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 Page A

whole sequences of them. On this inner canvas she was amazed to see painted a little row of fishing huts on her native island – with thatched roofs and whitewashed walls – and herself walking arm in arm with a man she recognised, a relative. Only then did she understand, with a violent contraction of the roots of her heart, that she had loved this man all her life, but never dared admit it. In the same instant she knew she must one day go back and marry him and fetch her son from the orphanage, and so make up the sum of her happiness. All this she knew with such certainty that for a moment she thought she had lost her mind. She had always looked on the man as any other relative, or so she thought. He was a skinny fellow with a slight squint and freckles who stammered. In his youth he had been a common seaman aboard English warships. Now she realised with a lucidity that threatened to burst her apart that she had loved him above all else ever since she was a little girl, but, aware that her love was forbidden, she had banished it to the cellar of her unconscious, tried to efface it altogether so as to believe she had outwitted it. Or else, if ever it had peered out, she had taken it for something else. Yet with undiminished strength it had gone on living, even though she’d had a child with another man, a drunken good-for-nothing who left her when she got in trouble. With a shudder she accepted all she now saw inside herself – the hallucinations which, aided by the boy, laid bare her most secret yearnings – to be true. In this knowledge there was as much terror as joy. Then in a trice he vanished from that place inside her where she had clearly felt him to be. Looking down she saw he was asleep in her arms.
    Years later Magdalena Holt, knowing her experience that winter day was the simple truth, a distillation of her own longings, would turn it into reality. She never told a soul, but until the day she left the brothel she saw the boy through different eyes and would be grateful to him for the rest of her life.
    Fancying there was some connection between her strange experience and the boy’s appetite, she became particularly observant when giving him the bottle. More often than not when she tried to catch his attention by passing a finger to and fro before his eyes he would lift up his deformed face, but nothing remarkable would happen. And indeed, she would only be exposed to his gift on three more occasions, the last time in association with a catastrophe.
    The second time, too, was when she was giving him his milk. Suddenly, with a gaze as ancient as bedrock, he looked up at her, and again she felt how he stirred her thoughts, all the while making a slight gurgling sound, which she understood to be the beginnings of speech.
    Out of the sludge of oblivion her forgotten desires again began to rise up, faintly at first, then ever more pictorially, until once again they appeared as a vision in her mind.
    She saw herself sitting bent over a thick volume with a magnifying glass in her hand. On the table lay a quill pen and an ink pot. She realised she herself had made the ink from camphor and pulverised oak apples. This too was an old dream that had been put to flight by life’s realities. A dream of looking for God. In the autumn of her years she would be re-baptised by a wandering Mennonite, and devote the last years of her widowhood to studying the Scriptures. At the time of this vision, though, the idea seemed to her ridiculous, it then being many years since she had closed her heart to any belief in God.
    On the third occasion – the most banal, but which she would always remember as the first time she heard the boy actually speaking inside her – Hercule had just learned to walk. It was a Sunday afternoon in springtime when the girls had a day off. Unobserved he had wandered perilously close to the waterlily pond with the spouting nymphs, which Madam Schall, after several years of the accounts looking