Dealing With The Devil

The residential institute was owned and run by a psychopath called John Sichel. He had an impressive record according to Wiki, but I was singularly unimpressed with his manner. I had booked in for a two-week course in film and tv (costing 500 pounds sterling) but after the first week, I was forced to leave due to this man’s scarily threatening manner towards me, for absolutely no good reason at all.

I was in a small group of six, five females and me. And out of those six, by the end of the week, only two remained. Here’s why.

I arrived at the institute on a Sunday afternoon and checked in and was shown to my quarters. I met the rest of my group and liked them all right from the very start. They were very friendly and warm and overall good fun.

The next morning we all got up and the ladies told me that they had been cold all night due to it being the back end of winter and very little bedding. They asked me if I would be their spokesperson and ask John Sichel if we could have some extra bedding.

I went outside to go to see John In his office, but just at that moment, I saw him crossing the yard to one of the other residential blocks. I called out to him and he stopped dead in his tracks. As I approached him he seemed to be normal. I told him the girls in the group had said they had been cold during the night and could we all have some extra bedding. For some reason, from his expression, I sensed that he was not best pleased with this intrusion.

“Go to my office and wait for me there,” he ordered. I had no idea what was to come next, it was truly shocking.

I went to his office and sat on a low sofa at the back of what seemed like a waiting area. Within a few minutes the enormous monster of a man, much taller than me at over six feet tall. He slammed the door and strode over to me in what I can only describe as an aggressive manner. Then he started to boom at me with a thunderous vexed voice.

“Right!” he said. “I know what you are up to, I know your sort, and I am here to tell you that I will NOT tolerate it, not for one moment.”

At that moment he was being so scary I looked down at the floor like a guilty, chided schoolboy.

“Will you look at me boy, I want to see those eyes. How dare you look at the floor when I am speaking to you.”

I slowly raised my gaze upwards and found myself looking into a pair of hard, unfeeling eyes that looked like they were about to kill me. It was a chilling moment

“Now you get out of my office right now, and let me hear no more from you during your stay here,” he ordered angrily. Now bear in mind, I was this man's paying client, not his shit bag to kick when he felt like it.

I stood to leave. However, he suddenly blocked my path out of his office. He grabbed a side door and swung it wide open. It was a little side office with some middle-aged blond woman sitting at a desk.

“Now here’s my witness….” he said as he looked at the woman. Lord only knows what she thought of all this, or maybe she was used to it.

To her, he said, "You heard him didn’t you, you heard what he said, did you not?” The woman meekly nodded. “There you go, I have my witness to what you just said to me, how dare you speak to me in that way. Now get out!” he snarled. Then he stepped to one side to let me pass. I could not get away quickly enough.

I had not said a single word for that blond woman to hear, not a word passed my lips. Indeed, I’m not sure if even so much as a soft breath had come from my mouth. What in the hell was this sick idiot on about?

I was in such shock I could not even go back to the girls. I just took myself for a long walk down some lane at the side of the campus. Later on, I met up with the girls and told them what had happened. They were as shocked as I was. What in tarnation was the man’s problem? What sort of person did he think I was? What was he going to say to somebody, anybody, about what I was supposed to have said? Who knows what goes on in a sick narcissistic mind?

One of the girls told us that she had done some research on John Sichel and that he had been blackballed by the BBC, as well as by other tv companies around the world. What for, we could only guess.

At this point, I was all for walking away from this horror, but the girls pleaded with me to stay, so stay I did, more is the pity. As the week wore on, things just did not seem right. There was a very subdued atmosphere around the place as if everyone was in fear of the man.

Two other things began to bother me. First, the man began to stalk me. In the mornings, I would go for an early morning walk to clear my head. The second day I suddenly felt I was being secretly watched, I was.

After turning around the corner of one block I stopped and looked back. John Sichel suddenly appeared behind me and just as suddenly dived back around the corner out of sight, like he had been caught doing something he should not have been doing. This went on every morning for the rest of the week.

Another strange thing that happened was things began to disappear from my room. Then they mysteriously turned back up two days later. What the hell this was all about I really do not know. Who took them and what for I don’t know. And if it was theft, why put them back two days later? Pretty weird stuff if you ask me.

In the end, I could take no more. I told the girls the following Sunday evening I was going and they fully understood. As we stood there chatting in the carpark somebody from somewhere in the darkness began to throw rocks at us, or maybe it was just at me. It was time to go.

On Monday morning I called John Sichel from the safe distance of my home to tell him I had left, and he did not sound very pleased.

“Well if you demand your money back, I will report you to your sponsor and tell them exactly what sort of a person you are and what you got up to, I’ve got my witnesses”

What the hell was this fool on, I wondered. I had asked a perfectly civilised question about extra blankets, and that was all I did. I was in such shock with the horrendous verbal on-slaught and Kafka-esque false accusations, the worrying stalking and things going missing out of my room…I couldn’t even concentrate on the course activities required of me. I was on high alert the whole time I was there.

To this day I did not know what the devil that was all about. It was as if I had stumbled into some mental institution and bumped into its most seriously ill mental patient. This was far beyond narcissism, this was a bona fide, off-the-bloody scale, scary-as-hell psychological breakdown.

Either he wanted me off the premises, for whatever mysterious reason, without giving me my money back, or he took a perverse toxic pleasure out of demeaning and humiliating some totally innocent soul who was helping to pay his bills.

A few months later I found myself chatting to a BBC programme editor about John Sichel and asked if he knew anything about him. The elderly man said softly, almost fearfully, for fear of being overheard. “Yes, a very bad lot I’m afraid. I remember him well. I can’t say too much, but he is somebody who we speak of very little and only in hushed tones, and it is not out of respect or reverence.” All I could come up with was that John Sichel was a troubled, scary, narcissistic, psychopath.

The above events took place in 1995. I didn’t do anything about it at the time as when I got home I found myself immediately embroiled in serious problems with my soon-to-be ex-wife.

I arrived home unannounced after a long drive through the night. Normally our front door was closed, with no lock or bolt, just closed shut. On this occasion, I could not open the door with my key and my wife took a long time to come downstairs and open the door.

What was curious at that moment was that she was wearing a very sexy neglige, something I had been carping on her to don for almost twenty years.

As the door opened I immediately sensed a certain nervousness. Looking back, I imagine she might have been sneaking her lover out the back door.

After all the trauma of the above, I was hurled headlong into not only a mountain of narcissistic toxic abuse from my wife, but also an attempt on my life. As you can imagine, my head was well and truly up my own backside with it all. Still, I got through it and lived to tell both tales of woe, almost thirty years later, but better late than never as they say.