M. P. Shiel (1865–1947)

I read, I say, I conned, I would not stop: but I read that night wracked by panics such as have never entered into a heart to fancy, my flesh moving and creeping like a pool which, here and there, a breeze breathes on. Sometimes for three, four, minutes the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the sense of one phrase, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable troops that camped about me, to musing on the question of whether they might stand, and accuse me: for the worm was the world, and in the air a stirring of cerements, and the taste of the grey of ghosts seemed to infect my throat, and the odours of the loathsome tomb my nose, and deep tones of tolling my ears; at last the lamp smouldered low, low, and my charnel fancy was chockful with the screwing-down coffins, lynch-gates and grave-diggers, and the grating of ropes that lower into the grave, and the first thump of the earth upon the lid of that gaunt and gloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers I seemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout of the drowned, and the vapid froths which ridge their lips, until my flesh was moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries, and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear which pauses on dead men’s cheeks: for what is one insignificant man in his garment of flesh against mobs and armies of the disembodied, he alone with them, and nowhere another, his peer, to whom to appeal against them?