She wondered what it all meant.
On top of this depressive outlook, as Clara’s grades slid during her first few months at JMU, the OG stepped in and asked what was going on. He was concerned.
“I see no reason for this!” Dr. Schwartz said to his youngest one night, according to Clara’s recollection of the conversation.
“I don’t know. . . .”
“You’re failing this for a second time—how is that possible ?”
“I need to take the semester off.”
She later told Patrick that what she really wanted was to “relax.” School was too much. She wanted to rest and just enjoy doing nothing for a while.
Nothing but play her games, in other words.
“As long as you live in this house and I pay for your tuition,” the OG said, “you will have to continue going.”
“She had been wishing to take a semester off the entire time I knew her,” Patrick said later. Clara had told him about this conversation between her and her father, how it had bothered her. She felt her father wasn’t on her side, supporting her.
Whenever Clara talked to Patrick about the OG and taying him, she was serious, Patrick later believed. It seemed to Patrick that she had thought long and hard about all of this. It wasn’t something she had just come up with during a time when she was plotting out a narrative thread for the Underworld. This was something on CJ’s mind—not only Lord Chaos’s—all the time.
“But it cannot trace back to me,” Clara told Patrick one night.
He was beginning to worry about her. “What can’t trace back to you?”
“It cannot trace back to me and it has to appear to be natural.”
“Natural?” Patrick now knew what she was referring to and grew concerned about how serious his girlfriend sounded about having her father killed.
“Yup, a heart attack or natural causes,” Clara clarified.
That first semester, when Clara left home for JMU and began spending more time away from family and friends, she communicated with Patrick, Mike, Katie, and Kyle via cell phone and Internet instant messaging. Whenever Clara went online and instant messaged, she went by MYGMU, her screen name. Patrick used DRASGON666. They would chat on the phone or on the Internet no fewer than two times a day at one point, Patrick remembered. And on many of those occasions, all Clara Jane wanted to talk about was the OG and taying. How and when was the OG going to meet his Maker? And how and when was Path going to fulfill his job within the Underworld and take care of what Lord Chaos had ordered him to do?
CHAPTER 22
SHE WALKED OVER. Took it out. And showed it to him.
“I’m throwing it away,” he said.
“No.” She grabbed it.
Then she walked over to another friend and showed it to him.
“It’s aloe,” he said. “Totally harmless.”
“Okay,” she said.
And then: I ate it all, Clara wrote in her journal of a suicide attempt she made one day while in high school.
Within a few moments, Clara claimed, she “felt dizzy” and couldn’t “walk well.” She had trouble swallowing. She told her friends—two of whom sat in the front of her classroom and two in the back—and explained what was happening.
“That can’t be good,” one of them said.
Class had started. Clara’s friend kept looking at her, waiting, apparently, to see what was going to happen next.
He looked concerned, Clara wrote.
Then, as her friend watched, Clara stared at the ceiling and, she wrote, it was “dripping.” She was now freaking out: I became a spectacle for everyone to watch. She wrote that she was shaking so hard you could see my pen move visibly. She was cold. She gave everyone “quizzical looks.” She was “changing colors” and losing “focus.”
Clara was scared. She went to her teacher. Asked him a question.
He blew up in my face, she wrote. She recalled him saying (which is very hard to believe in this situation), “You cannot do anything right!”
As she stood in front of her teacher, all Clara could think was: The OG said he’d ground me and probably send me to Oklahoma if I got an F.
She explained this situation to a friend after walking away from the teacher and her friend, she wrote, had a “mental breakdown.”
Clara had ingested what she described as “arrowhead poison,” which is actually nephthytis (arrowhead vine), a small-leafed plant similar to poison ivy with “heart-shaped leaves” and “distinctive light-colored veins.” The clinical signs of poisoning include oral irritation, excessive drool
ing, vomiting, intense burning and irritation of mouth, tongue, and lips, and difficulty swallowing.
She must not have taken enough to warrant a trip to the nurse or the ER, because Clara never wrote about what happened next, other than saying how sick she felt. Her next entry was dated two days later. She talked about getting yelled at for not taking care of her horse. She also mentioned that she’d slept well as it rained and the weather became “really foggy” outside her window. Her general feeling on this day? She said she was “happy.”
As Clara made her way through those tiring and seemingly endless latter years of high school and into her first few semesters at JMU, she wrote seriously about ending her life. It had become an obsession to write about the thought of suicide; however, her attempts were clear indications that she wanted nothing to do with dying—that it was all just one more way for Clara Schwartz—a budding narcissist and sociopath, scheming and plotting and planning so many devious and menacing things—to keep the focus always on her. Because whether Clara was playing her Underworld game or walking through what she’d said was her torturous, tumultuous life with the OG, the most obvious suggestion she put out into the world was that it all revolved around her. She cared little for anybody else or how they felt, showed very little compassion or empathy for anyone or anything, and only worried and cared about what was going on in her life.
This is a blood book, Clara wrote in her journal. She then talked about how she hoped to have dreams of a boy that night and that she was “banishing” a friend of hers from the Secret Society, simply because the friend had made a suggestion that Clara did not like. Clara concluded that she “hated” her.
A few days later, Clara was bashing Christians, writing how she “looked” at them and saw “infestations of evil.” She had been forced to go to church that weekend with a family member: I look at Satanic cults and see the future—bright and promising.
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