The group sensed strange forces in the room. Laurie and Dr Wills heard a ping. The Countess said that her head ached on one side. Alma said that she heard a cracking noise in her chair. Fodor lay on the floor and listened: it sounded like something stretching, he said, in the left front leg.
Mrs Dundas saw a light on the cushion just by Fodor’s shoulder, and heard a ticking sound. Mrs Taylor – who had seen the chair topple over in the library a fortnight earlier – said that she too could hear ticks, quite distinctly.
Fodor, still recumbent, heard a crackling in the chair’s left leg. Alma saw something flash past. Fodor got to his feet and sat on the arm of her chair. The Countess, sitting on the other arm and holding Alma’s clasped hands, sensed a soft object like a cushion pushing against her.
Suddenly Mrs Taylor, who was sitting opposite, started jerking in her chair, her eyes shut, clasping and unclasping her hands and crying, ‘I don’t want it! I don’t want it! Take it away!’ She thrust her hands towards Alma. ‘You have it! You have it!’
The Countess went over to Mrs Taylor, but she shouted, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!’ The Countess stepped back. Again Mrs Taylor started: ‘I don’t want it. You take it!’
Alma went up to her, took her hands, and soothed her: ‘It’s all right, Mrs Taylor, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. You are all right.’ Mrs Taylor sank back in the chair and opened her eyes.
The atmosphere in the seance room was more febrile than ever. Alma’s uneasy sensations were washing through the other sitters like waves: sounds and smells, cold, heat, jolts and shudders, lurches in the head and the gut. Solid edges seemed to melt, objects to quiver and press. The sitters flinched at the metamorphoses, the breaching of boundaries, the spillage.
Fodor was worried by the panic that had seized Mrs Taylor, and Alma seemed unsettled too. At the next session, as if to regain control, she performed a tightly managed projection.
At 3.20 p.m. on Friday, she leant back in her armchair and closed her eyes. ‘Hello, George,’ she said. ‘I have forgotten to give Rose that recipe. Give me a pen and paper. Anything will do, George. I feel giddy, George.’
Fodor put a sheet of paper in front of her and a pencil in her right hand. Her eyes still closed, she wrote out a list of ingredients for potato wine:
1 lb Potatoes
1 lb Wheat
1 lb Raisins
½ lb Dem. Sugar
½ oz Yeast
Since Alma seemed to be enacting a projection to Beverstone Road, Fodor urged her to bring something back to the Institute: the trick penny, or a dart, an egg cup, a brass ashtray, anything at all.
Alma said that George was trying to get through on the telephone, and she wanted Fodor to speak to him.
Fodor pretended to comply. ‘Hello, George,’ he said. ‘What has happened? I see. Yes, you mean you have seen her. That is very interesting, George. You are quite positive? Yes, she is here all right, George. Goodbye. Thank you very much.’
But then Mrs Kelly, the Institute’s treasurer, appeared at the glass door of the conservatory to announce that George had just telephoned to say that Mrs Fielding was at home. Alma had been right to report that he was trying to get through.
‘Will you leave George and bring something?’ Fodor asked Alma.
‘I cannot,’ said Alma. ‘He is holding my arm.’
Laurie left the seance room to telephone George.
‘George has given me something,’ cried Alma. ‘I cannot hold it.’
‘Try to hold it and bring it,’ said Fodor.
‘I cannot bring it,’ she said, ‘but it will come as an apport.’
‘Can you describe what it is?’
‘It is a compass off his watch chain.’
Alma said that George had released her now, but she was struggling to return to the Institute. ‘I cannot get back. I want to come back. I’m outside and I can’t get in.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Fodor. ‘We’ll let you in.’ Dr Wills went downstairs to the front door, in case Alma’s etheric self was outside, but found no one there.
Alma opened her eyes. She said that she had projected herself to the house and found George polishing some shoes. She had left a recipe for Rose by the telephone.
Laurie came back into the seance room and told the gathering about his phone call: George said that he was holding Alma’s arm. Laurie encouraged him to let go and put Alma on the phone. He heard George say, ‘Come along, they want to speak to you,’ before the call was cut off. When Laurie called back, George said that Alma had left the house with his compass. He read out the list that she had written. Laurie asked him to post it to the Institute as soon as possible.
The ingredients that George listed were the same as those that Alma had written in the seance room, except the abbreviation ‘Dem.’ (for demerara) was missing, and the quantity of sugar was given as 1 lb rather than ½ lb.
‘Did he say where she wrote it?’ asked Fodor.
‘On the dining-room table,’ said Laurie.
After tea, Alma produced several apports, including the compass from George’s watch chain. As she dressed in the library, ‘My arm!’ she cried. She pushed up her sleeves, lifted her cardigan to show the researchers the fresh scratches on her arms and back.
Fodor was struck by the daring of Alma’s projection to Beverstone Road. ‘If she frauds,’ he wrote, ‘she does it very coolly.’ This was the most elaborate self-transportation yet. It was obvious that she could have manufactured it only with George’s collusion. Fodor arranged to go to Thornton Heath to interview him the next day.
Alma telephoned Fodor at home before his visit on Saturday to ask him not to mention the latest astral projection to Les. She said that Les was already worried that something might happen to her. Fodor thought that Les might be worried about Alma’s increasingly wild deceptions rather than about her capacity to project herself across town.
Alma had endured another difficult night, she confided to Fodor: the incubus had visited again. She had been wide awake throughout his assault and with an effort of will managed to free herself from his clutches ‘before anything happened’. She still seemed very frightened by these phantom sexual encounters, Fodor observed, and yet quite unfazed by the recipe incident, an astral projection in three dimensions which, as far as he knew, was unprecedented in the psychic literature. He suspected that this was because the night visits were genuine episodes of dissociation, while the story of astral travel was a complicated piece of nonsense that she had cooked up with George.
Irene Fodor was curious about the latest developments in the case, so Fodor agreed to take her along to Beverstone Road on Saturday afternoon. He also invited Eric Cuddon, the barrister on the Institute’s council. Fodor interviewed George in their presence.
‘I was repairing boots in the shed at the bottom of the garden,’ said George. ‘About 3.30 p.m. I brought the shoes up into the kitchen to finish them up by the gas stove, as I had no methylated lamp.’ While he was working, he said, ‘I felt as if somebody was beside me.’ He turned to see Alma, who had left for the Institute an hour and a half earlier. He had not heard her come in. ‘I said, “Hello, what are you doing here?” She said, “I have just come back. I have forgotten the recipe.”’