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

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Some drunks were laughing. Someone else yelled:

  “But she’s worthless. What did you say you paid for her?”

  “Three ducats! And I was told she was worth twice as much. When she first came here she could do tricks, walk on her hands, dance like a real lady. Truth needs few words, but lies can’t get enough of them. I’ve been swindled by that damned gypsy who sold her to me.”

  The men around him moved aside to make way for the innkeeper, and now Langhans had a clear view.

  It was a guenon.

  The monkey, clothed in a dirty doll’s dress and printed calico nightcap, was chained to a hook in the wall. The chain holding her was extremely short, giving her no more than a few feet to move about in.

  “I bought this wretched monkey to perform tricks for my guests!” the innkeeper shouted. “But she’s an idiot, won’t do as she’s told! Now all she’s good for is bait.”

  The monkey did not utter a sound. Langhans wondered if someone had cut out her tongue. He perceived the crackle of some kind of language, mixed with hatred and bestial pain. It struck him that the conceptual world of a monkey was not wholly unlike that of a small child, and this insight filled him with awe.

  Another fragmentary thought interrupted the horror of the guenon. It was coming from the elder of the two brothers: a doubt about Langhans’ absent-mindedness.

  He turned his attention back to them and asked, “Does von Below have any guards?”

  “There’s a gatekeeper at nights. But apart from the baron no-one is armed. According to the foreman he keeps two Dutch pistols in a casket in the library.”

  “No mastiffs?”

  “No, the gatekeeper’s our only snag. But look, here, further away, if you follow the garden wall . . . See, a blind corner? A lamplighter usually walks past just after midnight. After that, not a living soul.”

  “The kitchen entrance will be open,” the younger brother added. “The foreman sees to that. The bottom of the secret staircase is behind a storeroom in the cellar.”

  But Langhans didn’t need to ask for any more details of the plan the brothers had had drawn up, he went on building logically on the information he already possessed; besides which, he saw what was going on in their heads, the entire plan, in detail: how von Below and his wife slept in another part of the house, that is, if the baron was there at all and hadn’t gone off to visit one of his factories. If he was staying in the house, he’d probably be sleeping soundly, although of course one could never be sure nothing unforeseen would occur. The plan prescribed how one brother was to keep watch outside the house while Langhans and the other brother climbed over the garden wall, entered through the open kitchen door – exercising every precaution so as not to wake the housemaids – descended to the cellars where barrels of wine and beer were kept, mounted the secret staircase the foreman had drawn their attention to, up to the wing’s upper storey where the monster slept behind a locked door – maybe because he knew he was being hunted – lulled into a false sense of security, little knowing that a section of the bookshelf was at that very moment being thrust aside, and two shadows were entering the dimly lit room where one of them, probably Langhans himself, being responsible for the affair being brought to a satisfactory conclusion, went over to the bed, marked on the plan by the diligent foreman, pulled aside the curtains and, grabbing the deformed mind-reader by the throat, put an end to a life that, but for an accident of nature, should never have been . . .

  “What about the woman?” he asked. “The baroness? Where will she be tomorrow night?”

  “In her bedchamber, we think. Right under the baron’s room.”

  “What do you mean, think?”

  “It’s rumoured that she’s the monster’s mistress. The foreman heard it from a chambermaid. It’s said the monster is the child’s father and that the woman visits him at night as soon as the house is asleep. It’s said they have plans to go to America . . .”

  Langhans laughed aloud. “That’s absurd. The monster’s utterly unfit to live. How could he sire children? And what woman would want a creature like that in her bed?”

  Even so, it was quite possible, he later reflected: the gift could be used to gain almost unimaginable advantages.

  “Wouldn’t von Below have noticed that?” he said equivocally.

  “He’s blind where his wife’s concerned. He’ll do anything for her. The foreman says he drinks champagne out of her shoe, as the Poles do when they’re besotted by a woman.”

  “God gave human beings two ears”, the older brother declared, “to hear better. And two eyes to see better. But only one mouth, to not talk so much. The foreman’s a braggart . . .”

  But Langhans wasn’t listening. His attention was on the chained monkey again. It occurred to him they might make use of a creature like that, Barfuss probably being on his guard.

  At the other end of the room, the innkeeper lashed out at her with his cane, and she tried in vain to avoid the blows. She pulled and tugged at the chain, straining to get free, scratching at the metal and then, with no chance of escape, went to the attack and took the cane between her teeth.

  “I’ll teach you,” the innkeeper shouted, “you damned brute!”

  With a wrench he tore the cane out of the monkey’s jaws and lifted it to hit back with full force. Langhans feared he would hear a crack, such as when someone strong snaps a dry twig across their knee, an explosive sound, as when an animal’s limb is broken; in fact, he could already feel it, as if it had been his own leg . . .

  Later, the innkeeper would recall a kind of whisper that had compelled him to let go of the cane and free the monkey from its chain for no obvious reason, unable as he was to grasp it. It was not his own will that acted, of course, but rather the taciturn guest sitting with two gentlemen at the far end of the room.

  A shudder passed through the priest. The monkey was exceedingly aggressive, filled with hatred for all humans; a highly efficient weapon in the hands of anyone who knew how to wield it.

  Freed of its chain, the animal, without a moment’s hesitation, again attacked the innkeeper. It was all Langhans could do to calm it down, and, using his gift, to lure it to him, sit at his feet, whimpering guiltily.

  The innkeeper was bleeding from two gashes on his leg and deeply shaken. Langhans turned to the wounded man, and said, “You’ve got all the animals you need for your baiting. I’ll buy the guenon off you. Name your price . . .”

  IN HIS DREAM he is walking through a forest, and his hearing is as keen as anyone else’s. Birdsong, the wind in the treetops, the babbling of a brook, human laughter.

  Looking at his arms he sees they have grown. The muscles are like a soft line of hills stretching from wrist to shoulder, veins protruding on the surface, a delta of blood whose effluents flow into two perfect hands lacking no fingers. And he has grown; the dwarf legs are long and muscular.

  He mirrors himself in a watercourse. Gone is the cleft palate. His nose is proud, its profile as noble as a buzzard’s. He sticks his tongue out, an ordinary pink tongue, not a snake’s. His face is neither handsome nor repulsive, a perfectly common or garden face, and that pleases him.

  There’s a smell of autumn in the air, of rotting leaves, mushrooms, damp moss. In a forest glade a young roe deer is standing. When a branch snaps underfoot, it sniffs the air cautiously but doesn’t run away. He hums a tune and doesn’t notice when his humming turns into song.

  Is he singing?

  Yes, he’s singing and his song is exactly like the idea he’s had of it, coming as it does from a piece he used to play on the organ; so the music in his head is the same as the music in his ear. The words stick in his throat through sheer amazement, but by and by he begins talking aloud to himself: “My name is Hercule,” he says, “Hercule Barfuss. Once upon a time I was a dwarf, deaf and dumb, disfigured. But now I’m a fully grown man, I can talk, an everyday kind of person, neither handsome nor ugly, but well proportioned, as if I’ve been blown up to my full size.” />
  The ground is drying out, the layer deepest down is sandy. The path winds its way onward among low pines, everywhere are sounds, the sounds of the forest, cracklings, little snappings of cones falling, birds. Not in his wildest fantasies could he have imagined the world as consisting of so many sounds, or that anything invisible can so fill existence. He sniffs in the odour of saltwater and seaweed. The path leads off to the west, takes him up to a hilltop. And there, in front of him, shining, almost at a standstill, is the sea.

  Lazy waves nibble at the shore. Sea is all around him. He realises he is on an island.

  The girl is sitting on one of the sand dunes. He calls her name, but she doesn’t hear him. Again he looks at his human arms, the sinews at the wrists, the finger joints, not one missing . . . nails, more grey than pink, on the back of his hand he can see wormlike veins . . .

  By now the girl has become aware of him and is beckoning him closer. He goes on along the sand dune, but the girl is still as far away as ever, as if she were being moved back at the same pace as his footsteps approach her.

  An insect bites him in the back. As it’s in a spot he can’t normally reach with his feet, he tries to shrug it off. How many lice have bitten him over the years simply because of this, how often has the itching tormented him between his misshapen shoulder blades because it happened to be out of foot’s reach. But then he remembers: he has hands! Carefully he draws his nails over his back. The growth of hair, too, he notices, is gone, as are the indentations and fossil-like protrusions. Out of sheer joy he starts talking again, quotes a French philosopher Barnaby Wilson had once drawn his attention to: “Happiness is a dream and suffering is reality.” But the philosopher was wrong. “It’s the other way around,” he adds, in his own, somewhat squeaky, nasal voice . . . no, quite the opposite, in a soft baritone, reminiscent of the middle range on an organ: “I’m dreaming, I know, but when I wake up, Henriette will be there, and I’ll be even happier in reality than in this dream.”

  He saunters down the final sand dune on the shore of what he assumes to be an island. He trips over something: a tortoise with jewels set in its shell. It nods at him with its wrinkled old-man’s head, and he senses it wants to communicate with him, but its way of thinking is so slow, so archaic, he can’t translate it into his own tongue, and anyway the girl is waiting for him.

  She’s wearing a silk mask, he sees it now. His own. “Henriette?” he says, but she doesn’t react; and suddenly he realises she is deaf, that in an act of self-sacrificing love she has taken his deformity on herself, along with his mask. Then he takes her mask off in order, once more, to exchange destinies with her, and when, a moment later, he opens his eyes, she is as endearingly beautiful as ever . . .

  She is lying in bed beside him in his room in von Below’s palace. The moon is casting a milky white light across the floor. Nobody sleeps as elegantly as Henriette, he thinks, like a temple dancer, with one hand on her forehead and her mouth formed into a kiss.

  How long has she been there?

  Since midnight, when she, cat-like, sneaked through your door and lay down beside you, Hercule, double your height, double your weight, infinitely more beautiful, but not double your love, since love, like silence, or come to that, eternity, cannot be multiplied.

  Night broods the house. Everyone is asleep except the tortoises who, with unending meekness, go on crawling across the floors downstairs. Henriette moans in her sleep, a tress of hair has fallen across her face and using two of his toes he brushes it aside and tucks it behind her ear. Whereupon she smiles in her angelic dream, in which he partakes, since if he concentrates hard enough, he is able to follow the series of dream images and finds to his astonishment that she is dreaming the same dream he has just dreamed. She too, is on the beach of an unknown island. He sees her, still wearing his mask, though in her dream he’s the same as he always is, and she can hear and speak as usual. Hercule, she thinks in the dream, why did you lend me your mask?

  There he sits in the night, unable to answer, still in phase with his unspeakable joy; dissecting it, examining a thousand wondrous particles spread before him on the quilt, reassembling them in the same pattern as before, or in a new and equally perfect one; a happiness beyond his wildest dreams, beyond anything he could ever have imagined.

  But these last few weeks’ restlessness has been a steady companion, so he gets up, rocks himself carefully from side to side until he has picked up enough momentum to roll over to the edge of the bed, turns on his axis, and slides, feet first, down to the floor, no mean drop for a man of his inconsiderable stature.

  A beam of moonlight runs the length of the room. The light falls on to him like a weightless mantle. Now he goes and sits down at the desk by the window; a child’s desk with a footstool for a chair. Carefully he opens the drawer, takes out a quarto sheet of paper between two toes and puts it on the desk. He eases off the top of the inkwell, picks up the quill between his big and second toe, dips the tip into rose-scented ink, wipes off a superfluous drop on the blotting paper, and writes: “I, Hercule Barfuss, am about to embark on a new life . . .”

  A blot has formed beside the lavish initial letter he drew; never mind, he thinks, and goes on, words to the effect that he’s just been born anew, is reborn along with his daughter, no, he corrects himself: the year before, when Henriette found him again, an unforgettable moment. Adding that all the years of hardship were as nothing compared with one second of happiness together with the woman he loves. He writes about the tickets to America, about their departure, only a week away, their plans and the precautions they have taken, the trunks packed in secret and the money they’ve set aside. Charlotte, his daughter, they will take with them. Everything is planned down to the last detail, they have rented a carriage which is to take them to Hamburg-Altona. They have a confidante, the squint-eyed Lisaveta, who runs their errands no questions asked, the baron must on no account become suspicious.

  The thought of the baron makes his heart constrict. His happiness will be the baron’s tragedy. He is a noble soul, he thinks, and he is indebted to him. After all, he was the one who rescued Henriette, wasn’t he?

  Yes, von Below’s the last in a long line of this waning species and it hurts him to have to deprive the baron of the woman he loves almost as much as he himself does . . . Whereupon a pang of jealousy passes through him. He can’t help it, for jealousy is ever love’s morbid companion in funeral clothes, a death in miniature that leaves a taste of lead in one’s mouth. The object of this emotion could well have been of a lower moral standing, but jealousy is non-negotiable. Love’s inflamed appendix, it lives its own life, so he lets himself be placated by Henriette’s assurances that although she is indeed most grateful to the baron for all he has done for her, it counts for nothing in love’s omnipotent perspective.

  The moon goes in behind a cloud and the room turns pitch black. Hercule gropes for the lamp with his feet, finds it, screws up the wick, lifts the glass and lights a tar match – all this with an orthopaedic elegance that would secure him a position in any circus. The lamp gives off a greenish glow, like some luminous aquatic plant, had he only been able to imagine such a thing. Again he dips his quill in the inkwell; writes the words symbolising his future: United States of America.

  No-one knows what awaits them, but since no-one is able to recall their birth or envisage their own death, everyone already possesses a premonition of eternity and is already living now and for ever. America, he thinks, is a geographic eternity, a cartographic “for ever”.

  He gives a start, so violent he almost loses his balance. On the window ledge, by the trelliswork, sits a raven. It pecks lightly at the windowpane as if trying to draw his attention. Naturally, he can’t hear the sound, but instead feels the vibrations. The bird, he surmises, probably sees its own image in the pane, and thinks it has found another of its own kind.

  With an instantaneous act of will, Hercule does the most fantastic thing his gift permits: he puts himself inside the raven a
nd looks at himself through its beady eyes. Then he climbs back into his own body again, grasps the pen and writes: “Does the raven see the world in black and white, or does this particular raven just happen to be colour-blind? The image is rough-grained, the mask especially, I forgot to take it off when I went to bed.”

  The bird takes flight and he with it, first over to the horse-chestnut tree in the yard, where an owl frightens it away with its executioner’s eyes, so it flies off again, with Barfuss inside it, ten fathoms up, twenty, forty, a hundred, straight into the dark Berlin sky.

  He senses the city beneath him; the alleys, courtyards, stables, shopping streets, palaces and hovels. The stench is indescribable, rubbish is piled everywhere, dead rats float in the gutters amid human excrement thrown down from windows and balconies, but that’s how nineteenth-century cities are: gigantic rubbish dumps, refuse tips for their budding civilisation.

  The bird’s consciousness, he notes, is no better than that of an imbecile, its thoughts are obsessive, scarcely distinguishable from instinct. For days on end, without cease, it repeats the selfsame thing: rest, rest, rest, or thirst, thirst, thirst. It sees everything with the same liberating air of indifference, nothing causing it to become unduly elated nor, for that matter, sad.

  It’s a dark night. The only visible sources of light come from a street lamp, or a window behind which a student sits studying, or a seamstress works late. Animals sleep in stables and sties. It is cold, the air extremely damp.

  This last year he has been freer than ever before in his use of his gift. For hours on end he can travel with what he has begun to call his “carriers”. A cat. A bird. Sometimes a mule or an ox. Only in exceptional cases, a human being, and then, preferably, a child. Sometimes he lets himself be carried several miles outside the city. It is easy for him to break off the journey and come back to his body whenever he wishes. But the night is long and he is restless, so he takes a respite behind the raven’s eyes, gliding in ever widening circles above the von Below palace, feeling a little dizzy and seeing the world in black and white, until the bird descends and lands at the foreman’s window.