The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren Page A
Authors: Carl-Johan Vallgren
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different wishes which floated up to him from every corner of the establishment.
Alone in his room he traced these thoughts back to where they had first taken shape, to the mind in which they had first sprung up, all manner of thoughts and passions he, Hercule Barfuss, had the peculiar talent of divining. In this house were assembled all the longings: for affection, for pain, for ecstasy, for forbidden fruits – and to inflict suffering on others.
This last desire, emanating from the soul’s darkness, from years of bitterness and hatred, was what frightened him most, realising as he did it was part of human nature. He could trace it back to its source, perceive the sick lechery, not the people, not their faces, but their terrible fantasies. When the tragic incident occurred with Magdalena Holt he already knew who the perpetrator was for he had already sensed him, years earlier, in this throng of impulses in the house.
As far back as he could remember Hercule had adored Henriette, ever since she was a little girl. Fate, for some inscrutable reason, had brought her into the world on the same night as himself. His was a love whose beginnings were lost in time’s first narrow passage, before the world had taken shape. He had no first memory of her. She had always been there, as taken for granted as the air he breathed, as night and day. They had been fed their milk in the same room, slept in the same bed, been put in the same playpen, cared for by the same sisters in misfortune who shared a common fate. Children of the same establishment, fathers unknown, they were bound to each other by love’s manifold mystery.
That February night when the bells had pealed and thundered, Henriette’s mother had asked herself, just as Dr Götz had, about Fate’s lack of justice. But at the same time she’d had a feeling that everything was already written down in life’s book, whose text no man on earth can alter and whose author finds it beyond him to own up to his own mistakes. In tragic conformity with some law, her sister in misfortune had to die so that she herself could live, and a boy had to be born so deformed that her daughter might be healthy. To such a degree had she been filled with these thoughts that shortly after her delivery she’d had a sensation of being dangerously in debt to Providence. She would have liked to come to terms with a happiness she did not consider that she deserved by adopting the boy; but Madam Schall, whose word was law in this autocratic kingdom of price-tagged delights, had delegated all maternal duties to Magdalena Holt, the new arrival.
For the newborns to be bonded together as brother and sister would in any case have been a supererogatory formality. They were twinned souls beyond any blood-tie. From the age when they started to crawl they turned to each other. Neither of them could imagine doing anything in their waking hours without the other. And on more than one occasion they had literally been dragged apart at bedtime. They were hungry and thirsty at the same moment, laughed at the same things and cried for identical reasons. Some found it eerie when their first milk teeth appeared on the very same Friday afternoon in July, or when they each took their first steps as a thunderstorm shook the building to its foundations one spring morning. People were amazed by their seeming to understand each other wordlessly, that they played soundlessly and hardly had to exchange glances to know what the other wanted. In the same extraordinary way one always seemed to know where the other was or was intending to go.
This child couple – the one so perfectly formed, the other so crippled – moved the girls to tears, and the incompatibility of the match became more evident with the years as Hercule never grew to be more than a metre in height, whereas Henriette grew to be a tall girl.
Sheltered not only from prying eyes, but also from any view of the outside, Hercule led a quiet life. Madam
Alone in his room he traced these thoughts back to where they had first taken shape, to the mind in which they had first sprung up, all manner of thoughts and passions he, Hercule Barfuss, had the peculiar talent of divining. In this house were assembled all the longings: for affection, for pain, for ecstasy, for forbidden fruits – and to inflict suffering on others.
This last desire, emanating from the soul’s darkness, from years of bitterness and hatred, was what frightened him most, realising as he did it was part of human nature. He could trace it back to its source, perceive the sick lechery, not the people, not their faces, but their terrible fantasies. When the tragic incident occurred with Magdalena Holt he already knew who the perpetrator was for he had already sensed him, years earlier, in this throng of impulses in the house.
As far back as he could remember Hercule had adored Henriette, ever since she was a little girl. Fate, for some inscrutable reason, had brought her into the world on the same night as himself. His was a love whose beginnings were lost in time’s first narrow passage, before the world had taken shape. He had no first memory of her. She had always been there, as taken for granted as the air he breathed, as night and day. They had been fed their milk in the same room, slept in the same bed, been put in the same playpen, cared for by the same sisters in misfortune who shared a common fate. Children of the same establishment, fathers unknown, they were bound to each other by love’s manifold mystery.
That February night when the bells had pealed and thundered, Henriette’s mother had asked herself, just as Dr Götz had, about Fate’s lack of justice. But at the same time she’d had a feeling that everything was already written down in life’s book, whose text no man on earth can alter and whose author finds it beyond him to own up to his own mistakes. In tragic conformity with some law, her sister in misfortune had to die so that she herself could live, and a boy had to be born so deformed that her daughter might be healthy. To such a degree had she been filled with these thoughts that shortly after her delivery she’d had a sensation of being dangerously in debt to Providence. She would have liked to come to terms with a happiness she did not consider that she deserved by adopting the boy; but Madam Schall, whose word was law in this autocratic kingdom of price-tagged delights, had delegated all maternal duties to Magdalena Holt, the new arrival.
For the newborns to be bonded together as brother and sister would in any case have been a supererogatory formality. They were twinned souls beyond any blood-tie. From the age when they started to crawl they turned to each other. Neither of them could imagine doing anything in their waking hours without the other. And on more than one occasion they had literally been dragged apart at bedtime. They were hungry and thirsty at the same moment, laughed at the same things and cried for identical reasons. Some found it eerie when their first milk teeth appeared on the very same Friday afternoon in July, or when they each took their first steps as a thunderstorm shook the building to its foundations one spring morning. People were amazed by their seeming to understand each other wordlessly, that they played soundlessly and hardly had to exchange glances to know what the other wanted. In the same extraordinary way one always seemed to know where the other was or was intending to go.
This child couple – the one so perfectly formed, the other so crippled – moved the girls to tears, and the incompatibility of the match became more evident with the years as Hercule never grew to be more than a metre in height, whereas Henriette grew to be a tall girl.
Sheltered not only from prying eyes, but also from any view of the outside, Hercule led a quiet life. Madam
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