Since childhood Patrick had had recurring dreams about his uncle’s farmhouse. The very magnitude of it had seized his imagination.

Growing up in the cramped quarters of his father’s simple lodgings, he was unused to architectural structures whose corners, windows, staircases, and basements could not be taken in in a single phrase of thought. His uncle’s house, to him, was a series of paragraphs, each one containing a subject entirely separate from the last.

The driveshed, although it functioned as one of the main entrances to the house, was a dark and disconnected world where the giant wheels of wagons were barely discernible in the gloom. The place reeked of damp; of black soil and mildewed burlap. It was the location of iron and leather and tin, harnesses, discarded washtubs, broken ploughs. It was where all cutting instruments were stored, teeth and blades, jagged edges of saws, soft shine of a sharpened axe. The boards, which extended around the shed’s perimeter, and which were used for walking purposes, were worn smooth by generations of men’s boots. The flash of a woman’s skirt through these premises was a shock to the environment – the way surroundings seem, sometimes, to respond to the sudden appearance of a trapped bird, which can be terrifying in the stillness of an undisturbed room.

Latch lifted and door pushed away from this spot, one entered another geography – that of the kitchen. Smells, colours, temperature, textures, underwent an abrupt change and, for Patrick the child, a change not quite so easy to undergo. It seemed to him that he carried the after-image of the driveshed’s unspecified menace with him into the warmth and activity of the kitchen, so that the loaf of bread rising on the counter, the plants unfurling on the windowsill, were charged with an almost imperceptible, ominous growth that frightened him, as did the voluminous cook, incessantly stirring by the stove.

This was a cumulative effect, and each room led to another without the transitional stage of a hall, though it too, had it existed, might have been pulled into the process. From the kitchen one passed directly into the dining room, and into this cool, still, formal space, Patrick carried the mood of earth and blades and machinery from the shed and the silent blind growth of the kitchen. Here, he could see his face change in a variety of polished surfaces: silver and mahogany, the glass doors of the china cabinet. Reflections and silence and a complete absence of dust. Patrick, knowing he was carrying by this time something of both the other rooms with him, began to believe he had a face for each. His dark expression, glowing in mahogany, was his driveshed self, the face that shone back at him from silver was one that he had acquired from the photosynthetic light of the kitchen, and in the cool transparency of glass where he could place his features over the objects behind it, a visage was given to him as a result of exposure to the dining room itself.

And so it continued, through the stuffed and billowing forms in the parlour, to the horizontals of the bedrooms with their large and frightening mirrors in which, Patrick believed, anything at all might appear. Any one of the ground-floor rooms could be entered into from the outside, but Patrick chose, as a form of thrilling self-torture, to follow the emotionally charged route of rooms that led to rooms that led to rooms, as if he were an explorer on the verge of a great discovery.

In his dreams, despite the fact that they were recurring, the discovery always came as a surprise. At the end of the parlour, in the position normally occupied by a large window, Patrick would find a door. His feeling of surprise would soon be replaced by one of intense curiosity and he would pull it open to be confronted with a narrow staircase which led, as might be expected, to rooms that led to rooms that led to rooms – a replica, in fact, of the ground floor of the house, except that the contents would be entirely scrambled. In this space, the dining room with its cold, blue walls and perfectly regular flooring, was filled with wheels and teeth and blades and smelled of damp, rotting burlap. The harsh, golden light of the kitchen, on the other hand, would expose undulating sinks and counters, soft tables and doughboards resembling the overstuffed furniture of the parlour. The parlour had become as smooth and untouched as ice; its surfaces reflecting not its own contents at all but those of rooms Patrick had never even imagined until that moment.

He would awaken, always, with blood pounding in his head and an intense fear that all the objects in the room where he slept would suddenly be unfamiliar and out of context.

As he grew older, the dream visited him less and less until, as he entered his twenties, it happened only once every two or three years. The fear that accompanied the dream subsided as well. Between occurrences of the nightmare there were long periods during which he forgot about it altogether.

But now, in his early thirties, walking through the rooms of his uncle’s house, carrying the anger towards the woman with him in his mind, he abruptly remembered it and, for the first time, understood its meaning, its message. Keep the sequence of fear, of quest, of desire in logical order – compartmentalized and exact. Try not to bring one with you into the other. Do not confuse fear with desire, desire with quest, quest with fear. Otherwise the world scrambles, becomes unidentifiable, loses its recognizable context.

A simple shift of objects, events, emotions, from their rightful place brings chaos. And the world you live in enters nightmare.

He had dislocated and mixed categories, had confused the woman with the whirlpool, had believed, in some crazy way, that she was the landscape that she walked around in every day. It was landscape that he wanted and needed, uncomplicated setting, its ability to function and endure in a pure, solitary state. He could enter it and depart from it without altering one drop of water, a single leaf on a tree. The forest, the whirlpool, could touch him and change him and remain as strong and relentless as they ever were before.

There would be no more confusion. He was through with the woman. From now on, whenever he visited Whirlpool Heights, and he knew he would visit often, it would be the landscape he was courting.