by Greyspid
TWENTY
THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES
PART VII
The Disappearance of Stuart Townsend
IN 1929, Stuart Townsend, who had been studying the Mayfair materials for years, petitioned the council in London to allow him to attempt contact with the Mayfair family.
He felt strongly that Stella’s cryptic message to us on the back of the photograph meant that she wanted such contact.
And Stuart was also convinced that the last three Mayfair Witches — Juhen, Mary Beth, and Stella — were not murderers or evildoers in any sense; that it would be entirely safe to contact them, and that, indeed, ’wonderful things’ might result.
This forced the council to take a hard look at the entire question, and also to reexamme, as it does constantly, the aims and standards of the Talamasca.
Though an immense body of written material exists in our archives as to our aims and standards, as to what we find acceptable and unacceptable, and though this is a constant topic of conversation at our council meetings worldwide, let me summarize for the purposes of this narrative the issues which are relevant here, all of which were raised by Stuart Townsend in 1929.
First and foremost: We had created in the File on the Mayfair Witches an impressive and valuable history of a psychic family. We had proved to ourselves beyond a doubt that the Mayfairs had contact with the realm of the invisible, and that they could manipulate unseen forces to their advantage But there were still many things about what they did that we did not know
What if they could be persuaded to talk to us, to share their secrets? What might we then learn?
Stella was not the secretive or guarded person that Mary Beth had been. Maybe, if she could be convinced of our discretion and our scholarly purpose, she would reveal things to us. Possibly Cortland Mayfair would talk to us too.
Second and perhaps less important- Certainly we had over the years violated the privacy of the Mayfair family with our vigilance We had, according to Stuart, ‘snooped’ into every aspect of their lives. Indeed we had studied these people as specimens, and again and again, we justify the lengths to which we go by arguing that we will, and do, make our records available to those we study.
Well, we had not done that with the Mayfairs ever. And perhaps there was no excuse for not trying now.
Third: We existed in an absolutely unique relationship to the Mayfairs because the blood of Petyr van Abel, our brother, ran in their veins. They were ‘related’ to us, one might say. Should we not seek to make contact merely to tell them about this ancestor? And who knows what would follow from there?
Fourth: Could we do some real good by making contact? And here of course we come to one of our highest purposes Could the reckless Stella benefit from knowing about other people like herself? Would she not enjoy knowing there were people who studied such persons, with a view to understanding the realm of the invisible? In other words, would Stella not like to talk to us, and not like to know what we knew about the psychic world at large?
Stuart argued vociferously that we were obligated to make contact He also raised the pertinent question: what did Stella already know? He also insisted that Stella needed us, that the entire Mayfair clan needed us, that little Antha in particular needed us, and it was time that we introduced ourselves and offered what we knew.
The council considered everything that Stuart had to say; it considered what it knew of the Mayfair Witches, and it concluded that the good reasons for making contact far outweighed any bad reasons. It dismissed out of hand the idea of danger. And it told Stuart that he might go to America and he might make contact with Stella.
In a welter of excitement, Stuart sailed for New York the very next day The Talamasca received two letters from him postmarked New York He wrote again when he reached New Orleans, on stationery from the St Charles Hotel, saying that he had contacted Stella and indeed had found her extremely receptive, and that he was going to meet her for lunch the next day
Stuart Townsend was never seen or heard from again We do not know where or when or even if his life ended We simply know that sometime in June of 1929 he vanished without a trace.
When one looks back upon these council meetings, when one reads over the transcript, it is very easy to see that the Talamasca made a tragic mistake Stuart was not really prepared for this mission A narrative should have been written embracing all the materials, so that the Mayfair history could be seen as a whole Also the question of danger should have been more carefully evaluated Throughout the anecdotal history of the Mayfairs there are references to violence being done to the enemies of the Mayfair Witches.
But in all fairness, it must be admitted that there were no such stories associated with Stella or her generation And certainly no such stories in relationship to other contemporary residents of the First Street house (The exceptions, of course, are the playground stories concerning Stella and Antha They were accused of using their invisible friend to hurt other little children But there is nothing comparable about Stella as an adult)
Also the full story of Antha’s nurse who died of a fall in Rome was not then known to the Talamasca And it is possible that Stuart knew nothing about this incident at all
Nevertheless Stuart was not fully prepared for such a mission And when one reviews his comments to the council and to other members it becomes obvious that Stuart had fallen in love with Stella Mayfair He had fallen in love with her under the very worst circumstances that is, he had fallen in love with her image in her photographs, and with the Stella who emerged from people’s descriptions of her She had become a myth to him And so, full of zeal and romance, he went to meet her, dazzled not only by her powers but by her proverbial charms.
It is also obvious to anyone who considers this case dispassionately that Stuart was not the best person for this mission, for a number of reasons.
And before we go with Stuart to New Orleans, allow us to explain briefly who Stuart was A full file on Stuart exists in the archives, and it is certainly worth reading in its own right For some twenty-five years, he was a devoted and conscientious member of the order and his investigations of cases of possession cover some one hundred and fourteen different files.
THE LIFE OF STUART TOWNSEND
How much of Stuart’s life is relevant to what happened to him, or to the story of the Mayfair Witches, I cannot say I know that I am including more of it here than I need to include And especially in view of what little I say of Arthur Langtry, I must explain.
I think I have included this material here as some sort of memorial to Stuart, and as some sort of warning Be that as it may
Stuart came to the attention of the order when he was twenty-two years old Our offices in London received from one of its many investigators in America a small newspaper article about Stuart Townsend, or ‘The Boy Who Had Been Somebody Else for Ten Years’
Stuart had been born in a small town in Texas in the year 1895 His father was the local doctor, a deeply intellectual and widely respected man Stuart’s mother was from a well-to-do family, and engaged in charity work of the fashionable sort for a lady of her position, having two nurses for her seven children, of which Stuart was the firstborn They lived in a large white Victorian house with a widow’s walk, on the town’s one and only fashionable street.
Stuart went to boarding school in New England when he was six years old He was from the beginning an exceptional student, and during his summer vacation home, he was something of a recluse, reading in his attic bedroom until late in the night He did have a number of friends, however, among the town’s small but vigorous aristocracy sons and daughters of city officials, lawyers, and well-to-do ranchers, and he seems to have been well liked.
When he was ten years old Stuart came down with a serious fever which could not be diagnosed His father concluded finally that it was of infectious origin, but no real explanation was ever found Stuart went into a crisis during which he was delirious for two days.
When he recovered,
he wasn’t Stuart He was somebody else This somebody else claimed to be a young woman named Antoinette Fielding who spoke with a French accent and played the piano beautifully, and seemed generally confused about how old she was, where she lived, or what she was doing in Stuart’s house.
Stuart himself did know some French, but he did not know how to play the piano And when he sat down at the dusty grand in the parlor and began to play Chopin the family thought they were losing their minds.
As for his believing he was a girl, and crying miserably when he saw his reflection in a mirror, his mother could not endure this and actually ran from the room After about a week of hysterical and melancholic behavior, Stuart-Antoinette was persuaded to stop asking for dresses, to accept the fact that she had a boy’s body now, and to believe that she was Stuart Townsend, and get back to doing what Stuart was expected to do.
However, any return to school was out of the question And Stuart-Antoinette, who became known to the family as Tony for the sake of simplicity, spent his or her days playing the piano endlessly and scribbling out memories in a huge diary as she-he tried to solve the mystery of who she was.
As Dr Townsend perused these scribbled recollections he perceived that the French in which they were written was far beyond the level of expertise which ten-year-old Stuart had attained He also began to realize that the child’s memories were all of Paris, and of Paris in the 18405, as direct references to operas and plays and modes of transportation clearly showed
It emerged from these written documents that Antoinette Fielding had been of English-French parentage, that her Frenchman father had not married her English mother Louisa Fielding and that she had lived a strange and reclusive life in Paris, the pampered daughter of a high-class prostitute who sought to protect her only child from the filth of the streets Her great gift and consolation was her music.
Dr Townsend, enthralled, and reassuring his wife that they would get to the bottom of this mystery, began an investigation by mail with a view to discovering whether or not this person Antoinette Fielding had ever existed in Paris
This occupied him for some five years.
During that time, ‘Antoinette’ remained in Stuart’s body, playing the piano obsessively, venturing out only to get lost or into some dreadful scrape with the local toughs At last Antoinette never left the house, and became something of a hysterical invalid, demanding that meals be left at her door, and going down to play the piano only at night
Finally, through a private detective in Paris, Dr Townsend ascertained that a certain Louisa Fielding had been murdered in Pans in 1865 She was indeed a prostitute, but there was no record whatsoever of her having a child And at last Dr Townsend came to a dead end He was by this time weary of trying to solve the mystery And he came to terms with the situation as best he could.
His handsome young son Stuart was gone forever, and in his place was a wasted, warped invalid, a white faced boy with burning eyes and a strange sexless voice, who lived now entirely behind closed blinds The doctor and his wife grew used to hearing the nocturnal concerts Every now and then the doctor went up to speak to the pale faced ’feminine’ creature who lived in the attic He could not help but note a mental deterioration The creature could no longer remember much of ’her past ’ Nevertheless they conversed pleasantly in French or in English for a little while, then the emaciated and distracted young person would turn to his books as if the father weren’t there, and the father would go away.
It is interesting to note that no one even discussed the possibility that Stuart was ’possessed ’ The doctor was an atheist, the children were taken to the Methodist church The family knew nothing of Catholics or Catholic rites of exorcism, or the Catholic belief in demons or possession And as far as we know the local minister, whom the family did not like, was never personally consulted as to the case.
This situation continued until Stuart was twenty years old. Then one night he fell down the stairs, suffering a severe concussion The doctor, half awake and waiting for the inevitable music to rise from the parlor, discovered his son unconscious in the hallway and rushed him to the local hospital, where Stuart lay in a coma for two weeks.
When he woke up, he was Stuart He had absolutely no recollection of ever having been anyone else Indeed, he believed he was ten years old, and when he heard a manly voice issuing from his own throat, he was horrified When he discovered he had a grown man’s body, he was speechless with shock
Dumbfounded he sat in his hospital bed listening to stories of what had been happening to him for the last ten years Of course he did not understand French He’d had a terrible time with it in school And of course he couldn’t play the piano Why, everybody knew he had no musical ability He could not even carry a tune
In the next few weeks, he sat staring at the dinner table at his ’enormous’ brothers and sisters, at his now gray-haired father, and at his mother, who could not look at him without bursting into tears Telephones and automobiles which hardly existed in 1905 when he had ceased to be Stuart startled him endlessly Electric lights filled him with insecurity But the keenest source of agony was his own adult body And the ever deepening realization that his childhood and adolescence were now gone without a trace
Then he began to confront the inevitable problems He was twenty with the emotions and education of a ten-year-old boy He began to gain weight, his color improved, he went riding on the nearby ranches with his old friends Tutors were hired to educate him, he read the newspapers and the national magazines by the hour He took long walks during which he practiced moving and thinking like an adult
But he lived in a perpetual state of anxiety He was passionately attracted to women, but did not know how to deal with this attraction His feelings were easily hurt As a man he felt hopelessly inadequate At last he began to quarrel with everyone, and discovering that he could drink with impunity, he began to ’hit the bottle’ in the local saloons
Soon the whole town knew the story Some people remembered the first ’go round’ when Antoinette had been born Others only heard the whole tale in retrospect Whatever the case, there was ceaseless talk And though the local paper never, out of deference to the doctor, made mention of this bizarre story, a reporter from Dallas, Texas, got wind of it from several sources, and without the family’s cooperation, wrote a long article on it which appeared in the Sunday edition of a Dallas paper in 1915 Other papers picked up this story It was eventually forwarded to us in London about two months after it appeared
Meantime curiosity seekers descended upon Stuart A local author wanted to write a novel about him Representatives from national magazines rang the front door bell The family was up in arms Stuart was once again driven indoors, and sat brooding in the attic room, staring at the treasured possessions of this strange person Antoinette, and feeling that ten years of his life had been stolen from him, and he was now a hopeless misfit, driven to antagonizing everyone he knew
No doubt the family received a great deal of unwelcome mail On the other hand, communication in that day and age was not what it is now Whatever the case, a package from the Talamasca reached Stuart in late 1916, containing two well-known books about such cases of ’possession,’ along with a letter from us informing him that we had a good deal of knowledge about such things and would be very glad to talk to him about it, and about others who had experienced the same thing
Stuart at once fired off a reply He met with our representative Louis Daly in Dallas in the summer of 1917, and gratefully agreed to go with us to London Dr Townsend, at first deeply concerned, was finally won over by Louis, who assured him that our approach to such things was entirely scholarly, and at last Stuart came to us on September 1,
He was received into the order as a novice the following year, and he remained with us from then on
His first project of course was a thorough study of his own case, and a study of every other known case of possession on record His conclusion finally, and that of the other Talamasca scholars assigned to thi
s area of research, was that he indeed had been possessed by the spirit of a dead woman
He believed then and ever after that the spirit of Antoinette Fielding could have been driven out of him, if anyone knowledgeable had been consulted, even a Catholic priest For though the Catholic Church holds that such cases are purely demonic which we do not there is no doubt that their techniques for exorcising such alien presences do work
For the next five years Stuart did nothing but investigate past cases of possession the world over He interviewed victims by the dozens, taking voluminous notes
He came to the conclusion long held by the Talamasca that there are a great variety of entities who engage in possession Some may be ghosts, some may be entities who were never human, some may be ’other personalities’ within the host But he remained convinced that Antoinette Fielding had been a real human being, and that like many such ghosts, she had not known or understood that she was dead
In 1920 he went to Paris to find evidence of Antoinette Fielding He was unable to discover anything at all But the few bits of information about the dead Louisa Fielding did fit with what Antoinette had written about her mother Time, however, had long ago erased any real trace of these persons And Stuart remained forever dissatisfied on this account
In late 1920 he resigned himself to the fact that he might never know who Antoinette was, and then he turned to active fieldwork on behalf of the Talamasca He went out with Louis Daly to intervene in cases of possession, carrying out with Daly a form of exorcism which Daly used very effectively to drive such alien presences out of the victim-host
Daly was very impressed with Stuart Townsend He became Stuart’s mentor, and Stuart was throughout these years noted for his compassion, patience, and effectiveness in this field Not even Daly could comfort the victims afterwards the way Stuart could do it After all, Stuart had been there Stuart knew
