The owner has brought you here to unghost the site. You picture the silhouettes lying in the backyard enclosure: each hypostatized nightmare is a human shape, a shade. It is easy to believe that the owner believes that these incubi are like so many ghosts, haunting him and the cabin. And even that they might discover some way, in his absence, of infiltrating the cabin: that he would return to find the building infested with specters, overrun by them, the logs riddled with nightmares as with termites. There is no question why he would hire a house sitter under such circumstances. He would need someone here to perform an exorcistic function. That, then, is the role that you have been assigned. You are to unghost the site by occupying it, to repel these specters by your presence. The house sitter is literally to sit in the house, in the same way and for the same reasons that you would sit in another’s chair while they were gone: to prevent strangers from taking it, to keep it warm. That is, precisely, to keep cold spots from developing in it.

But an alternate interpretation of I UNGHOST SITE also occurs to you, an uglier interpretation, and one that is even easier to believe. Namely, that you are to unghost the owner’s ghosts in the same way that you are to introject his thought structure: by inheriting them. That the madman intends to offer you up as a sacrifice to these shades, some substitute or scapegoat to be haunted in his place. He would have the silhouettes torment you rather than him; he would have them drive you mad until they drive you off the mountain, and not only that, but drive themselves right inside you as well, into your mind, so that you take them away with you when you leave. Out of sheer spite you ball up the sheet of paper and throw it onto the floor. So, you think. He thinks you will be the herd of swine into which his Legion can be driven, then be driven off the mountain. He thinks his nightmares will drive themselves right inside you, then drive the both of you straight off the mountain. Well, he will find that you are not so docile as a herd of swine. You step on the balled-up paper and grind it beneath your heel until the dining room resounds with the dry-leaf sound of its crepitating.

The mountain contains the forest; the forest contains the weed field; the weed field contains the enclosure, which contains the shadows, and it also contains the cabin, which is coextensive with the thought structure; the cabin and the thought structure both contain the dining room, whose walls contain the table at which you are sitting. Each container smaller than the last, and embedded inside it, like a series of nested parentheses. And at the center of this series is you. Every layer presses inward to where you sit. The mechanism is trying to crush your mind from all sides. But you are not worried, because you will never be driven mad. You sit calmly in the smallest chamber of all, your skull, impervious to the currents rippling against you: wall, wall, shadow, field. You are the one sane sentence at the heart of the parenthetical. You cannot be erased.