The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren Read Free Book Online

didn’t wholly lack hearing, despite the lack of conchae.
    It was hard to find any other explanation. When asked to sit still, for instance, he obeyed without hesitation. When urged to go to sleep, he closed his eyes. And when asked a question he would sometimes, if not always, respond with a nod or a shake of his head. The girls supposed he must somehow be able to lip-read, or that their voices’ vibrations must somehow be forming intelligible sentences within him. Very few of them ever suspected he could read their thoughts.
    Later on, when he had learned to interpret the girls’ gestures, of which some had been taken from a book by Wilhelm Kerger, the famous teacher of the deaf and dumb, he also learned to read and write, not only in German but also in French. Then Madam Schall, out of a sentimentality for her own past, had taken on a governess for him. But by that time no-one gave his silence a thought. When he wanted to communicate something important he would quite simply write it down on a slip of paper, and the circumstance of his never speaking fell, as it were, out of the picture.
    Clever as he was at compensating for his supposed deafness, Hercule became just as smart at compensating for his other handicaps. For lack of properly formed arms and hands, he became quite remarkable at using his feet instead, thus living up to his surname. Over time he became a veritable orthopaedic conjurer, until in the end there was no task an ordinary person carries out with his fingers Hercule couldn’t do with his sensitive toes.
    Aged one he could walk. At three he could use a knife and fork. At four he could open doors. At six he could force all kinds of locks and at seven was able to write. Later he would learn to play the organ with his masterly feet, though this takes us far on into our story.
     
    The woman who looked after Hercule Barfuss up to his second birthday was called Magdalena Holt. Living on the Danish island of Bornholm at the time of Hercule’s birth, she had been in dire straits, and was obliged to place her own six-month-old boy in an orphanage and take work at Madam Schall’s establishment not to starve. She cared for Hercule as if he was her own son, transferred all her pent-up maternal feelings on to him, badly chipped at the edges though he was. When he was in agony she wept with him. When feverish spasms wracked him, she was indefatigably at his side in an almost saintly way. It was she who wet nursed him, not from the breast, his mouth being what it was, but from a bottle of her own milk. It was she who tended his sores, eased his pains and rocked him to sleep. It was also she who first became aware of his unique gift.
    This gift, supernatural if one dare call it that, did not always function, and during his first years of life Hercule was too small to understand it himself. When gradually he did become aware of it, he would learn not only to master it, but also instinctively to conceal it, for his own self-preservation.
    The first time Magdalena Holt experienced the way he could rummage around a person’s mind was one afternoon about a year after his birth. At that moment she was sitting on a stool in the servants’ room with the little boy in her arms, feeding him from a bottle she had just filled to the brim from her breasts’ immense reservoir. Suddenly, he stopped drinking and stared at her. Unnerved, she met his eyes.
    It wasn’t the gaze of a child, but of a whole destiny. And suddenly she knew, with the same dizzy feeling that had assailed Dr Götz, that the boy could see through her.
    It was as if he had stepped inside her and revealed to her her own long-forgotten longings. Afterwards she would remember it as if he could read not only her conscious thoughts but also her subconscious ones, thus revealing her to herself in her soul’s mirror. What the boy first evoked in her was a feeling of disorientation, a queer, colourless mist that gradually assumed the shape of images, or rather