You Shall Not Pass

The bolthole is a very important location to my kind. It can come in many forms but the message it sends to you is very clear; you are not welcome. Our kind must always have a bolthole to which we can retreat. This is our sacred territory where you are not allowed to venture. When we first engage with you, you should notice two things which invariably occur. We will spend most of our time where you live. This enables us to stay by your side as often as we can in order to continue our seduction of you. It also means that your resources are the ones that are used up. It is your food, your cable bill and your utilities that we use and since it is your home we will not contribute to those bills. If asked we will point out that we have our own overheads to cover although of course they will be reduced as we are rarely there. We stay at your house and ensure that you provide us with a set of keys so that we may come and go. You are invariably not given a set for our house. When we decide that we want to engage in our methods of gathering fuel and/or we decide to subject you to a period of the effective silent treatment, we return to our house. You cannot enter and we are able to watch you pleading and begging from through a gap in the curtains as you turn up wanting to see us as you try to work out why we have just disappeared.

On the occasions we do allow you to stay at our property then this is little more than a licence which is revocable on a moment’s notice. If we want you out of our space then we will turf you out, irrespective of time, weather or convenience. We like to do this to reinforce that it is us who are in control in this relationship and not you.

Even if we properly move in together at one property or buy another one together, we shall manipulate the situation so that your house is sold and the proceeds used towards the joint property whilst we keep our house on. You will be puzzled by such a move but we will find an excuse to do this.

“It represents a useful investment opportunity so I am going to keep it.”

“Now is now the right time to sell in that area.”

“I need a pied a terre for when I work late in the city.”

“I want the market to pick up first before I consider selling the property.”

“I don’t want to sell it because my ex-wife will come sniffing around for a share of it.”

We will find the reason not to sell it. This is of course not the real reason. We want to keep it as our bolthole. We might decide to provide you with a set of keys for this property but then when you try to use them to go inside to find us, the door is bolted so you cannot access the property. Your shouts of frustration prove to be delicious fuel as we sit and listen to you.

Some times we will use hotel rooms as boltholes or the office or a bar. As long as it somewhere to which we can retreat and have you guessing as to where we have gone as you frantically telephone and text us, then it serves its purpose.

If there is not another property we will create a bolthole within the house that we share. The study will have a lock fitted and we keep the key on our person all the time. It may be a man-cave in the basement or the garden shed, but there is one simple rule concerning this bolthole. It may be in or around our joint property but you are not to enter it ever. We regard this as our throne room where we sit and plot our schemes. The chosen few will be admitted in order to emphasise to you how you are not special enough to be allowed in and thus prompt a reaction from you. We know it will drive you crazy wondering what we are doing in this place, especially if our guests are of the opposite sex. We will spend hours in this place, secreted away, often sleeping there too. Here we can send our messages and engage in our telephone calls with other sources of fuel, free from interference yet still gaining fuel from you as we know you will be in a spin thinking about what we are doing. We can enter the chat rooms, work our way through the dating sites and blitz social media, all entrenched in our control room. We will delight in sending you a message compelling you to bring us food or a drink and leave it at the door. You of course will comply in order to try and sneak a glimpse of what is going on inside or to try and talk to us, yet the door will be pushed closed in your face.

On occasions the bolt hole will be temporary in nature. Should we decide that we wish to exercise some withdrawal late at night when you are expecting intimacy and love-making, we will move to sleep in the spare room, sliding across the lock we had fitted. We will lie there smiling as we hear you tapping on the door and sobbing for us to come back to the shared bed.

The bolthole is very important to us. It allows us a clear way of reinforcing our control and superiority, it provides a base from which we can engage in our schemes and plotting and it is crucial in the implementation of silent treatment.

If you realise that the person you have a relationship with creates and uses boltholes there is every chance that he or she is one of us. Now you know it to be the case but you are still not coming in.