You can no longer even bear it, staring at the chair. The sight of it there in the corner forces you to reconstruct the line of the madman’s reasoning. And to think the thoughts that a madman must have thought is, you know, only another way of going mad. It would not be an exaggeration to say that when you think the thoughts that the owner must have thought, the owner is thereby invading your mind. He is possessing you via these thoughts about the chair—he is haunting the chair. Indeed, if the cabin is haunted by anything, it is not by ghosts of the owner’s nightmares—it is by ghosts of the owner’s madness. You can sense, sitting invisibly in the chair, all the thoughts that the owner must have thought about it. They haunt the chair. You, in turn, are haunted by that chair.

You stare at the chair. If you were ever to actually sit in it, you know, oh, it would be just like sitting in an electric chair: the owner’s thoughts would course into your body, flowing through you in currents. Your body would absolutely surge with the owner’s thoughts. They would be all that you could ever think.

You do not sleep that night. At first light of morning you stalk to the edge of the backyard to retrieve the push mower. The owner wants you to unghost the site? You will show him exactly how you go about unghosting sites.

You find the push mower still leaning against the side of the toolshed. A rusted contraption not much larger than a vacuum cleaner, it must have been left out in all weather: the red paint of its chassis is chipping badly, and the tips of its blades—lining the denticulate cylinder in its casing—are dull. It barely cuts grass anymore. You test it on the fringe of weeds where it stands, which rise as high as halfway up its steel handlebar. Setting the mower down in a patch and gripping that handlebar, you struggle for fifteen minutes, ramming the chassis back and forth over the grass stems. Each glossy green stalk just spools itself around the rotating cylinder, catching between its blades like floss. This causes the mower to halt, and you have to shove on it to uproot the recalcitrant grasses. Only then—after making multiple passes over that same fringe of weeds—can you effortfully shred them to confetti. It takes you half a dozen passes. When you are finished, the tendons in your arms burn with strain. Your skin is covered in a fine sheen of sweat and plastered over with little green flecks of grass shrapnel.

It will take entirely too long to trim the yard this way. You simply carry the mower to the enclosure in the middle. If nothing else, you will mow the silhouettes. Now you stand over the leftmost shadow, the chassis positioned atop its feet. You should be able to make quick work of them all. Their grass blades, already trimmed once by the owner, are shorter and more manageable, and probably brittle from the paint.