Free Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

still to do so.
    â€œTell me,” he said insistently.
    â€œI can’t answer that,” Natalie said.
    â€œDo you realize,” he said, amused, “that you made a perfectly outrageous statement? You
can’t
refuse an explanation.”
    I wonder what I said, Natalie thought; she tried to remember and found that just as her feet were wandering over the grass, so her mind was wandering over the hundreds of words she had heard and spoken that day; it was not possible, she thought, annoyed, to sort out any one statement from that confusion and answer it; he was asking too much. “Where are we?” she asked.
    â€œNear some trees,” he said.
    They had come, then, to the trees where Natalie had once encountered knights in armor; she could see them ahead, growing together silently. There were almost enough of them to be called a forest. Natalie could still, before reaching the trees, see the path under her feet; the darkness was then not yet absolute, but the light came by some unknown means, since there was no moon and the lights from the house could not reach this far; Natalie thought briefly that the light came from her own feet.
    â€œI used to play in here when I was a child,” she said.
    Then they were into the little forest, and the trees were really dark and silent, and Natalie thought quickly, The danger is here, in
here
, just as they stepped inside and were lost in the darkness.
    What have I done? she wondered, walking silently among the trees, aware of their great terrifying silence, so much more expectant by night, and their great unbent heads, and the darkness they pulled about her with silent patient hands.
    When the man beside her spoke she was relieved: there was another human being, then, caught in this silence and wandering among the watchful trees, another mortal.
    â€œLet’s sit down here,” he said, and without speaking Natalie sat beside him on a fallen trunk. Looking up as she did immediately, she saw immeasurable space, traveling past the locked hands of the trees, past the large nodding implacable heads, up and into the silence of the sky, where the stars remained, indifferent.
    â€œTell me what you thought was so wonderful about yourself,” the man said; his voice was muted.
    Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to
touch
me?
    *   *   *
    Natalie awoke the next morning to bright sun and clear air, to the gentle movement of her bedroom curtains, to the patterned dancing of the light on the floor; she lay quietly, appreciating the morning in the clear uncomplicated moment vouchsafed occasionally before consciousness returned. Then, with the darkening of the sunlight, the sudden coldness of the day, she was awake and, before perceiving clearly why, she buried her head in the pillow and said, half-aloud, “No, please no.”
    â€œI will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,” she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until, desperately, she said aloud, “I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened.”
    Slowly she knew she was sick; her head ached, she was dizzy, she loathed her hands as they came toward her face to cover her eyes. “Nothing happened,” she chanted, “nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened.”
    â€œNothing happened,” she said, looking at the window, at the dear lost day. “I don’t remember.”
    â€œI will not think about it,” she said to her clothes, lying on the chair, and she remembered as she saw them how she had torn them off wildly when she went to bed, thinking, I’ll fix them in the morning, and a button had fallen from her dress and she had watched it roll under the bed, and thought, I’ll get it in the morning, and