Republication of Chapter Ten as Chapter Eleven in “The French Courtesan, Who Came In from the Cold”

Life is far stranger than fiction.

It is the evening of December 16, 1992. I am seated in a movie theater near Alexandria, VA. I am waiting for the curtains to open for the beginning of the movie, The Last of the Mohicans. On my left is a middle aged couple, who most everyone thinks are idealistic historians, working in the basement of the Smithsonian Institute. They are actually very high ranking, covert intelligence analysts in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are the real X-files couple.

On my right is a beautiful, intelligent French lady, who flew across the Atlantic to celebrate her birthday today with the X-files couple and me. Until exactly two years ago, she was a successful actress and pop singer . . . at least that’s what most people in Europe thought. Secretly though, she is an international intelligence officer with the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure. She quit the entertainment industry the week after meeting me two years ago. Those professions were literally killing her.

The movie starts. Immediately, I see a stag being hunted on the steep upper slopes of my former farm in North Carolina. Soon there is a pioneer village on the former upper pasture then a massacred cabin on the former upper pasture then later the massacre of the survivors of Fort William Henry. I personally knew almost every tree in those scenes.

Fast forward little over a year to October 1993 I am seated in a living room of a subdivision house in suburban Fulton County, Georgia. Around me are members of one of the Singles Sunday School classes. We are just watching television, snacking, chatting and looking around for a suitable mate. The X-Files come on the screen. Very quickly the characters start mentioning place names in Northern Virginia that I know very well. Not long after that, I realize that the plot of tonight’s show is about me . . . slightly fictionalized and renamed. The only difference is that extraterrestrials are controlling the minds of some young people, not demons or drugs or whatever.

Because I am penniless and stuck at my parents’ house in south metro Atlanta, no one in the class believes anything I tell them about my recent past or the fabulous colonial home I once lived in a few months before. They certainly would think me totally insane if I claimed to have been the person that the guest star is playing. To get some sort of honor out the situation. I tell the folks at the party about the surprise ending of this plot. They laugh and ignore me. The show ends the way I said it would. The others stare at me and are beginning to wonder.

The new Chapter Eleven describes several of the events that became X-files programs. It also introduces you to a new star in our cast. FBI covert agent Susan Karlson from Minnesota. She looks like a 21 year old college homecoming queen, but is actually a 25 year old lawyer. She is also a Pentecostal Christian virgin and a shade away from being committed to a mental hospital. This is a photo of Susan on the day they first met at a Wendy’s Restaurant in Front Royal, VA. Things got weird, though, when she and her friends from a storefront Pentecostal Church came to his farm to pour blessed water on its boundaries and anoint him with holy olive oil, purchased from a magazine. The Shenandoah Chronicles continue.

The French Courtesan, Who Came In From the Cold – Chapter Eleven