The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (7 page)

On her side, Henriette loved Hercule as unreservedly as he loved her. He had always been there. His aspect was so familiar to her she never saw it as deformed. On the contrary, she found it pleasing beyond words just because it was unmistakably his. No more than he did she need any explanation for feelings so strong they lived a life of their own. From as far back as she could remember he had spoken to her through what might, for simplicity’s sake, be termed thoughts, something she had grown so used to she didn’t find it in the least odd. When she wanted to ask him a question she posed it within herself, and heard him answer in a voice so personal that it seemed no different from people’s ordinary voices.

Later, aware that she bore the same name as Heinrich von Kleist’s unfortunate lady love, she would relate that she had kept secret his special gift, even from her own mother, not out of fear, but because she knew intuitively, as he himself did, that it would frighten people even more than his deformed appearance.

She couldn’t conceive of a world without him, and imagined, as children do, it had been created solely for the two of them, which was why she defended all his actions, even when they broke the house rules. The year she turned eight Henriette campaigned to have the rules concerning his nightly quarantine changed, and, when she realised her efforts were doomed to fail, insisted on being with him in the room from when the first client arrived until the last had left. She got her wish, for nobody dared challenge a love bordering on fanaticism.

Shortly after Hercule and Henriette’s tenth birthday, the tragic event came about that would later be interpreted as an omen of the misfortunes that would befall the house. The catastrophe occurred one February night when no-one except our hero was awake. By this stage his gift of foresight had developed to a point where it worked even in his sleep. Nothing escaped its sensors and by the time the villain was in the garden he was already awake.

As surely as if he had seen him in broad daylight Hercule knew this individual was out there. He knew also that it was a man, one of the establishment’s clients.

Henriette Vogel was sleeping like an angel beside him, but everywhere he could sense the fantasies of someone whose only wish was to cause suffering. In his mind they took shape as elaborately detailed illustrations, images so dreadful that he had to drive them off not to burst into tears.

Like a hunter the man crept through the garden, climbed a wall, dashed towards the storage shed then on along the house’s façade before jumping up on to the terrace. At one point Hercule imagined a picklock. At another an ever more hectic rising pulse, a cold calculation, a lock broken open, a hand clasping a door handle.

Now the person was in the house, downstairs, moving stealthily in the dark so as not to wake anyone.

A fit of shivering shook Hercule when he realised that the man had stopped right beneath him, two floors down, and when this seeming human fount of hatred began moving again – along a corridor, up the stairs to the second floor where the girls slept, transgressing one internal boundary after the other – he felt sure he would die of terror. Whereupon the movement ceased and he knew exactly where the man was: outside Magdalena Holt’s room.

He didn’t know where he found the strength to get up and leave his own room. He had crept along the top floor, to the staircase. Everything was still. For a split second he hoped it was just his imagination playing a macabre trick on him, but in that same instant he was wrenched from his pious hopes. Now, as clearly as any person would sense the taste of salt or the smell of smoke, he sensed that the person who had woken him was standing by Magdalena Holt’s bed intent on fulfilling a hideous and gruesome fantasy. It took Hercule several minutes to pluck up the courage to go downstairs, and later he’d reproach himself for not knocking over a china cupboard or banging on a door to waken the whole house and drive the criminal to flight, for only a few minutes later the deed had been done.

Silence reigned in Magdalena Holt’s moonlit chamber. The door stood open. She lay on the mattress, tied to the bedposts, unconscious, with a rag stuffed into her mouth. She was bathed in her own blood. Her left breast had been cut off and taken by the villain.

In the spring the police began to look into the matter. But the sparse evidence led nowhere. The girls were of little help. Interrogated in private, they were questioned about clients with unusual desires, but this, as one of the gendarmes summarised the matter, seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. Nor did Magdalena remember anything about the event, having been knocked unconscious in her sleep. The constable in charge of the interrogations observed that the girls’ memories, not only of the clients’ names, but also of their physical appearances, was poor. Fear was a prevalent fact of their existence, weakening their memory more than was good for them. Hercule Barfuss wasn’t interrogated, since he, in the normal course of things, was always kept out of sight when the house had visitors. His testimony would in any case probably have led more to confusion than to clarity.

In late May Magdalena Holt left the establishment, marked for life, yet firmly resolved to return to her childhood island and marry the man whom, with Hercule’s help, she had realised she loved and a few years earlier had become engaged to by correspondence. Her long, drawn-out convalescence, which she barely survived and then only with the aid of Providence, left with her departure a feeling that all this was only the beginning of the house’s misfortune. It had become poisoned with suspicion. The girls grew cautious and reserved. Some refused to sleep with clients they didn’t know, others adopted an old wartime habit of sleeping with a dagger under their pillow. Rumours of the bloody deed spread and frightened off some clients. Others didn’t relish the thought of a brothel that had been visited by inquisitive gendarmes. By early summer the establishment had lost half its trade. The clients became ever fewer, and several of the girls stole away in the dead of night without giving notice, leaving only a hastily scribbled farewell note.

It was in these difficult times that the decision was made to auction off Henriette Vogel on the open market of love.

Henriette had grown to be an unusually well-developed girl, tall for her age and looking older than was attested by her birth certificate. Several men had already cast languishing glances in her direction, and more than one client had asked Madam Schall in a whisper whether the girl wasn’t a little old to be still wearing her hair in plaits. In a house where everything was for sale and fidelity was at best a daydream nurtured on lazy Sunday afternoons, there was no moral obstacle to selling off a ten-year-old girl’s maidenhead to the highest bidder. The
Jus primae noctis
was at that time an oft-used item of merchandise in the town’s brothels, and could fetch a considerable sum, invaluable for an establishment teetering on the brink of ruin. Anyway, the girl had been brought up to follow in her mother’s footsteps, the profession, then as now, being one that was handed down from generation to generation.

Even so, it was the failing economy that drove her mother and Madam Schall to the difficult decision. The girls did their best to prepare Henriette for her ordeal by means of an informal initiation rite made up of a thousand words of good advice and various admonitions. They gave her knowledge of tricks to bring the man to his bliss as quickly as possible and with minimum trouble; the surest manipulations, the least painful positions, how forgetfulness could help, and how by means of a brew of cloves, wine and camphor she could drive away recurrent attacks of nausea. They explained the simplest way to get rid of men after the act, how to negotiate a price and how far it could be bartered down. They told her never to fall in love, though that could sometimes be the easiest way to avoid humiliation, and never to go along with something her instinct contradicted, at least not unless the price had been fixed to her satisfaction. Kisses cost extra. They asked her to keep certain of love’s words and gestures to herself so they should not be worn out the day she, against all odds, found a man to take her to a happier existence as a married woman in a middle-class home – most of the girls’ dream. They taught her to protect herself against pregnancy and disease, and how best to defend herself against sailors who’d had one over the eight. They also gave her little gifts, accessories, jewellery, perfumes and amulets that would protect her from shameful diseases and bring her luck.

Henriette put up with all this in so carefree a way it seemed to verge on indifference. She allowed herself to be instructed in the arts of paid love, she delved into the musk-scented ambience of bedroom antics, accepted the ritual gifts, tried on suitable garments – hats with cockades in them, cordwain shoes, and frilly underwear – all the time heroically fighting off her fear of the evening of the auction. At moments she even managed to forget all about her coming ordeal. Her thoughts were with Hercule Barfuss.

He was in despair. Stricken to the ground by life’s injustice, he scarcely ate. He knew her future had long ago been sealed, but love refused to take facts into consideration. He couldn’t imagine any injustice more hideous than that she should be sold to nameless men. For the first time in his life he understood that a future awaited them, and it was blacker than night. Looking into it he saw nothing; it had no room for creatures such as he. Unable to envisage himself in so alien a place, he saw his life had been a provisional arrangement, protected by a sisterhood that before long would start questioning who he was and what he was doing here. It was like looking down into the grave.

Two weeks before the evening of the auction, to all appearances fatally weakened by his despair, Hercule was assailed by feverish cramps. After a night when all hope seemed to have fled and his heart could almost be heard grinding to a halt, with a deep sigh, as when a cork is pulled out of a bottle, the old wise woman employed by Madam Schall had to draw on all her professional skills to resuscitate him. Only slowly and with the help of Henriette’s care did he recover. She sat at his bedside from early morning to late at night. In the end, overcome by tiredness, she was found seated on the edge of his bed, one hand on his furry back and the other in an open Bible. She fed him with spoonfuls of meat broth, laid on mustard compresses, and calmed his fever with ice packs.

Delirious, he saw her face floating around the room, but it was a mask ripped off by an invisible hand, and underneath was a sheet of paper scribbled over with an obscure future filled with misfortune. Adrift in the floating ice of his subconscious, he was surrounded by a grief so strong that it could undoubtedly have changed the course of history. Hercule awaited the end.

So came the evening of the auction. The ground floor was filled with guests and the sound of clinking glasses and girls exchanging businesslike jokes. The bidding for an hour’s pleasure could begin.

There was crunching on the gravel as new cabs arrived. Lusts and desires spread throughout the establishment like a dense fog. Around this way of life there were no mitigating circumstances. Each evening demanded that happiness be reinvented and die as each succesive client climbed into one of the girls’ beds.

From his attic room Hercule inhaled the loveless air and cursed the deadly irony of Henriette from now on having to share it with the man who was shortly to take possession of her. Sobbing, he banged his head against the wall, again and again, trying in vain to knock himself out.

By the time he ceased doing so, an atmosphere of tense excitement had fallen over the house, and Hercule realised the auction had begun. He felt the madness spin round the room like an autumn gale that had lost its way. Half choked by his sobs, he wondered what unforgivable sin he must have committed to be punished with such terrible grief. Yet somewhere in the midst of his despair, with the image of Henriette Vogel in his mind, standing in her underclothes in a corner of the large salon, surrounded by faceless men, he must have passed out. Suddenly he was awoken by a terrifying grip on his throat that could have killed him on the spot. The man who had all but murdered Magdalena Holt was now alone with Henriette.

Years later, sitting on the windowsill of a burgher house in Danzig and staring out through the eyes of a stray cat, Hercule would recall in detail all that ensued that evening, which in less than a week would lead to his being torn up by the roots and ruthlessly flung into orbit around an extinct sun. He had run along the corridor and down the stairs. The clients turned round, astonished, and stared at him in disgust, revulsion writ large on their faces. Some of the girls had tried to bar his way. There was an eruption of horror from someone who was scared out of his wits by the mere sight of him. Tracking down the pulsating sick lust, Hercule prayed to God that there had not yet been time for anything to happen to Henriette. Opening a door to one of the rooms, he saw a man dressed in women’s clothing turn towards him and smile – but in an instant the smile turned into a disgusted grimace.

The instincts raging in the house confused him. They were everywhere: the bitterest longings of souls and bodies. Consumed by fear, he went on running, staggering and limping on his short legs, weighed down by the burden of his enormous head, the image of Henriette Vogel engraved on his retina.

In one room some naked clients leaned drunkenly over a blindfolded girl who had collapsed on the floor. Opening the door to another room he saw two men sharing the same girl, her features so distorted by shame that he didn’t recognise her. A group of sailors pointed at him, and burst into nervous laughter, two of them calling to mind their deformed sister. He rushed on, determinedly pursuing his trail.

At the far end of the wing he came to the bridal chamber. Tried to open it. Found it locked. The noise brought people to the scene: the sailors who had been laughing at him; a gold-braided officer wearing his jacket, but neither trousers nor shoes. Girls he knew, scantily clad in whatever had lain to hand.