‘Have you heard of vampires?’ asked Fodor. Until now, he had referred to vampires only when she was in trance.
‘I have read ghost stories,’ said Alma, ‘but I don’t remember any vampire stories.’ Les had seen a film called The Vampire, she recalled, but told her not to watch it. ‘He said it was rubbish and it would give me nightmares.’ This was probably The Mark of the Vampire (1935), a notoriously disturbing picture, which – like Dracula in 1931 – starred Bela Lugosi.
Fodor noticed that the latest vampire visit had taken place the night after he saw Alma throw a stone down the stairs. Perhaps her second self had speared her neck with a hairpin to punish her for her clumsiness, having done the same after she dropped the square of linen in May. Alma had a strong masochistic drive, Fodor observed: she played a double role, as aggressor and victim. But then he, too, had taken a double role, as Alma’s champion and her inquisitor. In the course of the investigation, their relationship had acquired a sadomasochistic shape, admiration and desire becoming entangled with secrecy, deceit and control. Just as the poltergeist had turned her into a shoplifter, Fodor had drawn her into imposture. Perhaps he was the genie she had summoned, the imp who had led her astray, and her feelings of persecution were expressing themselves as marks on her skin.
It struck Fodor that Alma could have modelled her night visitor on him. She might well associate him with vampire mythology. Like Count Dracula, he was an educated and cosmopolitan foreigner – in fact, the Count’s homeland, Transylvania, had been a Hungarian territory before it was granted to Romania in 1920. He was a friend of Lugosi, the most famous vampire actor in the world. And he was Jewish. From Bram Stoker’s novel onwards, the characterisation of Dracula as a ruthless, rapacious parasite drew directly on anti-Semitic tropes. To Alma, Fodor realised, ‘I was the vampire, not sexually, but by exposing her fraudulent phenomena.’ She had unconsciously cast him as her persecutor. The origins of this fantasy, he guessed, lay deep in her past.
In the morning of Tuesday 28 June, he briefed Elizabeth Severn on the developments in Alma’s case. Mrs Severn said that she felt sure that Alma had been assaulted as a girl. She believed that Alma’s vision of the man with an evil face was a memory, fused with her wish to see her assailant hanged for his crime. ‘In cases of violent dissociation,’ she said, ‘there is almost always a sexual trauma in the background.’ She supposed that Alma had been abused by her father, but Alma’s attacker might have been another man in her circle, such as her grandfather Jimmy, or her mother’s brother George, whose face she had drawn after the incubus incident and who had trained her as an acrobat when she was a girl.
It was natural that Alma did not remember the assault, Mrs Severn told Fodor. The incident would have been blanked from her consciousness even as it happened. Instead, she repeatedly relived it in her body: in weals, burns, bites and scratches, in the press of cold flesh against her as she lay in bed. Alma had told Fodor that when the red rings appeared on her neck she felt a swelling and tightening of her throat, as if she were being possessed by ‘somebody very big and hard’.
Alma’s fear that the incubus had made her pregnant, said Mrs Severn, was the unconscious fear that followed rape even in small children. The whole poltergeist outbreak, she said, was an expression of ‘desire, fear, horror and anger’. She agreed with Fodor that Alma’s tricks communicated her experience as effectively as her kinetic projections. ‘The child part in her is just as interested in doing it by fraud as by psychic force. It can have the same satisfaction from both.’ Elizabeth Severn explained that a traumatised child became amoral, expressing her own breakage by breaking all sorts of rules. ‘She says in fact: the impossible has happened to me. To show that something impossible can happen, I shall do this and that.’
Mrs Severn suggested that the bicycle accident to which Alma sometimes referred, which took place when she was on holiday with her father, was a cover memory for the original attack. ‘It reopened an old wound. She uses it as a pretext to say that an accident had occurred to her. There have been many similar cases with shell-shocked soldiers during the war. The shock of the battle reopened an old wound and shook the psychic structure into dissociation. They managed the first shock, but the second was too much.’
Fodor recalled the crumpled note that the ghost from the cupboard left by Alma’s bed – ‘Scrawls and smuts on a scrap of clean paper!’ – which seemed to communicate both a feeling of being dirtied and a wish that the experience be known. According to Alma, her mother had burnt the note, as if to destroy the trace of what had happened to her. Fodor thought that Alma’s physical phenomena were further attempts at disclosure, ‘dumb and confused complaints and appeals for help on the part of the forgotten child’. Even now, she was rendered almost mute as soon as she spoke of the evil man who interfered with children, her throat growing so sore that she could barely speak. Freud argued that a person who had experienced a traumatic event reproduced it as an action instead of a memory: ‘He repeats it, without knowing, of course, that he is repeating it… and in the end, we understand that this is his way of remembering.’
It was possible, Fodor realised, that other women’s supernatural experiences had a similar origin. Perhaps the powers of many psychic women and poltergeist girls were derived from experiences of violation. The Countess had childhood nightmares of men bearing down on her as she lay in bed; Eileen Garrett had learnt to separate her mind from her body after she was roughly petted by a group of huntsmen; the Romanian peasant girl Eleonore Zugun was persecuted by her father in the shape of ‘Dracu’. Fodor wondered if even the story of Gef the talking mongoose expressed something awry in the relationship between James Irving and his daughter Voirrey.
When Fodor first met Alma, she had described supernatural forces as ‘things which we are not meant to know’, as if weird activity stemmed from the suppression of knowledge, a necessary forgetting. A childhood assault was an experience so terrible that it insisted on expression; and also so terrible that it was unspeakable – it could take only unconscious, indirect, otherworldly form.
A ghost was the sign of an unacknowledged horror. It indicated a gap opened by trauma, an event that because it had not been assimilated must be perpetually relived. There were no words, so there was a haunting.
On Tuesday afternoon, Alma entered the small seance room with Fodor, Florence Hall and Mr Swift, a psychologist who had agreed to conduct a word-association test.
Alma sat in an armchair while Fodor read out the 101 words on the list that he and the psychologist had compiled, pausing between each for Alma to reply with the first word that occurred to her. Mr Swift timed her responses and Mrs Hall noted them.
Word-association tests were designed to tap in to a subject’s unconscious by revealing unusual connections or blocks. Alma replied easily and conventionally to many of the apparently potent words on Mr Swift’s list, such as ‘rape’ (‘bad’, she said), ‘father’ (‘kindness’), ‘coffin’ (‘death’), ‘roses’ (‘sweet’). She took more than three seconds to respond to ‘hanging’ (with ‘ghastly’), ‘lodger’ (‘room’) and ‘parliament’ (‘mixed-up’, a reference to the political turmoil of the time). Motorcar, fender, Japan, pancake and calendar also slowed her down, and she froze on ‘bicycle’, to which it took her twenty-two seconds to respond – with ‘pleasure’.