The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (20 page)

The Countess smiled, displaying her three remaining teeth. He smelled her odour of sweat, bad breath and old powder, for she never washed. In those northern cities no-one did. On the other hand, one didn’t wash in the next world either. Smells, the Countess maintained, caused a great many problems in the spiritual world. Particularly unpleasant was the smell given off by demons. This was because they couldn’t smell it themselves.

She picked up her pack of cards from the eiderdown. Not the marked deck she could fool her aristocratic women friends with, but a still-sealed Spanish pack.

Just do me one last favour, my little deformed friend,
she said.
Be my saviour this evening. The Lord Chief Justice Conrad so badly wants a game of poker, and I’m in financial straits, but who is going to pay Baptiste if I don’t? The blackamoor would starve to death if it weren’t for me. And who would put a roof over your head, repulsive little monster that you are? Tomorrow the spirits will reward you . . .

Countess Tavastestierna, who had promised him to find Henriette with the aid of the spirits, hailed originally from Sweden. But at that time the two of them were in Denmark, in Copenhagen, whither years ago she had fled from her creditors. How he had come to be here himself, Hercule wasn’t quite sure. He must have arrived in the town in the course of his wanderings, and somehow or other the Countess, whose interest in the supernatural was matched only by her mania for gambling, had become aware of his qualities.

As others had too.

One morning some months before, he had suddenly come to his senses in London. How he arrived there he couldn’t recall. Several weeks seemed to have passed since he’d last been lucid. He found himself standing naked on a demonstration table at the famous Athenaeum Club surrounded by a small group of inquisitive gentlemen. One of these, from the Teratological Society, was pointing out Hercule’s abnormalities to the audience’s mutterings.

“. . . these disturbances occur as disorders in the foetal phase. Why, we don’t as yet know. Syphilis, or perhaps the mother’s foetal membranes were too constricting?”

Charts had been unrolled; pictures of other monsters were shown: albinos, duplications, craniophagi, microcephalics.

“Gentlemen, look at the cleft in the face . . . this abnormal harelip is a sign of retardation. Moreover, our monster is deaf and dumb. The back has characteristic papillomas. Not long ago I had the privilege of witnessing the dissection of a similar tumour at St George’s Hospital. In it we discovered teeth, hair and cartilage, as well as a small, scarcely developed brain. What we see here is an autostisis with traces of parasitism. In some cases this deformity can develop in the foetal stage to become a full-grown parasite – another head, maybe even another body. It’s not unthinkable that the papillomas we see on the subject’s back could reveal traces of a parasite that under more favourable conditions might have developed into a Siamese twin . . .”

Hercule had heard none of this, for he was deaf, and glad of it. Instead, he had heard someone thinking:
an inferior form of life, but interesting from a racial point of view
. This made him feel sick, and by chance his gift enabled him to transfer his nausea on to the other man, and he laughed as the man rushed towards the exit to throw up.

This, then, was how he had been living the previous few years, he reflected; in a dream of lost love from which he never awoke. Adrift on an aimless journey where reality was nothing but poorly painted scenery.

It had been later that same winter, in Copenhagen, that he encountered this Swedenborg-obssessed countess. From what she said, Swedenborg seemed to have been the prophet of a new church in London; proclaimed himself the Saviour who had come to let himself be crucified by the Jews; had thrown his clothes off in public, been stigmatised at Easter, had oddly taken to washing people’s feet and had fallen into semi-delirious attacks while conversing for days and nights on end with the dead. He too had been a reader of minds.

The Countess, it was true, preferred the modern word “telepathy”, and to put her point across she cited as an example the big fire in Stockholm seen in a vision by Swedenborg as it broke out, though he was a good three hundred miles away at the time. Then there was the celebrated story of how he had found Madame de Marteville’s lost receipts by consulting her deceased husband, and the coffee party with Queen Ulrika Eleonora’s brother, by then dead for more than a quarter of a century.

When the Countess herself had met Swedenborg in Stockholm in her youth, the old gentleman had been spending most of his time conversing with the dead and walking about in a trance in the spirit world. On one occasion when she had come to visit him she overheard him speak eagerly in Latin with someone in his study, laugh and call for a threefold toast. She had waited until the door opened and Swedenborg, bowing deeply as he accompanied his invisible guest out into the hall, had shaken hands with thin air.

“Who was that?’’ she’d asked.

“That was Virgil,’’ Swedenborg had answered. “A devilishly decent fellow! We were discussing the antiquities of Rome.”

Little by little, she maintained, his Nestor’s talents had rubbed off on herself. To take her at her word, she, too, mingled freely with history’s most celebrated personalities; claimed to know Struensee, the Danish politician who had been executed, but whom she admired for his attempts to introduce the spirit of the Enlightenment into Denmark. With Machiavelli she was in the habit of discussing the laws governing legal procedure – warfare with Crassus, the Roman field marshal – and how to murder queens with Henry VIII who remained deranged until the end of his days. With Pope Clement X she had long been in celestial correspondence. Joan of Arc was like a sister to her and St Birgitta would offer her invisible sweatmeats. Naturally Swedenborg was her closest ally among the dead. With him she daily exchanged confidences.

Swedenborg, the Countess was fond of saying, had combined Leibniz’s monist ideas with the hylozoistic doctrine of living molecules and the notion that some people were in contact with heavenly beings, even during their time on earth. These heavenly beings were called Amores and acted through the souls of men. In order to achieve balance in His Creation, and thanks to His fateful stroke of generosity in endowing man with free will, God had also allowed certain genies, or evil spirits, to install themselves, which, the Countess explained, were in lively communion with the lowest parts of human consciousness. These genies shared the temperament of the person in question. Everyone was linked to two guardian angels and also to two of hell’s spirits, the latter trying everything to tempt them to commit grievous sins.

The spirits also had their own worlds which could be either demonic or good, depending on how their occupants had behaved during their lives on earth. In the spirit world, the Countess explained, people looked precisely as they’d looked in their earthly existence, only slightly more translucent and anaemic. They consorted with their friends and relatives, worked as they had done on earth, were divided up among the same religious denominations, had the same nationalities, and lived in identical cities.

There were, for example, two Londons for Englishmen to come to when they died. In one of these Londons, not far from the Stock Exchange, could be found its spiritual governor and his officials. In the west dwelled those who were neither particularly good nor bad. The best lived in the east. And in the north, in the Islington district, lived those who were most intelligent. In Moorfields and the surrounding areas gangs of criminals were gathered as they arrived from life on earth, and in this way the city was continually being cleansed of its bad eggs. The Londoners’ clothes, houses and food were all the same as in their contemporary London; the inhabitants drank beer, hot chocolate and tea, though punch was served only to the most righteous.

But where did people of other nationalities live? he had wondered.

In their own countries, naturally! the Countess had answered. Frenchmen in the France of the spirits, the Prussians in Spiritual Prussia, the Jews in a city called the filthy Jerusalem, where they roamed its streets littered with refuse and were tormented by the most excruciating stenches. They traded in all thinkable goods and occupied themselves with money-lending or selling precious jewels they had got hold of in some unknown manner in heaven, maybe with the help of the Cabal, and their existence in this Jerusalem was in fact so similar to the one on earth that they less than any other nationality noticed they had quit their earthly existence and were in fact in another.

According to the Countess, Swedes were by far the worst arrivals. The few good ones that existed lived in a town called Gothenburg, but the lowest of the low, the overwhelming majority, lived in a conglomeration of evil-smelling shanty towns which, apart from North Borås and Eastern Falun, included Stockholm, their abominable capital.

The Swedes’ most outstanding feature, she was in the habit of saying, was envy, plus their craze for power and ambition. They were forever perniciously chasing titles, drinking vodka and copulating. Worst of all were the aristocrats. Just as they had done in their earthly life, they held meetings in the House of Nobility, and God’s angels, who often sat in as spectators, could see they were incapable of telling good from evil, which was why they were gradually expelled from their positions of high office and ended up begging for alms on the streets.

These were the things Hercule pondered as the Countess waited for Lord Chief Justice Conrad to show up. He withdrew to the cubbyhole next to the bedchamber where she had been letting him live pending instructions from the spiritual world. There he was thinking about Swedenborg and this countess who could converse with spirits but had no mastery of “telepathy”. That was why they needed each other: she to win money at cards, he to find his Henriette.

It was a little past ten o’clock when the Lord Chief Justice’s carriage drew up outside the two-roomed apartment on Østergade. With a display of servile bowings the servant let him in, took his coat, top hat, gloves and scarf, and then led the way to the room where the Countess Tavastestierna sat enthroned in her bed amid her healing crystals. All was ready for their game. On the table lay the sealed deck of cards. A chair had been drawn up for her guest.

“Please excuse my being late,” said the Lord Chief Justice amiably, “but affairs of State do not take other matters into consideration.”

“You are forgiven, my dear Conrad,’’ replied the Countess, holding out her hand to be kissed. “Duty always comes before pleasure . . .”

Apart from the bed, the gaming table and the chair the room was devoid of furniture. A couple of paintings with flower motifs hung on one of the walls. There was a tiled stove, a small window with an extra winter pane of glass, looking out over a backyard, and a closet with a door locked on the outside.

After the two card-players had enquired about each other’s health and business affairs, the Countess bade Lord Conrad be seated, broke the pack and shuffled it herself, leaving it to her guest to cut and deal. The game could begin.

The judge’s hand consisted of a pair of kings, plus three cards of varying value. He kept the pair and bought new cards at the rate of ten dalers, which was the agreed price.

He was satisfied: one of the cards was the king of hearts.

The Countess replaced her whole hand, though her new cards weren’t much better. All she had was a couple of fours.
What has the Lord Chief Justice got in his hand
? she wondered. And immediately was given the answer:
Three kings
 . . .

Knowing there was no point in continuing, she threw in her hand even before the bidding had begun.

The second game went on the same lines. After his second buy the Lord Chief Justice had the luck to get three of a kind: aces. And the Countess, who’d been immediately informed about his hand, had only a pair of jacks. Once again she gave up before the bidding had started. Successive rounds all ended in the judge’s favour, but the pots, as earlier, were meagre. It was, he’d recall, as if the Countess had known in advance when he was sitting on a strong hand.

At one point, when he’d been dealt two pairs of aces over queens, she gave up instantly, as if sensing she couldn’t win. Another time she threw in her hand after he had bought a completely new one, where he found to his delight he had a straight, despite her having kept four of the cards from the deals, suggesting two pairs or possibly a full house. That he himself had got a straight after exchanging all his cards was hardly something she could regard as likely; she should have gone on with the game and moreover not have called him until after a longer bidding.

There followed a couple of amazingly easy victories for the hostess. Every time he bluffed she called him or bid just enough for him not to think he could afford to follow on.

He was an old hand at cards, and when the Countess ostentatiously blew her nose he cast a quick glance over his shoulder.

The room was empty. The only place anyone could be hiding was in the closet, and that was so small it could hardly contain even a child.

Besides which, as for a possible peephole, he was sitting at such an angle that no-one could possibly see his cards. The cards – he’d made sure of this – weren’t marked, nor had he heard any suspicious sounds, such as someone clearing their throat. Without guessing how right he was, he said, “You seem able to look right through my cards.’’

“Fortune favours the bold,’’ she replied with an enigmatic smile.

Seen from the Countess Tavastestierna’s point of view the game was proceeding exactly according to plan. Her hidden assistant was providing her with every bit of information she needed in order to win the decisive pots, and each time she had a bad hand, to lose as cheaply as possible. For it was through the judge’s own eyes, if a little out of focus, that Hercule Barfuss was viewing Lord Conrad’s cards.

He was doing it half asleep, lying on the floor in the dark closet, half inside his own mind, half in the Lord Chief Justice’s. But, taken up as he was by his dreams of meeting Henriette again, he failed to pay attention to the plans gradually evolving inside the Countess’s head. Instead, at regular intervals, he was obediently casting a glance at the Lord Chief Justice’s cards or answering the Countess’s nervous questions. And in this way, a subtle piece of trickery that would have needed an all-seeing Swedenborgian spirit to expose it, the two players were winning about an equal number of pots, the only difference being that the Lord Chief Justice’s were considerably smaller and more dearly bought. Before midnight struck he had lost all his cash.