That hideous strength

She had begun by dreaming simply of a face. Its expression was frightening because it was frightened. The face belonged to a man who was sitting hunched up in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls - waiting, she thought, for those who had him in their power to come in and do something horrible to him. At last the door was opened... She could not make out what the visitor was proposing to him, but she did discover that the prisoner was under sentence of death. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that frightened him more than that. The visitor, still smiling his cold smile, unscrewed the prisoner's head and took it away. Then all became confused.