A Dark Past

I finally opened my eyes, prepared to meet the sunshine of another day. Instead, all I saw was darkness. Complete and penetrating darkness. This couldn't be my room. "Okay, I'm waking up now!" I told myself.

"I'm afraid you can't awake or do anything right now. My Hypnosis is very powerful. You're stuck in here with me until the morning." It was that voice I heard. It sounded very close. It gave a cold laugh.

"I want to know three things: where am I, who are you, and what do you want with me?" The darkness was growing unsettling. Who knows who or what was talking to me.

"Why, we are in the very deep recesses of your mind." The darkness got lighter as the voice spoke to me. In front of me floated a Haunter, smiling at me. "My name is Cackle, with a C, of course. I belonged to your father. I want to help you find who you are and what your father is like."

"You knew my father? Tell me what you know."

Cackle cackled happily. Now you know how he got his name. "He was a very great man. Very interesting and very inspiring. His body was like an eggshell for the darkness within. You could see it in his eyes." The darkness returned to its original state.

I looked around for Cackle and heard something. It was my own whimpering. I tried to stop but couldn't. "What do you mean? I don't really understand you."

Cackle appeared in front of me and smiled again. "Poor baby. So afraid and confused. I guess you need some sort of ...visual. Let me see what I can bring up."

The black background changed into an outdoor scene. It was like we were in a TV and someone turned it on. I looked around and found a little girl with her Pidgey. The girl looked so familiar.

"Can you remember anything about that child?" Cackle asked me.

In a split second, all of this data poured into my memory bank. Someone not only turned on the light bulb of my brain, they turned on the high beams! "I not only remember that girl, but I'm pretty sure that was me when I was at least five! But where are we? This isn't Sunflower Town."

"You're right! It's not; it's Ecruteak City. You were born and raised here. At least, for a while you were." Cackle showed off the city, smiling like he was Vanna White.

"That's nonsense! I've lived in Sunflower as long as I can remember!"

"And how much can you remember?" he reminded me.

"Not much," I admitted. "Is that...Feather? Is that my Pidgey on my shoulder?"

"Yes, it is. You and that weakling were meant for each other." He gave a small grunt.

"I would go and say hi to her, but I think this is one of those 'Christmas Carol' moments, huh?"

"You would be right about that."

I watched Feather fly off Young Shonta's shoulder and into the starlit sky. "Feather was my best and only friend. She was a good singer and good company. There was one little problem..." I watched Feather crash into someone's weather vane.

"You could say that she was the George of the Jungle of Pokemon," I finished. How could I talk about my early childhood when I couldn't remember a second of it a few minutes ago?

"I remember it just like it was yesterday. Your father used to love being in the darkness. He would make you spend every night outside with Feather," Cackle told me.

Another Cackle appeared in front of my younger self and scared her silly. She yelled at him and ran into the house. Feather zoomed by the ghost-type and barely managed to fly through the open window of Young Shonta's room. "Yeah, but I didn't seem to like you. You were the scariest thing I've ever seen," I told Cackle.

The scene changed from outside to inside the house. I quickly recognized my mother but was curious about a man standing beside her. I must be my father. He looked handsome but reeked of something extremely creepy. You could almost see and smell his true nature. Now I knew what Cackle was talking about when he gave his "eggshell" description. It was like you couldn't feel anything inside that man. Nothing but cold, dark emptiness.

Young Shonta ran to her dad, crying. "Daddy, make Cackle stop scaring me!" she pleaded.

"Shut up, you little brat. Cackle was just being himself. Now dry your tears and go back outside," he growled.

"Can I just go back in my room, Mommy? I'm sleepy," she asked Mom. Mom looked like she was pregnant with Rod at that time. And was that a black eye I saw? It was! She looked like she had a broken nose, too.

"Well, I suppose so..." Mom said undecidedly.

"Thanks, Mommy!" She ran to her room with Dad glaring at her.

"I'm starting to remember it all now," I told Cackle. "I loved looking at the stars and the moon, but I didn't like being in the dark. I was afraid what was hiding in there, or worse, what wasn't. I believed in demons and real ghosts. I even had a nightlight in my room!

"Mom told me that I was born at exactly midnight. She said that very special people are always born at midnight. But when I told the other kids about this, they got scared and stayed away from me. I found out what she meant to tell me."

"Yes, the myth is that there are very powerful half-demons called Umbra that are born at midnight," Cackle explained. "They embrace the darkness because they are darkness themselves. They are said to grant wishes to anyone that could catch them at night at the price of someone's life. Also known is their ability to fill people's minds with fear and drive them insane. Umbreon are very close to being true Umbra. Your father seemed to believe this so much that he was angry when his daughter turned out to be a sunny little girl couldn't stand to be by herself at night. Of course, I couldn't blame him. He had the legend only half right, though. Umbra are born at exactly midnight under a full moon."

"That doesn't make sense. There's always someone or something being born at every minute of the day," I said to him.

"That's true, but not everyone who's born is normal, am I right?" he answered.

We were in my old bedroom now. Young Shonta was hugging Feather as she was crying. I heard shouting and cursing through the closed door. Feather was singing softly to try to comfort me.

"Every night Dad would yell at and curse Mom for giving birth to something like me. I got so tired of this that I decided to run away one night. This must have been that same night." I watched my younger self pack some things into a backpack, then put Feather in her pokeball and climb out the window.

The scene again switched to Young Shonta sitting under a tree in the woods someplace. "I ran to a place where I'd hoped that Dad would never find me: the woods near the Tin Tower. The only thing that was wrong with it was that it was crawling with nocturnal Pokemon, including ghost-types. That and the fact that it was darker in the forest than it was at the house. I was scared to go anywhere until a thunderstorm started. It just came out of nowhere. Strangely I was comforted by this sight and fell asleep soon after.

"I knew then that thunderstorms usually had lightning, and I loved to look at the lightning. I thought that lightning was so cool, and I was not afraid of it at all. It was bright and astounding. If you went close enough to it you could feel its heat as well. My mom to this day thinks it's weird that I would rather stay outside and enjoy the lightning rather than watch it from inside."

The background, instead of gradually fading to the next part, decided to just change the channel in my brain. I must not have known what happened between the last scene and the current scene. Now my young self was hanging upside-down over a raging river with her hands and feet bound with rope, and my father was holding me by the ankles. The younger Cackle was floating by my father, laughing at me. Both I and my younger self watched in horror as the pokeball containing Feather slipped out of her pocket and into the river. Younger Shonta was next.

"You're useless to me, just like that bimbo for a woman and that cursed life inside her!" he thundered. "You have no reason to exist." He dropped her into the river without a second thought. Young Shonta screamed on her way down. Everything went black after that.

I dropped to my knees and felt tears stream down my face. "There's no way to doubt myself since these are my memories. So Cackle, what happened to me? How did I survive? And where's my father?"

"How should I know? Your father and I never lived to make sure you were dead," he replied. "Right after we dropped you, this big, yellow, tiger-like Pokemon came and put us both out of our misery."

"Raikou killed you? So you really are a ghost! At least something good happened during this nightmare. But why did he do that? I'm sure that he doesn't go after every person that drops their helpless child in the river. And don't tell me you went through all this mess just to tell me about this."

"Not really. You see, I'm just following the rules."

"What rules?"

"Just try to remember this: when did we try to kill you?"

"How should I know? It's not like I was wearing a watch when it happened."

"It was midnight on this day! I can't haunt anyone until the day I was killed!"

"But where's Dad? Shouldn't he be haunting me, too?" Then it dawned on me. "Wait a second. You went from 'we' to 'I'. Did you try to kill me or was it a group effort?"

Cackle was starting to crack. "Well, um..."

"Dad had no part in that scheme, did he? He was just a puppet and you were pulling the strings!"

"You're right on target, kiddo! Well, almost. He did do some of the dirty work."

"Tell me now, Casper!"

"Well, do you remember the legend of the Umbra? Well, it's true. You're looking at one right now. He managed to catch me in that dreaded pokeball and force me to grant him a wish. He said he was willing to take a life. But I got to choose which life."

"So you took his. He was a soulless puppet, no, a ventriloquist's dummy. You were talking through him the whole time." I remembered his cold, empty eyes. He was just a shell. "So what did he wish for?"

"Who cares, he didn't live to enjoy it."

I had enough of this beast. "Thanks for the info. Now get out of me."

"Like I said, you can't get rid of me until morning."

"Oh yeah? This is my mind. I can eject you whenever I want!" I watched as he faded away.

"Go ahead, get rid of me. But first, don't you want to know whose life your father wanted to take for that wish?" He was trying to stall.

"I'll bite. Whose life did he want to end?"

"Yours." He laughed one last time before disappearing completely, leaving me alone in the darkness.