Akasia
Seth was planning a New Year’s Eve get-together, a quick dinner with guests at his mother’s house, before returning to the Lair. He was going to invite Kat along with his gaming friends, Andy and Peggy. There’d be no liquor or loud music. He wanted to ring in 2012 eating snacks and playing video games well into the morning. It would be a sort of “coming out” party for Kat, still only known to his friends as the “mysterious disappearing dragon.”
Seth recognized that getting Kat out of the house for New Year’s would take some advance planning, so he’d been advising Kat to start early, sowing the seeds with her parents that friends from school were going to be having a party. He brought up the importance of her coming over for New Year’s almost daily, and in order to please him, Kat concocted a series of false parties and invitations from friends in the days leading up to New Year’s.
Seth’s motivation for wanting Kat with him for concurrent days was about more than her uninterrupted company. He told her that, for the kind of sex he had in mind, she would need a couple of days to heal. Seth planned to teach Kat about impact play. She told him she was turned on just thinking about it.
“Mmmm cut me please,” she typed as they messaged about his plan.
“You apparently need to be cut,” Seth said, promising her more knife play. “I need to feed. Blood feeding might actually help with the Darkness.”
As his Submissive, Kat had been allowed to draw the knife across Seth’s chest and suck the ribbon of blood that flowered from the narrow cut. It was a rare and violent sex act that, as Dom, Seth permitted her to perform on him.
He wrote, “The thought of my blood in your body makes me . . . hard.”
She responded, “The thought of you cutting my skin makes me wet.”
Seth confessed that violence hadn’t always excited him. “Natasha drew it out of me,” he said, “and now bloodshed is a downright turn-on for me.”
Seth told Kat she might enjoy hot wax play. He claimed he once had a submissive who liked to have her nipples encased in wax, then have Seth rip it off once it cooled. He’d then use clamps on her burnt nipples, then drip more wax from the candle.
“I was very sadistic with her,” he said, boasting that he’d made her orgasm each time with this foreplay alone.
Seth said their night of passion would begin with impact play. He told her he was going to bind her to a chair with leather straps—ankles and wrists secured. He would then strike her with a belt across her thighs and torso. He’d whip her along the triceps, careful not to leave visible marks on her forearms, but Kat said that as long as she covered the bruises with her clothes she’d be fine.
Seth told her that if she got a long-sleeved shirt in the required shade of red for her job at Target, it would open up “more possibilities.” Given the extra time they planned together for her recovery, Seth said, “We can have much rougher fun than usual.”
When the evening arrived, they did all of these things and more. Seth fully dominated Kat’s body, restrained, cut, and flogged her. Not once during her extended stay at his apartment did he ever suggest they use a safe word.
—
After attending the party at his mother’s house that he’d so adamantly cajoled Kat to attend, the group went back to the Lair and played video games all night. There was no beer; there was no pot. There wasn’t even a champagne toast at midnight. There was just friends slaying Thundering Boulderkins, Cloud Serpents, and thistleshrubs in World of Warcraft.
The group also played Dungeons & Dragons, using Seth’s personas as characters in the game. Doomsday was a barbarian fighter. Darkheart was a paladin. Cyrus was a bard and an assassin. They used the game’s dice to guide these characters for hours through a fantasy world of pillaging and plundering.
When Kat finally returned home, her brother informed her that while she was away he had used a computer program to track her cell phone. He said the phone had pinged off a tower in Dover, not near the party in Portsmouth Kat had claimed to be attending on New Year’s Eve. He’d told their mother that Kat was lying about her whereabouts, and that she was probably with Seth. But he said their mom had just shrugged him off, saying that Kat could have been with any of her friends in Dover and he should let it go.
Kat was enraged at her brother’s treachery, though both she and Seth were relieved to hear their cover story had worked to fool Mother Dragon. It wouldn’t do for Kat to be caught in another lie. But the more they thought about it, the more uncertain they became. Was it some sort of test? Had Denise been so nonchalant because she already knew that Kat was in Dover with Seth?
—
The New Year’s party had gone so well that Kat wanted to meet more of Seth’s friends. In particular, she wanted to meet the one she only knew as “the psychic lady.”
Kat knew this was someone Seth had confided in about his personas and that her views seemed very valuable to him. But Kat also had worries about her. She told Seth she wasn’t jealous of the woman, romantically or otherwise. At least that’s what she said.
Kat said people with psychic powers had always bothered her, making some kind of unspoken distinction between the powers she and Seth claimed to have and those that might belong to others. She said she worried psychics could hurt her in the spiritual world. Seth promised to arrange a meeting.
Seth’s friend’s name was Roberta Gerkin. She billed herself as a professional psychic, available for readings in New Hampshire and southern Maine. Seth and Roberta met the year before he met Kat, at a Halloween haunted house where Roberta had been hired to read tarot cards. Seth had introduced himself to Roberta as Lex and showed a keen interest in her interpretation of the cards.
Roberta was in her early forties and had been doing tarot card readings for many years. She had carrot-colored hair that hung in twisting curls that brushed her shoulders. Roberta didn’t wear much makeup and carried herself like a sage of the New Age. She didn’t fit Seth’s preferred waifish mold, not that it mattered much. Roberta was going through a divorce, and romance wasn’t on her mind when they met.
But the two hit it off right away, and they had a long discussion about all things spiritual. Roberta was impressed with the intellectual way Seth spoke about otherworldly things. She was used to people asking silly questions about the tarot, but he took her work seriously.
The night they met, nearly a year before he met Kat and began sharing his many personas, Seth told Roberta about Darkheart, Cyrus, and the Nameless One. Roberta would later testify she sensed his true belief in these spirits’ presence beyond the Veil and she did tarot readings for several of his personas. Seth told Roberta that Darkheart was in control most of the time. He also told her about Doomsday, but she would later say she considered Doomsday less of a persona and more of an “event.”
Seth and Roberta’s friendship ran in streaks. Seth would contact her and they would see each other frequently to talk or read tarot cards, then they wouldn’t see each other for several weeks until Seth reached out again. Seth asked Roberta for guidance from the tarot cards about how to handle the Darkness. He asked Roberta to predict his future, to read what the cards said about his prospects of becoming a police officer. Her interpretations were frequently favorable.
One time when they met up to read cards, Roberta later said that Seth was twitchy, charged up like a spark plug. This was still months before he dated Kat, and he told his psychic friend he needed a release, otherwise the Darkness would overcome him. Seth asked Roberta to give him a blow job to help him control the Darkness. Roberta would later tell a jury she thought the request was “odd,” but she felt he needed it to keep from “overloading his circuits.” Roberta went down on him and gave him the release he wanted.
Seth called Roberta “the Valkyrie” after the flying female guardians of Viking myth. The Valkyrie were angels of the battlefield who selected which warriors lived and died, taking the slain to the Norse heaven, Valhalla. Seth saw Roberta as a kind of spiritual protector, a magical figure who could guide him, even protect him.
After Seth began dating Kat, he gave Roberta a version of her backstory. The tarot card reader said she was told his girlfriend was a high school student and a performer who came from a bad home where her father abused her and her mother refused to stop it because she didn’t want the neighbors to gossip about the family. Seth told Roberta he and Kat had plans to move in together imminently.
Seth eventually introduced Roberta and Kat at a party Roberta threw before moving into a new apartment with her boyfriend, Paul Hickok. Neither woman made a significant impression on the other, but Kat seemed satisfied that Seth and Roberta weren’t having an affair. Although if he were, Kat reassured herself, it would only be because Seth was going to make Roberta his minion.
—
During their midnight chats, Seth would not stop pressuring Kat to set aside her college plans and instead take the EMT-B course with him. Kat was now resigned to the fact that, if she wanted to stay in her relationship with Seth, she couldn’t leave the area for college and she should give the EMT-B training a try.
Seth’s obsession with the EMT-B course seeped into everything. Kat said she wanted to buy a new pair of shoes and a skirt. Seth told her not to. He said money spent on shoes was money not spent on EMT-B training.
“Shoes aren’t a thing I see futures about.”
With Kat still on the fence, Seth tried to elicit a decision by warning her that there would be serious consequences on both sides of the Veil if she didn’t take the course at the same time as he did. Seth said taking the spring class would be “a woman in red.” She was Akasia, he said, an enemy spirit sent from the Veil to turn Seth into Doomsday. He said if he were to take the class alone—without Kat—Akasia would slip into a nearby body and seduce him. As if the consequences in “this world” weren’t enough, Seth threatened Akasia could “sever the connection” between Skarlet and Darkheart for all eternity.
“How could she possibly do that?” Kat sounded frightened. “How could she possibly dispose of me?”
Seth said there were thousands of ways Akasia could do it. “I only need to slip up once . . . you taking the EMT-B this spring, ahead of schedule, is the only way I know to prevent it.”
Kat was now terrified that her spiritual presence was in danger, and that Seth could be taken from her if she didn’t comply with his vision. Her mind was made up. Seth had used her belief in this magical dimension to manipulate her . . . again.
Kat decided to empty her bank account to cover the seven-hundred-dollar tuition, but it was a joint account with her father, and he wasn’t keen on her blowing her savings. Kat overheard her father say he was afraid she’d fail the course and waste all of her money.
“He is a stupid fucking prick who I will kill . . . I hate him so much,” she wrote to Seth.
In response, he told Kat she should never be disrespected, then added, “The only ‘disrespect’ you should ever have to endure is purely for sexual kink and fetish reasons.”
Kat told Seth how he provided the love she had never felt from her father. Seth’s power over her was growing from submission to dependency.
“I have always been hurt in this life, and I feared that I would never escape it, that it would always find me. But no, I’m actually going to be safe with you. You’re not going to attack me over petty things like he does. You’re not going to insult me constantly. I’m actually safe from that. You don’t know how much that means.”
Kat and Denise eventually convinced Peter to let his daughter get her money. She took the cash and, with Seth picking her up at a secret location, drove directly to the campus on the last day of registration.
It was declared that Akasia would not be stealing Seth from her. At no time did Seth ever offer to give or to loan Kat the money he pressured her to spend. He did receive quite a dividend from the incident: Kat was even more disgruntled with family life, she was going to accompany him to the class, and she demonstrated again that she was willing to do whatever it took in this world to ensure unity in the other.
—
Even with Kat’s continued compliance with helping him “control the Darkness,” Seth’s hunt for a minion to join the couple in bed continued. Though it wasn’t one of her fantasies, bi-curious Kat thought the idea of a threesome was sexy. Seth, whose sexual appetite never seemed completely sated, talked constantly about sharing another woman. He didn’t speak of these potential partners in a loving or erotic manner; he spoke of them in terms that indicated disdain; in his view they were dispensable, disposable, and dehumanized.
“You could always drag some hapless pretty little thing along and watch the carnage,” Seth said, “but I’m not sure we have any viable victims in our immediate orbit.”
He said he wasn’t making progress with seducing his ex-girlfriend Bridget, and Kat wasn’t certain any of her school friends would be up for a threesome. Seth was still infatuated with Jill but conceded she was likely not ready for what he wanted from her.
“Do we subject poor Jill to untold horror before she even realizes she’s a part of this?” he messaged, “or do I discharge enough of the rage so we can have a slightly easier afternoon and evening?”
Kat chose to let him take out the rage on her instead.
As she fell asleep, he wrote to her, “Dream of lots and lots of fucking and orgasms and the redonkulous soreness of your hips and between your legs that you are going to feel for the rest of your life from the moment you move into your true home, the Lair.”
One evening, Kat could hear her parents fighting. Her father said it was time for Kat to start paying her own way. He wanted her to pay for her cell phone, for her medical bills, and for her auto insurance once she got her license. Denise was arguing against it. Kat was still in high school, she said, paying her own way wasn’t appropriate. Kat also heard them talking about charging her rent.
“If they try to make me pay rent,” she complained, “that’s the instant [I] move out.”
When he heard that, Seth told Kat trouble was brewing in the spiritual world. Both Cyrus and the Nameless One were shifting into combat modes.
“Something big is about to go down,” he wrote, egging her on.
—
On Valentine’s Day 2012, Denise returned from work to a suspiciously quiet house. She went into her bedroom to change clothes. That’s when she saw a note propped up on her pillow.
Denise snatched up the paper and quickly scanned the paragraphs of Kat’s handwriting. As she began reading it a second time, she walked back into the kitchen to grab her car keys, her eyes never leaving the paper.
“I love you, but I can’t stay here anymore,” the letter said. “I need to leave. I need to be free.”
Denise would later say that reading the note felt surreal, like finding herself in a bad TV show. She knew Kat was working at Target, so she drove directly to the store. She didn’t wait for her daughter’s shift to end. When she saw her mother looking around the store for her, Kat asked her manager if she could go on break and followed Denise to the parking lot.
“What is this?” her mother said, waving the note under Kat’s chin.
“Mom, you don’t understand,” she said softly. “I love you but I need a break.”
Denise tried to reason with her daughter. She said they could work things out with her father, with her brothers. Whatever it took.
“I’m staying at a friend’s house,” Kat said. “I’ll contact you when I’m ready.”
As she watched her daughter hurry back into the store, Denise wondered how she could have been so naïve. She knew the “friend” was Seth Mazzaglia. She’d really believed the relationship would have fizzled out by now. Denise was especially troubled because, with Kat gone, she’d lose the ability to guide her, to comfort her, to mentor her. She’d no longer be able to be a mother to her.
Kat had moved out only hours earlier and Denise felt like she had already lost the war. Maybe that was the point.
Denise was pained by one thing in particular: As an actress, she’d learned to study dialogue through playing different characters. Real or fictional, each person has a way of talking that is completely unique to him or her. It occurred to Denise that, in the note and during their confrontation, none of what her daughter had said sounded like Kat’s dialogue. She knew her daughter better than anyone else, and the words she’d used hadn’t sounded like Kat’s.
It was like someone else was putting those words in Kat’s mouth.