The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  In the midst of all this opulence he had installed the magnetic pole of his love: Henriette Vogel.

  Years later, when everything had changed, Hercule Barfuss would ask himself why von Below hadn’t grown suspicious; not on one single occasion cast a sidelong glance at the barred door of the bedroom through which his wife, in a state of feverish excitement, stole stealthily at nights, nor even vented a rejected lover’s frustration. Henrietta’s clumsy lies certainly did not suffice as an explanation, nor their awkward game of hide-and-seek, nor that the baron was away on business, or the fact that he, Hercule, was so patently deformed as to be beyond all suspicion.

  Hercule was shaken by the strength of the feelings they still had for each other after all these years of privation, the fire that made them seek each other out at midnight, their wordless conversations, the rays of pure energy that suffused his existence at the mere sight of her. Love was all, for love was greater than life. Henriette was the living incarnation of all the thousands of love poems he’d read in Barnaby Wilson’s library, he dedicated all the composers’ pieces to her, just as all roses had been created solely in her honour. She was all womanhood. The most beautiful creature he had ever known.

  Their symbiosis was complete. At first they parted company only to sleep, or to dwell in private on the stories of the other. He would recall life at this time as a realistic application of Plato’s idea about the origin of life in his Symposium. Each was the other’s missing half, fusing together again.

  But jealousy is every lover’s nemesis, and this dark force he too must suffer. Just to see her talking to von Below threw him into fits of indescribable anguish. It didn’t even have to be her husband, a visitor could trigger it off, or one of the servants, or even the attention she paid to the two tortoises as they lumbered with fossil-like slowness across the vast expanse of marble floor.

  Then he would sink into a despair as fathomless as his love, until a glance from her delivered him and in a matter of seconds made him once again the happiest of mortals.

  That summer they travelled to the family estate by Muggelsee, an old hunting-seat von Below had had restored with a view to his heir being able to spend holidays out in nature. It was by now quite evident that Henriette was expecting. The news had unleashed a fever of activity, with any number of receptions and parties where half of Berlin society filed past to offer gifts and congratulations. The baron was beside himself with joy, and the thought of becoming a father dimmed his wits. Hercule, on the contrary, aware of the true state of affairs, wasn’t in the least surprised; everything he’d experienced recently had been so improbable that miracles no longer seemed impossible.

  Von Below’s business took him away on long journeys. Left to themselves on the estate, they lived in ecstasy, where neither future nor past existed. Hercule struck the servants with awe by playing the grand piano with his feet. With Henriette he went on excursions to the Brandenburg forests, or took the mail coach to Spreewald where folk floated down the canals on rafts. They visited Dresden and admired the city’s architecture. To avoid attracting attention he dressed in a child’s clothes and wore a mask. The present moment had been ennobled to the rank of Emperor. But this made him careless . . .

  Von Below had installed a model factory in one of the adjoining mansions. Everywhere in Europe factory workers were living in the most appalling conditions. Men, women and children toiled at the machines in sixteen-hour shifts, working in dark, filthy barracks, and when trade recessions reduced demand the workers would be immediately laid off. Schooled in the spirit of German idealism, von Below had begun experimenting with more humane methods of industrial labour. It didn’t make sense that a whole family should starve to death simply because a tariff wall had gone up, or a rate of exchange gone down. In his new, model factories no-one worked more than a twelve-hour day, the premises were light and spacious, the company provided its employees with housing and medicine, and if they ran into hard times he intended to keep them on, unemployed, but with half pay. He also founded schools for the workers’ children, none of whom were employed in the factory under the age of twelve. The adults too were taught to read and write. Much to the baron’s delight, these measures actually helped raise output, doubling it within a few months. Hercule could not help but admire this rival who seemed scarcely aware of his existence, and whom he would never get to know, since Henriette made sure to keep them apart. If on some occasion they happened to be in the same room, the baron seemed to look right through him. Towards the end of his life, in correspondence with his exiled daughter, Hercule was to describe his rival as honest and kindhearted . . .

  Marriage doubles your duties, but halves your rights, the baron used to quip whenever his wife was mentioned. Adding Schopenhauer’s words: “Time is truth’s ally.”

  Hercule grew to doubt this sentiment, for what they were shortly to experience was that all our “nows” are different from future “thens”.

  Nothing is predictable, not even for someone endowed with such a gift as our hero. Happiness was distorting his sense of reality, which was why he failed to heed the alarm bells. Had he been more vigilant, the catastrophe might have been averted. The foreman responsible for the factory in von Below’s absence, for instance, had received several visits from mysterious gentlemen. But the closer Henriette came to her delivery, the more the two of them abandoned themselves to their imagination. Much later he would write to his daughter that they had formed plans to go to America, had even contacted a Bremen shipping company. Henriette had put aside some money and had begun to formulate a letter of farewell to her husband. She and Hercule had found each other again, and all the lost years entitled them to a future.

  Late in autumn they returned to Berlin. By now Henriette was so big the midwife feared she was going to give birth to twins. Towards the end, Hercule saw little of her, since family duties and keeping up the semblance of being a good wife were taking up all her time. Jealousy plagued him. The irrational feeeling of being scorned by the whole world.

  When first Charlotte saw the light of day, on the morning of November 9, he was alone in his room, but his gift enabled him to follow all that was going on in the house. He felt the baron’s pride and joy as he paced the corridor outside the room in which the little girl was being born, he felt Henriette’s birth pangs as if they had been his own, and even climbed into the state of non-verbal awareness to be experienced by his own daughter. The world is a wondrous place, he thought, it surpasses everything anyone can imagine . . .

  ON THE SAME afternoon that the little girl was christened in a simple ceremony on the von Below estate, three men met up at the Golden Cockerel Inn, beside Berlin’s Holy Trinity Church. The tavern was upstairs, and overlooked the graveyard. While two of the men were studying a plan of some building, the third was looking half-heartedly at a poster advertising an animal-baiting contest at the inn later that evening and marvelling at the idea of a mastiff set against a she-wolf, two cocks fighting to the death, and even something so extraordinary as an ape skinned alive by a lynx.

  Though known as the “beggar monk” his real name was Johannes Langhans. He was adviser to the secret service built up after the Congress of Vienna by the Austrian Chancellor Metternich, a position to which he’d been appointed on the recommendation of the Italian cardinal Aurelio Rivero, also of a certain inquisitor named Sebastian del Moro. And as he sat in the inn he reflected on his divided loyalties, to Vienna on the one hand and the Vatican on the other. Like Hercule Barfuss, the Jesuit monk Langhans was able to pick up on other people’s thoughts.

  The other two gentlemen at the table were also monks, although it was not obvious from their outward appearances since they were dressed in civilian knee-breeches, overcoats and broad-brimmed hats. One even wore, swinging in full view from a leather sword-belt, a military sabre.

  Their names were Hans and Erich Malitsch, and they were brothers, orphaned during Napoleon’s invasion of the Rhineland in the early years of the century. A Fr
anciscan institution in Westphalia had taken pity on them, and they’d been recruited by the Inquisition, albeit indirectly. It was the younger of these two brothers who was just now in the act of inspecting the plan on the table.

  “It has cost us four gold marks to get this drawn up,” he was saying. “There are no honourable men about these days.”

  “How did you go about it?” Langhans asked.

  “The foreman had gambling debts. We started by paying him visits on von Below’s estate. As you know, he was an overseer in one of the factories . . .”

  The plan was of a building surrounded by a garden, with a high wall between it and the street. The only way into the garden was through a gate. A short avenue led to the coach house. Two wings flanked the courtyard, indicated by a row of fruit trees. Doors and windows were marked more thickly in charcoal, as was every room and floor in the west wing.

  “Which room does the monster sleep in?” Langhans asked.

  “One in the west wing. Von Below never sets his foot in there. Only his wife and Barfuss. The foreman says it’s the wife who keeps the two of them apart.”

  Langhans threw the younger of the two brothers such a sharp look that he lowered his eyes.

  “We wouldn’t need a foreman at all,” he said, “nor a plan, if you hadn’t insisted on going from door to door making enquiries about his whereabouts. That merely aroused suspicion. Now they’re taking all possible measures to protect him and we’ll have to break in like common thieves.”

  “It’s not certain we’d have had more success if we’d gone about it some other way,” the elder brother said. “They say the monster can make himself invisible. The maid swore she’d walked past him at least a dozen times without even noticing he was there.”

  “Let’s stick to what we know and not to what silly people concoct to make themselves seem remarkable. Why didn’t you do anything last summer when they were alone on the estate?”

  “We did, but the monster must have a guardian angel. Twice we were about to go ahead, and both times they went away.”

  “You should have followed them.” Langhans pointed to a broken line in an upper corner of the plan. “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “A secret door. A section of the bookshelves can be opened from a concealed space behind the bedroom. Only von Below and the foreman know it exists. It was the baron himself who had it installed, shortly after he bought the house, as an escape route. That was before the woman arrived on the scene. He’d made himself some enemies at the Ministry, and it seems there was an attempt to poison him. On another occasion he opted out of some duel or other, not very honourably. Any man of von Below’s standing makes enemies and takes the necessary measures to protect himself.”

  “Duels are a barbaric custom,” Langhans muttered. “Why do people have to kill each other for something so inglorious as honour?”

  “Maybe because they haven’t got any,” the younger brother offered. “Von Below gets involved in shady business transactions. Besides his factories and railways, I’ve heard he deals in art stolen from churches. In my opinion, we should just take a walk over to the baron’s bedroom when we’ve done with the west wing . . .”

  But Langhans wasn’t listening. Since his arrival at the inn he’d had a distinct feeling of someone watching them. Not that he’d noticed anything to corroborate his misgivings, but the premonition was there like an annoying tune one can’t get out of one’s head. Which was why, while he was laying aside the flyer advertising the animal-baiting contest and the brothers were marking a cross on the plan, he turned round to take a look.

  The tavern was far from full. Further inside the premises some coachmen were playing dice. A group of guards officers were conversing loudly at a table. Two yawning women of dubious virtue were strolling between the bar and a separate part of the tavern, fitted out as a smoking room, where, to judge by the smell, you could also sink into opium dreams. At the far end of the tavern, the innkeeper, surrounded by half a dozen men, was busy demonstrating something. At regular intervals he let out a series of curses, unleashing general merriment.

  Even so Langhans noticed nothing untoward, or outside the range of normal sensations. There were of course the usual chunks of longing and bitterness, undercurrents of love gone awry, short outbursts of joy or pain, tributaries of thought and streams of absent-minded images running aimlessly, without direction, one association merely hooking on to another, until nightfall and sleep, or inebriation, turned them all into dreams . . .

  Johannes Langhans had acquired his gift during his time in Istria as a priest. That had been during the years when the Society was under an interdict and the house, which had become famous for the severity of its rules, had been surviving on charity on the outskirts of the Empire. Taking such banishment for granted, the abbot had proposed the novices go and live as hermits in the mountains. Langhans had taken a personal vow of silence. No-one had demanded it of him; but he was young, and impressed by the legends of the saints.

  For nearly ten years he’d lived with no other human contact than the district’s shepherds. By and by he discovered he had a natural inclination towards a hermit’s way of life, impervious as he was to hardships, whether snowstorms or heat, hunger or thirst. It was during this time that he realised he had the gift. At first it was so faint that he put it down to the hallucinations brought on by hunger, but gradually, as it grew stronger, he’d interpreted it as his reward for the vow of silence he’d offered up to God.

  He could sense the approach of another human being miles away. Had carried on a one-sided telepathic contact with the abbot and surprised him by sending letters via the shepherds, in which he described his superior’s problems and gave him advice on how to solve them.

  Eventually the heads of the house – ill at ease with this figure who, clad in rags, mute as a stone, emaciated beyond recognition, had more and more come to look like a tramp, and had an uncanny knowledge of what was going on in their minds – would absolve him from his vows; he was sent to the Vatican as a secretary to the bishops’ congregation.

  The connection between speech and thought having been all but severed, it had taken Langhans several months to recover his voice. He was convinced he was alone with his gift. No-one eluded him: he penetrated their souls. This wasn’t imagination: he saw right through them, saw the secrets they thought well hidden, picked up the stench of their rotting souls, became shocked at the discrepancy between thought and speech among clerical officials, and had the insight to foresee that his gift might get him into trouble. Miracles were rarely rewarded by canonisation. On the contrary, the wars had created a surplus of icons and madonnas which shed tears of sacred oil in provincial chapels.

  During his third year in Rome he’d been summoned before an investigating commission. The first time he met Sebastian del Moro he realised that it was this man who somehow or other had disclosed his gift.

  The investigation established that it was not of a demonic nature, but he was forbidden to speak of it, and he heard from the corridor gossip that he, together with his prior, was on the list of clerics being considered for post-mortem canonisation. The rumour must have been put abroad by the Inquisition in order to protect him. That made him laugh.

  Shortly thereafter he’d been placed in quarantine in an office specially invented for him. Two years later del Moro had him appointed to a post in what was to become the sapinieri movement. When his reputation had grown to the point where, on Cardinal Rivero’s recommendation, he was offered the position of religious counsellor to Metternich, he’d gone on working in secret for the movement. The cases he was entrusted with were considered to have such high priority that only a man of his qualities could be called upon. Which was why he was just now in Berlin, under such clandestine circumstances that not even the Chancellor knew of his whereabouts.

  Seated at the table in the Golden Cockerel, Langhans turned his attention to the brothers. They were intent on the job in hand: the drawings, the way into the
house, any patrols, who was to do what. They had spent almost a year in Berlin, pursuing rumours that the monster was performing in salons as a mesmerist. But when they searched he seemed to have disappeared. All that remained was the eternal flora of legends in the making: that the boy could see into the future, pass on messages from the dead and ask favours of the Devil. There were people who swore blind they hadn’t seen him though they’d walked past him only a foot away as he, at the expense of their sanity, tried out his faculty for rendering himself invisible. These rumours had been followed by others – that he was living in Brussels, in Copenhagen, in Hamburg and, finally, in Berlin, where he enjoyed the protection of a certain Baroness von Below.

  This last rumour had proved correct. For almost two weeks now Langhans had been staying at a Catholic hostel by the Trinity Church graveyard while the final preparations were being made. And all the time he’d had this feeling of something not being quite right. Now it seemed as if his misgiving was being verified. He was picking up a most peculiar wavelength, sensing a flow of thoughts, or rather, a state of awareness, that he could neither understand nor locate.

  Again he turned round to look. A squint-eyed woman smiled at him. The kitchen boy was blowing his nose like a trumpet and scrutinising its contents in his handkerchief. Over in the corner the innkeeper was swearing ever louder.

  The consciousness Langhans was failing to locate was, however, in his immediate vicinity. He intuited it with a sense of urgency that was almost tangible, as if it had been rubbing itself up against his clothes and his skin. Over in the corner, he now noticed, the innkeeper had picked up a cane and was hitting out at something, though he could not tell what, since the men’s backs formed a wall, blocking his view.