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Beyond the wall
by
“There came a fateful night. Worn out with emotion, irresolution and despondency, I had retired early and fallen into such sleep as was still possible to me. In the middle of the night something–some malign power bent upon the wrecking of my peace forever–caused me to open my eyes and sit up, wide awake and listening intently for I knew not what. Then I thought I heard a faint tapping on the wall–the mere ghost of the familiar signal. In a few moments it was repeated: one, two, three–no louder than before, but addressing a sense alert and strained to receive it. I was about to reply when the Adversary of Peace again intervened in my affairs with a rascally suggestion of retaliation. She had long and cruelly ignored me; now I would ignore her. Incredible fatuity–may God forgive it! All the rest of the night I lay awake, fortifying my obstinacy with shameless justifications and–listening.
“Late the next morning, as I was leaving the house, I met my landlady, entering.
“‘Good morning, Mr. Dampier,’ she said. ‘Have you heard the news?’
“I replied in words that I had heard no news; in manner, that I did not care to hear any. The manner escaped her observation.
“‘About the sick young lady next door,’ she babbled on. ‘What! you did not know? Why, she has been ill for weeks. And now–‘
“I almost sprang upon her. ‘And now,’ I cried, ‘now what?’
“‘She is dead.’
“That is not the whole story. In the middle of the night, as I learned later, the patient, awakening from a long stupor after a week of delirium, had asked–it was her last utterance–that her bed be moved to the opposite side of the room. Those in attendance had thought the request a vagary of her delirium, but had complied. And there the poor passing soul had exerted its failing will to restore a broken connection–a golden thread of sentiment between its innocence and a monstrous baseness owning a blind, brutal allegiance to the Law of Self.
“What reparation could I make? Are there masses that can be said for the repose of souls that are abroad such nights as this–spirits ‘blown about by the viewless winds’–coming in the storm and darkness with signs and portents, hints of memory and presages of doom?
“This is the third visitation. On the first occasion I was too skeptical to do more than verify by natural methods the character of the incident; on the second, I responded to the signal after it had been several times repeated, but without result. To-night’s recurrence completes the ‘fatal triad’ expounded by Parapelius Necromantius. There is no more to tell.”
When Dampier had finished his story I could think of nothing relevant that I cared to say, and to question him would have been a hideous impertinence. I rose and bade him good night in a way to convey to him a sense of my sympathy, which he silently acknowledged by a pressure of the hand. That night, alone with his sorrow and remorse, he passed into the Unknown.