Page 41 of Girl, Entangled

Jennifer was three steps from the car when the shape came off the wall.

It came from the blind side, from behind the concrete pillar she walked past every evening without a glance. Jennifer’s primary response was the social embarrassment of nearly walking into a stranger, the apology already forming, because the shape was so large that her mind filed it as an obstacle before it filed it as a man.

Then a hand the size of a dinner plate closed over her mouth and the back of her head met a chest like a wall. Her car keys hit the ground with a sound that seemed very far away, and the apology that rested on her lips vanished.

Jennifer tried to break free. She drove an elbow back and hit muscle that didn’t give. She raked at the hand with her nails and got nothing but the dry smell of this stranger’s skin.

For a fleeting second, Jennifer thought that, along with the stranger’s attack, a wasp had pricked her neck.

***

Jennifer came back to herself by degrees, as though she was surfacing from anaesthetic. The world rematerialized piece by piece, and she became aware that she was no longer in the parking lot at work.

There was open air above her. It was a wide, soft darkness with no ceiling to it.

Outdoors. She was still outdoors.

How long had she been out? Her mind scrambled for some kind of temporal awareness. It could have been minutes since she was in the lot. It could have been the middle of the night. The last thing she had was the wasp at her neck and the keys going down, and then this, with a gap in the middle she couldn’t account for.

Her mind, casting about, offered her the easy answers first. She was asleep at the office. She’d put her head down on the markup and dreamed herself outdoors. That was all. She’d wake with a crick in her neck and the fan whirring and Dear Mrs. Grisham still blinking on the screen.

Or not, because she could feel physical sensation that dreams didn’t offer.

Her next thought was that someone was taking her to the hospital. Had she passed out in the parking lot – it wouldn’t be the first time – and jumped to her aid?

No. That idea dissolved as quickly as it came, because her environment did not correlate with the locations of the hospitals in D.C.

Or – and this one came with a flush of shame – it was Mrs. Grisham. The thought made no sense and she knew it made no sense even as it formed, but it formed anyway. Jennifer half believed she’d been brought somewhere to be taught a lesson, and that Mrs. Grisham was behind it, and that any moment a plain-spoken woman would step out from behind a tree and explain to her exactly what severity meant.

None of it held. She lay there and the answers came apart one after another, and underneath them, where the truth was, something else was happening that she’d been too busy explaining away to notice.

She was moving.

In front of her, trees shrunk and grew.

A field. She was in a field, in the open, in the dark, and she was being taken across it, and she was not the one doing the moving.

The arms were the next thing she saw, and they came into her vision at the edges, one on either side, swinging into the corners of her sight and out again. They were the arms of the shape from the parking lot: the obstacle her mind had refused to call a man. Out here, she had nothing to measure them against, but it was obvious they were thicker than her own torso.

She tried to pull away from them.

It was a small request to make of her body, but the brain’s instruction did not carry to her neurotransmitters. Jennifer Darling was, as far as she could tell, paralyzed.

And yet her thighs shook and her fingertips moved when she told them to. Why wouldn’t anything else work?

She looked down, and her chin came up off her chest with an effort that swam the field in front of her, and she saw the rope. It went across her chest in a turn and round again, and it went over her arms and pinned them to her sides, and below that there was another turn at her waist, and the rope ran back behind her to whatever she was sitting in.

That was the moment the explanations died. There was no version of fainting at her desk, no ambulance, no Mrs. Grisham, no plain-spoken lesson waiting behind a tree. There was a field, and a chair with wheels, and rope, and a man at her back with arms that could likely crush her to dust.

Jennifer felt a scream gurgle, and then it reached her throat and found the door shut. A thin whisper emerged. She tried again and again, and each attempt died smaller than the last, and the field around her did not so much as turn its head. Sweat broke out across her back and her forehead though the night had turned cool. It ran into her eyes and she couldn’t lift a hand to clear it. Her heart pummeled against the rope at her chest, and the harder it pummeled the more she felt the rope, and the more she felt the rope the harder it pummeled.

The chair turned. He angled it round some obstacle she couldn’t see, and the swing of it brought a new piece of the dark into her sight.

There, ahead of them, was the tree.

It was a broad oak tree, set apart from the treeline on its own patch of open ground, and the moment she saw it she knew it. She’d stood at a podium in this very field. She’d used the tree without ever knowing she’d remember it.

This was the death site.