Chapter 4. Transfer.

"You should've come to me from the very start," a stern voice from the chair in front of us admonished.

The two monks standing on either side of me winced. We were a bruised and broken group standing before the seated woman in front of us, like supplicants crowded before an oracle. Only Brother Kenji was unharmed, though you wouldn't have thought so judging only the pained expression on his face. Brother Nico's hand was sandwiched thickly in gauze with dried blood caked on the lower layers. Aunt Polly's arm was set awkwardly in a sling. She didn't make eye contact with the woman, glancing at the door every so often as though hoping for an escape. I stood in the middle of their group with old, bursting cuts all across my face and the Poke ball held so tightly in my hands that it hurt.

"But Madam Antonella," Brother Nico began, "we didn't think—"

"Obviously not," Madam Antonella cut across him. Of course, she had to be a Madam. Miss or Missus wouldn't have done the job. In the countryside someone like her might've received the honorary title of 'Mother,' whether she had offspring or not. But no… in the city someone like her was most definitely 'Madam.'

She was older than any woman I'd ever seen before, her dry, speckled skin filled with cracks and deep valleys between wrinkles. Sparse white hair shrouded her head, thin enough that her purpled scalp could easily be seen through it. A wreath of dried leaves and withering flowers crowned her head, with black, dribbling candles posted at each corner. Their flames flickered oddly, as though something unseen moved through them.

She brought up to her lips a nearly depleted cigarette that she had squashed between her fingers. "You're lucky that no one got killed," she mused. After a moment's thought she added: "Nobody did get killed, right?"

Brother Nico looked tired. "The Master is still in and out," he said gravely, "but the doctors think we got to him before he lost too much blood."

Madam Antonella smirked unkindly. "Kazuma always was a fool."

While Brother Nico bristled on behalf of his master, Brother Kenji saw this as an excuse to make his case. "It's because of me that he's alright at all," he broke in shakily. "If I hadn't left to get help then he—"

"Yes, your pissing your pants and running away really saved the day," Madam Antonella commented acerbically. "I'm sure Kazuma will appreciate you abandoning your Master and your fellow acolyte once he regains consciousness."

Brother Kenji's expression changed, like one who'd taken a step forward on the stairs in the dark and found no step to land on.

"I don't understand it," Brother Nico continued. "From the way the boy described it, the thing was just a Gastly. I don't see how it could—"

I must've told them what I saw, but I could barely remember doing so. Everything had felt so unreal after the Poke Ball closed and I picked it up. The paramedics had arrived and brought Brother Nico to, and patched him up. He and the returning Brother Kenji had gathered around me and asked some questions—what questions I cannot remember. All I can remember of that was that they were scared and without their master they didn't know what to do. And that had led them here. To the dark and stony guild of the channelers.

"Of course you don't see," Madam Antonella, the head channeler snapped. "You monks never see." She twisted bad-naturedly in her simple wooden chair. "Monks!" she spat. "In times like these people always turn to holy men when they'd be better off with unholy women." She glared from monk to monk. "You incompetents! 'Just a Gastly?' You call yourselves exorcists? You have no idea what you stand against. You have never," she said, enunciating every word with cruel clarity, "never known what a spirit can do to a human host. You've never felt a spectral force moving through your mind and blending with your soul."

"But that's exactly what the master said we didn't want to happen," Brother Nico protested. "If an evil spirit can wreak that much damage in a weak person's body then imagine—"

"And that's why Kazuma's a fool," Madam Antonella said again. "He'll never know his enemy until he becomes it."

Brother Nico was about to speak again, to argue some more, but the old woman held up a blue veined hand signaling that she was done with this particular conversation and no further input from him was necessary.

"Now… you," Madam Antonella accused, turning her black eyes to Aunt Polly, who nearly jumped out of her skin at the unexpected attention. "What do you know about this?"

"Me?" Aunt Polly asked. "I… I don't know what you—"

"How did this start?" Madam Antonella asked. "How did the boy become possessed?"

Brother Nico coughed, slightly annoyed with himself for falling silent before at the channeler's command. "Apparently it started with an old Ouija Board," he said. "The evil spirit must've begun contacting the boy through that."

Madam Antonella rubbed her twisted hand across her forehead. "The devil take those Ouija Boards," she cursed.

"I think he already has," Brother Kenji quipped. Then he let out a high-pitched giggle—the hysterical kind of laughter of someone who knows he's almost definitely going to lose his job.

Madam Antonella glared at him, then rounded her gaze back at Aunt Polly. "And how did the boy get access to the Ouija Board in the first place?"

I looked up at Aunt Polly, blustering around in her mind for an answer. "It was just an old thing a friend gave me when I was a teenager," Aunt Polly murmured. "I put it up in the attic and hadn't thought about it for years. It… it was nothing, really."

Nothing? I wonder if it was. But I've never been able to gather up the courage to ask Aunt Polly if there was anything more to the story. I doubt she would've answered me if I had.

Madam Antonella's nostrils flared up, but she let it be, turning back to the monks. "Well? What do you intend to do now? You've botched this entire thing so badly that now you're in even worse trouble then you were before."

"Worse?" Brother Nico repeated. "The monster has been trapped. All we have to do is… is…" he trailed off.

"Yes?"

"Well, the boy caught it, so I suppose he could train it," Brother Nico said, but there was doubt in his voice.

"Ha!" Madam Antonella snorted. "Train it? You've traded one connection for another, and this one is subtle and runs deeper. Before the boy belonged to the spirit and now the spirit belongs to a boy. Only idiots like you think we're better off now, when the connection between them has been made permanent."

"But if he trained it then he might get it under his control," Brother Nico protested. "After all, he was strong enough to catch it, and—"

"And doesn't that strike you as suspicious?" Madam Antonella asked. "If you have more than a spoonful of brains it should. Unless, that is, you think you two and your master put together are weaker than one eight-year-old boy. This thing let itself be caught."

My stomach did a flip-flop. I ran my fingertips over the surface of the Poke Ball. The material suddenly felt strangely organic, and I swore I could feel it expand and contract slightly as though a breath went through it.

"Then we'll get rid of it!" Brother Kenji cut in, manically. "We'll throw it into the ocean or something."

"And it'll come back," Madam Antonella concluded calmly, tossing her used cigarette onto the stone floor of the compound. "It has muddled itself within this boy's soul and if you unchain it then it'll come back. You can lock it up or try to destroy it, but it will break free—and it will always come back."

There was nothing but silent for a moment—a heavy silence that nearly bent me double with its weight.

"…Then what should we do?" Brother Nico asked.

Madam Antonella tapped her overgrown fingernails against the arm of her chair for a moment. Then, so suddenly we were afraid she would tip too far and knock the candles onto her lap and incinerate herself, she leaned forward. She got up, keeping her balance and not letting a single flame go out. She walked over to me, quicker than any woman her age should—but jerkily, like a spider.

She stared at me, her black pupils darting all across my face, exposing a light blue film over parts of her eyes. She was barely any taller than me and her breath fell hot and rancid against my skin. She held out a hand to me and my first impulse was to back away.

"I'll keep it. It won't be able to rise up against my hand. It won't be able to get to the boy through me," she said, each word engraved in stone. "Give me the Poke Ball."

I gripped the Poke Ball, terrified to let it go. I felt as though letting it leave my hand would be like cutting out a body part—a hand, a lung, a heart. It should always be in my possession.

"Stupid boy," Madam Antonella rebuked, her thin lip curling. "Let it go. Give it to me."

I moved slowly. Each stirring forward amplifying my desire to jerk back. I knew I couldn't escape with it. I knew I shouldn't have it, but yet…

I placed the ball in her skinny hand, brushing against the calloused skin as I withdrew. She clamped her fingers around the surface and tucked it away into a pocket of her dress.

My fingers tingled. I could still feel the phantom sense of the ball in my hand.


It was like I didn't know what to do with myself anymore. But in a way, that was okay. I found myself able to do nothing at all with much greater success than I ever had before. In the past, restlessness or boredom might have spurred me on to a new activity, but after everything that had happened… I could happily sit for hours on end, just staring at the wall.

I learned to make my inactivity a little less obvious, however, in those weeks following the exorcism. A niggling worry that Aunt Polly might call someone if she saw me vacantly meditating from sunrise to sunset made me put on at least the slightest pretence of action. I slept as much as I could, and when I was awake I parked myself in front of the TV. I didn't watch it.

The colorful forms of Franklin Furret and the Rattata Retinue danced across the screen and reflected in my eyes. Occasionally I'd shift position and I'd feel my body scream that I hadn't moved for hours.

You could say I didn't know what to do with myself because I didn't know what "myself" was anymore.

Brother Nico had assured Aunt Polly that I'd get back to normal if we were both patient. That I'd "come back to myself." As though the hole that Gastly had carved out in me would eventually heal over.

I didn't feel like I'd ever get back to normal. Or rather, "normal" for me had changed so dramatically that I thought it would never feel right to be normal again. I felt like someone who'd just lost a lot of weight after a prolonged illness—wispy and faint. I hadn't had to think when Gastly was with me. Now I had to. I was the one who was steering my body, and how unequal I was to the task had never been more clear to me.

Back then I didn't know that what I was going through was pretty normal. Disorders of excess, for example, are common among people who have survived possession. Binge eating, drinking problems, drug addiction, sex… some people who have been exorcized will do anything to fill the empty space that their invader has created.

I might've gone that way too, if it weren't for the fact that my case is rather… unique. I can't know for sure.

Aunt Polly approached me tentatively as I stared blankly at the television screen. Her arm was still in a cast, but like my cuts and bruises, it was healing.

"Morty," she said, "I've been thinking… You know you're going to have to go back to school eventually, right?"

I nodded. I wasn't sure at all if I was up to it, and being around other people was not high on my priority list. But yet part of me that knew better wanted it, because it might finally be the thing to shake me out of my doldrums and convince me that my current "normal" was livable.

She walked over to me and sunk down on the far end of the couch from me. I think it was the closest to me she'd gotten since we'd come back home after giving Gastly to his keeper. She fished around in the pocket of her dress with her good hand and pulled out a brochure. She was about to pass it to me when she hesitated.

"I just thought that… well, after everything that happened," she said, "that maybe a change of setting might be best for you. Best for everyone."

She handed me the brochure which I took wordlessly. A building with a steeple and a clock was on the cover, with squatter, more modern buildings behind it.

"It's a school in Violet City," Aunt Polly explained hurriedly. "It's a very nice facility and you'd be getting a better education than you would here. Plus it works in conjunction with the Pokemon Academy down there, so you could learn about being a trainer too." She paused, having delivered this in one whole breath. "…It's a boarding school," she added, as though making a kind of confession.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," she added, a note of worry embroiled in her voice. "But it's not far. And I think it would do you… good."

She wanted me gone. She'd do her duty alright, but she didn't want me in her house.

She looked at me, blinking her watery eyes. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Morty?" she asked, her voice nearly pleading.

…But the thing of it was, that was all okay. I wanted to be gone too.

"Yes, I would," I answered.


I was in my room—not as it was at the time, but as it was when I first walked into it, lost, lonely, and in shocked disbelief at my parent's death. It bore none of the changes of the years—the Eevee comforter on the iron bed was still there, where I'd long ago switched it out for a neutral blue; the toys and childhood books that I had parted with were still there; the bookshelf was there and so was the picture of my parents. There were only two things that were different from the first time I'd stepped foot in it. The first was the set of six Poke Balls, which now only held five. The second was me. I seemed to loom like a giant in that space—off-scale.

I reached out a hand to touch the photograph of my parents, which I was sure I'd taken with me. It was then that I noticed the thread. It was fine, clear and would've been invisible if it weren't for the light that hit it with a nearly audible glint. Thin as it was, it was sturdy, like fishing-wire and it was tied around my wrist.

I looked more closely around the room, and in the dim light peeking out from between the blinds I could see more glints in what should've been empty space. Something pulled.

I moved, jerked forward by the tug at the end of the line. Every scrap of furniture, every item packed in that room moved with me. Stuffed animals were strangled in the line, the bed creaked as its weight was dragged across the floor, and the glass on the frame of the photograph shattered as the translucent noose around it tightened, eating away at the edges of the paper until it too was sliced in half. The wire around my wrist cut into the skin, leaving a bracelet of blood that was too red to be real.

Everything in that line, everything that was caught, was pulled out the door and into the hall. The catch and I were dragged downward, down the stairs. I was smothered in the midst of my possessions, so I could not see what lay at the bottom of the stairs.

But I heard a woman scream.


"Was it about Suicune?"

I let my eyes flutter open, and turned groggily to the figure standing on the ladder of my bunk, arms leaning against my mattress and a focused, nearly accusatory expression on his face.

"W-what?" I managed to get out sleepily.

"Your dream. Was it about Suicune?" Eusine asked again, a little bit testily this time.

I rubbed my hand across my face, trying to ease back into reality. "No," I muttered. "It wasn't."

Eusine frowned, and then jumped down from the ladder and onto the dormitory floor. He finished tucking in his shirt and looked around for his gloves. The attitude he radiated into the room was that of annoyance, as though I was purposefully not dreaming about Suicune just to spite him.

I sat up in bed, nearly bumping my head on the low-ceiling. No matter how disinterested Eusine might have been in any dream that didn't involve Suicune, last night's vision had left me with a peculiar mixture of fear and hope. These past nine years I mostly didn't have dreams—not those kinds of dreams. Not the dreams that mean something. They'd never completely stopped, but they were much rarer and thinner and more colorless than the dreams I'd had when I was little. It was as though… when I was possessed there was a door to somewhere else that was wide open. Now that Gastly was gone it was as though the door had been nearly closed. But there was still a crack open for light to shine through. There was something of the other that my mind could still tap into.

I scratched my head as Eusine and the other guys in the dormitory got dressed and ready for the day. Eusine had just finished putting on his bow tie. When I'd first come to Violet City and enrolled in classes, I'd assumed that the bow tie had to be something his mother forced him to wear every day, because no one in his right mind would wear such a thing of his own free will. But then I found out that he'd transferred in from Kanto, and his mom was in Celadon City—far out of nagging and coddling range. He wore that bow tie by choice. Of course, this was before he'd taken to wearing the cape that I've been trying to convince him for years is stupid looking, so I can't complain too much about the bow tie.

He threw on a purple jacket to complete his one-of-a-kind look and glared sharply at me. "Remember, you have to tell me if you have one of those dreams about Suicune again."

"Yeah, I know…" I answered.

Those dreams. I often felt nagging regrets about ever letting him find out about those dreams, because there was always the worry that he'd find out how I managed to come by these strange, prophetic flashes. I didn't want him to know about that. But then again, I had to admit with a certain amount of bitterness that if it wasn't for the chance that I might psychically be visited with information about Suicune then Eusine might not have been as inclined to befriend me.

I hadn't even known before I met him that I'd dreamed about Suicune. I'd simply walked into the dorm and saw him with several illustrated books from the school library spread across the bunk below mine.

"The Rainbow Pokemon," I said quietly to myself, catching sight of one of the pictures as the memory of my vivid childhood dreams began to stir.

He whipped around and looked sharply at me, but a moment later seemed to settle down. "Right. You're from Ecruteak. You've probably gotten sick of hearing the legend by now."

It's funny to think now how little I knew about my own hometown then. There had been stories when I was a child, yes, but I hadn't paid much attention to them. Now, of course, things are different…

"Legend?" I repeated, uncomprehendingly. "I was just going to say it looks like a dream I had."

Eusine narrowed his eyes at me suspiciously. We were both new at the academy and I'm sure he didn't know what to make of me. "Are you trying to be funny?" he accused.

"Why would that be funny?" I asked, unaware that I was treading into a territory he felt very strongly about. I peered over at one of the other books. "Hey, I've seen those before too. What are they?"

He stared at me as though I'd grown a second head.

"You're telling me," he said slowly, "that you dreamed about Suicune, Entei, and Raikou too?"

"Yeah," I said. "But I didn't know those were their names."

I can't tell you how thrilled I was. The dream I had with the rainbow bird was perhaps the most cherished memory I had from after my parents died. And here it was… coming up again in the real world. As if to say that maybe it wasn't all just a dream.

"And when I saw them they were shaped just like in that picture, but black," I chattered on. "They came out of these burnt rock thingies and ran at me. They moved so fast that I could hardly—"

Eusine held up a hand. "You're saying, that you don't know anything about Ho-Oh, Suicune, Entei, and Raikou… but you dreamt about them anyway?"

I nodded emphatically.

There was a brief silence as the gears began turning in Eusine's head. And then he exploded with questions.

…And I probably answered too many of them. He never found out about Gastly, but he did find out about some of my other dreams and about the strange glimpses into the future I'd occasionally get. My correct prediction of a fire breaking out in Violet Gym during my second year had him convinced. And since then whenever I so much as mumbled in my sleep I'd wake up to a terse: "Was it about Suicune?" Up until that point, I'm afraid I had disappointed him.

"I'm going to the library," Eusine said, snapping me out of my remembrance. "You coming?"

I tilted my head, trying to get a nasty kink out of my spine. "I'll catch up," I said.

The library—on a Saturday. Well, it seemed like we did nothing but research. But research was why Eusine had transferred out here in the first place. After all, Kanto had decent schools. But it was Johto's legends that drove him. He wanted to see Suicune.

I tagged along because… ambition is a catchy thing. And besides that, now I knew that I wanted something to. I wanted to see Ho-Oh… and not just in a dream this time.