Psychological Science

Hypnos is a first-person narrative, written from the perspective of an unnamed character living in Kent and later London, England. The narrator writes that he fears sleep, and is resolved to write his story down lest it drive him further mad, regardless of what people think after reading it. The narrator, a sculptor, recounts meeting a mysterious man in a railway station. The moment the man opened his "immense, sunken, and widely luminous eyes", the narrator knew that the stranger would become his friend-–"the only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before.

When you're a fast-failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, with a known termagant for a wife, an event like this - digging up a human hand in your potato patch - can be devastating to your small profits when the news gets out, especially since that ancient hand has peculiar "qualities." This discovery sets off a chain of inexorable events that lead Leonard Johnson to rash action resulting in a terrible kind of justice. A balance must be restored and a lesson learned.