Beyond the Wall

by Ambrose Bierce


Many years ago, on my way from Hong Kong to New York, I spent a week in San Francisco. A long time had gone by since I'd been in that city, during which my business interests in the Far East had prospered beyond my wildest dreams. I was rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew my friendship with some friends from my youth who were still alive. The most important of these was Mohan Dampier, an old school friend I was no longer writing to - as often happens between men who are far apart.

I remembered Dampier as a handsome, strong young man with academic interests, but with a great dislike of work and indifference to many of the things that the world cares for, including wealth. He had, however, inherited just enough to make him comfortable for the rest of his life. His family, one of the oldest in the country, was proud that none of its members had ever been in business or politics, nor become popular or well-known. Mohan was unusually superstitious, which led him to study the occult, although his intelligence protected him from fantastic and dangerous beliefs.

The night of my visit to him was stormy. It was the Californian winter and the incessant rain splashed in the empty streets, or, lifted by the wind, was thrown against the houses. With great difficulty, my cab driver found the right place in a sparsely populated suburb. The house, a rather ugly one, stood in the centre of a garden which had no flowers or grass. The house was a two-storey brick one with a tower, a storey higher, at one corner. The only visible light came from that tower.

In answer to my note asking if I could call, Dampier had written, 'Don't ring - open the door and come up.' I did so. The stairs were dimly lit. I managed to reach the top floor without disaster and entered the room in the tower through an open door. Dampier came forward in a dressing-gown and slippers to welcome me. If I'd thought for a moment that he should have said hello at the front door, my first look at him showed me it was not because of his lack of hospitality.

He was not the same. Although he was only just middle-aged, he had gone grey and had a noticeable stoop. He was extremely thin, his face deeply lined, his complexion dead-white, without a touch of colour. His eyes, unnaturally large, glowed with a fire that was almost manic.

He offered me a seat and a cigar and said how pleased he was to meet me. Some unimportant conversation followed, but all the while I had a sad sense of the great change in him. He must have noticed, for he suddenly said with a bright enough smile, "You are disappointed in me."

I did not know what to reply, but managed to say: "Really, I don't know."

He made no reply and I was silent too, for our talk had taken a depressing turn, yet I could not think how to make it pleasanter. Suddenly, in a pause in the storm, when I could almost taste the silence, I heard a gentle tapping, which seemed to come from the wall behind my chair. It sounded like it came from a human hand, not like someone trying to get in but, rather I thought, an agreed signal. I glanced at Dampier. He seemed to have forgotten me and was staring at the wall behind me with an expression in his eyes that I cannot describe, although my memory of it is as vivid today as it was then. I got up to leave. He seemed to recover at once.

"Please sit down," he said. "It's nothing - no-one is there."

But the tapping was repeated.

"Pardon me," I said. "It is late. Can I call tomorrow?"

He smiled - a little mechanically, I thought. "It's very polite of you," said he, "but quite unnecessary. Really, this is the only room in the tower and no-one is there. At least..." He left the sentence incomplete, got up and opened the window which the sound seemed to come from. "Look."

Not knowing what else to do, I followed him to the window and looked out. A street lamp gave enough light through the rain to make it plain that 'no-one was there.' There was nothing but the wall of the tower.

Dampier closed the window and sat down again.

The incident was not especially mysterious. Any one of a dozen explanations was possible (though none has occurred to me), yet it affected me strangely - more perhaps because of my friend's effort to reassure me, which seemed to give it a certain importance. He had proved that no-one was there, but that made it more intriguing and he offered no explanation. His silence was, in fact, irritating.

"Please stay", he said. "I am grateful you're here. What you have heard tonight, I believe I've heard twice before. Now I know it was no illusion. That means a lot to me -more than you know. Have another cigar and a little patience while I tell you the story."

"Ten years ago," he said, "I lived in a ground-floor apartment in one of a row of houses, all alike, at the other end of the town. It had been the best area of San Francisco but had been neglected. The row of houses where I lived stood a little way back from the street, each having a little garden, separated from its neighbours by paths from the gates to the doors.

"One morning as I was leaving, I saw a young girl entering the next garden on the left. It was a warm day in June, and she had a white dress on. I did not pay much attention to her simple clothes though, because no-one could look at her face and think of anything earthly. All that I had ever seen or dreamt of loveliness was in that living picture. For a moment I stood motionless, my hat in my hand, conscious of my rudeness in staring. Then I went away, leaving my heart behind. Usually, I would not have returned to the garden until nightfall but, by the middle of the afternoon, I was back there, showing an interest in the few flowers I had never looked at before. She did not appear.

"I will not bore you with details. Many times afterwards I met the girl, yet never spoke to her or tried to get her attention. But I was in love with her.

"But I was from an old family and, although she was beautiful, the girl was not from my class. I had learnt her name and something about her family. She was an orphan, a dependent niece of the impossible elderly fat woman in whose lodging-house she lived. My income was small and I was not the marrying type; perhaps it's a gift. Marrying into that family would have made me live as they did, part me from my books and studies and destroy my social standing. In brief, my tastes, habits, instinct and my reason all fought against it. No woman, I argued, is what this lovely girl seems. Love is only a dream; so, why should I cause my own awakening?

"What I had to do was obvious. Honour, caution, preservation of my ideals - all told me to go away, but I was too weak for that. The most that I could do - and only that by a great effort of will - was to stop meeting the girl. I did. I even avoided the meetings in the garden, leaving my rooms only when I knew she had gone to her music lessons, and returning after nightfall. Yet all the while I was like a person mesmerised.

"One evening the devil put a stupid idea into my head. By apparently careless questions, I learnt from my gossipy landlady that the young woman's bedroom was on the other side of the wall from my own. I could not help it. One evening, I gently tapped on the wall. There was no answer but I could not accept this. I repeated the madness, but again without success.

"An hour later, while concentrating on my studies, I heard, or thought I heard, my signal answered. Throwing down my books, I ran to the wall and gave three loud taps. This time the response was unmistakable: one, two, three - an exact repetition of my signal. That was all I could get from her, but it was enough - too much.

"The next evening, and for many evenings afterwards, that madness went on. I always had "the last word". During the whole time, I was madly happy but I persevered in my decision not to see her. Then, as I should have expected, I got no further answers. "She's disgusted," I said to myself, "that I'm making no effort to see her" and I decided to make friends with her and - what? I did not know, nor do I know now, what might have happened. I only know that I spent days and days trying to meet her and all in vain; she was invisible as well as inaudible. I walked in the streets where we had met, but she didn't come. From my window, I watched the garden in front of her house, but she went neither in nor out. I became very depressed, believing she had gone away, yet I did not ask my landlady. In fact, I had taken a strong dislike to her for speaking of the girl with less kindness than I thought she deserved.

"There came a night when, worn out with emotion, indecision and misery, I had gone to bed early and fallen into a deep sleep. In the middle of the night something made me open my eyes and sit up, wide awake and listening intently for I did not know what. Then I thought I heard a faint tapping on the wall - the ghost of the familiar signal. In a few moments it was repeated: one, two, three - no louder than before. I was about to reply when I thought of a cruel revenge. She had ignored me for so long; now I would ignore her. All the rest of the night I lay awake, 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 that I had heard no news and did not want to hear any.

"'About the sick young lady next door,' she babbled on. 'W'hat! You didn't know? She's been ill for weeks. And now...'

"I almost jumped on her. 'And now,' I cried, 'now what?'

"'She is dead.'

"That is not the whole story. In the middle of the night, as I learnt later, the patient, waking from a long period of unconsciousness after a week of delirium, had asked - they were her last words - that her bed should be moved to the opposite side of the room. The nurses thought her request a symptom of her delirium, but did as she asked. And there the poor dying girl had wasted her energy trying to communicate with me.

"What can I do? She is a ghost 'blown about by the winds' - coming in the storm and darkness. This is the third visit. On the first occasion I was too sceptical to do more than listen and make sure there really was knocking; on the second, I answered the signal after it was repeated several times, but got no reply. Tonight is the third time. There is no more to tell."

When Dampier had finished his story I could think of nothing to say. I got up and said good-night and told him I was sorry but would see him soon. That night, alone with his sadness and remorse, he passed into the Unknown.