A/N: Got some extra writing done so I'm fairly certain that, even though there are a lot of other (Halloweeny!) things I want to write this month, that there won't be too long a break between this chapter and the next one.
Chapter 7. Séance.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” the monk said warily, looking up at me as though I was unavoidable.
I’d lingered. He seemed to know I would after he told us to run on back home and not try this kind of stunt again. I told Eusine and Falkner I’d catch up with them, trying to ignore the questioning looks on their faces as they headed back to the dormitories.
“I suppose it makes sense that you’d leave Ecruteak. But to be honest, I thought you’d end up locked away in some kind of hospital.” He must’ve seen the shiver cross my face even in the dark. “I mean… I could get barely anything out of you after it happened. You were practically catatonic.”
“…Brother Nico, wasn’t it?” I asked, watching for the confirmation on his face. “What are you doing at Sprout Tower?”
“I work here,” Brother Nico answered simply. But simplicity didn’t seem to do the job for him, so he went on: “My master… the man who you—the man who the evil spirit nearly killed,” he corrected himself, “never fully recovered after what happened. So they…” he paused here, trying to find the right words, “sort of tucked him away. He doesn’t really work anymore. They replaced him.”
He stared up at the night sky. “I couldn’t stay on after that—so I transferred here. It’s quieter.”
I tried to remember that day, those lives that I… that he… that we joined forces to destroy. “There was another monk with you… what happened to him?”
Brother Nico shrugged. “He got demoted and ran off from kitchen duty one night. I suppose he didn’t want to climb the ranks of the order a second time.”
His adjusted his grip on the lantern he was holding and, just for a moment, I could see the flash of white scars along the back of his hand. “Say…” he began, with some trepidation, “as long as we’re asking about people… Madam Antonella still has the… the creature under her control, right?”
His uncertainty shook me. Was there reason to doubt that? “I… I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t been back to Ecruteak since then.” I jogged up closer to him. “But she can control him, right? I mean, that’s why I gave him to her—because you said—because you brought me to her.”
Brother Nico let out a long sigh. “Look… don’t think we brought you to her because we wanted to. We just didn’t have any other choice.” The reflection from the lantern drifted out of his eyes. “They get up to some weird things at the Channelers’ Guild.”
“Weird things?” I repeated. “Like what?”
He shook his head. “Strange, sinful rituals… at least that’s what I always heard. But I don’t know if I should repeat any of it to…” he trailed off and gave me a sort of appraising look, as though deciding whether I was old enough or not.
“It might help to understand that ‘Madam’ Antonella was a madam,” Nico repeated, having made his decision. “That’s how the story goes, anyway. The Channelers Guild used to be her brothel, but when she and her… ‘co-workers’ got too old...” he trailed off. “Well, she was always quite a bit more than just a dabbler in the occult and her ‘business’ changed.”
I turned my gaze toward the ground, not particularly wanting to image the shrunken, ancient creature I had met at age eight with that kind of backstory.
“Now who knows what they get up to?” Brother Nico said grimly. “Them in their compound that they lock up so tight that no one can see what they’re doing. The point of exorcism is to get an evil spirit out—but to hear them talk, you’d think it was the opposite.” He grimaced, a sour look on his face too mean-spirited to belong to a holy man. “It figures, for a bunch of ex-prostitutes, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t answer, but I wondered then, as someone who hadn’t yet come to truly know the Channelers Guild or the mediums that call it their own, how much of this talk was actually true. Madam Antonella had described her channelers as “unholy women” in contrast to the holy men of the temple. In what way had she meant that?
I couldn’t help but think that such dark and sensuous rumors were just the sort of thing that a bunch of cloistered, celibate men would whisper in the cause of hate and lust. Yes, what would these strange and powerful women—not all old, these days, some of them newer, younger—do in their secret rituals? Would they undress in the moonlight and stand in circles on mountaintops, chanting darkly to summon some unholy being? Would there be demonic, sexual rites? They might ask, what do these mysterious, forbidden women who claim parity with us do? What is their secret?
It was the kind of line a mind could run wild with—particularly a mind to which such things are the most verboten and therefore the most attractive. Would the old men whisper such things out of spite and the young men repeat them out of interest? Perhaps, perhaps not. Neither I nor Nico, though he passed on the tale, could authentically say that the guild was once a brothel, or that it is now run by faded women of ill-fame. The only ones who could say for sure what that guild was before it was a guild, would be the people of its time.
“I… don’t know why the master told us to go there as a last resort if anything happened to him,” Brother Nico mused, fidgeting slightly as he shifted his lantern from one hand to the other. There was a hollowness in his voice—a quality of shaken faith. “But he did.”
I could offer him no assurances—no explanation for why Madam Antonella was his master’s trusted second and not another monk of his order, no benevolent reason why she should be on a first name basis with the holy man. Back then, my future interested me far more than his master’s past.
“…What do you think I should do now?” I asked.
He turned to me, slightly caught off guard. “What?”
“I’m graduating soon,” I explained. “A… well, a friend of mine wants me to take him to Ecruteak, but I’m not sure. If you can’t trust Madam Antonella… then is it even safe for me to go back? And even if it is safe…” I gulped. “…Should I?”
He looked at me very carefully. He lifted his hand for a moment as though to put it on my shoulder, but then caught sight of the ring of scars in his flesh. He pulled his hand back.
“If you want my advice,” he said, “don’t ever go back to that city again.”
With that statement, he lifted his lantern and head down the path toward the monks’ dormitories, but before he’d gotten too far he turned back to face me.
“And for God’s sake, get some religion,” he added, before turning back once more and leaving me in the dark.
…Religion. As I took the lonely path back to my dormitory, I felt certain that I would fail in taking that last bit of advice. How could I be God-fearing, when there was something out there that I was much more terrified of?
*****
I think Eusine was attempting to lift me by the lapels and slam me against the wall, but all he managed to do was grip my collar angrily as he hissed, “Why didn’t you tell me?!”
“Tell you what?” I choked out, caught off-guard by him jumping out at me just outside our dormitory.
The strange red glow around him was back and brighter than ever. He made a sound, like a word only partially spoken, so flabbergasted was he that I would dare to not know what this random bit of assault was about. “That you can talk to ghosts, of course!” he finally managed to get out.
I tried to keep the grimace off my face, hoping Eusine would put any fluctuation in my expression down to him cutting off my oxygen. “I… can’t,” I protested.
“Are you kidding me?” he asked incredulously. “I saw you with that Gastly early—you were controlling it somehow!”
He narrowed his eyes at me, finally letting go of my collar. “You knew, didn’t you? Even before tonight—you knew that you could talk to ghosts and you didn’t tell me,” he accused icily.
I rubbed a hand across my neck. “I… didn’t actually know that before tonight,” I tried. I took refuge in the fact that it wasn’t a lie—it was just almost a lie. Before that evening, I’d known that I could communicate with a ghost… singular.
He glared at me. “You expect me to believe that?” he asked, straightening his bowtie. “Then what were you talking to that monk about?”
The night air felt wintry for a moment as I wondered whether or not Eusine had stayed behind—listened in to my conversation with Brother Nico. I took a deep breath and steeled myself against such a thought. No… no he probably would’ve tried, but I doubted Falkner would’ve sat idly by and let him. Not to mention Eusine had obviously gotten back to the dormitory before I had. He would’ve had much bigger questions to ask me if he’d listened in.
“Just… nothing really,” I answered as nonchalantly as I could. “He used to live in Ecruteak so I thought I’d say hi and see how he was doing.”
Eusine raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?” he asked.
“Honest,” I breathed. “But hey, about this ghost thing,” I said, willing to shift to any topic, even a dangerous one, if it kept Eusine from thinking any further about Brother Nico. If he’d thought to ask the monk for information himself… I’d like to think Brother Nico, wouldn’t have said anything. But who could really say? “Does it even really matter? I mean, I wasn’t even talking to it, really. Just sort of… I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not important,” I said, trying to blow the whole thing off.
“Not important?” Eusine repeated. He ran a hand through his hair furiously. “Do you honestly not get it? Are we trying to find Suicune and Ho-Oh or not?” he demanded.
“I don’t see what that has to do with any—”
“We’ve been digging up books in the library for ages and don’t have much to show for it,” Eusine cut over me. “But imagine what we could find out… if we could ask the dead about it.”
I pulled my sleeves as far as I could over my hands to ward off the chill. “No,” I said.
“We’re talking about ancient secrets—the kind that mortals don’t have access to,” Eusine went on, ignoring me. “But with you… there’s something about you that the Gastly responded to—and you could see through their illusions too. I know we can find what we’re looking for if we just use you to communicate with them. It’s better than sitting around waiting for a prophetic dream that just isn’t going to come. We have to take initiative here.”
“No,” I said again, more forcefully this time.
He stared at me for a long, painful moment—mouth open as though poised to deliver a retort, but too angry to take it any further. He closed his mouth and walked passed me, bumping my shoulder along the way. When he made it to the door to our dormitory, he turned around again.
“I can’t believe you,” he said. “You know that I can’t do this—only you. If I had your gifts,” he began, turning up his nose in judgment, “I wouldn’t waste them.”
*****
All I wanted was to lose myself that night—to ignore everything that had happened over the last few days in an incomprehensible blur of alcohol, music and people. Finals were done and the school shook with celebration. Falkner, perhaps moved to pity by the threadbare get-together with me and Eusine at Sprout Tower, had invited me to an off-campus party his upperclassmen friends were throwing. “You can even bring Eusine if you absolutely insist,” he’d added, somewhat bitterly.
I wasn’t going to insist—a fact that pricked at my conscious every time I saw Eusine leading up to that night. I’d barely spoken to him, though, so there wouldn’t have been much of a chance to make the offer anyway. Well, I suppose it’s more correct to say that he’d barely spoken to me.
None of it was meant to be anyway. I met Eusine on the way out of my dormitory.
“Come on,” he’d said, already making his way down the hall and outside.
I hesitated. “I’m kind of going somewhere,” I said, wondering if I should lie if he asked where or if I should make a last minute effort to include him in an event for which he had no interest.
“Forget that,” Eusine said dismissively, grabbing at my arm. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I asked, letting myself be dragged along.
He didn’t answer, but in time I found that “where” was the library—lying fallow in the wake of finals, now that there was no longer any need to crack a book. I followed him down to the basement, through the stacks of old, uncategorized manuscripts and over to a long table resting on a moldering carpet.
I cough as I inhaled the decaying scent of worm-digested paper and centuries old printer’s glue. “What are we doing down here?” I asked. Eusine and I had been to the stacks many times before—it was where the oldest manuscripts in the school were housed—but we’d gone through it so many times that I doubted that some tome that held all the answers we were looking for had been overlooked.
“Just looking for a little privacy,” Eusine said, stalking toward the table where several boxes were already stacked. “I thought the library would be the last place anyone would be tonight. Last thing I want is a bunch of partying morons interrupting.”
I neglected to mention my desire to join the ranks of aforesaid morons. “Interrupting what?” I asked.
He turned to face me and put a hand into his pocket. “…I want you to try talking to my Gastly,” he finally said.
I felt my shoulders droop. “Eusine, we’ve been over this. I already told you—”
“I don’t see how it would hurt to just try communicating with my Gastly,” Eusine snapped. “You two already seemed like you were getting along pretty well at Sprout Tower, so it’s not like you’ve never seen it before or anything. And it’s not wild—I can bring it back into my Poke ball whenever I like, so there’s no need to worry about it going crazy or anything.”
“Eusine…”
“Look,” he said, taking out the Poke Ball and enlarging it to its full size, “I already tried talking to it myself, but I’m just not one of those clairvoyant types, like you. If the world of the dead can actually provide me with information about Suicune, then that’s something I have to know.”
I’d opened my mouth to respond, but he’d already let the little ghost out. And it was little. It was probably closer to a PokeDex description of a Gastly than my Gastly. Which of course meant it looked wrong to me.
It gazed around, surprised to have been let out of its ball. Then, immediately upon accepting that it was out in the world, it dived into Eusine’s breast pocket, shrinking in size as it did so.
“Hey! I told you not to do that anymore!” Eusine yelled, slapping at his pocket. “Get out of there this instant!”
The Gastly obeyed, sliding out of its purple prison. “Sttttly,” it said, brows tilted upward in a mildly sheepish expression.
Eusine thrust a hand out toward his Gastly and gave me an exasperated look. “Please don’t tell me that you’re honestly going to be scared of talking to that.”
I had to admit, even in my vast reticence to make any sort of communication with a ghost… it was very, very hard to actually take the little ball of purple smoke looking nervously around the room seriously. Even its fangs seemed rounded and non-threatening.
“Umm… hello there,” I began, bending over and watching the ghost uncertainly. It turned to focus on me as I spoke.
Eusine rolled his eyes. “This isn’t just some social exercise. Ask it what it knows about Suicune.”
I felt intensely stupid as I turned back to the ghost and asked: “So… what do you know about Suicune?”
The Gastly blinked its overlarge eyes at me twice before answering, “…Gas gastly?”
“Well, what did he say?” Eusine asked, as I straightened up.
It was like reaching out to some old forgotten skill—some language half-remembered. Though… no, not a language. Language would imply that some kind of direct translation could be had. But yet there was something there—something understandable.
“I’m not really sure what it’s saying, but it’s more like… I get a feeling from it,” I answered.
“And what does that feeling translate to?” Eusine asked, impatient to get to the bottom line.
“Well,” I said, scratching at the back of my neck, “if I had to paraphrase it would probably be something like ‘what’s a Suicune?’”
There was a cold silence before Eusine swiftly withdrew his Gastly. “We’ll talk about this later,” he promised the Pokemon in a low voice before he returned it to his pocket.
I actually almost felt like laughing. It was a wonderful and so rare emotion that I would’ve happily indulged in it if it weren’t for the fact that Eusine would’ve been even more annoyed. It wasn’t that the moment was particularly funny—it was relief that drove the impulse.
“So, we’re done, right?” I asked. “No more trying to get secrets from ghosts? I mean, they obviously don’t know.”
“Mine doesn’t know,” Eusine corrected. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
He turned back to the table and picked up a long, flat box from the bottom of the stack. “If we really want to find the answers we need, we should ask the spirit world at large. …I know it seems a little stupid, but we might as well try it. It’s called a Ouijia b—” He turned around and frowned as he saw me back away. “…What’s your problem?”
“I’m not going near that thing,” I insisted, the acid in my gut churning as I saw the familiar game board.
He furrowed his brow. “Don’t tell me you believe the crock that this summons demons or something? I borrowed this from the sophomore girls’ dorm… it’s the opposite of threatening.”
I’m sure my face disagreed. In fact, I’m sure every bone in my body disagreed.
“There’s no need to freak out about it. It’s not like you even have to do much,” Eusine argued. “Just put your hand on the little game piece and—”
“I know how to use it, but I’m not going to,” I responded, freaking out, in my opinion, quite needfully. “It doesn’t matter what you say to me. I’m not doing it.”
Eusine let out a groan. “…I suppose there’s no chance of talking you into trying to channel a ghost then, is there?” he asked with little hope in his voice.
“No!” I exclaimed, looking at him in horror. “Would you agree to that?”
Eusine crossed his arms. “I’d do anything if it meant finding Suicune. I’m the one that actually takes this thing seriously, remember? Not like your little Ho-Oh thing that’s apparently just a hobby to you.”
That last barb might’ve stung me if the situation wasn’t quite so extreme. As it was, I knew that even Ho-Oh wasn’t worth what he was asking. Not by a long shot.
Eusine sighed. “Look… I get not wanting to actually summon a ghost from the start,” he said, as though we were at the beginning of many séance sessions to come, “but… how about just looking? You don’t have to interact with the spirit world in any way—just look at it.”
“…What do you mean?” I asked, not quite sure where he was going with this.
“I mean crystal gazing,” Eusine clarified, though he seemed to find the phrase slightly embarrassing.
“…You actually got a crystal ball?” I asked, bemusement breaking through the fight-or-flight responses my body had had to the channeling portion of our conversation.
“Of course not; those things are ridiculously expensive,” Eusine answered. “But I read that a basin or water can be used instead.” He shrugged. “I mean, it’s just about looking for patterns in things to figure out what’s going to happen. Like with tea leaves.”
I hesitated for the moment. I’d wanted to draw a hard line after the “channeler” comment. Eusine had no idea the kind of thing he was casually suggesting getting into. But yet… what he was suggesting now seemed as harmless as looking for shapes in the clouds.
“Literally all I’m asking you to do is sit in a room and look in a basin of water for five minutes and tell me if you see anything that could mean something about Suicune,” Eusine summed up. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
I drew in a breath. “…If I do this,” I said, “you have to promise me that this is the end of it. No more… séances or whatever these are. This is it.”
“I promise,” Eusine said—too easily. Far too easily. A promise from him without any thought put into it was no promise at all.
I shouldn’t have taken him at his word; shouldn’t have gone forward with this gambit just to appease him. But I did.
