- Charles Manson
The seals have been revealed and God’s judgment on the earth is in. The Clave is here to deliver the news.
ABIGAIL
LA wasn’t home… just home for now.
Transplanted here to model, I learned Hollywood isn’t where dreams survive the harsh reality of millions all sharing that same dream.
Executive assistant is who I am now.
Slave.
Hollywood’s darling took a liking to me. One not easily ignored when they give you a taste of the high life.
I was supposed to give up hope and give in to LA’s bad reputation, but I had rules.
Well, just one: Read the rules before you break them.
Unwilling to abandon all my morals, the filter came off my life to see the world I was one foot in was invitation only...
GRIMM
I’m not sure I was ever really Jason.
Whoever he was, was a distant memory now.
Grimm is who I am now.
Death.
I abandoned my birth name, companionship, happiness that wasn’t shaped like Xanax… all because I was expected to be the kind of elite that pulls the strings.
Pull the strings, but follow the rules.
No distractions.
No serious relationships.
Keep what we do secret.
Born into a rite I didn’t ask for, a society of puppeteers.
An invitation I marked ‘not attending’...
GRIMMP
The Servants of Patmos was a sentence to a life I was all too excited to accept at the ripe age of thirteen. As the four pillar families, the only boys, we were obligated to attend The Servants of Patmos in the mountains far away from our comforts.
They wanted you uncomfortable so they could see what you reach for in the middle of the night, in your desperation, in your conquests.
That was the whole point of this boarding school made only for our families: to prepare us for what our lives would be as active members of the oldest society to exist: The Clave.
The Clave pulled all the strings you couldn’t see with your naked eye. The strings were clear and tied to every vital organ of this country:
Lust.
Greed.
Envy.
Sloth.
Wrath.
Gluttony.
Pride.
The Clave wasn’t just a room full of men puppeteering the world from their billion dollar offices, rather they oversaw a bunch of other organizations meant to bring order to the world.
It was all bullshit politics run by four elite families who were stripped of all options. There were no plan b’s, college, or being whatever you wanted to be. You served a great purpose, and that was it.
No one was ever clear on if we were bringing the apocalypse or stopping it from swallowing the world whole.
I didn’t give a shit either way.
I wasn’t afraid of death.
It was the living part that made me uncomfortable as hell. I would watch everyone around me move through life so certain it would all work out.
How did they know that for sure?
Bad shit happens every damn day: babies die, junkies get higher, bad people fuck over good people, murder, rape, the corruption that is America… and we just keep pushing on to the next day with a crooked fucking smile, happy to do it all over again. Living made me uncomfortable. It agonized every bone in my body.
Social awareness was another part of living I would like to avoid. Human interaction was messy at best, and the only way I liked getting my hands dirty was less verbal and more physical.
The eighteen therapists my parents hired all came to the same conclusion: I was suffering from anxiety, PTSD from childhood trauma, and most likely some bipolar in the mix.
Suffice to say I had been on a daily dose of horse pills since I was eight.
None of them stopped me from being the certain death I am today… nothing would. I was sent to Servants of Patmos to shape me to be exactly what I am today: one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Did that mean God feared me the way he should?
ABIGAIL
Most kids play sports after school or even some kind of extracurriculars, like French Club or Debate Club.
Not me.
I thought the trauma was over when the nightmares finally stopped, but those nightmares were really just a purgatory. When I entered Hell, I knew whatever was coming next was going to try to break what was left of me.
Whatever was left of me to break.
Every day my mom dropped me off at our local church with her eyes focused ahead and her body practically shaking. She knew exactly what was happening inside those doors when our priest got me alone.
Punishment.
It was hard to swallow that my parents thought my inability to lie was working against them.
I had said too much. I was too agreeable and cooperative for their liking. Now I was paying for it.
If the priest couldn’t expel the disloyalty my parents refused to unsee now, then I could consider myself exiled from their love—even though I already felt their love snatched from my still beating heart.
Walking in the same church I attended every Sunday wasn’t hard; it was waiting in the pew for Sister Brenda to come out and show me back to the priest’s office. The 37 steps it took from the pew to his office was where all my anxiety geared up and my body tensed, knowing exactly what I was in for.
The religious way of making you compliant, making you holy enough for his love, was a painful one.
In his office is where all of God’s glory rained down on me like a storm.
His voice was like the choir singing, full but gentle. It was a hard lesson to learn that someone can look so innocent and be so deadly.
“Did you complete your memorizations?”
I could read something a thousand times and not be able to repeat one word back to you. I knew the meaning; I knew the details; but I couldn’t verbatim anything. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear when he asked me to remove my shirt tucked into my Catholic school uniform.
A sudden chill and discomfort rumbled across my body when I stood in just my small cami bra that I had to beg my mother to get me. I hadn’t grown in like the other girls in my grade, yet this was still violating.
I knew to kneel and silently pray for the strength to make it through another session. That’s all I could do: pray.
The lashes of the flagellation whip kissed my skin and left behind a stinging warmth that I couldn’t explain.
If God loved me, then why was he punishing me for being honest?
GRIMM
Anxiety was my own personal stalker.
Black hat. Black bomber. Even complete with sunglasses or a book—anything to blend into the world and make you overlook them.
Sometimes my stalker would get so close I could feel their breath, their presence, their sole desire to capture me whole.
Sometimes I let my stalker win.
Sometimes my stalker would manage to press the cloth of chloroform to my mouth and hold it there long enough that my real world faded out.
My limp senses were being overthrown, and my body was dragged to this alternate reality where I needed to fight for survival, because giving up meant being stuck in those feelings longer.
That’s what was happening right now… on my bedroom floor in the small space between my bed, bedside table, and the wall, where I had thrashed my way to.
My breath was short and violent, trying to do all the stupid tricks all eighteen therapists of my past had ground into me.