The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (25 page)

He could sense the approach of another human being miles away. Had carried on a one-sided telepathic contact with the abbot and surprised him by sending letters via the shepherds, in which he described his superior’s problems and gave him advice on how to solve them.

Eventually the heads of the house – ill at ease with this figure who, clad in rags, mute as a stone, emaciated beyond recognition, had more and more come to look like a tramp, and had an uncanny knowledge of what was going on in their minds – would absolve him from his vows; he was sent to the Vatican as a secretary to the bishops’ congregation.

The connection between speech and thought having been all but severed, it had taken Langhans several months to recover his voice. He was convinced he was alone with his gift. No-one eluded him: he penetrated their souls. This wasn’t imagination: he saw right through them, saw the secrets they thought well hidden, picked up the stench of their rotting souls, became shocked at the discrepancy between thought and speech among clerical officials, and had the insight to foresee that his gift might get him into trouble. Miracles were rarely rewarded by canonisation. On the contrary, the wars had created a surplus of icons and madonnas which shed tears of sacred oil in provincial chapels.

During his third year in Rome he’d been summoned before an investigating commission. The first time he met Sebastian del Moro he realised that it was this man who somehow or other had disclosed his gift.

The investigation established that it was not of a demonic nature, but he was forbidden to speak of it, and he heard from the corridor gossip that he, together with his prior, was on the list of clerics being considered for post-mortem canonisation. The rumour must have been put abroad by the Inquisition in order to protect him. That made him laugh.

Shortly thereafter he’d been placed in quarantine in an office specially invented for him. Two years later del Moro had him appointed to a post in what was to become the
sapinieri
movement. When his reputation had grown to the point where, on Cardinal Rivero’s recommendation, he was offered the position of religious counsellor to Metternich, he’d gone on working in secret for the movement. The cases he was entrusted with were considered to have such high priority that only a man of his qualities could be called upon. Which was why he was just now in Berlin, under such clandestine circumstances that not even the Chancellor knew of his whereabouts.

Seated at the table in the Golden Cockerel, Langhans turned his attention to the brothers. They were intent on the job in hand: the drawings, the way into the house, any patrols, who was to do what. They had spent almost a year in Berlin, pursuing rumours that the monster was performing in salons as a mesmerist. But when they searched he seemed to have disappeared. All that remained was the eternal flora of legends in the making: that the boy could see into the future, pass on messages from the dead and ask favours of the Devil. There were people who swore blind they hadn’t seen him though they’d walked past him only a foot away as he, at the expense of their sanity, tried out his faculty for rendering himself invisible. These rumours had been followed by others – that he was living in Brussels, in Copenhagen, in Hamburg and, finally, in Berlin, where he enjoyed the protection of a certain Baroness von Below.

This last rumour had proved correct. For almost two weeks now Langhans had been staying at a Catholic hostel by the Trinity Church graveyard while the final preparations were being made. And all the time he’d had this feeling of something not being quite right. Now it seemed as if his misgiving was being verified. He was picking up a most peculiar wavelength, sensing a flow of thoughts, or rather, a state of awareness, that he could neither understand nor locate.

Again he turned round to look. A squint-eyed woman smiled at him. The kitchen boy was blowing his nose like a trumpet and scrutinising its contents in his handkerchief. Over in the corner the innkeeper was swearing ever louder.

The consciousness Langhans was failing to locate was, however, in his immediate vicinity. He intuited it with a sense of urgency that was almost tangible, as if it had been rubbing itself up against his clothes and his skin. Over in the corner, he now noticed, the innkeeper had picked up a cane and was hitting out at something, though he could not tell what, since the men’s backs formed a wall, blocking his view.

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.”