Author's Note: Please forgive me for any weirdness/inconsistencies in tone as I try to find my footing :) Enjoy, and I love hearing feedback!
Exhuming the Horrors That Made Us
Chapter One
Us
"From the elephant to the flea, from the flea to the sensitive living atom, the origin of all, there is no point in nature but that which suffers and enjoys."
—Denis Diderot, from The Dream of d'Alembert
Up in the moldy attic, where the inch-sized corpses of baby spider Pokémon rest half-decomposed amid tangles of itchy pink fiberglass, an eighteen year old girl with rosy cheeks and dithering eyes stands feebly like an acrophobic on a mountaintop. An eerie humming sound sends a chill down her spine, though she knows it's just the vents settling in the cool of the night. Downstairs, the indistinct chatter of the television and the frantic shuffling of her father's footsteps help her feel as though she is not alone in this arachnid gravesite after all. A Magmar plush doll, stuffing drooping out of a tear in its left-side abdomen, is held tenuously in her hands as her eyes dart from cardboard box to cardboard box. She is looking for a sewing kit.
Her patience for this creepy ambience dwindling, she bumbles over to a small box marked in the illegible scrawl of black permanent felt-tip and pries open the flaps. She sets Maggie down beside her. Inside, there is an eclectic assortment of occult trinkets and documents that gives a sense of what a necromancer might store in a time capsule. Her eyes fall on a tattered manual entitled Beginner Mediumship by Miss Edith. As she picks it up, an old photograph slips out from between the sweet-tea-stained pages.
The photograph floods her with nostalgia; memory upon memory pours in from her times living in Ecruteak City. In the photograph, she poses in front of the burned-down Brass Tower, a charred shadow of its former glory, while out with her friends for one of their favorite pass-times: Magmar-watching.
A hundred years ago, not long after the Bell Tower lost its twin to the fire, a troop of nomadic Magmar took up permanent residence in the scorched cellar and began thriving as a settlement. It wasn't unusual to see Magmar and Magby taking afternoon naps out in the front lawn of the tower, sequestered in by a metal enclosure set up by the city both to ensure that its citizens do not suffer third degree burns and to prevent innocence-pleading poachers from capturing a member of these exotic species and splitting their families apart.
Magmar had since developed into something of a cultural icon for Ecruteak City, being featured on its flags, its tourism brochures, and numerous cartoon animations. Magmar had become Ecruteak's pride and joy, its battling mascot, and one of the most popular choices for plush dolls among young girls. The girl in the attic has had Maggie since she was six. She would never forgive herself were she to allow her lifelong companion to go unrepaired.
She begins to flip through the pages of Beginner Mediumship. She thinks of the mediumship classes she took at Ecruteak Gym, where she learned, among other things, how to attract, capture, and raise Ghost Pokémon; how to control her premonitions and predict the near future with 65% certainty; how to willfully enter trance and—god forbid—allow a spirit to possess her!
The look of epiphany takes over her face.
"How in hell did I not think of this sooner? It's genius," she mutters. She takes one final cursory look through the box before scrambling towards the exit, anxious to evacuate this pungent chamber of decay. Despite all her psychic schooling, this attic still always manages to instill within her an unshakeable sensation of disquiet, of being watched. With manual in hand, she clambers down the ladder and collapses it with minimal difficulty. She pushes the hatch shut and does not look back.
It has been four years since Meredith moved from Ecruteak to Lumiose. In those four years, she has made many mistakes as an inevitable result of the process of growing up. She has made the mistake of underestimating the brutality of female menstruation. She has made the mistake of assuming that the path to a boy's heart was an easygoing stroll and not an obstacle course. She has made the mistake of believing that God had never indulged in a sprightly guffaw over pies-in-the-face or molested children. And tonight, she has made the especially grave mistake of deciding not to return to the attic that night.
Meredith has made many mistakes. But if she was right about one thing, it was that up in that moldering attic, where the putridity of the wood, the throngs of dust bunnies, and the deserted cobwebs of spiders-now-cadavers sponsored an atmosphere rife with the portent of death so poignant so as to awaken that primal fear of the grim reaper or the bogey under our bed furtively embossed deep in the sheltered recesses of our minds, the kind of primal fear that triggers even the most intrepid of adventurers and the most apex of predators to rethink whether they truly are safe in the dark; if Meredith was right about one thing, it was that up in that attic, she was not alone.
"You said we would be together forever. I didn't know that meant only until death."
Two weeks have passed since Merry hologrammed me to inform me of her frankly asinine and hubristic plan, which she—over-charitably, I might add—characterized as a "brilliant idea" and something over which I would "melt into a blissful ooze." I mean—what? A blissful ooze? Let's not get ahead of ourselves, considering that her idea is for us to hold a goddamn séance. I mean, that was what was so brilliant? I would almost rather saw off my fingers with a string of floss than indulge her in her wanton ghost fetishes.
Yet here I am, standing stalwart in her dining room as I silently but judgmentally watch her and Missy, her Misdreavus, prepare the séance materials on a small table. Spazzing out in the corner is sapphire-eyed Igor, my Sableye, whose all too frequent convulsions freak the apathy out of most people that pass him by. Cuffed to both of his wrists are a pair of heavy steel manacles, each with its own ten-foot long metal chain, remnants from his days as a house slave.
He mutters something nonsensical, like: "Need a waste a helmet of meat so my scalp only peels in," one of his more common shibboleths. His speech is shrill, echoed, and fragmented as always, but noticeably more fatigued than usual.
I think: today has not been a good day for Igor. To be fair, every day is an off-day for Igor, but today especially is not a good day. I think: it's enough that he has to schlepp around all that cumbersome metal with those sprigs for arms, that his continual inability to socialize and sit still while in public or unfamiliar places sentences him to a lifetime of loneliness, that sunlight in any quantity literally burns the skin clean off his shadowy body. In Lumiose City, no less! Probably one of the worst places to live as a pallid introvert, and even worse for someone like Igor. And now he has to be a part of this séance? Now he has to confront that traumatic event of our pasts that have been infused into our very cores, much like how nougat is infused into chocolate?
"Hey Ghost Girl, I'm going home," I say, half serious, half in hopes of rousing a pouty reaction, but she doesn't bite.
"Cool," she says, "no you're not. You want this, Yaud. You can try all you want to be cavalier about it, but I know the truth: you're terrified of confronting your fears, of discovering that what lies on the other side doesn't align with your preconceived expectations of what death is. Or you're afraid something might go wrong, and I quote, 'What if a ghost flies into our lungs and pops our alveoli like bubble wrap, asphyxiating us then and there, or otherwise leaves us with irremissible lung cancer?' First of all, I can guarantee you that has never happened before in the history of ever. Second of all, as your best friend, dealing with your PTSD is downright fatiguing. So as hard as it's going to be—and trust me, I know how hard it is—I'm going to need you to be brave. I'm going to need you to show strength, maybe, for once in your pathetic life and I mean that in the nicest way possible. I promise you won't have to do this alone like you usually do, because I'll be with you the whole time. I'm not going to leave your side."
I stay silent. It's better, I figure, to let her think she is an expert in psychoanalytic inquiry than to revile her with the many gender-specific expletives at my disposal, but which I refrain from using in anticipation of the statistically most common of replies: to cry misogyny and proceed to gather the locals into a lynch mob, which, for lack of a better word, convinces the hapless sexist offender to go on the run.
She sticks out her temptingly severable tongue. "In other words, stop being such a pussy."
"Fine. You're right. I do want to do this. But I don't think I'm ready to do this now."
Ghost Girl gives an exasperated sigh and stands up straight, letting the half-sprawled burgundy tablecloth fall to the floor in a sad, miserable pile. She looks to Missy who is hovering in the air, then to me, then back to Missy.
"Missy, call him a pussy."
"I do not really want to do that," Missy says, knowing that only one of us here can understand Pokémon speech. Hint: it's me.
"See? Even Missy thinks you're being a pussy."
"That's not what she said," I retort. "And I think she still resents you for naming her something so uncreative."
"I. Was. Twelve!" Ghost Girl cries with feigned indignance. "Besides, yew wuv it, don't yew Missy?"
Missy displays a look that says: "Eh. So-so. Fifty-fifty. But more importantly, please never talk to me like that again."
"Yaud. Listen," Ghost Girl says with a sudden and uncharacteristic gentleness that catches both me and Igor so off guard that his twitching seems to cease for a full half-second. "You and Igor… You've been through a lot. The fact is, you haven't moved past it. I mean, look at him." She gestures discreetly to the twitchy cretin in the corner who is now scratching his face as though afflicted with an apocalyptic rash. Poor Igor. "He's a mess. And then look at—" She gestures to me. "You're even more of a mess."
I say that her first point is well-taken, but her second is at least a smidge unwarranted, or misguided.
She frowns and gives me a tender look easily misconstrued as an attempt at commiseration. "If you don't want to do this, we don't have to. But this might be the last chance we're ever going to get. I've reread through this entire manual." She holds up Beginner Mediumship. "My parents are gone for the weekend. You're soon going to leave for your research trip. The timing is perfect, but it's limited. But again, and I promise you, if you're uncomfortable doing this, then we'll pull the plug right here and spend the rest of the night watching that Diantha rom-com in the living room. I'm your best friend, Yaud. I only want what's best for you."
I think: her terribly obvious connivery-disguised-as-sensitivity proves she thinks I've never had someone tell a lie to my face. Who does she think she's trying to fool? Her sympathy is an obvious pretext for something more sinister. What could it be? Unless…
"And there's also that matter of you being the person I was prophesized to help," she adds coyly and looks to the ceiling, her cheeks darken from rosy to crimson as she whistles a nondescript tune.
Ah, there it is. The prophecy, the whole reason Ghost Girl and her family packed their bags and flew halfway across the globe to Kalos. The whole reason we became friends in the first place. According to her, Morty (apparently Ecruteak's Gym Leader) had woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, his breath tight and apneic and his sheets soaked with piss as a result of some overwhelmingly orgasmic out-of-body cosmic future vision (the wetting the bed part is my addition, but can we really definitively rule that out?) prognosticating the greatness that Meredith Ouija was destined for. This greatness was to manifest as enviable riches, fame, and longevity for her entire family. What a windfall! There was, however, one condition. She was required to complete one (frustratingly ambiguous, I might add) task, that is, to help an "idiosyncratic Kalosian individual" bring about great change in the balance and direction of the world's teleology—AKA, the world's grand purpose, whatever the fuck that means or is.
Well, Morty reportedly was unable to return to sleep that night, so he paid Ghost Girl's family a personal visit. Imagine their annoyance-turned-stupefaction when the face of Ecruteak showed up at the front of their doorstep, alarmingly enervated and clad in purple slippers, at four in the morning! Out of what I interpreted to be blind respect for and unconditional trust in this kooky Gym Leader (let's just say ghosts aren't the only thing afflicting him) and his hocus-pocus words, as well as a far too optimistic outlook regarding their future prospects, the Ouija family found themselves leasing a two story house in a suburb near the outskirts of Lumiose City by the end of the month.
Upon meeting me soon after, she had quickly concluded that I was that veritable idiosyncratic Kalosian individual. "I have never met anyone who wears cynicism on one sleeve and an almost pusillanimous fear of danger on the other" and "You realize only probably, like, five people in the world can talk to Pokémon, right?" and "The closest friend you have ever had is a former house slave who happens to be terrified of little children half his size."
My response that there are probably many others in similar shoes (think: unfortunate older siblings whose parents neglected to check for Down syndrome in utero the second time around), not to mention that there are other people idiosyncratic in their own ways (think: I would never eat my own shit), fell on deaf ears.
"Yes," she would submit, even though she meant the opposite, "but you're unique." As though that somehow wasn't the point of contention the entire time.
So while the whole of our relationship is built predominantly on her misplaced belief that somehow, by helping me shift the course of the world (I should emphasize, ladies and gentlemen, the course of the WORLD) I will be able to usher her parents into a premature retirement and ensure that she, herself, and Missy would never have to work a serious day in their lives.
Yet despite the fact that I am obviously a prop for her presaged success and luxuriance and maybe also for her ceaseless curiosity, there is no mistaking that she's still my best friend, and I'm still hers. She has never tried to hide her motives, so I at least have to give her credit for her candor. Not only that, we were also always there for each other, no questions asked. To think for a second that we wouldn't be friends without this crackpot prophesy hanging over our heads is to patently misrepresent our relationship.
It's rare to see her be this endearing, and in a way it's kind of endearing even if she's only pretending. I have a feeling it would get old real fast; still, and though I hate to say it, she has a point, beguiling as she may be. Igor and I could come up with all sorts of reasons for avoiding a confrontation with our past, but in the end we're just stalling, not without good reason, mind you, but we also can't just sit on our hands waiting for the flesh to necrotize. It's something the two of us have to confront eventually. It's something we promised each other we would confront together.
I look to Igor, hoping for something like an encouraging nod. Instead, I receive a fitful series of spasms that make it look like his entire body is nodding and I realize he is barely conscious, much less paying attention. Poor Igor, I think. Poor Yaud, I think self-absorbently.
"Okay," I say. "Can I help set up?"
She brightens and lets out a restrained squeal, clasping her hands together in an ebullience that truly captures what it means to be Merry.