The house emptied terrifyingly fast.
Distant relatives descended upon the estate like a flock of Murkrows. They didn't care about the Master's legacy. They cared about the assets. Eric remembered why he used to hate humans as he saw strangers bark orders, stripping the priceless vases, rolling up the carpets, and boxing up the library.
They were also pissed to find out that the Master had left the chateau to the butler in his will. But even though he wanted, the buttler couldn't legally keep the daughter with him.
She was standing at the top of the grand staircase, clutching a small doll. A stern-looking aunt grabbed her by the wrist, pulling her down the stairs.
"Come along. We don't have time for dawdling."
There was no proper goodbye. She looked frantically over her shoulder, her eyes searching the shadows for her ghostly friend, for the butler who had raised her. Haunter, seeing her distressed, went out to protect her from the relatives.
The butler tried to stop it, but it was too late.
"What the- what's a wild Pokemon doing here. Houndoom, take care of it."
Haunter tried to protect the girl, but was easily defeated. The butler intervened to not let things get any worse. But they couldn't keep the young girl from leaving.
She was dragged out the front doors, stuffed into a carriage, and taken down the forest road.
One morning she was there. By the afternoon, she was gone forever.
The staff was dismissed; the doors were locked.
But the butler stayed.
He was the last human presence in the manor. Eric watched the elderly man, his back hunched, moving through the completely empty halls. He dusted tables that were no longer needed. He swept floors that no one would ever walk on. The only company he had was Haunter.
He kept going out of habit. Out of unyielding, absolute loyalty. Out of simply not knowing what else to do with a life that had been entirely defined by serving a man who was no longer there. All through this, Haunter stayed with him.
Years passed in the memory.
Haunter and the butler spent all this time in each other's company, until finally, even the butler couldn't go on and passed away peacefully.
Soon, the estate was empty, leaving behind just Haunter.
Every room in the house was exactly as the butler left it.
The memories slowed, the intense rush of emotions settling into a deep, suffocating well of grief.
Cynthia had tears in her eyes.
Both hers and Eric's eyes flashed with understanding as they understood what the projections were.
They weren't hauntings. Haunter wasn't deliberately creating illusions to scare away intruders. The massive ghost had simply been alone for so incredibly long, holding onto the memories of the people it loved so tightly, that its immensely dense Ghost-type energy had begun to leak.
The energy took the shape of the things it missed the most.
The butler, endlessly maintaining the empty rooms, was Haunter remembering the shape of devotion. It was the physical manifestation of what it looked like to care for a place because someone you loved had lived in it. Haunter couldn't project the butler's voice, it had forgotten the sound decades ago, but it remembered the exact way his shoulders moved.
The little girl, peeking through the doorways, was Haunter remembering the fondest time of his life, when everyone he cared for was around.
Eric looked at the memory of the empty house, a question forming in his mind.
'Why doesn't he project the Master?'
The answer came to his mind after some thinking.
The Master was too central. He was too deeply embedded in the very foundation of the Haunter's existence to be held at arm's length and projected as a mere memory. The Master was the reason the rooms were still being maintained. He was the reason Haunter drifted the same hallways, in the exact same order, every single night.
The Master didn't need to be projected. Because to Haunter, the Master was the house.
He never left. And so neither did it.
As the decades went on, the dense, sorrowful energy radiating from Haunter began to warp the environment. He began to draw the ghost-type energy from Eterna Forest into the perimeters of the Old Chateau. It attracted many ghost-type Pokemon who thrived on ambient ghost energy.
A wild Rotom had moved into the old television upstairs, drawn by the rotting electronics, completely unaware of the emotional weight of the property it was squatting in.
To it, this was just an empty, rotting house.
---
The golden light of the memory snapped, fading to black.
Eric and Cynthia gasped, stumbling slightly as their minds were violently pulled back into their physical bodies. The freezing, dusty air of the ruined foyer filled their lungs.
Gardevoir lowered her hands, a single tear slipping down her pale cheek as the telepathic link severed.
Cynthia was standing completely still. Her hands were covering her mouth, her sharp, elegant grey eyes shining with unshed tears.
Eric slowly lowered his hands from his pockets.
His deadpan, pragmatic demeanor was completely gone. He looked at the massive, purple ghost floating silently in the center of the foyer.
"Haunter..." the massive ghost murmured again, looking down at the rotting floorboards.
Eric took a slow, deep breath, the cold air biting his lungs. He walked forward, closing the distance between them, and stopped just a few feet away from the giant ghost, reaching into his spatial watch.
From it, he pulled out a small, sweet pink Poffin, and gently set it down on the dusty mahogany table next to him.
"The wind," Eric said, his voice incredibly soft, echoing the words spoken in this library decades ago, "sounds terrible tonight."