When, in the middle of the night, lying in his bed by Gerda’s side, he recalled this evil experience, he found the explanation of it in a sort of dissolution-hypnosis, or corruption-sympathy, linking him with the actual dead body of Albert Smith!

What he experienced was strange enough. He found himself very soon clutching with his fingers one of the posts of that stile, while with his other hand he dug his stick savagely into the sunbaked earth. And it seemed to him that every revolting or secretive instinct he had ever had took on a material shape and became as an actual portion of his physical body.

He became, in fact, a living human head, emerging from a monstrous agglomeration of all repulsiveness. And this gross mass was not only foul and excremental; it was in some mysterious way comic . He, the head of this unspeakable body, was the joke of the abyss; the smug charlatan-prig at which the devils shrieked with laughter.