Except Patrick—she didn’t want him around. (Patrick had already told her, however, that he wasn’t coming!)
Is Kyle a master of staff and sword? Clara asked. The comment seemed random.
Katie didn’t respond directly. Instead, they talked about the size (very small) of a friend’s penis and laughed about it.
Then Clara asked again: Is Kyle a master of sword & staff? Adding, I get the impression he is, especially if he’s teaching people.
Kyle was taking some people from the group into the woods and, using wooden dowels, was teaching them how to spar with swords. He liked to tell the others he was a master swordsman and had trained with various masters throughout the East Coast. No one ever knew if it was bullshit or the truth, but they only believed half of whatever Kyle said, because he came across as such a blowhard sometimes. His stories sounded overly dramatic and fictional. It was hard to believe him at face value. Still, no one ever challenged Kyle.
Clara was intensely interested in the fact that Kyle claimed to be great at wielding a sword.
Katie wrote back: Kyle won’t tell me. He’s too wrapped up in his little Canadian.
Clara was confused. She asked what a little Canadian was.
Katie said it was the girl Kyle was on the phone with, Brandy.
Clara didn’t like to hear this. She didn’t think Kyle was at all serious with Brandy. After all, he never brought Brandy around, hardly talked about her much when they were together, and he held Clara’s hand and even kissed her sometimes. Clara liked the idea that Kyle was totally into her—even if they weren’t “lovers.”
Katie and Clara talked for five additional minutes and Katie said she had to go. Kyle wasn’t quite finished with his phone call, so Clara would have to ring him up later if she wanted to talk.
Clara said okay. She’d do that.
Clara sat in her dorm room. She had her journals spread out before her. She had been thinking about sharing some of her writings with Kyle the next time she saw him. This was her proof, Clara surmised, that she lived a “shitty life.” It was all right there before her in black and white.
She opened one of her old journals from high school. It was the day before the start of her junior year: OG woke me up @ 11:30. (He told her to go feed the horse.) He slapped me on the right cheek hard enough to leave it red. . . .
That was a good entry for her to show Kyle.
[OG] yelled at me . . . thinks I’m a Satanist.
Another good one.
She described how bad her day had started off, having written, OG said if I set my alarm to go off 2X in 1 morning, he’d kill me.
Clara liked that one, too.
At the time, Clara had been upset because the OG was dating a woman and Clara feared that they’d marry. If that happened, Clara wrote in her journal, she was not going to listen to her stepmom because the woman had “no place.” Clara believed the OG’s girlfriend was “trying to fill in” for her mother—a rather common, normal reaction from a high-school student whose mother had just died: She can go to Hell and I don’t care.
Earlier that week, Clara had tried cutting her “arteries,” as she explained the incident in her diary. However, in typical Clara fashion, the knife was too dull and she couldn’t complete the job. Apparently, there was not a sharper knife around.
I scare myself, she wrote back then.
One particular entry stuck out to Clara as she sat, reading through the best excerpts to share with Kyle. It involved the beginning of that new school year. She’d been a junior for a week. She hated her life. She despised her brother and her sister. Definitely her father and his girlfriend. And just about everyone and everything else. Within these pages, there was nothing during this whole period that Clara had found any solace in whatsoever.
She’d had a bad day. She was in her room, after fighting again with the OG, trying to have some alone time. She had the music turned up, waiting for [him] to turn off my tape.
Sure enough, antagonizing the guy once again, he came upstairs and walked into her room and shut the stereo off.
OG made a blunt death threat . . . , she had written. Clara smiled at this entry; it was perfect for Kyle to see.
“I’m pretty sure you won’t last till your birthday and you won’t be here to celebrate,” Clara claimed her father screamed at her during that afternoon.
It was the second time by then, she wrote, that OG had threatened her life. She concluded the entry: I’m positive I’m going insane.
THE NEXT TIME Clara and Kyle got together with Katie and Mike a few days later, she laid it all out for Kyle, pulling him aside and getting him alone. She showed him the diary entries she’d carefully chosen, explaining how badly her father wanted her dead.
“She . . . [told] Kyle how her father had abused her and poisoned her, and [she] pulled out some of her journals and showed them to him,” Katie explained in court later. “I ignored them because it was a regular thing to hear complaining about her father.”
Kyle listened closely, turning the pages of Clara’s journal, reading through each entry slowly, taking it all in.
“This is incredible,” Kyle said.
“It is,” Clara responded.
They were alone. Mike and Katie had gone off somewhere on campus. Mike had a friend there whom he’d stop and see once in a while, which gave Kyle and Clara the opportunity to spend time together without anyone else around.
“I’m sorry, Clara,” Kyle said. “I’ll protect you.”
“He sexually abuses me, too,” she said, breaking into a graphic explanation of what had happened.
“She told me that he used his fingers on her sometimes,” Kyle said. “That he didn’t have intercourse with her, but would go into her room when she was home and finger her.”
Kyle didn’t get visibly angry when Clara showed him her journals or told him stories about the abuse, but he would internalize the information.
“Not like aggravated . . . or anything,” Katie later explained. “Kyle was just quiet. And Kyle is not often quiet.”
“I was thinking,” Kyle later explained. “Thinking of how I could help her.”
CHAPTER 29
KYLE HULBERT WAS not sleeping well. Not because of the medication he wasn’t taking, or that he was drinking too much caffeine, or from the noise inside wherever it was he spent the night. No, for Kyle, as he put his head to the pillow on most nights these days, all he ever saw was Robert Schwartz.
“I could no longer sleep without seeing him (the OG) doing something to Clara,” Kyle explained.
Kyle would lie down, pull the covers over his body, fluff up his pillow, maybe roll over to one side and try to get comfortable, and then came an explosion of images: There was the OG, standing in the kitchen inside Clara’s farmhouse, cooking her dinner, looking over his shoulder evilly, making sure Clara wasn’t sneaking up on him, “poisoning a lemon or a pork chop.”
Kyle could see the man doing it. Clara had implanted these pictures so firmly inside Kyle’s mind that he was now having visions of what she had told him.
Soon, after the stories from Clara became more of a daily occurrence (“We talked every day on the phone or online, and every day she told me different things regarding her father trying to kill her”), it became more than simple mind games at night while Kyle was trying to fall asleep. Kyle would get up. He’d walk from one room to another, maybe to use the toilet in the middle of the night or to go play a video game, and he’d be struck by a lucid, extremely realistic “hallucination.” He’d open the door to the bathroom inside the house he was sleeping in and walk directly into Clara’s house, as if through some sort of time warp or wormhole. He’d be invisible to the people around him inside the vision. From Kyle’s point of view, it was like watching a film of what was happening while being inside the film itself.
One night in particular, Kyle walked from where he slept inside Brandy’s mother’s house to Brandy’s bedroom to go play a video game. Yet, when he opened the do
or to Brandy’s bedroom and stepped in, he wasn’t inside Brandy’s bedroom. Instead, Kyle found himself standing inside Clara’s bedroom, watching an ongoing scene from Clara’s life taking place in front of him.
The OG opened the door to Clara’s room. He shouted angrily, “Get up. . . .”
Kyle stood by, looking back and forth, listening. Clara could not see or hear him. He was invisible to both Clara and the OG.
“Get your ass up . . . you worthless piece of shit. You’re nothing,” Kyle heard the OG shout.
Clara jumped out of bed.
Then the OG left the room, closed the door behind him.
Clara? Kyle said. Clara?
Clara stared at the door; she had tears streaming down her cheeks.
Kyle stood there, speechless. These scenes tore him apart as he watched Clara sit in her room, crying and shaking. Kyle felt helpless; he couldn’t do anything to help her at that moment. He was part of the scene, but he was unable to react to what was happening before him.
“I think that’s what did it most for me—seeing Clara cry,” Kyle said later. “I could not bear the sight of that.”
Then, within a flash, Kyle would be out of the scene and back in his reality.
“What the hell just happened?”
Clara would call, too, and cry on the phone to Kyle. She’d claim the OG had touched her again, or threatened to kill her. Or slapped her.
Lying in bed, Kyle thought about his latest vision. It was over. But now he needed to converse with his gods, those voices, he said, that controlled everything he did and did not do; his allies and imagined friends. Kyle always discussed his thoughts with Nicodemus, Saba, Ordog, and Sarin, but he couldn’t shut them out (or off) if he wanted. They were always there, “arguing” with him over the things he wanted to do.
It’ll be easy, Kyle told himself on this night. He was fixing to kill the OG. He couldn’t take it anymore—and now he was watching the OG abuse Clara. A witness to the sickness.
Eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, Kyle waited for a response.
“To just kill him would be a violation of your desideratum,” Kyle heard one of the gods say to him.
Still, as part of that desideratum, Kyle felt it was essential that he do something to the OG. He felt it was his duty to protect Clara with whatever means he had possible. The more he heard about her being abused, the more he heard about how she was being poisoned, and the more he heard about how Clara’s life was a living hell, the more Kyle Hulbert understood that this was no RPG. It was life or death for Clara Schwartz. And Lord Chaos, he knew, counted on him.
“The times I had met him, he was very hostile toward me . . . ,” Kyle explained, referring to the OG.
In his mind, Kyle plotted out the scene.
Not death, though. Just scare him, Kyle convinced himself . Intimidate him. He’ll back off. He’ll leave Clara alone.
“You cannot kill him without just cause,” one of the gods said. “ If you are not defending yourself or someone you love, you can never kill.”
Kyle was good with that order. All he wanted to do was make sure the OG knew that Clara had allies. She had a protector now.
And maybe—just maybe—he will back the fuck off.
CHAPTER 30
PAT SCHWARTZ E-MAILED his brother Robert. Clara’s uncle was concerned about her. She had spent some time with Pat and his wife and they had noticed odd behaviors.
She really needs some analysis beyond what we can do, Pat Schwartz wrote to Robert. She needs to be understood in a way that we cannot understand her—perhaps by a professional.
In a roundabout way, Pat was saying that Clara needed some counseling. The girl was depressed. She lived inside her head, which had turned into, as far as he could tell, a very dark place.
There was one time when Pat had walked up to Clara, who was on a computer while inside his house. “What are you doing?” Pat had asked. He noticed Clara was inside “these chat rooms” where they were talking about “murders and all sorts of horror, and things like that,” he said later in court. He couldn’t tell if it was fantasy or reality. So he asked Clara what she was doing: “Is that reality, Clara?”
“Oh, this . . . no.”
After not receiving an immediate response from the first, Pat asked Robert in a second e-mail, Why in the world would you allow her to spend extended periods of time on the Internet in those grotesque chat rooms?
A week went by and Pat didn’t hear from Robert, who he knew to be an extremely private person. Robert didn’t like outside people meddling in his affairs.
Soon, though, an e-mail came from Robert.
Pat was stunned to read that Robert felt Clara was “his business” and that he would “deal with her.” Pat should keep his “nose out of [Robert’s] business.”
Clara’s aunt and uncle could do no more than let it go and hope the girl got the treatment and help she needed.
CHAPTER 31
STRANGE DEATHS WERE occurring around the country during the fall of 2001, when Kyle Hulbert and Clara Schwartz began to meet regularly, talk daily, and immerse themselves deeply in the Underworld that Clara had created around the supposed reality of her father plotting to poison her. Kyle had an important role to play in this new world order that Clara had scripted.
In Kyle, Clara had found certain needs met; whereas Patrick House had proven, time and again, that he was incapable of satisfying those. Where Patrick balked when Clara mentioned uncomfortable things about the OG and how she wanted him dead, Kyle listened and innately took it all in, as though willing to do whatever Clara needed. She felt that. With Patrick, there was a clear separation between the Underworld and reality; and he and Clara hardly even entered that world now, or saw much of each other. With Kyle, though, it seemed to Clara that their entire existence, whenever together in person or online or on the phone, revolved around the fantasy. Clara understood that for Kyle there was only one world. There was no separation between life and the Underworld—and Clara made sure to keep it that way.
In those weeks after Osama bin Laden had created havoc in the world with his devastatingly violent and deadly attack on the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, a 260-mile, four-and-a-half-hour drive north on I-95 from Leesburg, Virginia, a death occurred that would soon cause some concern within the community that Robert Schwartz was such an integral part of then.
Sixty-one-year-old Kathy Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant to New York, a Bronx resident who worked for Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on the East Side, became very ill on Halloween night, October 31, 2001. The sickness just came out of nowhere. One minute she was okay, the next she was gasping for air, barely able to walk. Her vital signs were failing quickly.
For Nguyen, who had lived under the same routine every day, going to and from work via the subway, her life was nothing but ordinary. Yet, she was “critically ill” on that night, all of a sudden, and so she admitted herself to the ER.
Not long after walking through the doors of the emergency room, Nguyen was placed on a respirator. Within moments, she was unable to speak.
Later that night, sadly and quite tragically, Nguyen died from complications related to anthrax poisoning. It would be one of several high-profile anthrax-related deaths to send up red flags within the FBI, CDC, and other agencies looking into terrorism and the growing threat that overnight had become the new normal in the United States.
Kathy Nguyen’s case, however, was particularly interesting to several in the medical and scientific community watching the situation unfold, because the next high-profile case related to this community, only a few weeks later, would involve a biologist, Dr. Benito Que, who was viciously attacked by four men wielding baseball bats. It had the earmarks of a hit—a planned and well-choreographed beat-down.
After that violent attack, a microbiologist, who had been investigating immune disorders, turned up missing. His vehicle was found by a bridge near the Mississippi River. His body was later recovered downstream
, about three hundred miles away. His family had no reason to believe he was suicidal.
Then another biologist, who had once worked on biological weapons in Russia, died unexpectedly and suddenly from a massive stroke; another microbiologist died from asphyxiation related to gas in a storage shed. Scientists, some of whom were working on the same types of disorders and groundbreaking projects, appeared to be dropping (or were murdered, depending on which conspiracy theorists you spoke to) at a rate of about one a week.
Clara and her troops sat by and closely watched all of this unfold. Not that they were that interested in these strange deaths, but it was hard to ignore, since Robert Schwartz, the OG, was a renowned scientist within this same community. All considered, when push came to shove, it was a very small field. Scientists talk. They stay in touch. When they start dropping due to anthrax poisoning and other strange circumstances—anthrax being a poison that can be made in a lab by the scientist—many stop and take notice.
Who would be next?
Or, could this be used as a ruse for the OG to meet his fate in the Underworld?
CHAPTER 32
KYLE INSTANT-MESSAGED CLARA one night in late October. He was writing from Katie’s computer: WWWWWAAAAASSSSSUUUUUPPPPP!!!!!!
No response.
Then: (Kyle), he tapped out and hit ENTER.
Okay, I figured as much, Clara responded.
They asked how each other had been, as though they hadn’t spoken in some time. It took Clara all of twenty taps of the keyboard in front of her to bring up Patrick, who was slipping further and further away from this group. Clara was “angry” at him, she explained to Kyle.
Kyle ignored the comment and said: I miss you, CJ.
Clara wanted to know who said that: Kyle or Katie?
Kyle, who else ... lol.
Clara needed to tell Kyle that Patrick was supposed to be there to do something for her—she never said what—but since she was angry at him and he wasn’t coming, Clara wanted to know if Kyle was interested in taking his place.
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