By midnight you can no longer endure staying inside the cabin. You pace from room to room. You can see now all the ways in which the owner is trying to drive you mad. You see how the cabin has been laid for you like a trap.

There is no question that the rooms have been scrupulously arranged to make you lose your mind: the dreamcatchers in the windows, the bareness of the walls, even the placement of the furniture—it is all rich with significance. Each detail is specifically designed to catch your attention and invite interpretation. You are meant to wonder what the owner must have been thinking when he arranged these things and, in this manner, to think your way into the owner’s thoughts.

For instance, that chair in the living room. Tonight you notice, as if for the first time, how strange it is that one chair has been removed from the coffee table in the room’s center and positioned in the northeast corner. The three other chairs remain around the coffee table, identical to one another and to the missing chair: beige, unpainted, the wood of their railings splintered. But the fourth chair has been conspicuously set apart from the others. Its seat faces the corner, opposite the vertical crease where the northern and eastern walls meet, with its scalloped back to the room, such that anyone seated in it would see nothing but wall. The chair is positioned like the stool of a dunce.

Why would the owner position a chair like the stool of a dunce? What would have possessed him, not only to remove the chair from the coffee table, but also to set it in this eccentric position? He must have needed the extra elevation of the chair’s seat, perhaps standing on it to replace a lightbulb. Except that there is no light socket above the chair. The only light in the room is the bare bulb dangling from an exposed wire above the coffee table. No, if the owner had decided impulsively to move the chair, it must have been motivated—like everything else—by his madness. The chair, too, you realize—even the chair—must be playing some role in his thought structure.

What must the owner have been thinking? What thoughts must have been passing through his mind? But this thought, you understand, is exactly what the chair wants you to think! The chair has been placed in the corner for no other reason than to elicit this thought in you. And that, that exactly, is what you loathe about the chair: that it coerces you into wondering what the owner must have been thinking, that it forces you to imagine all the thoughts passing through that madman’s mind. Now you cannot help thinking his thoughts. I should like to punish my nightmare, the owner must have thought, you think. I should like to banish my nightmare to the corner. I will make it sit in time-out, facing the wall. He must have hallucinated one of his own nightmares sitting in that chair: a paper-thin silhouette or incubus, facing the corner like a dunce. The man is absolutely mad!