by Bennett Sims
You are certain that the apricot spider is responsible for these streaks. It has woven this web of misrecognition in the mirror: where faces get stuck in its threads like flies, they can no longer be recognized. A face is caught in it right now. It is not your face. And before you can witness the spider clambering onto the mirror to begin feeding on this face, you flee the bathroom.
In the bare light of the next morning you return to find that the mirror’s streaks do not look like anything anymore. You can discern no organizing design in them—just a random arrangement of stray lines. With a wet paper towel you wipe away the grime. When you have finished, you lift the mirror a few inches off the wall, leaning around to peer behind it. But of course there is no trace of the apricot spider. It was foolish, you tell yourself, to let yourself get whipped into such a frenzy last night. Scared of your own reflection! You resolve to spend the day swimming laps in the pond. You need to get out of the house. For the space of an hour, it seems, you thought the kinds of thoughts the owner would think, and believed in the superstitions that he believes. As if you were contracting not cabin fever, but the owner’s very madness.
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.
You stare at the six dark blotches on the grass, pretending they form an elaborate Rorschach test. To arrive at the same interpretation of their pattern as the owner, you must first imagine your way into the particular mythology of his madness. He believes himself to be in a life or death struggle with nightmare; he has barricaded his cabin comprehensively against it. At first you assumed that these silhouettes belong to the same defense system. But now you cannot shake the image that the owner, you feel sure, must have of them: anthropomorphic, minatory, what they most resemble are incubi. As if these are the very specters he has boarded himself up against.
Not scarecrows to scare away nightmares, but nightmares themselves. Each shadow a hypostatized nightmare. You are certain this is what the owner believes. On those mornings when he woke from a terrible dream, he must have waded out into the clearing with a can of spray paint. By casting his shadow on the ground, he must have imagined he was casting the nightmare from his body. And to complete this unhinged cleansing ritual, he crouched down and filled in the shadow’s outline with paint, wrapping the nightmare in black the way a spider wraps its prey in silk. Yes, he would have believed that the blackened ground was itself having a bad dream, coated with the terrors that had coated his mind. Contaminated. To you, of course, the grass blades seem blackened by nothing other than his madness. If they are coated with anything, it is with the thoughts he must have been thinking when he painted them. Moltings of his madness. Part exorcism and part ecdysis.
You reach out your hand toward the foot of one of them, as if to pet its black grasses. But almost immediately you think better of it. For this feels tantamount to plunging your hand into an anthill of insanity—your skin coated with the blackness that coats the grass, positively crawling with the thoughts that madden the grass. You snatch back your hand, as from a flame.
But that in itself is a mad thought. It is the kind of thought the owner would think. To prove this point to yourself, you force your fingers forward. You run their tips gingerly over the blackened grass. The blades are stiff and dry.
That night you have trouble falling asleep. You are lying on the owner’s mattress in the dark, staring out his bedroom window. You are not afraid of the dreamcatcher there, or of the six silhouettes lying beyond it in the yard. Rather, what unsettles you is the fact that the owner has installed them at all. You keep thinking: you are living in the cabin of a madman. You wonder: how long can you live in a madman’s home without going mad yourself?
You are not being superstitious, you do not think. It simply stands to reason. For it would be like sleeping in a house where a family has been slaughtered: whether or not you believe in ghosts, there is the atmosphere to consider. And here, in the cabin of a man who believes himself to be besieged, on every side, by nightmare—the atmosphere is bound to be tinged with insane energies. Before you arrived, the owner was living who knows how long alone between these walls. It is possible that he has polluted the very air with his madness.
You toss about on the mattress and picture the owner lying here, as sleepless as you are. You think of the many nights he must have lain awake, meticulously constructing his mythology. For it is meticulous. He has devised rules, and then revised those rules: how the incubi operate and how the dreamcatchers work; what protocols need to be observed when stenciling the silhouettes. Indeed, what in reality he has built is a thought structure: hermetic, self-contained, freestanding. This is the house that his madness has constructed around itself; this is the web it has woven. And for who knows how long the owner inhabited it alone, the thought structure’s sole occupant: at once its dark architect, seated at the building’s center, and its dark spider, patiently spinning out its thread. Now that he is gone, this center is empty, but the vacant thought structure remains. Oblivious, you have wandered right inside it, like a visitor to the house, or, yes—why not say it?—like a fly into a web.
It seems unlikely that the owner was always mad. You doubt, for instance, that he arrived at the cabin and bega
n installing dreamcatchers first thing, initiating the silhouette ritual first thing. Probably, he was mildly paranoid when he first retired here, and only after prolonged seclusion did his delusions worsen. For that matter, he may even have been perfectly sane when he arrived. Prolonged seclusion would warp even a perfectly sane person’s thought processes eventually. That is the nature of cabin fever: the isolation gets to you in its own good time. If the cabin does not drive you straight out of your mind—if you absolutely refuse to be driven out of your mind—very well: then the cabin will find a way of driving itself straight into your mind, implanting an insanity there itself. The insanity is simply a nail, but the cabin is the hammer.
And now here you are, alone not only inside the cabin, which hammers at you with cabin fever, but also inside the owner’s thought structure, which hammers at you with madness. The prudent thing would be to take your half of the stipend and abandon the position immediately. Already you are showing signs of strain, after all: that midnight access of irrationality at the mirror. But then again, on the other hand, there are only two months remaining. You can withstand two months. Two months is not nearly enough time for you to be driven mad. Now if you had to stay six months, maybe, a year. But two months?
You turn over in bed and stare at the ceiling. Your mind is racing. You cannot stop analyzing the relationship between architecture and psychology. Even at the etymological level, your mind cannot stop cataloguing all the terms that the vocabularies of architecture and psychology share. Entrance, for example. For while entrance is a psychological verb, referring to the process of hypnosis, it is also, at the same time, an architectural noun, referring to a point of ingress. To be entranced, psychologically, is to be pushed through the entrance of an alien thought structure. Hypnotized, you stand inside a new structure of thoughts, one that has been designed especially to encage you. Or the word threshold, a noun in both vocabularies. Threshold refers—psychologically—to liminality, the spaces between perceptual awareness. And yet threshold also refers—architecturally—to the doorways that separate distinct rooms. The thoughts you think in the bathroom differ qualitatively from the thoughts you think in the hall, and dividing these thought systems—no less than the physical spaces themselves—is a threshold. When you cross a threshold, psychologically, you are passing from one room of thought into another.
You wonder whether such a structure of thought—which, like any structure, also has its entrances and its thresholds—might ever actually become coextensive with a building: whether it would be possible for a thought structure and a physical structure to overlap. If an occupant lives a long enough time alone in the same building, and if his mental layout is gradually scaffolded over the rooms in which he thinks—then yes, you decide, eventually the two structures will grow concentric. If you step over the threshold of that building, you pass over the threshold into its thoughts. Crossing the entrance of that building, you are entranced. And if the thought structure happens to be a mad one, then you must move from room to room in that madness.
You really are living inside a madman’s thought structure, you realize, and his madness’s mansion has many rooms. In a spasm, you clutch at the bedsheets with your fingers. Your brain is racked by a black panic. Sitting up, you survey the empty room around you. It seems to reel, spinning as if you were drunk. Beneath the baseboards, behind the joists, you can visualize—as in an X-ray—a cage of translucent gray lines, shadowed like bone. And when your temples throb, you can feel the room driving itself into your mind. You can feel the cabin and its thought structure hammering away, driving itself deeper inside. It will go on pounding for as long as it takes, you know, until finally you internalize it, introjecting all the owner’s psychical architecture. Then your mind will mimic the layout of that madman’s mind completely. Like two apartments in a complex, your mind and the owner’s mind, mirror images of each other: two insanities sharing a floor plan.
Gritting your teeth, you clench your eyes violently, as if trying to crush something between cheek and brow. What you are trying to crush is every throbbing thought in your skull.
In the morning you take a walk through the backyard, cutting a wide berth around the field’s middle. You have not slept all night.
It is a cool morning, dim with impending sunrise. For a while you are able to admire the dawn. Lying on a slope just three hundred feet beneath the timberline, the backyard commands an eastern prospect of declivitous pine grove and horizon, and, staring ahead, you can see clear out across the forests. The woods stretch forever away and down, black avalanche bristling the foothills. Above the dark margin of the lower fir forests is an argent margin of overcast, and at the border dividing them is a thin interstice of gold light. You listen as a breeze insufflates the pine trees. Even at this distance you can hear it, a hissing like water sizzling all over the mountain. You turn to head back toward the cabin, and at this moment a strong wind blows, giving the pines to sough again. Suddenly the sound is hateful to you. For now that hiss reminds you not of water sizzling, but of the noise a threatened spider makes: a circumambient, mandibular sound, sibilant, as if the entire mountain is hissing in your ear. The wind picks up, and the hissing intensifies. It engulfs you. You hurry back to the cabin to escape the wind, and as you walk you keep your eyes fixed on the porch and your hands cupped tightly over your ears.
The following day you sit at the dining room table with a sheet of paper and a pen. At the sheet’s heading, you scrawl the word HOUSESITTING, and beside it, the various positions that this encompasses: GUARDIAN, CUSTODIAN, SENTRY. None describe your function in the cabin. You are no longer sure what that function is. And lately a troubling thought has occurred to you. It is an obvious thought, yet only now do you think it: it is that you, too—the house sitter—must be playing some role in the owner’s thought structure. Like the dreamcatchers, like the silhouettes, you must figure somehow into his madness.
You meet no practical need by being here. Aside from the dreamcatchers, there is nothing to protect in this place, no property to guard. Some furniture, the contents of the toolshed—nothing, or close to nothing. Nor is there any standard of general upkeep to maintain. The place needs no house sitter, yet the owner has hired a house sitter. It follows that he must have had a unique conception of house-sitting. If the typical duties or responsibilities do not apply to the cabin, then the owner must have had in mind different duties—no doubt madder duties, more frightful ones.
Does he expect you to clean out the dreamcatchers each morning? Keep them from clogging? Are you to carry on the ritual of the silhouettes, spray-painting incubi of your own in the enclosure? It is almost as if you have been hired not to house-sit the physical cabin, but to house-sit its parallel thought structure. To occupy and tidy up the owner’s thought structure while he is gone.
On the sheet of paper, you study the word HOUSESITTING. It is an odd word, you realize. The longer you look at it, the odder it seems. And oddest of all is what the owner could possibly have meant by it. Beneath HOUSESITTING, you start a running column of the word’s anagrammatic permutations. You begin with HISSING. You write the word GUT, then the word SIN. You write the full sentence HE IS TO GUT SIN. Then you superscribe an E above the U in GUT, so that the sentence optionally reads HE IS TO GET SIN. You notice you can make NOUS. Below, you write the full sentence I GET THIS NOUS. You can feel yourself closing in on something here. You are sure that the true nature of house-sitting, what it really is and means, is hidden somewhere inside HOUSESITTING. When the owner placed an advertisement for a house sitter, it was really this hidden something that he was soliciting. And you can just see it, embedded in the letters, catching your eye and calling out to you to be deciphered: a secret meaning that, if only you could crack its code, would illuminate everything. You keep rearranging the twelve letters into short, complete sentences. H… I GUESS IT NOT, you write.
You write the word HOST. Below, you write the words GUEST and, beside it in the margin, GEIST. Then, in an inspir
ed and almost automatic way, you find yourself writing, I UNGHOST SITE. You set the pen down on the table and stare at this sentence. You feel sure that this is it. What is more, you are certain that ghost in particular is the one word you have this whole time been searching for: the hidden element that has been haunting HOUSESITTING from within, catching your eye and calling out to you; the pea buried beneath all of HOUSESITTING’s anagrammatic mattresses, giving the word no rest.
The owner has brought you here to unghost the site. You picture the silhouettes lying in the backyard enclosure: each hypostatized nightmare is a human shape, a shade. It is easy to believe that the owner believes that these incubi are like so many ghosts, haunting him and the cabin. And even that they might discover some way, in his absence, of infiltrating the cabin: that he would return to find the building infested with specters, overrun by them, the logs riddled with nightmares as with termites. There is no question why he would hire a house sitter under such circumstances. He would need someone here to perform an exorcistic function. That, then, is the role that you have been assigned. You are to unghost the site by occupying it, to repel these specters by your presence. The house sitter is literally to sit in the house, in the same way and for the same reasons that you would sit in another’s chair while they were gone: to prevent strangers from taking it, to keep it warm. That is, precisely, to keep cold spots from developing in it.
But an alternate interpretation of I UNGHOST SITE also occurs to you, an uglier interpretation, and one that is even easier to believe. Namely, that you are to unghost the owner’s ghosts in the same way that you are to introject his thought structure: by inheriting them. That the madman intends to offer you up as a sacrifice to these shades, some substitute or scapegoat to be haunted in his place. He would have the silhouettes torment you rather than him; he would have them drive you mad until they drive you off the mountain, and not only that, but drive themselves right inside you as well, into your mind, so that you take them away with you when you leave. Out of sheer spite you ball up the sheet of paper and throw it onto the floor. So, you think. He thinks you will be the herd of swine into which his Legion can be driven, then be driven off the mountain. He thinks his nightmares will drive themselves right inside you, then drive the both of you straight off the mountain. Well, he will find that you are not so docile as a herd of swine. You step on the balled-up paper and grind it beneath your heel until the dining room resounds with the dry-leaf sound of its crepitating.
