In J. B. Priestley’s play I Have Been Here Before, serialised in the Daily Mail in April 1938, a married couple meet a German professor in a Yorkshire inn. The husband tells the professor that he has been ‘half-dotty’ since serving in the war, while his young wife is fixated by fortune telling and horoscopes, ‘always longing for marvels and miracles, not even wanting to be sane’. He is caught in the pain of the past while she flees into fantasies of the future. The professor tells them that they are experiencing the same phenomenon: ‘We each live a fairy tale created by ourselves. We move along a spiral track. What has happened before – many times perhaps – will probably happen again.’ Priestley based his play on the theory of eternal recurrence advanced by the Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky. For Fodor, this kind of time travel was a psychological rather than a metaphysical event: as Freud argued, there were those so snared by the past that they could do nothing but repeat it.
Fodor cancelled the sittings with Alma on Tuesdays and Fridays, which had been advertised in Light. ‘The public sittings with Mrs Fielding will have to be stopped for an uncertain period,’ he told C. V. C. Herbert of the SPR. ‘She is suffering from the strain and we have decided to keep her in private sittings for some time to come.’
Alma seemed more disturbed than ever. To find the origin of her phenomena, Fodor realised, he would have to take her dreams and inventions as seriously as if they had been real.
SIXTEEN
The cunning of ten thousand little kittens
Fodor invited Eileen Garrett to Walton House in the afternoon of Friday 20 May, in the hope that she might relieve Alma of her frightening new phenomena. Alma wore a silver crucifix. A lit stick of incense was placed on a round table at the centre of the circle, and the sitters – Alma, Eileen, the Countess, Dr Wills, Fodor and Laurie – recited the Lord’s Prayer. Mrs Hall, as usual, made notes.
When Bremba’s voice emerged from Alma, Fodor asked for his explanation of the bites on her neck. Bremba said that while Alma was undergoing a kidney operation a year earlier, her body had been taken over by the soul of an Indian girl, and that Alma’s own soul, in the form of the blood-sucking bird, was now returning for sustenance. Bremba said that the researchers must kill the bird in order to release Alma’s spirit and enable it to return to her body and oust the Indian girl.
Dr Wills asked: ‘Is it your wish that her own soul should come back completely into her own body?’
‘Yes,’ said Bremba. ‘When this is done she will be healthy and the flesh firm on her bones.’
‘What shall we do?’ asked Fodor.
‘There is only one thing to do,’ Bremba replied. ‘To wait for it.’ He advised the researchers to stake out the bird while Alma and Les were in bed. They should leave the bedroom light on and the windows open, he said, and not make a move until the bird had settled on Alma.
‘What then?’ asked Fodor.
‘Shoot it?’ asked Laurie.
‘In any way you please,’ said Bremba.
‘How shall we know it is the right bird?’ asked Laurie.
‘It has an animal’s body. I think you call them bats.’
‘A large bat?’ asked Fodor.
‘Take her to the Zoological Gardens. Do not rouse her suspicions, but point out the vampire bats there and watch her reactions.’
Laurie interjected. ‘It is a purely practical question, but what is her husband going to say if we arrive with traps and rifles? Is he going to consent to it?’
‘I will see to that,’ Bremba assured him.
‘Then we will do the rest,’ said Laurie.
Bremba was vague about when the bat would next appear (‘I cannot tell you that. I am not allowed in the Middle Sphere’) but he had thoughts on how to destroy it. He recommended that the researchers catch it in a net and wring its neck.
Fodor guessed that Alma was familiar with the Dracula story. Bram Stoker’s gothic novel of 1897 had inspired two recent movies starring the Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi, whom Fodor had known in New York. In Stoker’s version of the myth, Dracula’s victims become vampires too. They sleep in coffins by day, and rise by night to seek fresh blood. The hall of coffins in Alma’s dream was an image straight out of a vampire movie.
Fodor told Bremba that they had a powerful medium in the circle that day who might be able to help restore Alma’s soul. He asked Bremba if he would like Eileen Garrett’s spirit guide to come through.
‘That would be very good,’ said Bremba. He bade the sitters farewell. Alma sat in silence, her eyes still closed.
Eileen Garrett changed places with the Countess and took Alma’s right hand. Alma trembled as Eileen went into trance.
‘I Uvani,’ came a voice from Eileen’s body. ‘I give you greeting, friends. Peace be with you in your life, in your work and in your household.’ The spirit guide addressed Fodor: ‘I am indebted to the honour to speak with you, my estimable doctor.’
Fodor explained Alma’s difficulties to the guide: ‘The position is this, Uvani. You have on your left a young medium whose control has just told us that during an operation twelve months ago her soul was cast out and an alien spirit – an Indian girl – has taken possession of her ever since. Her soul is trying to come back and two nights ago she had a visitation – a vampire sucking her blood. Until her own soul returns to her body she cannot be well.’
Uvani told the investigators to treat Alma with trust and kindness, regardless of whether the vampire story was wholly true. ‘I think you are dealing with an obsession,’ explained Uvani. ‘Therefore it can be difficult or dangerous, for you know an obsession becomes a reality. You have seen it happen in a man who has, for instance, shell shock. In certain phases of mind he has a dissociation, he moves away from the mechanics of the body, gets into contact with someone who may be looking for a stimulation of this nature, and so you have a change of personality.’
The theory – as explained in Fodor’s Encyclopaedia – was that a psychologically damaged individual was prey to occupation by an earthbound spirit. It was similar to the Jewish myth of the dybbuk, in which a tormented or vengeful soul could possess the body of a living person. In Shlomo Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, widely performed in eastern Europe and the United States in the 1920s, a young woman is taken over by the angry spirit of her dead suitor. Uvani’s description made it clear that obsession was a psychological state, which only sometimes developed into supernatural possession.
‘Well, what do you want us to do?’ asked Fodor.
‘Make a circle in her own home,’ said Uvani.
‘Would you come with us,’ asked Fodor, ‘and see what could be done?’
Uvani agreed to visit the Fieldings’ house, and in the meantime left a message for Alma. ‘I would ask her soul to know that there is nothing in this that could hurt her unless she so opens the door and makes it possible.’
When Alma and Eileen both came out of trance, Fodor informed them of the advice that Uvani had given. In the conservatory, he asked Alma again about the night-time visits. She told him that Les had been scornful of the researchers’ theories. ‘Do they think a bird can come in the window and bite you in the neck?’ he had scoffed. ‘That is a lot of rot!’ And yet Les was frightened, Fodor observed: he had dreamt of his throat being slashed in a trench, heard the fluttering in the bedroom. Alma said that he had changed sides of the bed with her several weeks earlier because he too had felt a cold presence lying next to him – ‘like a dead thing’, he said – and he refused to swap back.