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 1840s, 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 Paris 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 ever 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 steps, 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 had 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, 1917.
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 this 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
