They startled me. “Behind the wall?” I said to myself. “Behind the wall? What wall?”
There were the scientific notes he had made! Then at the end a sane and eminent doctor had written shocking gibberish. “What’s behind the wall?”
“Come here,” I called to that grim machine, the nurse.
She came, looked over my shoulder at my finger pointing at the words, and her face filled with a dreadful expression of apprehension, all the more uncouth because it sat upon a countenance habitually blank. She did not answer. She pointed. I looked up. And then I knew that the wall in question was that blank expanse of pale blue, that noncommittal wall that rose beside the bed, at one moment flat, hard, and impenetrable, at another with the limitless depths and color of a summer sky.
“Turn up that light a little,” said I uneasily. “What has this wall to do with us?”
“Nothing,” said Miss Peters. “Nothing. I refuse to recognize such a thing.”
“Then, what did Dr. MacMechem see?” I asked.
“He saw nothing,” she answered. “It is the child who knows that something is beyond that wall. It is her delirium. There is no sense in it. She believes some one is there. She has tried to explain. She puts her hands upon that surface and smiles, or sometimes her face, as she looks, will all screw up in pain. It has a strange effect upon her.”
“How?” said I. “You are impressed, too, eh? Well, how does it show? MacMechem was no fool. Speak.”
The raw-boned woman shivered a little, I thought. “That’s what causes me to wonder, Doctor,” she said. “There is an effect upon her. She can foretell the condition of her disease. She seems conscious that her life depends on the welfare of something else or the misfortune and suffering of something else—beyond—that—wall.”