The following day you sit at the dining room table with a sheet of paper and a pen. At the sheet’s heading, you scrawl the word HOUSESITTING, and beside it, the various positions that this encompasses: GUARDIAN, CUSTODIAN, SENTRY. None describe your function in the cabin. You are no longer sure what that function is. And lately a troubling thought has occurred to you. It is an obvious thought, yet only now do you think it: it is that you, too—the house sitter—must be playing some role in the owner’s thought structure. Like the dreamcatchers, like the silhouettes, you must figure somehow into his madness.

You meet no practical need by being here. Aside from the dreamcatchers, there is nothing to protect in this place, no property to guard. Some furniture, the contents of the toolshed—nothing, or close to nothing. Nor is there any standard of general upkeep to maintain. The place needs no house sitter, yet the owner has hired a house sitter. It follows that he must have had a unique conception of house-sitting. If the typical duties or responsibilities do not apply to the cabin, then the owner must have had in mind different duties—no doubt madder duties, more frightful ones.

Does he expect you to clean out the dreamcatchers each morning? Keep them from clogging? Are you to carry on the ritual of the silhouettes, spray-painting incubi of your own in the enclosure? It is almost as if you have been hired not to house-sit the physical cabin, but to house-sit its parallel thought structure. To occupy and tidy up the owner’s thought structure while he is gone.

On the sheet of paper, you study the word HOUSESITTING. It is an odd word, you realize. The longer you look at it, the odder it seems. And oddest of all is what the owner could possibly have meant by it. Beneath HOUSESITTING, you start a running column of the word’s anagrammatic permutations. You begin with HISSING. You write the word GUT, then the word SIN. You write the full sentence HE IS TO GUT SIN. Then you superscribe an E above the U in GUT, so that the sentence optionally reads HE IS TO GET SIN. You notice you can make NOUS. Below, you write the full sentence I GET THIS NOUS. You can feel yourself closing in on something here. You are sure that the true nature of house-sitting, what it really is and means, is hidden somewhere inside HOUSESITTING. When the owner placed an advertisement for a house sitter, it was really this hidden something that he was soliciting. And you can just see it, embedded in the letters, catching your eye and calling out to you to be deciphered: a secret meaning that, if only you could crack its code, would illuminate everything. You keep rearranging the twelve letters into short, complete sentences. H… I GUESS IT NOT, you write.

You write the word HOST. Below, you write the words GUEST and, beside it in the margin, GEIST. Then, in an inspired and almost automatic way, you find yourself writing, I UNGHOST SITE. You set the pen down on the table and stare at this sentence. You feel sure that this is it. What is more, you are certain that ghost in particular is the one word you have this whole time been searching for: the hidden element that has been haunting HOUSESITTING from within, catching your eye and calling out to you; the pea buried beneath all of HOUSESITTING’s anagrammatic mattresses, giving the word no rest.