Austin can tell he’s close to the car wreck once it’s freezing enough for him to wish he had brought an extra sweater, or the puffy winter jacket he saw hanging on the back of Otter’s bedroom door. But he can’t blame himself for not thinking of it - this is unseasonably cold for September. Supernaturally cold. Austin’s teeth are chattering together so hard that his jaw is starting to ache, and he could swear that his breath is coming out from between his lips in visible puffs of air, but maybe that’s a trick of the light. The fog, though - definitely not a trick of the light, even if no one else can see it.
The hairs on the back of Austin’s neck begin to prickle. He can feel eyes on him, and he hopes it’s not the sheriff, because sneaking around like this is a great way to get himself arrested. He hopes it’s no one dangerous, either. It’s too cold to be fighting out here.
“Hello?” His tongue feels numb, but he forces the word out anyway, shoving his hands in his armpits to try and keep warm.
“Hello?” Another voice echoes Austin’s. It sounds like it’s coming from a long way off, or being hollered from the opposite end of a tunnel. “Hello?”
Austin whips his head around. “Who’s there?”
“Stop it, Jeffrey, you’re scaring the kid.” A different voice - a woman’s, coming from a different direction.
“Aw, come on, Myra, he can’t even hear us.” The first voice sounds put out. “No one can.”
“I can hear you, though,” Austin says, turning in a slow circle, leaves crunching under his feet. “Are you the people who died in the accident out here? Can I ask you some questions?”
There’s a pause, during which Austin can hear the two voices speaking to each other in undertones, sibilant whispering sounds that anyone else could easily mistake for the wind rustling through tree branches. The mist is starting to make condensation bead on his hair and clothes, but he doesn’t have to wait long for an answer. Two figures emerge through the big oak tree in front of him like swimmers pulling themselves from a lake; heads and torsos first, then the legs following behind.
One of the figures is a stocky, no-nonsense looking woman with short locs that float freely around her face. The other is a man with glasses and thinning hair, who twists the bottom of his shirt anxiously between his bony fingers. Both have a handful of bloody holes pierced through their chests, like they were shot several times over, their clothes stained bright red.
Austin grimaces a little. He hasn’t seen a new ghost in so long that he almost forgot - they retain the injuries they had when they died. The longer they stay ghosts, the more they heal up, and start looking closer to how they did when they were alive. When Austin first started to see ghosts, around eleven or twelve, Richard was still growing some of his skin back. Austin’s never talked about how badly it scared him, back then, but he has the feeling Richard knows. And besides, Richard hasn’t looked like that in a long time.
“How come you can see us, kid?” The woman, who must be Myra, puts her hands on her hips and quirks her eyebrows up. She seems calm, but there’s a note of urgency, maybe fear in her voice. Austin wouldn’t expect much less. Most ghosts who have died only recently are usually racked with panic - though it sounds like these two have had all night to come to terms with it.
Austin shrugs. “I’m a medium. I see things other people can’t.”
The man, Jeffrey, peers at Austin over the rims of his glasses. “How do we know we can trust you?”
“You’re already dead,” Austin says dryly. “What else do you have to lose?”
“He’s right,” Myra mutters. Jeffrey looks at her incredulously.
“Really? And who’s even going to believe him if we do tell him? He looks like a punk to me.”
Austin finds this hard to resent. He’s aware of the way he looks - the ring through his lip, the dyed-red hair, the bruise-dark circles under his eyes. He’s even more aware that most people don’t trust him because of it. But with ghosts...well, they usually don’t have anyone else to trust.
“I can’t promise anyone will believe me,” he says, looking from Myra to Jeffrey. “But if you tell me what happened, I can try to make sure your death actually gets solved. And it might help you pass on.”
“Really?” Jeffrey asks, instantly changing his tune. The mention of passing on does that, for most ghosts. “We won’t be stuck here forever?”
“I said it might help. Unless you’ve got any other important unfinished business,” Austin says, with a shrug. With most ghosts who die in mysterious accidents, finding the perpetrator is enough of a resolution to help them pass on. Of course, some - like Richard - choose not to pass on after that, because they still feel they have business to do, even if the universe at large doesn’t.
Myra snorts. “Well, it’s worth a shot. What do you want to know, kid?”
“How you died. If it’s not too much trouble.”
Austin’s done this before, but it’s best to be delicate when asking ghosts questions about their deaths. Some of them don’t want to talk about it, like if they pretend it never happened they can pretend that they’re still living, breathing human beings. Some get violently upset when they’re reminded that they’re dead. And some are fine with it. It’s always a crapshoot, asking this question, but Myra and Jeffrey don’t seem particularly offended. In fact, they exchange a glance that’s almost sheepish.
“Well, ah,” Jeffrey says eventually, twisting the fabric of his shirt with a little more force now, “we were attacked by a deer.”
“By a deer?” Austin repeats, incredulous. There’s no reason for Jeffrey to lie, but...deer don’t just up and attack people, in Austin’s experience. Maybe it has something to do with the animal attacks Otter mentioned, though those sounded like they were from something dog-like, not a deer. The holes in Jeffrey and Myra’s bodies, though, definitely didn’t come from a dog.
Jeffrey opens his mouth to reply, but Myra butts in. “It was strange. You don’t see deer just up and attack people like that.”
“You don’t,” Austin mutters, glancing around the woods. There’s something strange that he can’t quite put his finger on, until he remembers what the sheriff said to the crowd gathered near town hall. A car accident. How does a deer attack cause a car accident? “Where’s your car? I heard you crashed it or something.”
“We did,” Jeffrey overlaps Myra just as she starts to talk again. “We were on the way to the motel here and we saw this big, dead deer in the road. A big stag. Probably the size of a horse. So I veered -”
“Veered the car right off the road,” Myra says, a little acerbically. “Dumped us in a ditch.”
Austin glances from Jeffrey to Myra, then back to Jeffrey. “But you were okay?”
“Scraped up a little, but fine.” Myra nods.
Jeffrey nods, too. “But we went up to check on the deer, see if we could haul it to the side of the road before we called for a tow truck. So nobody else would run into it”
“What did it look like?” Austin cuts in. “The deer?”
“Regular deer, so far as I know. Big old thing with antlers, like Jeffrey said,” Myra says shortly, as though annoyed that Austin would ask such an obvious question. “Anyway, once we climbed up onto the road, it was gone.”
Austin blinks. “What?”
“That’s what I said,” Jeffrey agrees. “And then we hear this sound from behind us - you know what a stag sounds like?”
“I didn’t know deer sounded like anything,” Austin admits.
“Sounds like a bull. You hear a stag scream like that, you’d think it was a cow, if you weren’t looking straight at it,” Jeffrey says. “So, we hear it from behind us, and then we hear it running -”
“But we don’t see it until it’s right on us. And it got Jeffrey first, with the antlers,” Myra says, gesturing to the bloody holes in Jeffrey’s torso.
“Dead, just like that.” Jeffrey turns slightly, showing Austin the holes in his back, too. Apparently the stag’s antlers gored him all the way though. Austin shoves his hands in his pockets again, where maybe they’ll be warmer, and watches silently.
“This thing’s antlers were half my size, probably.” Myra holds her hands out in an approximate measurement, gradually spreading her arms wider as she tries to estimate. “It shakes Jeff off, really tosses him into the woods, and then it turns to me, and -”
The crunch of leaves nearby abruptly draws Austin’s attention to a fourth person in the clearing, someone much more corporeal than Myra or Jeffrey. Austin turns and opens his mouth to shout, but the person - whoever it is - is already off like a shot, dashing through the trees and obscuring anything about them he could possibly hope to identify. All Austin can see as he gives chase is a blurry shape in a green jacket, hood pulled up to hide the face.
“Hey,” Austin barks, hopping a fallen tree and skidding through the underbrush, nearly falling flat on his face before he catches himself. “Come back here!”
Of course, the person he’s chasing doesn’t stop, because they’re - assumedly - not an idiot. Austin has to wonder if they were listening to his whole conversation with Jeffrey and Myra. Can they see ghosts too, or did they think Austin was talking to himself? Either way, you don’t sneak into a crime scene, eavesdrop, then run away, unless you’ve got something to hide.
The person in the green jacket takes a sharp left and disappears into a bank of trees, up ahead. Austin starts to follow them, but a flash of color in the corner of his eye distracts him. He turns his head to see Myra and Jeffrey’s car, lying in a ditch on the side of the road, just as they said it was. And crouching on the road above the car, the sheriff. Her eyes meet Austin’s, and narrow.
“What are you doing back there?” she asks sharply.
Austin swallows. He doesn’t exactly have a good answer, and he’s not going to run, not now that he’s been spotted. Antlers is small enough that the sheriff will definitely find him if he tries to head back to town and, while this might be a good excuse to leave town entirely, he really doesn’t want to. He’s got a good thing going here, and a mystery that sort of begs solving.
“Come up on the road!” the sheriff orders. She doesn’t sound like she’s in any mood for bantering, so Austin sighs, and starts making his way towards the tree line.
1.3
austin, disturbing an active crime scene: who the hell is this shady character disturbing this active crime scene?