You have never met the owner. You have not even spoken with him over the phone. When you responded to his house-sitting advertisement, he wrote back within days, asking whether you would be available to begin immediately. He had, apparently, already left. A key would be waiting for you beneath a stone on the porch. Because you live in the foothills of the mountain, and because you had arranged no other employment for the summer, it had not been a problem for you to pack your bag that night and set out first thing in the morning. In this way you—without so much as an interview—accepted a house-sitting position in a cabin in the woods.

Once inside, you make a quick inspection of the cabin. It is not the quaint woodland cottage you had been expecting, but for just a summer it will be serviceable. In the kitchen you turn knobs at the sink, and water runs, ruddily, from the faucet. Flipping switches, you find that there is power. For the most part, the interior of the cabin exudes the same air of abandonment as the outside. Some tables and chairs, a desk. In the bedroom an unsheeted mattress, stained, lying on the floorboards. And the walls, closets, shelves, and drawers: all perversely empty. You search the living room for a book or magazine, but see nothing: only the coffee table with its three chairs, a fourth chair in the corner. And opening the drawers of the bedroom dresser, you satisfy yourself that not a single article of clothing has been left behind. There could just as well be no one living here.

Seemingly the only personal possession of the owner’s are the dreamcatchers that he has strung in all the windows. Their feathered nets flash out at you from every pane. The bedroom window, naturally. But also in the small window above the kitchen sink, a dreamcatcher, and in the three windows arranged across the dining room’s northern wall, dreamcatchers. Where there are panes of glass in the doors, dreamcatchers in the doors. Even in the bathroom, you pull back the shower curtain to reveal a dreamcatcher in the stall’s brick-sized window. When you see it you have to laugh. The sheer excess: no glass in the cabin is unprotected by these webs. By these prophylaxes against nightmare.

Now here, you think, is a man absolutely terrified of nightmares.

When you finish unpacking your duffel bag you stand at the bedroom window, idly fingering the dreamcatcher there. Through the pane, you can see that the back lawn is equally weedy and lush as the front. Tall grasses stretch for a few hundred yards to a final stand of pines, as straight and dark as a squall line. The property ends where the forest begins, and each day the border between them must grow more blurred.

You try to imagine what sort of man would live this way. You have been assuming that the owner is older: rangy and gaunt, with a white beard and unkempt hair; retired, probably, and living out his last years on a pension, alone in hermitic reclusion. But in truth you have no idea how old he is, or how long he has been living in the cabin, or where—other than this cabin—he could even be staying right now. Nothing in the cabin suggests either that he is retired or that he isn’t; that he practices a specific trade, or what that trade might be. Indeed, the only clue to the owner’s identity is how completely he has avoided the usual traces or clues to identity. And from the absence of these things in the cabin, all you can infer is an absence of them in his life. You survey the empty bedroom and try to imagine him here. You picture an old, bony man, on the mattress on the floor, naked and cradling his knees to his chest—delirious with fear.