The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (35 page)

Dust whirled up when the dogs attacked. One of them sunk his teeth into the bear’s abdomen and tore off large tufts of its fur. Another hopped to and fro in front of the bear’s nose, feigning an attack, then withdrawing. The two remaining animals approached it on either side.

The bear flailed wildly, but the moment it struck with its paws in one direction, a dog would attack it from another. Again and again the tether stopped the bear from getting at its tormentors.

Then one of the dogs lost its balance, and with a movement which seemed unnaturally swift, the bear pinned it to the ground. A sound like a piece of cloth being ripped could be heard as the beast tore the dog’s belly open. The animal tried to drag itself away, its intestines trailing in the sand.

Foaming at the mouth, the mastiffs kept throwing themselves at the bear, as if to avenge their dying friend. The bear’s ear was ripped off, blood gushed from an abdominal wound and sinews lay exposed on a front paw.

Then, once more, something happened to change the scene. One of the dogs lunged at the bear’s back leg, feinted and withdrew; the bear tried to attack it with one paw but failed to notice the dog approaching from the side; with a single bite it tore off the bear’s nose.

Thick streams of blood welled out, as from a fountain. The beast gave a scream of pain, but now that the nostrils were completely gone, so was the tether. The bear reared up on its hind legs, snorting out its own blood.

Blood pumping from the open wound, the bear went on the attack. The dogs tried to escape, but the arena gates were closed. A sweetish smell of blood and intestines descended over the area.

The bear flung one of the dogs to the ground, and tore off its lower jaw. The animal was still alive when the bear turned round and went to attack its next tormentor.

The mastiffs’ owner was shouting out, calling for an end to this performance, it had gone too far, too much blood had already been spilled; but the audience held him back. Bloodlust, Langhans thought; ravenous for the suffering of others. They all bore within them a desire to witness others’ pain, to feel on their cheeks the breath of others’ deaths, the horror of a life so easily extinguished, the tremor that went through them all when one of them, for no good reason, almost nonchalantly, was snatched away simply because life was abandoning them . . . At the same instant, he again got that feeling of being watched. He looked around at the crowd, but as before, no-one stood out.

People’s thoughts were easier for him to pick up than they had been for a very long time. Over by the wild animals’ cages he saw the one-eyed ringmaster who had led out the bear. He was in a cold sweat of excitement, inebriated by the scent of blood. His consciousness was that of a drunk, and inside him someone was whispering, though Langhans couldn’t grasp exactly what.

The sun blazed down over the compound, and he was overcome by an intense thirst.

A little way off he saw a drinks stall, but the crowd was now so dense he couldn’t budge. Once again he picked up on the thoughts in the one-eyed man’s mind, or rather, the thoughts of someone else speaking to the one-eyed man and making him walk over to the cages of the last remaining beasts.

This is what happened. In response to some inexplicable inner command the one-eyed man, owner of an entire menagerie of wild animals, began walking towards them, towards the cage containing a highly aggressive wild boar. All this the one-eyed man did in a kind of a trance, little knowing it wasn’t his own will that was controlling his every action, but that of a small figure he couldn’t even see, even though he’d been standing less than a metre away for the last few hours, on a vacant spot in this human sea, vigilant of every step he took, but so unnoticed he could have been taken for thin air. And it was the wild boar’s cage, constructed of high-grade timber, that he now, inexplicably, opened, as panic broke out in the arena.

While the one-eyed man, believing he had temporarily lost his self-control having maybe had a drop too much to drink, was engaged in carrying out the invisible man’s will by releasing the wild boar, the bear, pain-crazed, had managed to break out of the compound, smashed through the fencing, and with blood splashing out of the open wound that formerly had been its nostrils, charged into the audience.

Langhans shuddered. Out in the arena he could see three of the dogs in their death throes, their bellies gashed open and intestines bared. The white corrosive sunlight illuminated this macabre scene. The bear flailed wildly. People fled in all directions. And in the midst of this chaos, this orgy of death, he became aware of how someone else, someone with a gift similar to his own but infinitely stronger, was planting his legionary will in the wild boar: driving it to rush out of its open cage, into the crowd of humans, and, ploughing ahead with Homeric force amid the horror-stricken onlookers, move with a speed only a wild boar can muster, until, to Langhans’ horror, it stood in the very place where he too was standing, pinned against a wall by the immense force of the panicking crowds.

You think you live a life
, he heard a voice hiss inside him,
but it’s life living us, and when we’re used up it carries on without us
.

Apt final words, he thought, preparing himself for the horrific coda. The crowd had locked him into a sitting position, on a level with the beast’s tusks, sharp as awls. Confronted with this raw power his gift had little worth. At the very moment the bear avenged its humiliation, with one deft blow of its paw decapitating her one-eyed master, the wild boar, taking Langhans to be its enemy, went on the attack.

For such was the power of the man he couldn’t see, it could create something out of nothing, and carry a trick of substitution to its extreme. A beam of pure energy lifted up Langhans’ face, a concession, or so it seemed, to a sudden desire to look up at Vienna’s blinding white sky, but which in fact bared his throat to the wild animal’s tusks.

Where Hercule Barfuss was standing invisibly, or rather, unseen by the terrified crowd, it occurred to him that no man can imagine his own end, with the result that he dies astonished.

In order to fully enjoy the Jesuit’s imminent death from the inside, to pay him back for the loss of his one true love, he had placed his mind in the grandstand of Langhans’ consciousness. Yet, at the very last instant, something stopped him.

Langhans would subsequently recall how the wild boar had stopped short in mid-onrush, as if someone had commanded it to halt. Then, turning round, it had gone calmly back to its cage. And, almost instantaneously, right there in front of him, as if appearing out of thin air, was the deformed boy.

Never before had Langhans experienced anything like it. The boy seemed to have made himself invisible, then materialised before his very eyes.

He sensed Barfuss inside his mind and knew all about him. Yet at the same time, he, Langhans, was inside Barfuss and knew all about him, too. They were inside each other, were each other, as if their souls had changed places. Never would he be able to account for how long this went on, whether for an eternity or for only the briefest of moments. But inside the boy he heard a girl’s voice. And it was the girl, he heard, who bade the boy contain himself.

For Hercule Barfuss this moment altered his life for ever. Inside him he heard Henriette Vogel speaking. And it made him a changed man.

It was indeed her voice, reaching out to him from the brink of the abyss; clearer, more tender than ever before. Beyond all human language, beyond life and death, it was the voice of love itself speaking to him from within; pure, undiluted love, its very ideal, its essence spread warmth through him, banishing the force of hatred that had threatened to destroy him. Suddenly he was engulfed in a tenderness he had never before felt, so strong it obliterated everything else: abhorrence, bloodlust and what he had believed to be unremitting sorrow. No longer aware of his surroundings, he was carried away from the macabre place where he was, on an inner journey. The priest Langhans, the wild beasts, the crowds – everything vanished in the face of this experience of unalloyed purity. A final capitulation to a love that defied the laws of nature. From some place on the other side of time, he heard the girl explain that these acts of cruelty were pointless and would poison him if he did not cease. He heard her pledge her undying love, saying death isn’t the end, only the beginning of a new existence where they would one day be reunited.

It wasn’t people, she explained, which were his most powerful enemy. It was hatred. The hatred he had lived with half his life and which, having driven him to a dead end, the limit of what a man can endure, would erode him. Hate, she continued, was meaningless; it gave nothing, only took. Forever placing new demands for more nourishment, more blood, more loathing, hatred demanded to be satisfied. Only love could replace it.

Amid the screaming crowd, the dying animals and trampled people, he fell to his knees. Unaware of his surroundings, all he was conscious of was the voice of his beloved reaching out to him over distances inconceivable to the human mind:
I’m with you
, she whispered.
Always with you, until we meet again . . .

Johannes Langhans, too, was to remember this day to the end of his life in the Age of Steam. Pushed up against a wall, he saw Barfuss’ contours clarify, as if distancing himself from his invisibility. He saw the boy’s eyes sparkle with love for the girl he’d lost: a love as great as the Creator felt for His Creation, a love for love’s sake, holding existence together, preventing the universe from losing all meaning.

Then he disappeared, vanishing on his dwarf legs through the panic-stricken screaming crowds: happy, Langhans knew, infinitely happy that the girl had made her presence known, had banished hatred once and for all.

MANY YEARS LATER,
Hercule Barfuss would describe this event in Vienna as the watershed of his love and his life. He’d thought he had reached the end, when in reality he was on the brink of a new beginning.

Until the end of his days he was to remember every little step that had taken him to the bear-baiting, his plans for Langhans, and how, when love at last had been avenged, he was shortly thereafter going to take his own life. That wasn’t the way it had turned out. Instead, love triumphed over hatred. Henriette had spoken to him from somewhere beyond the unknown, and this had changed him for ever. He had gone out among people again, one among others, without hate, without bitterness, as one of their kind, grateful to life, to his fate, to existence in all its infinite wealth.

All that day he’d walked through the imperial city, along its streets, through market places, along alleys and into parks. Fully visible, without his mask, he’d walked, a deformed person, a dwarf, but proud and, beyond belief, happy. He’d noticed how people smiled at him, how he infected them with his love and his happiness in the knowledge that death isn’t the end, but the beginning of a new existence. For the first time in his life he understood what freedom implied; knowing no limits, causing people to rise high above their own earth-bound selves: it was identical with being.

That same summer, also in Vienna, he ran into Barnaby Wilson in the market place by the Danube canal, not far from the Augarten Palace. He was in a crowd of folk on an exhibition area, watching a hot-air balloon rise skyward.

Did you know, kind sir, that it’s the phlogistonised air that makes the object rise?

The little cyclops was standing close by him, holding a telescope to his one eye. Hercule could hardly credit his senses. He’d thought Wilson was dead.

No, Hercule, I survived . . . the others didn’t, but my mission, whatever it may be, is still awaiting its accomplishment
.

They went off together. The cyclops told him all about his life and plans. How Cavour’s and Garibaldi’s nationalistic ideas had taken hold of him. Since the dissolution of the roadshow he had been working for a new and better world. Socialism, he claimed, was the future; new thinkers were planning a better world: they called themselves communists. The world would become an improved place to live in, even for deaf people. In Paris, he expounded, there was a school for the deaf that was subsidised by the French state. He had been there himself and studied its methods. The teaching used a new form of sign language based on French grammar. The introduction of various forms of inflection and conjugation marks, formerly the missing link, now made it possible to develop a complete language. All the teaching was done in sign language. Hercule ought to go there, he said; their own way of communicating via thoughts was clumsy, since others found it frightening. True, the practice of burning witches at the stake had died out on the European continent, but science would never accept their way of conversing. He really ought to pay the school a visit, sooner or later he would have to learn a language that others could understand. Sign language should suit him, with his sensitive feet he could easily learn to make the signs.

Barnaby Wilson smiled. The world, he assured Hercule, would soon be a paradise to live in. Everything was going in the right direction; progress was unstoppable. Within a few years the railway would cover the whole of Europe, linking up people in a way not formerly believed possible. Disease, cancer and the pox, as well as famine, crop failure and war would be eradicated. If only factories and manufacturing were properly managed, goods could be produced at cost price and everyone would receive according to their needs.

In America, Wilson went on, there was a place where deaf people were in the majority and where they led their own lives in the spirit of freedom. This was on an island off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard. Their society consisted almost exclusively of the deaf. They all addressed each other in sign language; even those who could hear learned to sign first. Spoken English came as a second language. Hercule ought to go to America as soon as he could save up enough for a ticket. Could Martha’s Vineyard be his special place in the world?