increasingly healthy, had installed in a corner of the garden. Magdalena spotted him just as he was standing on the brink, delightedly flapping his little stumps of arms, entranced by the Chinese goldfish popping up to the surface for a nip of air, and was waving to Henriette Vogel, the girl who was born the same night as himself and from whom he never wanted to be away. Terrified he would fall in, Magdalena ran over and grabbed him, frightening him and making him cry.
Rocking him in her arms, she felt how the fur on his back stood on end, how his body trembled, how his tears wetted her stay-less bodice. She stroked the huge, grotesque head that swayed so clumsily on its neck she was fearful he might one day suffocate. Whereupon it happened again, without him even looking at her. Taking his stance right in the middle of her anxious stream of consciousness, he said very clearly and in a sort of ghost voice:
Put me down!
Which she did, more out of shock than because of the force of his command; and instinctively she replied, in her thoughts:
What did you say?
Then it happened again, without his lips stirring or him looking at her, the goldfish having recaptured his attention. Inside her mind she heard him say, quite clearly:
You scared me! Let me be!
Years later she would note that the boy had actually spoken to her in Danish; and she was clever enough to realise that most probably he sounded different depending on who he was communicating with, as he made himself understood, so to speak, beyond the confines of language, and therefore what she heard as a voice was in fact a thought. Yet one so personal she had instantly known it to be his and no-one else’s, just a shade more toneless than if he’d actually spoken out loud, as if the acoustics were worse inside her head.
Though all likenesses were inadequate, Magdalena accepted that the boy not only read her thoughts, conscious or subconscious, but with all the ease in the world could suddenly start to speak inside her.
The fourth and final occasion was shortly before Magdalena, determined to make up for past horrors with a happier future, left Königsberg for good in a little lateen-rigged fishing boat that flew the Danish ensign.
The terrible mutilation of her breast was by then a fact, and Hercule had come into her room to comfort her, because in those days she was crying nearly all the time. The pain had made her close up like a mussel. She had wanted him to go away. But before she knew what was happening he started singing inside her in that strange ghost-voice of his: a simple, children’s ditty she herself had sung to him during his earliest years at the time when she imagined he would at least be able to respond to her voice’s vibration. Now she could hear his voice clearly inside her, how he was speaking loving words of comfort to her mingled with a child’s innocent sympathy.
Don’t be sad
, he was saying,
everything will be all right, you’ll soon be leaving here
.
Many years later she would look back at him in a religious light and, shortly before her death, write to a woman friend in Odense: “Nothing could be hidden from him, and that was a relief. It was like making a great confession.”
Hercule Barfuss’ talent wasn’t to everyone’s liking, however. And it would be even less so after he had learned to control it.
People who experienced it during his first half-dozen years at Madam Schall’s were in the habit of blaming their experiences on something else, to the general relief of their common sense, their sanity.
In her second year there one of the girls, Anke Strittmater, suffered a nervous breakdown after being bitten by an adder that had somehow got into the house. Once, when Hercule happened to be in her room, she had cried out so loudly before she lost consciousness it could have shattered the crystal glasses in Madam Schall’s display cabinet. Later, when asked what had happened, she explained she had heard the ghostly voices
Kit Tunstall, R.E. Saxton