The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (17 page)

He heard the boy panting like a consumptive. Saw him open his eyes and look vaguely about him before settling his gaze on him. Carefully, Schuster wiped away the blood with a handkerchief, and managed to get him on to his feet. Pointed to the back door. Limping, the boy ran off down the alleyway.

Later, Hercule Barfuss would reproach himself for not having used all his powers to prevent Schuster from going back to the examination room. But perhaps he’d already made up his mind?

Less than twenty-four hours later Schuster was found by a shepherd, in a vineyard out at Trastevere. Vultures were pecking at his eyes. Round his neck, as if drawn on in ink, was a very thin blue line In the carabiniere’s protocol it was described as “the body of an unidentified male, strangled with a snare”. He’d been found naked save for a small Indian amulet tied to a strap round his wrist. Leaflets asked the general public to come forward with any information that might lead to the arrest of the murderer.

But by then Hercule, ignorant of Schuster’s fate, was already far away, unaware that he too was being hunted or that there was now a price on his head.

“
ROLL UP! ROLL
up, ladies and gentlemen! Thrilling entertainment for only two centesimi! We’ve got just about everything you’ve ever dreamed of, and maybe more besides, some things being beyond the human imagination. What are the Seven Wonders of the World compared with the Eighth, and Ninth and Tenth? No-one ever leaves Barnaby Wilson’s Roadshow disappointed.

“Pardon me, Your Ladyship, what did you say? What is it we have on show? Well, what don’t we have on show! We’ve got Brutus’ bloody dagger, Napoleon’s confirmation suit, St Veronica’s authentic Handkerchief, the golden dish on which John the Baptist’s head was served up on a bed of crushed ice. We have several beasts and extinct species of animal, we have three of the infant Jesus’ milk teeth, a bottle of the Mother of God’s distilled tears at the price of ten lire a drop. A hydra, a dodo, as well as a great anteater from the Virgin Forests of Brazil, where no man has ever set foot, or at least, has not returned alive. Ladies and gentlemen! If nothing of all this takes your fancy, then at least have your portrait painted in the latest fashion from the East End of London – as a heliograph. In Hermann Bioly’s studio your portrait will be drawn in light, your soul will be fastened to a glass pane by collodium, and you’ll be immortalised. What, still not convinced? Well, then we’ve got something to suit all tastes. Do you perhaps suffer from some illness? The Moorish pharmacist Ibrahim, King of Liniments and Emperor of All Tinctures, whose mixtures are famous all over Christendom, has just joined our travelling show. The Grand Duke of Baden-Baden was himself cured by his famous ointments. The King of Saxony, whose eczema of the feet all but precipitated a war with the Austrians, was cured as if by magic by his incomparable footbath. In his apothecary shop Ibrahim the Moor can offer you love pills, invisibility pills, pills for virtuousness, pills for immortality, pills for consolation in nameless sorrows and pills for imaginary aches and pains; besides which, we have Professor Steinert’s rejuvenation cure and Brown’s infamous treatment by opposites, which cures everything from corns to inflamed heart sores. You’re most welcome to join us, ladies and gentlemen, don’t hesitate, the next show starts at a quarter past the hour . . .”

Here Barnaby Wilson pretended to lose his voice, coughing extravagantly just as a glass of water, filled to the brim, materialised in his hand. Through a slit in his mask he drained it to the dregs, and at the same time as the liquid disappeared in little sips, the glass itself, strangely enough, also disappeared, centimetre by centimetre, before, after a loud burp on the circus director’s part, it went up in smoke.

“Have you ever, ladies and gentlemen,” he went on, “heard of the giraffe? Six metres tall, spotted like a fly agaric toadstool, with a dragon’s neck . . .what are a steamboat or a locomotive compared with the sensations awaiting you at Barnaby Wilson’s Roadshow?”

His monologue was suddenly interrupted by a violent explosion in one of the covered wagons parked in a circle of about a hundred ells in diameter beside the market place, thereby making the circus area invisible to the curious crowds. Feigning horror, he put his hand to his heart.

“What we have just heard an example of”, he said in a conspiratorial whisper, “is the Saxon phlogistonist Bruno von Salza’s hair-raising experiment with lead sugar, arsenic butter and powder of zinc. With the aid of phlogistonised air he can blow a cathedral sky-high, make gold out of all kinds of base materials, get matter moving to the point where the dead will arise from their graves and cut and run for sheer horror . . . Allow me also to introduce Leopold the Savage, caught with a lasso in Numidia’s endless desert, Gandalalfo Bonaparte, bastard son of the great Napoleon, Miranda Bellaflor – the girl with four tongues – or the Ligurian omnivore Jean-Paul who swallows coins of various denominations and spits them out in any order you ask him to. Show us a sample of what you can do, Jean!”

With a discreet bow a tall, very thin gentleman, disfigured by a big outgrowth of hair covering half his face, took his place beside Barnaby Wilson on the little platform from which the circus director was addressing his public. In one hand he held a glass jar filled with live bees. Very carefully he unscrewed its lid. Placed his mouth against the opening – his gape was so wide he was said to be able to swallow cannon balls – and the public could clearly see the insects flying into it.

The Ligurian omnivore pursed his lips, replaced the lid, and then, calm as if it were a question of the apothecary Ibrahim’s pills against nameless sorrows, noisily swallowed the bees, one after the other.

After which he, at a signal from Barnaby Wilson, reopened his immense abyss of a mouth so that the public could see with its own eyes that the insects were gone, and with another bow, to the crowd’s undisguised delight, cleared his throat and spat out the bees, one by one, so that to deafening applause the tiny winged creatures flew away on the mountain breeze down to the bay where the town of Nice was bathed in the red of the setting sun.

Satisfied, through his mask Barnaby Wilson surveyed the gathering with his one eye. By now several hundred curious persons had congregated in a crescent around him: women, men, old folk, children.

A little further forward to his right, he saw an elderly gentleman, clad in a frock coat and with a funny-looking shock of thick grey hair falling in waves on to a pair of somewhat feminine shoulders.

“Good sir, step forward, and we’ll reward you with a free ticket,” he said in a honeyed voice, “and allow me to demonstrate yet another of our show’s sensations: the Emperor of China’s very latest fad, telekinetic fluid magnetism that works at a distance!”

The man appeared flattered at having been selected for an experiment with the Chinese Emperor’s latest toy, and as he, proudly, if a trifle hesitantly, approached the platform, Barnaby Wilson took out a Leyden jar from the pocket of his baggy nautical waistcoat, had him stop right there on the steps and, in a flash, electrified him. “Fluid magnetism, the core of all secrets,” he exclaimed, affecting a theatrical tremor in his childlike voice, all the while furtively rubbing a glass wand behind his back against a piece of chamois leather. And before the bashful gentleman in the frock coat had time to react, the circus director stood once more before him. Moving mysteriously as a mediaeval magician, mumbling formulas in an incomprehensible tongue that in fact was none other than Welsh from the islands in Cardigan Bay, he waved his hands over the man’s head. Much to his pleasure, he heard his audience sigh raptuously as all manner of lightweight objects circulating in the air began sticking to the man’s frock coat: leaves, particles of dust, scraps of paper, even two very-much-alive bees that the Ligurian omnivore had spat out a few minutes earlier. Little lightning flashes flew off the frock coat and a decimetre or so above the crown of the man’s head his wig was hovering freely in the air like a greying halo, sparkling and electrified.

“Behold the Eleventh Wonder of the World!” Wilson exclaimed triumphantly. “The magnetic fluid known as electricity, the latest thing from the Emperor’s court in China. By this singular power cities will soon be lit up, turning night into day, horses will be abolished in favour of electric cabs, messages be sent in a matter of minutes at distances of more than a hundred miles, and the face of God will be illuminated across the heavens as He looks down in amazement at the inventiveness of the being He once created at random out of a lump of clay.”

Flushing red all over his face, the man made a grab for his hovering wig and disappeared at a run out of the market place. The audience shouted for joy and inside the nearest tent Lucretius III lit the lamps for his complicated phantasmagoria.

At a given signal, from out of the murky tent opening by the ticket window, to the genuine alarm of the public and the feigned alarm of Barnaby Wilson, now materialised a thirty-foot monster squirting fire to the accompaniment of the circus’s ill-tuned brass band: the so-called Giraffe, so imaginatively described by the circus director a moment before.

The audience withdrew in alarm, but just as panic threatened to break out, the scene changed into a phantasmagoria of Marat’s dreary bathroom with that famous revolutionary floating lifeless in an enamelled hip bath full of water.

“Ladies and gentleman,” shouted Barnaby Wilson. “For a mere two centesimi the dead will rise again and archangels appear in reality . . .”

A new murmur went through the audience as Lucretius showed another spectacle, this time representing a deathly pale Robespierre who, a flintlock pistol in his hand, took a couple of steps towards the circus director and looked as if he was going to shoot him in the back. But at a sign from Wilson, Robespierre turned into a centaur and galloped back into the tent, to the accompaniment of two evil-sounding explosions from the phlogistonist Bruno von Salza’s powder-stained tent.

“Have no fear, ladies and gentlemen,” continued the smiling Wilson, “for two centesimi we promise you something more. You will be protected against any designs the ghosts may have on you.”

One last presentation remained before the circus opened its ticket office to receive, this evening as on all previous evenings, hundreds of the curious to fill to the last seat its tent outside Nice. In the tent opening through which the centaur had disappeared stood an exceedingly pitiable being, scarcely three foot tall with a misshapen, outsized head disfigured by stony calluses. Stripped to the waist he let the audience take a good look at his furry back, at the little foreshortened arms that resembled roots, the cavities in his skin and the bones and joints protruding criss-cross from his skeleton as if imprisoned in his body and struggling to escape. He was dressed in knee-length socks, a kilt from the Scottish Highlands, and his face was covered by a colourful Venetian-style cat mask.

“Allow me to present our latest attraction,” Wilson said in a voice scarcely able to conceal his personal pride at this sensation which, in only a few months, had beaten all conceivable attendance records along the Ligurian coast. “Sir Hercules from the little known Barefoot clan, the monster from the Scottish Highlands who recites the Bible as fluently as a priest and can read your innermost thoughts!”

All that spring the Scottish mind-reader Hercules Barefoot, not knowing that the Cardinal’s men were on his heels, had been fulfilling his duties as the circus’s chief attraction. His telepathic powers were enabling him to reveal the colour of a lady’s underwear, pull cards out of a tarot pack at will, treat the audience to mnemonic numbers that could only be explained by some dubious alliance with the supernatural, declare people’s most intimate secrets and describe homes he’d never set foot in.

On a French clavichord he also played operatic airs that volunteers in the audience had been exhorted to hum under their breath – while Sir Hercules, to be on the safe side, though Barnaby Wilson had solomnly sworn he’d been deaf and dumb since birth, had put rubber plugs into his ear cavities and got down into a locked beer barrel, all to dispel any suspicion of fraud.

He also treated them to yet another sensation, playing with his feet, so vividly that the audience’s collective longing materialised in the notes before dissolving in a tremolo of unrelieved yearnings that fell over them like a tearful cloudburst which all could feel but none could see.

On the circus poster that to Wilson’s undisguised delight filled the tent to its last standing room seven days a week wherever they went, he was shown in his carnival mask, grasping a magician’s wand between two toes.

His act was always the last to come on – after Lucretius III’s Jacobin phantasmagories, after Leopold the Savage’s breakneck trapeze acts, after Leon Montebianco’s tales from a fabulous past, and after the Turkish poet who, scorning all pain like a fakir, had invited a member of the audience to use his scorching hot legs to light his cigar. At that point Barnaby Wilson, clad in a conjuror’s coat spangled with the signs of the zodiac, would step into the ring and hold a brief discourse on the inner world of the deaf; about their sight, sharper than on those of us who can see; about their fantastic ability to lip-read and about Sir Edmund Booth’s vision of the deaf and dumb one day having a state of their own in America.

It was to America Hercule had told Wilson he was headed when they had bumped into each other in a Liverpool pub. Hercule had a ticket to America in his back pocket and, at fourpence a sentence, had been just about to read the secret thoughts of a dressmaker’s assistant. Only through a great effort and several hours’ persuasion did Wilson induce him to postpone his voyage and instead take on a job with the circus where he could show off his wonderful gift in public, Wilson alleged to the crowd.

After his soliloquy Wilson would bow, the lights would dim and Lyra the Infant Harpist, climbing on to a stool that came up to her chest, stroked the strings of a harp five times as large as herself, causing the astounded audience to fall silent. When the lights went up again, Sir Hercules stood in the centre of the ring holding a pack of cards between his toes.