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

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  For a little while he stood there, eyes closed, imagining the sort of things he could get up to with the young housemaid up here. She wouldn’t protest, he thought, no matter what he did to her. She was too young, too frightened, too powerless. He could even kill her.

  He was just about to turn back when he heard a noise coming from the roof. Further along, one of the skylights stood ajar. Beneath it was a ladder. Feeling strangely dizzy, he climbed out on to the roof. The city lay sprawled out below him, St Mary’s Church, the Town Hall with its spire, the Artushof, Lange Gasse and Langer Markt. In the harbour the boats looked like toys. In the background gleamed the River Weichsel and the sea.

  Then, without forewarning, he began hearing voices in his head: the voice of a ten-year-old girl he’d once drowned, the whimpering sounds made by a prostitute as he’d cut her breast off in a Königsberg brothel, the panting of the girl who had stabbed his genitalia with a knife in a Danzig hotel years ago. All followed by guffaws, hysterical laughter, the hissing of a crazed cat and the abbot’s whining as he’d climbed down from the prisoner’s cart at the place of execution.

  Was he going mad?

  On the furthest ridge of the roof, he saw the cat. It was standing up on its hind legs like a human being – and laughing at him. A wholly human laugh, with the corners of its mouth upturned. It was talking to him now, unimpededly, inside his head, in a flat, terrifying voice. Come closer, it said, see how close I am, come closer. And he himself was shivering inexplicably. I’ve gone mad, he thought. I’ve lost control of myself.

  Yet something made him go on walking across the roof. It’s the cat making me do it, he thought, making me move my feet, step by step across the ridge – slippery though it is after the rain . . .

  Fifteen metres below him, in the garden, he caught sight of his wife. She was calling up to him to take care, to come back down; but the voice, or rather the voices, hundreds of them, forming an enormous choir in his head, were screaming at him to keep moving, no matter what, impelling him to continue. Unbearable, incessant, the screams urged him towards the edge of the roof where the cat was standing on its hind legs, smiling at him – a wholly human smile.

  Then he felt a completely novel sensation, a terrible itching in his maimed sexual organ. Never before had he experienced anything like it, it was as if thousands of lice were on the move down there, biting and tearing at his crotch making it itch in a way he didn’t believe possible.

  Afterwards his wife, the venerable Rosalinda von Kiesingen, who was following his perilous balancing act from her seat in the stalls down in the garden, would remember his movements as being like those of someone submerged in water, as if he’d been trying to swim his way across the roof and how, when he fell, he’d done so with abnormal slowness, in a wide arc over the stone-paved terrace.

  From the perspective of a stray cat, all this looked quite different. All it saw was a clumsy, staggering human animal with a panic-stricken look on its face, like one of its prey fleeing from some real or imaginary pursuer. At most, the cat, erect on its hind legs with its mouth curled up in a human leer abhorrent to and utterly out of keeping with nature, was amazed by its own unnatural stance.

  VIII

  IN THE VILLAGE of Fossa, in the Abruzzi hills, a man is opening a wardrobe. Momentarily, on the wall behind the clothes hangers, a demonic face comes into view. An horrific sight, for the face is sorely maimed. The nose has been cut off. An eye plucked out. And both ears have been drawn out from their roots.

  The man gasps, shuts the door, and collapses on the floor, pulled downward by earth’s implacable gravity and by the fear that has been pursuing him now for weeks on end. But his faith helps him get a hold on himself – faith, this thing humans so unhealthily confuse with remorse and fear of a life they’ve never even asked to be born into, but which imperceptibly takes possession of them and drives them on even so.

  Knowing full well what lies in store for him, he reopens the door. This is how it has been these past few months; surprises recurring until they no longer surprise, only fill him with an icy fear, which is why he knows the maimed face will now have gone. Apart from the bag of mothballs on a hanger, the bag filled with his equipment, the black, leather-trimmed coat he wraps himself up in at night against the cold and the dreadful dream visions, the wardrobe is empty.

  The nightmares, he thinks in despair, looking at the surface the face had just peered out from, these very real nightmares that haunt me and make me shun sleep.

  But no-one can survive without rest, and in the end, at daybreak, the body, his unreliable body that doesn’t give a fig for his will and exposes him to the demons who climb uninvited in and out of his dreams, snatches an hour’s slumber for itself.

  True to his motto that Satan’s cunning tricks are as manifold as mankind’s sins, he tries to brace himself. My faith will help me, he thinks, condemning this room that has ended by becoming a prison – a prison he daren’t leave, even in the daytime, because the demon is watching over the door, a room for travellers in a godforsaken village he has come to on a great quest, or, to be more exact, challenge. But his challenger has proved himself stronger than anything he could ever have imagined, for he has never before experienced delusions of this calibre.

  He lies down on the bunk and closes his eyes. These sudden visions in broad daylight have been happening more frequently the past few days, as have the dreams that are no longer dreams, but journeys into an horrific landscape.

  He wonders if he is nearing a settlement that can be at the end of this long journey to the Tropic of Darkness. An hour earlier, for instance, the room had filled with the pungent smell of smoke, a smell of burning human flesh, the crackling of something on fire. But when he’d turned round he could see nothing burning. Soon afterwards he, quite distinctly, had heard someone call his name, and when he’d answered automatically in a voice that for the last twenty-four hours had failed to speak, he’d been met by a cacophony of mocking laughter. Ordeals of this kind are continually assailing him. Woken by knockings on the wall, when he asks in anguish, “Who’s that?” he is answered with a sigh or someone teasingly whispering his name.

  But that’s not all. At any moment he can be assailed, possessed, by music. His body becomes an acoustic chamber in which someone is everlastingly arranging concerts. He’s an organ made of flesh and bone on which someone is playing fugues, whole cantatas on the keyboard of his fears; pumping air through his fear’s organ pipes. He lacks words to describe the experience; the notes threaten to blow him up, they are playing so loudly inside him he’s afraid his eardrums will burst and the stagnant water inside come splashing out in a triad intoned with the Devil’s tuning fork, bringing on a fit of the shivers. He is terrified these delusions will drive him crazy. It is Satan tempting him, and he escapes into morbid broodings.

  Is all this simply a delusion? Just like suffering and illness, he wonders, which perhaps only make sense if seen from the lofty viewpoint of the Creator? But if man is unable to see it all from this divine point of view, both the Creator and His creation can only appear to be evil.

  God is one with His creation, say the theologians. But since evil is everywhere apparent in creation, is not then God, too, evil?

  The demons tempt him with this thought. Because if it is true, equally in the murderer and in his victims, what is left for man to worship?

  Satan exists, and he exists within himself. Creation isn’t perfect, and therefore neither is the Creator. Those people he knows in the Vatican . . . the learned theologians . . . they’re wrong when they maintain that evil isn’t really evil, only a lower level of goodness, or for that matter, an absence of goodness . . .

  Now twilight is falling swiftly beyond the windowpanes where the demons, regular as clockwork, have been appearing. He looks out towards the mountains. The sky is monochrome. The trees leafless. He wishes he could leave the room, but doesn’t dare to.

  Is evil an absence of good? he pursues his line of thought. Just a
s saltiness is a lack of sweetness, sorrow a lack of joy or black a lack of white? Attempts to save God’s honour suddenly strike him as laughable. What was it St Augustine wrote: “Evil is but goodness reduced to the point where it no longer exists.” But if that was so, how did the God he had served all his life relate to what he was being forced to experience now; to the trail he’d followed through the villages, to the disfigured face he’d just seen in the wardrobe, to Satan who was tempting him now as never before, who was trying to make him confess: “Yes, since my Lord doesn’t intervene, you are more powerful than He.”

  He wonders whether God is indifferent to his trials? Or simply irresponsible? But a failure to intervene is also to adopt a standpoint.

  He is nauseous with fear. If he opens the front door he will encounter the flames of hell. He wonders how it is that fire has been made so hot it can mutilate a human being. Why didn’t God hold back a little on the potential for suffering? “If God hadn’t created suffering to its extreme limit,” his old prior had once said, “neither would His creation have been complete.” In a perfect world there must be room for everything. A limited world disputes the principle of the generosity of creation. Thus also fear.

  Cold sweat is running in a furrow between his shoulder blades, carrying with it the pungent smell of fear. Again he smells smoke, followed by a voice calling eerily from inside his chest: Del Moro, my dear inquisitor, I’m not frightening you, am I?

  He falls to his knees, his body jerking like an epileptic’s. Violent convulsions are shooting through him as each hell-pitched chord leaves its imprint in his flesh. Sounds from an organ being played by some invisible demon, shrieking with laughter, about to drive him mad.

  Exhausted by his horrific recollections, Sebastian del Moro lies asleep in the travellers’ guest room here in the village of Fossa. He is awakened by the sound of someone clearing their throat. Opening his eyes, he discovers on his chest a diminutive figure. A man, no bigger than a thumb, busily examining the hairy landscape of del Moro’s torso. The figure is wearing glasses, the black garb of the Dominican Order and a soiled kaftan. Del Moro realises this must be a miniature version of himself. But this double, who seems not even to notice him, lacks ears and a tip to his nose. In his hand he is holding a bag. An exact copy of del Moro’s own, over in the wardrobe.

  Sebastian, my exorcist, whispers a childish voice that seems to come from all directions at once, you didn’t expect this, did you? We’re inside you already. We are legion, as they say . . . and if you want to get rid of us you’ll have to resort to your most advanced rituals . . .

  Rotating his eyes in their sockets, del Moro looks around the room. No-one there. He suspects he may be dreaming, but then reminds himself that the status of his conscious mind is neither here nor there, the nightmares having recently penetrated so far into his waking hours, and, conversely, his nightmares of his waking hours having pursued him into his dreams.

  “Who is it?” he asks, with this in mind. But as he expected, there is no answer.

  On his chest, his double has opened its miniature bag of demonological equipment. He chooses slowly between various instruments, until he decides upon one of the sharp awls in the outer compartment. To del Moro’s surprise, and still apparently unaware of his existence, he takes out, from the same bag, two false ears and a false nose, which he then with some difficulty proceeds to attach to his face. That done, he takes out a small but perfectly formed human tongue, which he sews into his mouth with the aid of a needle and thread thin as a spider’s web.

  Del Moro! the voice repeats, but more challengingly this time. You wonder where we are since you can’t see us, neither when you’re asleep nor awake. That must be making you wonder!

  And what state are you in? Let me make this quite clear: you are asleep, but soon you’ll realise that it makes no difference whether unnatural things happen when you’re asleep or in broad daylight, because, in your case, sleep and waking are two sides of the same coin . . .

  His catatonic state has begun to let up a little. Much to his relief he can turn his head to one side. He looks about him. On the table by his bunk someone has lit a branched candlestick. Meanwhile, on his chest his diminutive double has grasped one of his awls and is busy jabbing it energetically into his skin just under his left nipple, making a rhythmical sound as the instrument digs painlessly into his flesh.

  Listen to me, the voice says. You can’t see us, and yet the most rational explanation doesn’t occur to you: namely, that we are talking inside you. Maybe we’ve possessed ourselves of your body, the way we sooner or later take possession of all evildoers . . . How? you ask yourself. And when? In an unguarded moment of course . . . through the first accessible bodily aperture . . . through your disgusting anus, let’s say. We detest you! But how to get rid of us? Flush us out with an enema of holy water?

  The demon voice gives a mocking laugh, and del Moro understands with a shudder that it is true: the demons have indeed taken possession of his body.

  He tries to gather his thoughts into a prayer, but is distracted by a tune. In his head he hears a piece by Clementi, played on an organ, which turns into another piece by Bach, before, strangely enough, being played backwards, note by note.

  On his chest, his double has succeeded in boring a small hole in his skin using the awl. Now he can hear the minute figure cluck its newly sewn tongue and then burst into a lengthy tirade in a nonsensical language. A drop of blood wells up on his chest like a red bead, before coming loose from its mounting and spilling down into the cavity formed between his ribs. His miniature wipes the sweat from its brow with a handkerchief bearing a papal monogram. The work has fatigued him.

  While del Moro stares bewitched at this remarkable scene, a pillar of steam rises from his other nipple.

  Del Moro, you ass, says the demon voice. The time has come! It’s time for you to cast us out!

  The music in his head stops playing. Out of the nipple where the pillar of steam had just arisen, a demon’s face appears and then, quick as lightning, vanishes, once more withdrawing its ethereal, greenish body. His little double, too, has vanished, but on del Moro’s stomach, immediately above his navel, the bag still lies open, leaving all its instruments in full view.

  The bag swells as if someone were blowing it up, or as if del Moro himself were inflating it with his navel; it grows ever larger, until arriving at its proper size.

  The time has come for you to perform the duties of your profession, the demon voice whispers inside him. Time to look for us inside yourself by all available means . . . this, truly, is your last hope.

  Opening his eyes del Moro thinks he has been dreaming. But only for a split second, for resting on his stomach is the bag. Unaware of having himself put it there, or of someone having made him sleepwalk over to the wardrobe and fetch it, it seems to him he is gaining a clearer grasp on his predicament and what to do about it.

  I’m possessed, he thinks with lucid insight. The demon is already inside me. I must expel it.

  By the window a small domestic altar has been put in order. The tools are neatly arranged on a white cloth: a flask of holy oil, a crucifix encrusted with relics, a syphon of holy water. The greater Roman ritual, or Rituale Romane as it is called by demonologists, is a ritual reserved for exorcising serious cases of demonic possession. Del Moro has carried it out before, but never yet on himself. Now – in this ghostly room – he prepares the ceremony in its every detail.

  Just as he is about to embark on the introductory prayer to the archangel Michael, the demon’s voice pipes up inside him, You fool! I hope you know what you’re doing . . . exorcising evil spirits can kill a man . . .

  The voice is stronger than before, and with a feeling that time is running out del Moro hastens his recitation, “Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium.”

  As prescribed by the liturgy, he strews salt on the floor, lays a purple linen cloth over his shoulders and kisses the cha
lice of sacramental wine.

  “Exorcizo te,” he chants, “omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Jesu Christi Filii ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti.”

  He puts the sacramental wafer to his lips, lets it dissolve on his tongue. Inside the back of his head he hears the demon laughing, followed, this time, by another, more childish voice, that says, What use is a host against my sheer hatred? You have no idea what hatred can drive us to. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We have a debt to settle . . .

  Prayer, del Moro thinks as the demon’s voice peters out, prayer will give me strength, for in prayer mankind has been given a divine power.

  “Ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei,” he mumbles, “quod Dominus noster ad templum sanctum suum vocare dignatus est, ut fiat templum Dei vivi, et Spiritus Sanctus habitet in eo.”

  The voice in the back of his head giggles, as if the demon had become tipsy on the sacramental wine. Unaffected, del Moro goes on, “Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum, qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos, et saeculum per ignem. Amen.”

  By now the room is quite silent and for a brief moment del Moro cherishes a hope the evil spirit has gone away, frightened off by the sacred words. At the same time, he knows from experience that the powers of darkness will resort to every kind of stratagem to nullify an exorcist’s ceremony.

  So he bows down to the crucifix, kisses it, spits on the tips of his fingers, genuflects, wetting first his left ear, then his right, with his saliva. “Eppheta, quod est, adaperire,” he prays. “Open up!”

  Another wafer dissolves on his tongue as he touches his nostrils.

  “In odorem suavitatis. Tu autem effugare, diabole; appropinquabit enim judicium Dei.”

  The demon is beginning to feel worried. He can hear it muttering something, but cannot grasp the words. From the depths of his chest comes something del Moro initially believes to be a new voice, but which he finally recognises as organ music. Again he kisses the crucifix, lights two mass candles and asks himself solemnly, “Abrenuntias satanae. Do you abjure Satan?”