Here is another installment in 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.
1.
The searchlight glare flashed in his eyes as it swept the Grand Plaza of New Worlds. To Nick Pretorius it was “Grand” only in the minds of its dreamy originators. He had written often enough about this oversized and mostly empty expanse of composite pavement with the obelisks for the four worlds in the center, along with a few non-functioning fountains and a small sunken arena stage. Criss-crossing lights at eye-level and more flashing overhead were an annoyance to the few people walking the emptiness at night. Those lights weren’t just there as a colorful display. They were also a reminder. They – the city, the police? – were tracking the night pedestrian traffic. In the midst of that flashing, his senses became slightly confused. He thought he heard something. Was that a sound of footsteps behind him or only the noise of lights jarring his mind?
A few long shadows of other solitary walkers crossed his path as they briefly blocked the searchlight beams. Here and there the laughter of a couple or a small group out partying echoed across the empty space. At times, the acoustics carried voices so clearly that he could hear a moment of conversation, a few scattered words. As he approached the central obelisks, Nick heard it clearly this time, a closer sound, the hard footfall of another person walking behind him at some distance.
It gave him a strange feeling, a trace of fear he had never felt before in this place, where street crime was such a rarity. He paused on the far side of the northeast obelisk, the one meant to symbolize Earth, and leaned back against its pediment, out of sight of anyone following him.
The sound hardened behind him with an unmistakable urgency to it. Someone with a fierce stride, trying to overtake him. Why? Soon enough a woman in a long close-fitting coat marched past the obelisk. After a few meters, she realized there was no one ahead of her and stopped.
He called out to her: “Looking for someone?” She turned and walked toward him, pulling a scarf away from her face. She stopped a few feet from him and smiled. There was a staring gleam in her eyes that didn’t look friendly.
She stood in front of him for a long moment, then demanded. “You must recognize me.” She was a woman of mid-thirties standard with short auburn hair and a depth in her eyes that held his attention.
“Hold on,” he began, at first taking her for someone upset by one of his profiles, but he wasn’t placing this imposing woman in his memory. “Who are you?”
A worried look in her eyes, as if something important depended on his knowing her. “You know.”
After a moment of confusion, his mind snapped into focus and quickly shuffled through the images of women he had profiled over the last several years. He found her face but could hardly believe it was the same woman.
“Maari?”
She smiled. “Right you are. I’m your ‘Woman Who Disappeared’.” That was the title of the profile he’d done about her after she had gone missing in the Spider Hills north of the city.
“They had search parties looking for you all over that mountain. Where did you go?”
She looked away. “Hard to describe.”
“Hard? People spent a lot of time looking for you. It was months before the Authority gave up. And there were a lot of hikers who kept on trying.”
“You stirred up the publicity, didn’t you?”
“I did the profile. That was it. And it was a pretty dramatic story.”
“So, I was a story,” she said, weighing the word.
“Look, it’s cold out here. Why don’t we get together soon. You can tell me what’s happened” he said. “You know I couldn’t recognize you at first because you’ve changed so much.” He tried to see in this driven-looking person the bent, tentative, small one he had met two years ago.
“Why didn’t you tell people what you saw? I mean all of it.” she demanded.
“What do you mean? I did.” Yet his answer seemed weak to him.
“No, not everything.” She stared into his eyes. It unnerved him.
“I didn’t see as much as you seem to think.” He had been through this with other people he’d written about, but he knew what she meant. “I don’t know what you’re imagining. What I did see was pretty strange.”
“But you saw.”
“A glimpse of a lot of lights and mist and you standing there. What was that? Why don’t you tell me. If I got it wrong, set the record straight.”
She kept smiling at him, a gleam in her eyes. He couldn’t be sure if she was blaming him for getting the story wrong or pitying him for having missed something that she wanted him to understand.
“Let’s go somewhere to talk.” She turned abruptly and walked on.
“Hey,” he called after her. “I can’t just trot off with you. I have a meeting to get to.”
She stopped and looked back at him. “No, you don’t.”
That stopped him. A flash of fear returned. “How do you know what I’m doing?”
She didn’t answer that. “This is more important than anything you were planning.”
He wanted to know what had happened to her. She was right. That was more important than the club he’d been heading for.
He pushed himself a bit to keep up with her rapid pace. There was a power to her stride that had not been there when he’d first met her. He remembered her as painfully shy, holding her shoulders in, as if trying to make herself disappear. Yet now she was marching along, head high, strong.
A step behind her, he called out, “Hey, hold up. You never used to walk so fast.”
She looked back at him, slowed to match his pace and took his arm. “Well,” she said, holding him close in order to move him along at a faster pace, “Like you say, big change. It’s kind of … spiritual.”
He felt the strength in her arm as she swept him along. “It feels a little more like martial arts.”
“Who says they’re not connected?” She marched him toward the lights of a bar at the far end of the plaza. At first, he resisted her pace, but then he found himself falling into it as if he usually walked at that speed.
As they approached the place, Nick could see through its front window a dozen tables full of young people. Of course, everyone was looking young to him these days and not just because he was in his fifties. He resisted those re-makes that kept people looking like they were in their twenties or thirties.
They entered and moved to the rear of the long room where there were plenty of empty tables. She called out to a waiter to bring a mild wine to them, and they sat down well out of the buzzing talk of the other patrons. Perhaps it wasn’t the physical distance that isolated them but rather the zone of quiet that surrounded her. What had brought about these changes in the woman who had described herself as a lost soul, desperate for something to bestow a meaning on her life? That’s what he wanted to know.
She turned her well-deep eyes on him. He could almost feel her gaze penetrating to a hidden core that even he didn’t know about. “You wrote that you missed my stepping off the trail and could only assume that I had gone. But I saw you looking right at me when it was happening. Tell me why you didn’t describe exactly what you saw.” She said it like a command, but he reminded himself that he was the interviewer, not her.
“I wrote what I saw, a glaring barrage of pinpoint lights and you in the middle of them. Then I fell and lost sight of you. When I got back on my feet, you were gone. I didn’t want to speculate, and I certainly didn’t want to encourage a lot of people to run up there and jump to their deaths. I had no idea what happened to you.”
“You were afraid of what you saw.” A statement, not a question.
He had seen more than he said, but he still couldn’t bring himself to admit it. The sight had chilled him deep inside. He didn’t want to believe it, and keeping quiet let him withhold reality from what he had seen. “Believe what you like. And by the way, how do you know what I wrote? You were gone.”
“Not hard to find your old q-casts.”
“It’s not so easy. They charge a lot to get into the archives.”
“I have a transcript. Actually, someone sent it to me.”
“Someone?”
She shrugged, sat back in her chair and looked into her cup of wine. “I want you to finish the story. You can do the exclusive interview with the woman who came back from a different world.”
“What different world would that be? Or did you just fake that jump off the trail, lay low for a while to get yourself together and then decide to reappear?”
Her eyes flared at him. “But you see the changes in me. Do you think that’s fake too?”
“People change all the time. Around here they can get stronger, smarter, practically super-human with the right enhancements. What’s to say you didn’t do a reviv, even a gene sculpting job. That would make more sense than going into a ‘different world’ and being reborn, or whatever you claim happened.”
“When you talked to me before, you had no doubt that I was devoted to a spiritual path. You couldn’t have, the way you described me then.”
“I didn’t doubt that you believed, but I never shared those beliefs. And people can believe something so intensely that they are certain all sorts of things are true, even when they can’t be.” Even while he was trying to argue her down, he felt something strange in her presence, almost as if he might get a shock if he reached out to touch her.
“Is that what you think of the spiritual world, that it can’t be true?”
“It’s never been real for me. Let’s leave it at that. There have always been devout people who have pulled out of life to meditate and pray. They try to merge with God or whatever they believe in. You were clearly one of them. I didn’t have to believe any more than that to write about you and to feel for what you were going through.”
“You were right about me in that way. So how could you think I could also be a fraud? Hide out somewhere and make all this up? That’s not the kind of person I am, and you know that.”
“All this? All what? You really haven’t said what happened.”
“I just mean the way I’ve changed. You knew me before, you see me now. I don’t pretend to understand what happened.”
“But what did you go through? Where were you?” She was shaking her head as he spoke. “You must remember something.”
“I really don’t. That part is scary, but I feel so changed, more alive than ever before. If the price for that is a blank memory, I don’t mind so much.”
“So you disappear off a cliff and show up two years later with no memory of what happened? Somebody did something to you and then zapped your mind? That’s what you want me to believe?”
“I don’t know what happened. That’s all I can say. … But, I’m not done yet.”
“Not done with what?”
“I’ve changed a lot. But there’s something not right. I feel more alive than ever, but I’m still not completely here.”
“Sorry, I have no idea what you mean. You have changed in some fundamental ways that I can see, but I can’t pretend to understand.”
“A long time ago,” she began tentatively, “I lost something, and I still haven’t gotten it back.”
Nick studied her face for a minute. He saw someone immersed in deep belief that what she was telling him was true. He couldn’t pick up anything fake about her at all. Still he was distrustful, simply because he had been fooled before. The convincing grifters were great actors. But he had to admit as he stared into her eyes that he had never seen any grifter like her. There was a power in her eyes, a sense that she had seen and lived through something different from normal life. Yet also, something else. Was it fear? What had happened to this woman? It was worth exploring. He suddenly wanted to touch her to feel if there was something special coursing through her, but he held still.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about. But why do you want publicity from me?”
“I don’t. I don’t want to be famous or anything like that. I just feel it’s important to let people know that there’s more …” She stopped, plainly struggling with her effort to remember.
“More of what?” he interrupted. “You have no idea where you’ve been. You can’t tell me a thing.”
“It’s not what I can tell you.” She paused and leaned in close to him. “It’s what I can show you. I want you to see what happened, to feel it in your bones.”
“How would you do that?” Nick wanted to keep pressing her, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know this answer.
She sighed. “I suppose you’ve seen it all, every kind of phony and scam.”
“I have.”
“The truth is I need help to find out what happened. I need to go back there. I need you to be a witness. Again.”
“What do you mean? You’re planning to disappear again?”
“No. I don’t want to disappear. I want to go back to that spot on the mountain to see if that will bring the memories back. I need you there. You’re the only one who might be able to help. And that’s because you’ll look long and hard at whatever is up there.”
“You need a skeptic’s eye?”
“Yes. And you’ll get more than the bare facts. I know you tried to get me in that profile, I mean really get me. The problem was you made me out to be someone I never really was. Maybe that made it easier to write your story, but there’s a lot more to it.”
“What did I get wrong about you?”
“I was never the shrinking flower you described.”
“So if I got it wrong, why do you want me to try again. No one’s ever given me a second chance.”
She waved that comment away. “If you will do this with me, go there again, I will tell you more about what made me do that in the first place. There are things … things I didn’t tell you before. You need the full picture.”
“I don’t need your life story …”
“No, not everything. Just one thing I avoided telling you last time. You can’t really understand me without it.”
She paused, head down, eyes fixed on her long-empty wine cup as if it held her secret.
“I killed a man.”
Continue reading Makeover World – Part 2.
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
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