Makeover World – Part 3

Here is the third installment in Makeover World, one of the Stories of Elektra series. Like Time Islands, this is a longer story so I’m publishing it in three parts on three successive days. Makeover World is a standalone but is related by setting, character and theme to the others in this series. Here is Makeover World – Part 3. Be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

3.

The mountain was set apart from the main structure of the hills. It was a broad limestone shoulder pushing up like a giant trying to emerge from the ground.

Nick’s flyer brought them down on a landing pad about a mile from the base of the mountain.There were maintenance sheds and a visitor center that were closed up this late in the day. They followed a walking path that led to the long, winding ascent that would take them about a thousand meters above the surrounding plain. The well-trodden trail wound around the southern face for the first thousand feet of the climb. At the beginning of the trail was an area amid the brush that was full of small shrines, memorials and what seemed to be offerings. There were narrow pennants, ribbons tied around branches, cairns with images, various plaques with inscribed messages in many languages, some in scripts Nick couldn’t begin to decipher. It was twilight, and none of this had been visible in the darkness of his first visit. But the atmosphere felt the same, as if there were an observing mind, something that waited, perhaps for the offerings or prayers that were expected. He felt out of place, as if he were in the church of a faith he did not share.

That first leg of the hike took them to a kind of viewing platform. That was the easy part. The rest of the climb was over a rough trail loosely marked in the scree and gravel patches that made footing difficult. Hiking in this terrain at night was officially forbidden since there were any number of ways to get lost or injured. But it was the only way to find out what they wanted to know. As the dusk deepened into night, the twin moons of Elektra cast a surprisingly strong glow that kept the ground visible enough to keep them on the path. Nick had insisted they both wear safety packs and carry soft glow-lights to help them along.

He kept sensing a presence around him, as if he were stepping over a living terrain. When the trail turned into a narrow defile, the feeling was intensified as he stared at a cliff face a few hundred meters across a ravine. Dim as that massive wall appeared, he imagined for a moment that it was watching him. He shrugged off the feeling as silly, but he couldn’t rid himself of the sense of an awareness lurking about them as they trudged up the trail.

The last part of the path leveled off a bit as they arrived at a wide ledge. There was a steep cliff wall on one side, and off the edge opposite an emptiness that in daylight would have given them a sweeping view of the western side of the Spider Hills. In the far distance they could see a glow of lights from Elektra City. This was it, the place where Maari had disappeared two years ago.

Just as she had then, she rushed right up to the edge of the void that dropped off a thousand feet. Nick hung back close to the cliff wall. He saw the slight incline where he had slipped last time and so had missed the moment when she had disappeared.

Maari looked back at him. “Don’t you feel it? This place is magical.”

“I feel something, but I wouldn’t call it magic, more like danger.”

“Oh, you just have to open up to it, try to forget yourself and your skepticism for a minute at least.”

“I have to say it makes me nervous to see you so close to the edge.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere, not this time. I want to stay right here.” She looked about expectantly.

“I guess there are no lights this time, no walkway into … all that emptiness,” Nick said, half hoping that something would appear, something that could begin to explain what had happened.

“It takes a strong will and a mind that’s ready to go there, at least that’s what I think. I’ve already done it and need to be back here. And you don’t want to go anywhere.” She looked at him again. “Or do you? Isn’t there part of you that wants to know, really know what happened to me?”

“I’m here to see what happens to you and write about it. That’s what I do.”

“But can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“This place, I don’t know. Everything! I can feel this mountain like it’s part of me. I’m part of it, through and through. Every pore of my skin is open to it. My mind, my eyes, everything is so vivid, fiery. God, I can’t stand it!”

The excitement in her voice turned harder, like she was suspended between joy and pain. He couldn’t stop the anxiety about her standing so close to the edge.

“Hey!” He called to her. “Come over here. You don’t want to fall for real, do you? Just step toward me a little bit.” Nick didn’t want to get any closer to where she was standing and reached behind him to touch the exposed stone face of the cliff. He expected the hard, rough surface of the typical limestone of those hills, but the palm of his hand felt a soft chalky texture that gave a little under the pressure of his touch. Startled, he turned to examine it, holding up his glow-light, but when he looked more closely and rubbed his fingers over the coarse surface, it felt just as hard as it should have been. What was that soft, yielding surface he had touched a minute ago? Perhaps it was an odd moss or something else he had brushed against, but no he couldn’t spot anything like that. He was just about to turn back toward Maari when he felt her hand on his shoulder. The touch startled him for a second, but he relaxed when he turned and saw her standing there.
A minute ago, she had been exuberant and urging him to open up to whatever she was feeling at the edge of the cliff. But now she looked almost sombre.

“I’m ready. We can go now.”

“Is that it? I was half expecting …”

“What?”

“I don’t know what. Did I miss something just then when I was looking at this rock? It felt strange when I backed into it. But I was turned around for just a second.”

“Maybe it was more than a second,” she said. He looked at her for an explanation, but she went on. “Whatever it was, I found all I’m going to find, so let’s go.”

“Wait a minute!” Nick was annoyed. He had come for the story to be completed, one way or another. He hadn’t learned anything new.

He grabbed her arm as she was turning away.

“No!” Her voice was suddenly hard. He released his grip.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“That’s not the way you do it.,” she said.

He was puzzled. “Do what?”

“Contact. This is what you do.” She reached out to take one of his hands in hers placed her other hand firmly against his neck. She stood in front of him, her eyes fixed on his.

“What are you doing?”

“I told you. Contact. Just hold still for a minute.” She shut her eyes for an instant, then opened them and pulled back her hands. Abruptly, she turned away and started walking rapidly down the trail.

“What was that all about?” He called out to her, but she kept going. Her stride seemed longer and faster than before, and she rapidly moved far ahead of him.

He glanced about the terrace and the ledge by the cliff, but there was nothing at all to be seen. Nick started after her but realized she would far outpace him and so let her go as he carefully worked his way down the trail.

Baffled and ticked off at this long trip for little purpose, Nick’s mind kept focusing on the image of Maari happily exclaiming at the edge of the cliff. What had she been feeling that made her feel so excited, ‘complete’, she had said. What was that all about? And what had he felt when he backed into that wall? It was definitely soft to the touch. That had scared him until he whipped around, touched it more closely and saw with his light that it was the usual rough limestone surface, full of tiny pores but quite hard and unyielding to his finger tips. He thought it was only a moment before she turned his attention back to her, but he realized his focus on the stone had been intense. Perhaps it had lasted a little longer than it seemed at the time, his mental absorption in the details of the surface making it seem that no time at all had passed.

As he trudged along, angrily kicking stones out of his way, he suddenly heard “Contact” in her voice, as clearly as if she were right next to him. He looked up, only to see her disappearing around a bend. That was a memory of what she had said. Plainly she hadn’t spoken.

“Contact!” He heard it again, louder and more immediate than before. Suddenly he was seeing himself, as if through her eyes. The sound of the word was resonating through his own skull as he, no, she looked beyond him to the space off the ledge they had been standing on. She saw a luminous cloud of swirling spots of light, flickering gleams that maintained a steady brightness as a whole, even as each small light she tried to focus on flamed out. The lights extended far outward from that cliffside, filling the sky and suffusing the mountainside with its steady glow.

The ground they stood on and the rock face of the mountain itself swarmed, almost pulsed with the constant motion of light. Her mind opened fully to a presence she couldn’t describe but sensed so deeply that it became a part of her being. She was interfused with it, and her mind, her self merged into everything around her, including him, the one she was touching, as all distinction between them disappeared. This is the immersion she wants, the spiritual union with everyone – and yet there is a pulling force that begins to scare her. She looks down at her body and realizes it has dissolved among these tiny, yet infinite, clouds of mist. Why is her mind still feeling bound to that body, then? Her consciousness drifted outward into the flowing light. It’s as if tiny versions of her self were scattering all over this mountain. She could see everywhere at once.

There’s Nick staring at me, his eyes popping, mouth open. He can’t seem to grasp how amazing this is. My mind is dividing into a hundred minds, but my body. I can’t see it. Where? Who? The questions fade away with this being, with a last lingering hint of questioning. Do I want this? Do I want? Do I….

But then she saw herself through his eyes and felt his mind returning, shutting off that complete absorption into the other awareness. For there was a presence, a mind, that she could touch. Almost. She wanted it to stay, to let herself swim completely into it. But that mind started to recede, dissipating quickly as he returned, as she returned. The two of them stood there, quite separate, looking at each other, he surprised by her touching him, she longing for what she had just lost, pulling back her hands abruptly and turning away to head back down the trail. He stood there, confused as his sense of who he was coalesced again.

That was a strange memory he had just had. Was it even his memory? She had touched his neck for a moment, but now she was gone, and he was standing there. For an instant he had been terrified as if he had lost himself somewhere. But just for an instant. Now he was getting back together, her presence out of his head. He was standing in the middle of the trail’s gently declining slope, balancing himself on the rough gravel underfoot. The place felt more familiar now, like an old haunt he had been to so often he felt he knew it intimately.

Where was she anyway? He seemed to fly down the trail with no effort, focused entirely on what he would say when he caught up with her. In what seemed like a minute he was back at the upper trailhead clearing and the viewing platform. No sign of her. He kept searching, using his glowlight to peer off the edges of the trail, trying to see into the darkness around the clearing. Then he was off on the last leg down to the landing pad where his flyer still stood. She wasn’t in sight. He ran up to the jet copter, the hatchway opening at his bio presence. Not inside, not anywhere. Don’t tell me, he thought, she’s done it again. Another disappearing act. But he knew, as he thought that, he needn’t worry about her. She knew what she was about. More than he did, that was clear.

Then, as he settled into his seat and programmed the return flight into the logic core, she was suddenly beside him. “Where did you go?” he asked, as he watched the seat enclose her in its safety restraints. “I thought you had disappeared again.”

She didn’t answer but stared straight ahead at nothing, lost in her own thoughts.

“I felt something up there,” he began. “After you touched me, I could see … differently. But it was like I was seeing what you had seen, almost like … through your eyes.” She didn’t respond. He shrugged and tried to laugh about it. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
He was about to tell the flyer to head back when she spoke. “Oh, it makes a lot of sense, but you still don’t want to understand anything. I was hoping for … more.” She stared through the curved window screen in front of them at the base trail, dimly visible in the moonlight. “I thought I might get it back.”

“Get what?” he said. “Ah, that soul you were talking about.”

She looked out the windshield at the trail and mountain she could barely see in the night. “I felt great up there, but that’s not me exactly, at least not what I need. I thought I would be complete again.”

“But you were renewed, remade, whatever you want to call it. What else do you really need? Does anyone ever feel complete?” Nick realized he was trying to make things right, fix her state of mind, and that was worse than useless.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for. What does it mean to have a soul or not have a soul. There’s nothing to see. There’s nothing really to feel. Yet there is something, isn’t there?”

“There’s something here, on this mountain,” he said. “That’s for sure. I can feel its presence. You want to call it a soul? Fine.”

“No, what I feel here I can’t take with me. It’s here, but it’s not me. Is that as close as I can get? A place to visit? Something to borrow while I’m up there, or something that doesn’t belong to me at all that takes me over for a minute. Then it’s gone again. Is that it?”

“How would I know?”

“No, you don’t know,” she turned to him fiercely and grabbed his shoulders. ‘You don’t know, but you have to see what it means to me…”

“Take it easy!” He tried to push her back, but she was stronger than he was. Her eyes were boring into him. She put her hand on his neck again and demanded. “You have to see!”

“Easy!” He tried to disengage but suddenly stopped. He was looking again at himself, as if they had changed minds, and she was inside him and his mind inside hers.
He shut his eyes and felt suffused with an agonizing sense of loss, a kind of grief or emptiness, as if he was missing something essential, like a leg or a vital organ that kept him alive but that he’d taken for granted until now. But it was her loss.

She was showing him what she felt, what she missed, a nameless essence that had made her who she was, perhaps more than that, made her a person, a human. Now it was gone, and she could never be still or content or anything until she had restored this unidentifiable thing. That was the agony, not being able to point and say “That’s what’s gone. That’s what I need to get back.” She knew only that awareness of this emptiness had opened in her after she had returned. Perhaps that thing had been taken when she lost consciousness on that path amid the strange lights. She didn’t know. Maybe she never would. That’s what she wanted him to see, to feel, above all else.

He opened his eyes, back in his own head. She was sitting silent beside him. He reached out for her hand, and she grasped his in a quick fierce grip and then let go. He spoke the commands to the flyer, and they took off for the city.

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash