Grope

grope
verb, intransitive. To feel about or search blindly or uncertainly with the hands. To search mentally with hesitation or uncertainty for a word or answer. To move along with difficulty by feeling objects as one goes.
verb, transitive. To feel or fondle someone for sexual pleasure, especially against her will.
Also a noun.

Marie had been awake and blinking for several seconds before she realized that she didn't know where she was. She didn't recognize the lumpy surface where she lay, or the odor of dry rot that she inhaled. Uneasy, she sat up and reeled at the sudden pain in her head.

She felt the area where it hurt. The hair was matted and dirty there, but nowhere else. Had she fallen and cut her scalp? Had someone hit her and knocked her out?

Reaching for the lamp on her nightstand revealed that she was not in her bedroom. There was no nightstand. She wasn't on a bed. Exploring further with her hands identified the surface where she now sat as a couch. Her eyes were not discerning anything in the room yet, so she concluded that she was in complete darkness.

Exploration of the floor beside the couch failed to locate her shoes, so Marie decided to stand in her socks and find a door to this dark space. Tentatively, she rose, reaching a hand overhead to make sure there was enough head room to do so. She moved to the end of the couch by keeping one leg pressed to it, rounded the couch's arm, and continued to a wall. She began to follow it, leading with one arm and holding the other out into the room.

She counted corners to keep track of where she was in the room relative to the couch. She had negotiated three when she found the closed door. If she had turned left instead of right, she would have found it earlier. She found its knob, turned, and was relieved to find it unlocked. Now she would get somewhere! She opened the door, felt beyond the threshold with a foot, then passed through it.

At last: she could see a dim shape ahead--a shade lighter than the darkness that surrounded her. Fearful that the space she had just entered was cluttered with obstacles she still could not see, she stayed by the wall and groped her way toward the only light she had seen since she awoke. As she approached it, she thought she could hear a faint murmur of voices.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.