She pulled at the doorknob. Yanked, tugged.

Panicked, she called out, “Hello? Hello?”

Rapping on the door with her fist. “Hello? Is somebody there? I—I’m in here … I’m upstairs, I’m here.”

She pressed her ear against the door. Beyond the rapid beating of blood in her ears she could hear—something …

Voices? Footsteps? A door opening, closing? The ordinary sounds of a household, at a little distance.

Desperately she struck her fists on the door. Calling out, crying—“Hello hello hello! Let me out!”—until her throat ached, her voice was cracked and hoarse.

Was she being kept captive? Was she a—captive?

Of course it was likely a mistake of some kind. A misunderstanding.

Mistaken identity, was it? She, Abigail R___, closely resembled another woman, perhaps … This other woman was the one intended to be captive.

Standing now close by the mahogany bureau, still she couldn’t make out faces in the photographs. No matter how she squinted, the faces inside the frames—adults, children—remained out of focus, hazy with light.

And the view from the second-floor windows: tall trees, mostly leafless, a landscape that was still sere and bleached from winter, though beginning now to revive; since trees surrounded the house, there was no visible horizon, all was foreshortened.

Yet when she looked more closely, she saw that the scene was flat and unconvincing, like a stage set; trees, grasses, sky, overly bright sun seemed all at the same approximate distance from her, lacking depth.

The wave of dizziness intensified. Was she flat as well, in this landscape?

When had “perspective” come into human consciousness?—she tried to recall.

Medieval art was strangely flat; there was no illusion of depth. Human faces lacked expression, as if the artists of the time did not “see” the plasticity of the normal face. Children did not resemble children, but rather stunted adults.

She pressed her heated face against the windowpane, trying to see at a slant—a corner of the barn that had been converted into a garage, a glimpse of the country road where her car was stranded a quarter mile away, front wheels in a ditch.

Oh, why had she abandoned her car so quickly! She should have tried to free it from the ditch. If she’d rocked the car forward and back, forward and back, gaining momentum by degrees, as a more confident and skilled driver might have done, she might be home now. Instead she’d given up at once, defeated.

Instead she was trapped in a stranger’s house. Only a few miles from her own house, captive.

Her bladder ached sharply, as a child’s bladder might, in animal panic.

A bathroom adjoined the bedroom, Abigail went to use it, hurriedly.

Here was a spacious, white-tiled bathroom that was clearly in frequent use. Thick towels hung on racks, slightly askew. There were two sinks, neither entirely clean. A mirror just perceptibly spotted. Electric toothbrushes (two), a twisted tube of toothpaste, hand lotion, hand mirror, hairbrush, combs (two), cuticle scissors, tweezers … At least two people used this bathroom. Abigail lifted the hand mirror and saw, yes—it was a silver mirror, heavy in the hand, ornately engraved but in need of silver polish.