‘Well, nurse, how’s the patient?’
Nurse was a plump, motherly woman, who had attended more than one odd protégé of mine, and whom I kept pretty constantly at my beck and call. She held out her hands.
‘It’s hard to tell. He hasn’t moved since I came.’
‘Not moved?—Is he still insensible?’
‘He seems to me to be in some sort of trance. He does not appear to breathe, and I can detect no pulsation, but the doctor says he’s still alive,—it’s the queerest case I ever saw.’
I went farther into the room. Directly I did so the man in the bed gave signs of life which were sufficiently unmistakable. Nurse hastened to him.
‘Why,’ she exclaimed, ‘he’s moving!—he might have heard you enter!’
He not only might have done, but it seemed possible that that was what he actually had done. As I approached the bed, he raised himself to a sitting posture, as, in the morning, he had done in the street, and he exclaimed, as if he addressed himself to someone whom he saw in front of him,—I cannot describe the almost more than human agony which was in his voice,
‘Paul Lessingham!—Beware!—The Beetle!’
What he meant I had not the slightest notion. Probably that was why what seemed more like a pronouncement of delirium than anything else had such an extraordinary effect upon my nerves. No sooner had he spoken than a sort of blank horror seemed to settle down upon my mind. I actually found myself trembling at the knees. I felt, all at once, as if I was standing in the immediate presence of something awful yet unseen.