The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (10 page)

Shortly afterwards, also with the boy’s foresight, another peasant had succeeded in finding a silver plate that had vanished some thirty years earlier. In the boy’s presence he had been vouchsafed a vision. It was in fact this peasant himself who had buried the plate in an apple orchard during one of the wars, when raids had been everyday affairs, but had afterwards forgotten where. He swore the boy had shown him the exact spot. His inner vision had been under the aegis of the Blessed Virgin holding a golden sceptre in her hand, her halo of mechanical butterflies glowing so strongly he was momentarily blinded by it.

A woman, Konstantine Paul – admittedly a known hysteric – had insisted he was a kind of mirror in which one could see one’s unknown self. She maintained she had been cured of vague heart ailments merely by sitting outside the monastery gates and listening to him play the organ. “He helps me look into myself,” she said when questioned by the village priest, “God bless him!”

Then there were people who saw he could read their thoughts and was a mesmerist, others who claimed he had cured them at a distance of all sorts of ailments: toothache, ringings in the ears, bad breath, constipation, lameness, lung trouble. A blind man even claimed to have had his sight restored, though Schuster was sceptical about this, and rightly so.

But what worried Schuster most was the novices. No fewer than seven had disappeared since the boy had come. One had declared with the confidence of an adult that God was an invention of the authorities to oppress the masses, and that Christ’s sacrificial death was a myth. The man who had been crucified was actually a Greek highwayman, whereas the Galilean carpenter’s son on whom they had built their bogus faith had fled with his mother to Assyria, as was proven by the apostle Paul – then still called Saul – having met him on the road to Damascus.

The interesting thing about this novice, Schuster noticed, was that shortly before these events he had been alone with the boy for nearly a whole week, encouraging him to lend a hand – or rather a foot – in the monastery kitchen.

Another novice had admitted in the confessional to no longer being able to keep his vows of chastity. Two more had quite simply disappeared without leaving any explanation. Yet others had been overcome by inexplicable bouts of weeping. One would wake in the middle of the night crying like a lost soul, straying about the corridors, mumbling prayers to be forgiven for some nameless sin.

The boy was rumoured to be possessed. On their own initiative some of the older brethren had sent a spokesman to Abbot Kippenberg and, citing the rules of the house, asked him to return this “devil’s child” to the madhouse.

In all these thoughts Schuster was trying to find some link between the recent unexplained events in the monastery and a twilight hour forty-five years earlier during his time in America, when with a sense of wordless insight he had at last stood in front of a certain Tihuan – or Juan as the Spaniards called him – a medicine man, blind from birth, from one of the villages in the north of the country, selected to find a cure for a dysentery that was assailing Schuster’s sensitive European entrails.

The experience taught Schuster not to underestimate the healing arts the Indians had developed through the necessities imposed by the jungle: the feverish realities of a snake bite, poisonous plants, stinging thorns, bloodthirsty vampire bats and hungry parasites. This was why he had gone to him, tempted by his reputation for being able to cure all the illnesses the Spaniards hadn’t brought with them to a continent which already had enough of its own.

He had found himself outside a hut set apart from the village by a grove of agave cactuses. Blind though Tihuan was, in some amazing way he could, even so, “see” Schuster. With astounding self-assurance he’d held out his hand, grasped his arm, and drawn him into his hut.

Lying down on the floor, Schuster ignored the half-dozen shrunken heads of one-time enemies whose eyes stared indignantly down at him from the ceiling. In the dark the man’s own eyes had seemed luminous as he muttered an invocation that, besides the names of the legions of spirits that – according to the Indian way of seeing things – had beset him, included the name of God’s Mother. Half hypnotised, Schuster closed his eyes.

Never would he find words to adequately express what he’d experienced that day, nor any explanation for his journey inside himself. Later, he was to describe it as taking on the shape of the wind or a draught, and of his being sucked, by some gastroscopic miracle, into his own mouth, the hot moist cave where his tongue lay, swollen and blue as a dead whale, and travelling down the rough shaft of his gullet until he found himself hovering over a turbulent, splashing internal sea.

It was true. He had descended into his own belly, looked at the lumps of sweet potatoes, maize cakes and the recently ingested river mussels drifting about in semi-dissolved platforms on the surface. To his own great surprise, he had dived below the surface of this stinking marsh, which was so murky it was almost impossible to see, until he reached the drain, the roaring cesspool which he understood to be the beginning of his large intestine. He had plunged into this ghostly tunnel through bloody catacombs, a gushing stream of bodily waste, past flocks of intestinal parasites that were attacking the walls of his guts where he felt how Tihuan, through his power, was locating and annihilating them.

And so it went on, mile after mile, hour after hour as it seemed, through the dark winding tunnel – grooved, bleeding, with a stench that defied description – until it tapered off and squeezed with convulsions, like seismic quakes from his physical geology, pushing him through his rectum and out into the darkness of Tihuan’s hut.

Shaken to the core, he had managed to rise to his knees, rub his eyes and then open them, sure he’d emerged from an hallucination. What he had experienced at first aroused his suspicion that the medicine man had decided to drive him mad as punishment for colonial crimes; for now, through a point in his own consciousness, he could hear him clearly:
The jungle spirits have deserted Schuster, they hate the White God, but I have spoken to them . . . all Tihuan asks for his services is a tankard of brandy . . .

With his soul in a state of dissolution, and a distinct feeling in his diaphragm of his diarrhoea really being cured, he stood up and with a silent prayer to the holy Franciscus Xavier, patron saint of missionaries, left the hut.

So this was how the events were connected, he understood it now, this evening hour in the Silesian monastery: the medicine man and the deformed boy. Maybe it was true what Konstantine Paul had whispered to the village priest in a sudden overwhelming eagerness to confess: the boy – like Tihuan – had the key to let them into their own souls, could himself pass into them, was actually capable of speaking to them through their own thoughts.

THE YEARS IN
the asylum had all but robbed Hercule Barfuss of his sanity. He didn’t even know how long he had been there. Had only a diffuse memory of the magistrate von Kiesingen personally having him chained up and ordering the coachman to take him away from Königsberg. After which had followed the mad stagecoach journey along snowed-up roads at nights with neither food nor water, until at dawn, half dead of starvation, he’d been dumped on a Silesian country road. And when he’d recovered consciousness he found himself in an institutional hell.

Memories from the lunatic asylum would haunt him far into his old age; memories of living corpses dragging themselves about the halls, drooling, wailing, sobbing, more prisoners in their own confused minds than ever they were behind the asylum’s locked doors. Souls of the dead were doomed to endless wanderings, the horrors they had endured in life having so deprived them of any sense of direction that they couldn’t find their way to the heavenly realms they invariably deserved.

Here were all kinds of lunatics. Idiots, mongoloids and epileptics. There were hysterical women, ranting and deranged, and others suffering from fainting fits and painful bouts of nervous fever. Human life was as easily snuffed out as a candle’s flame. Behind these locked doors women and men of all ages lived and died, children too, unfortunate victims of a fate that knows no mercy. Some, the fruit of nocturnal meetings between two confused people on a straw-covered floor, had been born in the institution. Others’ fathers were the very men who guarded them, their mothers chained to the walls of the women’s wing.

For seven years he had lived in this shadowland that could surely have spurred even Dante to greater achievements.

He had never been afraid of the inmates. In a world where all the rules were inverted they had seemed almost sane. It was the guards he feared.

One night during his first month in the asylum, they had picked at random on a victim to avenge an unsolved theft: a ten-year-old girl. They had beaten her with canes and handcuffs until, long after their victim had given up the ghost, exhausted, they had taken a break, laughing and drinking wine, before having another go at the corpse until all that was left was a bundle of ragged clothes, blood, bones and lacerated flesh.

It was such men who ruled over this inner circle of hell, and Hercule had seen straight into their souls, blacker than the blackest night. In their depths lurked only one desire: to inflict suffering on others. To be able to do so gave them as much pleasure as if it had been a gift from heaven. Such people, he knew, existed everywhere in the world, made up of the same dark matter in which evil had its source. Amazing, that mankind had even survived, hadn’t long ago succeeded in destroying itself.

The wing of the asylum he was in was under the command of two brothers named Moosbrugger. The younger, a short stocky man who never expressed himself in anything but grunts, used to beat his victims unconscious. The older, a pock-marked tyrant who had lost one ear in a duel, had made it his habit to steal their food. On one occasion the brothers were said to have strangled a boy after raping him. It was only a rumour, but Hercule had never had reason to doubt it, for these monsters, as he was to know from his own experience, were capable of anything.

When rescue came and he, to his astonishment, found himself at the Jesuit monastery, absorbed in music’s circle of fifths and its interrelationships between thirds, under the supervision of Julian Schuster, beyond the reach of his tormentors, and still unsure whether he was dreaming, he couldn’t understand how he had survived. It was Fate, he thought, that must have selected him blindly.

Perhaps his gift, too, with whose help he could anticipate and influence people’s actions, had kept him alive. He had been able to make the guards thirsty by planting the idea of a pitcher of beer in their heads, or setting their guts itching, so that instead of assaulting him or stealing his food they would sit down on a bench, to drink or to scratch imaginary louse bites.

The thought of Henriette Vogel had also helped him to go on living. Her memory had prevented him from capitulating unconditionally to madness and surrendering himself to a fate dictated even before he’d been born, but with which he had called an indefinite truce: death. At such times, when he’d been amazed at each new beat of a heart living on borrowed time, he had evoked the image of her in his gloomy cellar. Where could she be?

Was she with her mother or had they been separated? Had she inherited her mother’s profession? He had to remind himself that she was now a grown woman, no longer a child; and he had imagined her as being beautiful as ever, or more so, if such a thing were possible. Love filled every corner of his consciousness over which madness did not stand sentry. Just to meet her for a single moment he was prepared to renounce everything and often this longing became so strong he forgot his own horrible predicament. He knew she was waiting for him, and all he lived for was to find her again. He had entertained fantasies of escaping, impossible though it was, the lunatic asylum being as heavily guarded as if it were the repository of state secrets. He saw others try but fail before they’d even breathed the fresh air, only to be sent down five metres underground to a place, the horrors of which no-one had lived to tell the tale.

Little by little, surprised by the strength of his dark feelings, Hercule turned his hatred on to the guards. Hate, he realised, was a force infinitely more powerful than his gift, a force of nature that could oppose even the fiercest resistance; a concentrated beam of hatred, capable of destroying everything in its path, but also of corroding its own bearer. He had hated the guards with a strength that could only measure itself against his love for Henriette. At the same time he was careful not to provoke them, for he knew he was defenceless against their innate ruthlessness, and they needed no more than a whiff of a pretext to knock him, with one deft blow of their canes, senseless.

It could well have been the last year of his life, had Julian Schuster not intervened. With a distilled horror dawning inside him, Hercule had begun to feel his strength was giving way. The slightest glance at his surroundings told him the inmates weren’t here to be hidden away, as the insane, the mad and the misshapen always have been down the ages. They were here to be killed off. The guards beat them bloodily for the slightest misdemeanour, stole their food so as to hasten their departure from this life. Some of those who ranted and raved were kept in cages. Others were exhibited for money, the curious, for a ha’penny, being given leave to peep through the bars of their prison.

That last winter had been so dreadfully cold. Not a morning had gone by without one of the inmates being found dead of hypothermia, huddled up on the floor next to some fellow sufferer in hope of sharing a little warmth. Sometimes an almost blissful smile intimated that death had come as a saviour, inviting them to a heavenly banquet with kind words, words they had never heard in life.

Since longings and dreams were the last to leave these human wrecks, Hercule could see right into their most secret selves. He saw their simplest desires: to eat their fill; to move, just once, freely among other people. He heard their confused thoughts, their mute cries for dignity, felt their vain yearning for love, their feverish desires in summer’s heat, the dumb man’s longing for language. He traced in a Czech woman who was in the asylum, not “andromania”, virginal hysteria – the excuse her guardian had given in order to get rid of her – but simply a desperate need for sleep; she had not slept a wink in ten years.