There is something eerie about the quality of that lamplight. How thin it is and full of shadows, like the lighting of a long hallway in a dream. You can see where the doorless entryway to the shed gapes black. The lamp hangs directly above it, casting its cone of light downward: there the grainy haze creates a nightmare space, a space of expectancy. If it were the owner standing here tonight, he would almost certainly be waiting for something to step out into that cone of light. He would be bracing himself to see something emerge from the shed. And every second that something did not exit the shed and enter the cone of light, it would only become more certain, and more dreadful, that some vague, dark shape was about to exit the toolshed and enter the light.

Then there actually is the vague, dark shape to consider: the push mower. Leaning against the toolshed where you left it, just inside that cone of light, even the push mower takes on a sinister aspect. At this distance, its silhouette is easily mistaken for a man’s, for example. Whole seconds at a time, you can convince yourself that it is not a push mower at all. This is surely what the owner would be convincing himself, you understand. Even as he recognized, deep down, that the silhouette is merely the push mower, he would see in it nevertheless a man’s shape. He would convince himself that it is not just any silhouette, but one of his silhouettes: one of the backyard shadows risen from the ground of the enclosure. Staring longer and longer at its vague, dark shape, there in the grainy haze of the cone of light, he would whip himself into a frenzy, convincing himself of everything that the silhouette is: not a push mower, but an incubus, stockstill before the toolshed. Something malevolent, staring back at him. Looking straight through the bedroom window.

At this thought the owner would—as an hour ago you did—turn off the bedroom’s light, so that he could peer surreptitiously through the darkened pane. And invisible now he would—as all night you have been doing—stand sentry at the window.

The safety lamp’s bulb does not burn constantly. Activated by a timer, it burns for fifteen minutes and then blinks out, to prevent overheating. In this way, the shed gets bathed in its orange aureole only for quarter-hour intervals. Then, whenever the bulb blinks out, the shed is plunged into a vanishing darkness. Right now, for instance—even as you watch—the bulb snaps off, causing the shed to disappear. The windowpane goes instantly flat and black, and for a moment you see nothing. Your eyes adjust slowly, until you can descry the outline of the shed: a frame of slightly purer darkness carved into the night, like a trapdoor of blackness. Glowing faintly inside this outline is the safety lamp’s casing. Although the bulb is off, you can still make out an orange remnant where its coils cool. You see it suspended in the emptiness of the blackened windowpane, a wisp of ember. You can no longer distinguish the push mower at all.