Chapter 86: Idol:Blind Worship
Elena looked around the café. Nobody had noticed the gun.
The weight of it, being at the wrong end of sothing like that, feeling her own life sitting in another person’s hand, settled over her cold and unpleasant.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," she said, keeping her voice level.
The stalker’s jaw was tight.
"You were supposed to be perfect. The untouchable kind. The girl everyone envies, brilliant student, future pride of your family, everything going right.
Not this. Not wandering around on vacation, wasting your ti, letting so man you’ve known for two days follow you around like you’re a normal person with no standards."
His eyes had the particular shine of soone whose reality has been organized around a single idea for a very long ti.
"You weren’t supposed to be like this. It’s all wrong. Everything is wrong."
He reached into his pocket and produced a doll. Rough work, carved wood, a crudely painted face, brown eyes, a wig assembled from hair that had clearly been collected from sowhere it shouldn’t have been.
"See? I made you. Doesn’t it look just like you?
Ha. I had to go through the drains under your building to find enough of your hair. Took a long ti."
Elena breathed slowly and felt the cold spread up the back of her neck.
The stalker looked at the doll. The worship in his eyes shifted into sothing darker.
"I admired you so much. You were everything. And you threw it all away."
His voice had the quality of soone reciting a grievance they’ve lived with for years.
"You have the family everyone wishes they had. The money, the connections, a mother who’s a Chief Justice.
You have the mind everyone wants, mory like a machine, top marks in everything, every teacher’s favorite. And you..."
He pointed at his own face.
"You’re nothing like . Ugly, diocre, nobody. You were beautiful and graceful and everyone loved you. You had no idea what it cost the rest of us to watch that."
The bell above the café door rang.
A warm current of outside air moved through the room.
The stalker felt sothing knock against the gun in his hand, light, like a brush, but when he looked around, nobody was close enough. He told himself it was nothing.
Elena didn’t look. She understood, now, what was driving this. She’d seen it before, in a different shape.
The constructed idol. The person who exists only inside soone else’s imagination.
She borrowed her mother’s voice, cool, flat, carrying the weight of a courtroom.
"Are you finished? Because what you’ve described is a disappointnt of your own making. You built soone in your head.
You gave her every quality you wanted her to have, perfect, pure, elegant, untouchable. And then you watched the actual person fail to match the version you invented."
He tried to interrupt. She held eye contact and he stopped.
"So when I wasn’t clever enough, or elegant enough, or pure enough, whatever that ans to you, you decided I’d betrayed you. That I’d broken character.
That the good student and the family pride were performances, and I’d dropped them."
She tilted her head slightly.
"You gathered a remarkable amount of information about . More than I’ve put into learning about myself, honestly."
She almost smiled.
"You turned
into your ideal self. The version of you that succeeds, that’s loved, that the world treats well. You needed
to keep being that so you could keep believing it was possible."
A pause.
"You were a classmate, weren’t you. Suspended? Poor marks? I don’t even recognize your face."
She saw a familiar silhouette in her peripheral vision, standing just to the side, unhurried, listening.
Her voice ca out sharper.
"So tell . What standing do you have? What right do you have to stand over
and announce that I’ve failed to be what you decided I should be?
What obligation do I have to fulfill your expectations and live out your ideal future on your behalf?"
She looked at him directly.
"The person you worshipped was never . It was a character you wrote. I didn’t audition for that role. I’ve never even t you."
His mouth worked. Several responses started and died in his throat.
"Shut up—!"
He slamd his palm on the table and stood, face red, voice breaking. Everyone in the café looked over.
When they registered that the woman’s companion had returned and was seated nearby, most of them looked away again.
He leveled the gun at Elena’s head.
"You think you’re so much better than ? You arrogant, disgusting..."
"I don’t believe you."
The stalker spun.
Raphael was sitting right beside him, one hand propped under his chin, elbow on the table, watching with the expression of soone who has been following a moderately interesting street performance.
The stalker swung the gun at him imdiately, the sneer returning.
"Good. You’re here. I don’t know when you snuck in, but, kill you, and she goes back to being what she was supposed to be. Perfect again."
Raphael looked at him the way you look at sothing that doesn’t quite make sense, then exhaled.
"I’m not going to explain why you’re wrong. You don’t deserve to hear it."
The words landed like a pin going in sowhere specific. The stalker’s face changed.
"Then you can die without hearing it—"
He pulled the trigger.
No shot. No sound. Nothing.
"Looking for this?"
Raphael yawned, reached into his jacket pocket, and produced a full magazine and a single brass cartridge, both of which he set on the table with the casual presentation of soone returning borrowed items.
"No — that’s impossible! "
The stalker checked the gun with shaking hands. The magazine gone. The chamber empty.
Soti between sitting down and this mont, while he’d been speaking, the man beside him had emptied the weapon without him noticing.
Raphael watched him work through this with a faint, cold curve at the corner of his mouth.
The red in his eyes was fading slowly.
The stalker laughed, not the sound of soone who has found sothing funny, but the sound of soone choosing a different strategy.
"You think this is over? You don’t understand."
He grabbed the wooden Elena doll from the table and threw it into the fireplace set into the café wall. The wood caught imdiately.
He turned toward the window and raised his voice.
"Witch! I know you’re watching! I offer my life as the price, I want your curse!" He pointed at Elena. "I want her dead."
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