Let them think what they want. As long as they do nothing to threaten you, it is okay. For if they do, they will have to answer to me, Kyle answered back.
This was a good sign. Kyle was in his protective mode. Clara appreciated that. She replied, Okay.
Even if you kill them first, Kyle responded, hoping to bring the conversation to a place he liked to enter late at night: violent fantasy. Kyle’s head was full of violent and bloody images. At times, he needed to explore it all with someone he could trust. He had realized over the past few weeks that Clara was that person. By now, Kyle was entirely fixated on fighting with swords and blood drinking and all things vampire-related. This world online was a godsend to him. Kyle could enter into it and feed his darkest desires—but only, Kyle began to feel, to a certain extent. It was like the guy who carries a gun around with him all the time, realizing at some point that he is going to have to use it sooner or later to justify its presence, or why even carry the damn thing?
For Kyle, his life revolved around faeries, vampires, and blood (he was cutting himself regularly). His mind was his map. He listened to the voices.
Clara clarified: I don’t kill unless absolutely necessary.
Aye.
If I must defend myself, I shatter bone. . . . I lacerate throats. . . . I injure.
You are a woman after my own heart, CJ.
Why?
You injure! Kyle tapped out on the keyboard.
Yeah, Clara responded.
Sounds like my style, Kyle said.
Clara talked about how she had shattered someone’s knee and someone’s ankle once when she went out with her staff and actually got into a fight. It was not clear if this was game chat or a true situation.
To inflict pain is to bring joy, Kyle responded after hearing the story.
How come I can never rid myself of enemies? Clara wanted to know. She felt Kyle had some experience with this. She’d known by then that his ongoing battle with those “bad vamps” was something he had under his control.
Hhhmmmmmmmmmmm. Good question.
Bad people?
I cannot help you there, as I have not figured that one out. My advice would be to avoid them.
Here?
What?
Bad people here? Clara asked. She seemed lost.
Are you there? Kyle said next. He seemed to have lost Internet contact with her.
Clara was back. She proposed a question built around a “what-if ” scenario. What would Kyle have done just then if, within the time they had been disconnected from the Internet, she hadn’t returned and had instead been kidnapped by the evil demons plaguing the Underworld? How would he handle such a situation?
I would have tracked you down and killed the bastards.
You sound like Sebastyen.
Kyle asked who that was.
He trained Pat—he also has a knack for finding me, Clara answered.
They discussed potential threats Lord Chaos faced, never once mentioning Lord Chaos by name. Kyle reminded Clara that he would track any of them down, at any time, and gladly “exterminate” each one, and enjoy every moment of it.
Now he was speaking a language Clara was quite fluent in. She responded by saying, Those whose cause is solely to hurt or kill me are killed. Or in another term I use, tayed.
Trust me, I can see to that, Kyle answered back.
Tay means to kill or killed in Moorian native language of Gwchyndo.
Kyle knew that already, but he asked if Clara was willing to teach him the language she’d created.
She explained how she hadn’t learned the language herself, specifically, but it just flowed out of her. So it would be very hard actually to teach it, but there was another way, Clara explained, for them to communicate without anyone around them knowing what they were saying. Clara called it “A.L.,” or Acronym Language.
It uses English, but differently.
Teach me? Kyle asked, surely engrossed in this conversation.
This girl seemed to be everything Kyle had been in search of: She understood his mind. The voices. The worlds he’d step in and out of. She sympathized with him and his ills. She seemed to care about his thoughts. He knew of no one else whom he could relate to so intimately. Not even Brandy.
Clara explained that not all terms are acronyms, such as “death.”
Death as an AL term means the same as fucking . . . having sex in other words.
Hmmm . . . Now THAT is interesting . . . , Kyle said, making it clear that she had this eighteen-year-old boy’s raging hormonal attention.
Meinacide is suicide. Can you guess the difference?
Kyle couldn’t and wanted clarification.
Suicide is a cry for help. Meinacide is actually killing yourself . . . just doing it and not warning anyone. She added that “meinacide” simply meant that the person was actually prepared and willing to do it “by any means possible.”
Kyle said he understood.
This point of the conversation led them into a discussion about how fun it would be to talk A.L. in public and weigh reactions from passersby. Kyle laughed and said he couldn’t wait to learn it and speak it with Clara in public—which made her ask when that would be, exactly—because Clara made it clear that she desperately wanted to see him.
Kyle told her he was going to find out soon if he could spend the upcoming weekend with her at JMU. He needed to check on a few things first.
Clara said that might work out perfectly. Katie and Mike were planning a trip to JMU to see her. Then, as they talked about meeting up, Clara tossed out something at random to get Kyle onto the subject she had wanted to discuss from the start.
~thinking and trying to divert the shaking, Clara tapped out and sent at random.
Kyle bit hard, asking why she was shaking.
As if part of a script she had written earlier that day came to mind, Clara sent back: Around this time of night, I start remembering. . . .
He asked what.
Clara said it was the kidnapping by Bylod and Satynsts on 8/30-9/1 and 9/2.
Kyle perked up. That last date was his hatching day.
I was rescued 75 minutes before they would have executed me. And 30 minutes before they would have started raping me.
Kyle could barely get a word in now; Clara was off and running, saying how they had “starved” her, “tortured” her “twice,” and “emotionally fucked” her up.
All Kyle could say was I am sorry.
Didn’t actually rape, but put it this way: hands, Clara added.
This was not the first time Kyle had heard Clara talk about someone penetrating her vaginally with his hands. In fact, the only person Kyle knew to have abused Clara sexually with his hands, which he had heard several times from her, was the OG.
This set off a series of sympathetic remarks from Kyle. Clara kept ladling it on as he continued to say how sorry he was. If there was anything he could do to help her, he would do it without question.
Clara Schwartz knew exactly what she was doing when she entered into this type of rhetoric. She had brought Kyle to this place online and was now feeding him the right amount of emotional blood to ingest. Clara knew what this would do to Kyle. He was inherently a protector—a guy who would turn to violence in a heartbeat to protect a lady he considered an intimate friend. Clara was very familiar with this territory of plying the mentally unstable with raw emotion and letting them feed on it.
Clara had practiced it and even talked about it in her diary, explaining, I think I’m not mentally well. Higher the IQ, the greater the chance that person is not mentally well.... She then went on to discuss how she’d sat and spoken with a friend whose IQ was in the 170 range, but he was “schizophrenic” and she realized how she could easily twist and turn, shape and mold him with simple words.
Clara promised Kyle that if he came down to JMU by that Sunday he would be “fluent” in A.L. Then she tapped out: Give you a chilling thought ...
Give it your best shot, Kyle respon
ded. According to the times on the instant-messaging transcript, they had been chatting for almost ninety minutes by then.
Clara brought Patrick back into their conversation, saying she “assumed” it was okay “to play.”
Play what? Kyle wondered.
Down there, Clara said, explaining that Patrick had taken Clara’s “silence” as he did whatever it was he did “down there” to mean the sexual experience was pleasurable. But it wasn’t, Clara said. All it did for her was bring her back to a hell she had visited when she was once violated in the same way—so Patrick, Kyle now assumed, must have been fingering Clara at the time.
That’s part of my problem with Pat, she said.
Kyle fessed up and talked about a time he was sexually abused. He finally felt close enough to her to open up about it. He had been waiting for the right moment.
Clara said she had always known this about him. She had sensed it in him, which was one reason why there was a bond between them that no one else could comprehend.
Kyle felt an immediate attraction to Clara like he had not felt since meeting her. He told her how the abuse had occurred while he slept, so he guessed that was why he didn’t sleep much and suffered from insomnia most of his life.
Clara explained that they would use the acronym of SMO from now on to discuss “sexually molest, as a verb.”
She claimed the first time for her was when she was nine years old—by her own father.
Sorry, Kyle tapped back.
It’s okay, that’s probably why I am a virgin. . . . He didn’t go so far as death.
“Death” meant “sexual intercourse” within the context of the A.L. language. Clara explained that the OG did it “in front” of her mother, and Clara didn’t know at the time it was wrong. Her mother finally stopped it. Clara later added into the conversation that the OG was the reason she feared water.
Kyle wondered if he had tried to abuse her sexually in the water, too.
No, he tried to tay me. . . . He dragged me under so by the time everyone else came out to the pool ... it looked like I was drowning.
Clara could sense that she had Kyle totally under her wing. She’d developed the character of the OG in Kyle’s head as a completely violent and sexually abusive villain, a man who walked menacingly around the house, abusing his daughter at every given moment.
Kyle sat behind the computer clenching his fists, seething, wanting a piece of this man who was hurting his friend.
Clara next wrote: Pat wants to tay him. . . . Then, without a response from Kyle, she tapped and sent: If you do . . . all I ask is that it not trace to me.
Kyle then made it clear that this was between him and the OG now; Clara had nothing to do with it: Let’s put it this way: I don’t know of anything he ever did to you. . . . I just have my own issues with him.
Kyle didn’t need any longer a reason from Clara to kill the man; he had his own.
Okay. He did it every time I swam from four to eight, Clara added, giving a four-year range for that abuse.
He is most lucky.
The recent occurrences have been ... think what happens to Snow White.
With the apple? Is that what you are talking about?
Yeah. What did her stepmother do?
Kyle thought about it. What had Clara shared with him during those times they had already been together? What was her biggest fear these days?
Kyle wrote back, Try to kill her. Lose her in the woods. . . .
Kyle was having trouble finding the word.
Then it came to him.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Click.
Clara stared at the screen, waiting to see if Kyle was following.
In it came.
Poison.
They discussed where the OG spent most of his time. Just outside Leesburg, at the Stone House, Clara explained. She even gave Kyle the address, which he said he wrote down, in case he didn’t know how to get there from his memory of having been there once before already.
Then Kyle came out with it: If I was to tay him would you be mad at me?
No. Just don’t do it now.
Not now—my mind is a bit too cloudy for that at the moment. Maybe in a month?
We’ll talk about it down here. . . . Take a long walk and talk ... okay. Leave Mike and Kate. . . .
Very well.
Unless you don’t want to. I just hate talking about that kind of stuff on here, Clara typed back.
Clara could say what she wanted later, but with this one instant message, written by her own hand, Clara indicated that she was certainly speaking outside of the Underworld character, Lord Chaos, whom she’d created. Because the Internet was the one true place Clara Schwartz felt most comfortable talking about the game, the idea that she didn’t want to discuss killing her father online meant that it was a direct order in the real world.
I would like to talk face to face, Kyle confirmed.
Clara said she needed to look for her “little black book,” and Kyle should stand by a moment. And when she returned some time later, she listed the times the OG had tried to poison her recently.
Kyle felt good. She had listened to him when he told her a while back to keep track of it all. Pen a record of the attempts on her life. Clara had even sat down and remembered other times and wrote those down, too.
Clara then explained that she was concerned Kyle would act on his own and show up at the house to confront the OG. She didn’t want this. She wanted a plan put in place and then carried out with her order, at her will. She wanted to know if Kyle understood this.
I would do nothing in your domain without your consent, Kyle wrote, indicating that he, too, understood his role in Clara’s life now.
After discussing the weekend and what they were planning on doing, Kyle said he had a question.
Go ahead, Clara encouraged.
When we first met, you said that you trusted me—is that true?
Yep. Why do you ask?
I get the impression that is not something that happens every day. (Kyle meant a girl trusting a boy enough to go online and ask him to kill her father.)
They agreed Kyle was “lucky” that Clara trusted him, because when it came down to it, she didn’t trust many people.
Kyle brought up the idea that they could begin a relationship “physically” at any time. Clara said she desired “friendship” first, and she thought he had a girlfriend, anyway. Kyle balked, ignored the girlfriend comment, and said he would gladly “leave” the “final decision” to her.
Clara responded by saying how it could “remain unspoken,” if they both chose.
I can keep it a secret if that is what’s to happen, Kyle added.
There was a debate raging in Clara’s heart, she explained: whether she loved Patrick or not. She thought she might. Kyle said with regard to relationships, he would never “try to force” her into anything.
There was one guy, Clara explained in a series of back-and-forth comments, she’d known since she was four years old that she’d dated right up until March of that year. He was “the one,” she told Kyle. She had dated the guy seriously for five years, on and off. In the end, he was unable to commit. He had even left the country and moved to Europe. She said how she had been “willing” to spend the rest of her life with the guy, but he was ultimately too scared. That decision truly hurt her.
They spoke for another few moments and bid “adieu,” calling each other “sweetness.” They made plans to see each other later that same day. Kyle said he was totally into going up to JMU to see her now. It didn’t matter what he had to do. He’d get out of it.
Kyle logged off and was already trying to wake Mike up.
“I wanted to see Clara,” Kyle said later. “Mike was going to take me there.”
Before logging off, Clara searched the desktop of her computer for the icon named “uw people,” a file she had created. Clara would save various conversations between her and those involved in the Underworld. No doub
t smiling, she clicked the SAVE button inside a menu she’d opened, downloading the entire instant-messaging conversation she’d just had with Kyle, saving it inside a file named “Kyle.”
CHAPTER 35
DEALING WITH KYLE, Clara had to be careful. He might have been crazier, but he was also smarter than the others she had shaped and molded into stewards to play her silly Underworld game. Clara figured this out almost immediately and would have to continue working Kyle from the inside out. Thus, as November brought the coldest weather of the season, Clara intensified her narrative with Kyle. She had Kyle where she needed him, finding that perfect balance between what she could and could not say to him. Just the previous night, while they spoke online, Clara had both committed and did not commit to perhaps beginning a romantic relationship. Effectively, she left Kyle hanging.
As for her communication abilities, Kyle said later, Clara was extremely skilled. Additionally, regarding that “abuse” she talked about, Clara “likely magnified even the slightest bit of [it] at home,” which she might have been subjected to, Kyle added.
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