A month passes in routine. You go into N— less and less: just once every week or so, to stock up on groceries. You also leave the cabin less frequently, find yourself growing used to it. While you still take hikes through the forest to the little pond in the mornings, there are some afternoons when you do not leave at all. You forget about the owner and his nightmares; you become so acclimated to the dreamcatchers that you learn to ignore the sight of them. Indeed, you can go days at a time without remembering that the owner even exists, that the cabin, the forests, and the pond are not your own personal property.

And then one morning, while exploring the backyard, you discover the silhouettes. In the month that you have neglected it, the yard has grown thicker and taller with weeds. This morning the sky is clear and the sun high, but a mist has not yet burned off the mountain, so the tall grasses clump wetly together. You have to force your way forward, pushing with your hip, to penetrate the overgrowth. But once you reach the middle of the yard, the grass gives way suddenly: you stumble onto a small clearing, an elliptical enclosure measuring about two dozen feet. The owner must have mowed it before he left. It is on the ground of this clearing that you see the silhouettes: six black blotches spanning the width of the enclosure, evenly spaced and placed side by side, as dark against the green grass as char marks. You even take them for char marks, at first, scorches from an electrical storm. Then you notice their vaguely human shapes, the regularity in the row of them. Clearly these are silhouettes that the owner has made. Crouching to inspect one, you see that the blackened blades are indeed glossy and stiff, as with paint, and that your own shadow, compact and hunched inside itself, fills in the blotch’s outline perfectly. Scanning the perimeter of the enclosure, you spot the discarded can of spray paint, half buried by the rim of weeds, its cylinder’s cap jet-black. The six shapes look like crows perched along a power line, or like the chalked outlines of murdered men.

As for what the owner must have been thinking while he made them, you cannot fathom. The silhouettes seem no less insane than the dreamcatchers. On the one hand, there is the ritual installation of the dreamcatchers; and on the other hand, the ritual effigiation of the silhouettes. On the one hand, hammering into place all the dreamcatchers; and on the other hand, painstakingly stenciling these silhouettes. It is likely that the two rituals are interrelated: that both the dreamcatchers and the silhouettes are involved, somehow, in his idée fixe about nightmares. The only question is what role the latter plays. Like the dreamcatchers, the silhouettes probably constitute one more line of defense in the prophylactic apparatus of the cabin. Anthropomorphic, minatory, what they most resemble are scarecrows. Would the owner have thought they could ward off flocks of nightmares, established in the yard like this? You would not put it past him. Though it is possible that he had some other, more insane plan for them altogether.