CONTENT WARNING: This update contains mentions of child death.
The cellar is dark, and the lingering musty book-smell of the library is oppressive. Austin coughs. His boots come down heavily on the stairs as he descends, and he imagines one breaking under him, the old wood giving way and slicing deep gashes into his leg. Before he can entertain the thought any longer, he’s down the stairs, standing on solid stone floor.
Mac is hovering not far up ahead, the moonlight from a small window near the ceiling pouring through her body and making it seem to flicker like a candle flame. Austin walks towards her and Richard does the same, floating through stacks of boxes and rusted book carts.
“So what did you find?” Austin asks.
“Um,” Mac says, in a very small voice.
She’s fidgeting with her hands, picking at the skin around her nails, and she won’t meet Austin’s eyes. There’s something on the crooked, dusty table in front of her, a dirty, rough pile of something, and Austin can’t see past or through her well enough to tell what it is. There’s a cardboard box next to it that’s tipped over, with the word BOOKS scrawled on the side in sloppy permanent marker. Austin cranes his neck to try and get a better angle, but Mac is blocking his path, and walking through her would be uncomfortable for both of them.
“You didn’t tell him?” Mac asks Richard, lifting her head to look at him.
Out of the corner of his eye, Austin sees Richard shake his head.
“I…didn’t get the chance.”
“Tell me what?” Austin asks.
Mac and Richard exchange a glance between each other. Austin watches them, feeling a little unsteady on his feet - the longer he stays still, the more his body remembers the pain it’s in. What could be there that they’re so worried about? Something occult - something of a demon’s? Something we need to contain?
Then Mac moves aside so that Austin can step forward and see the pile of bones that are on the table, spilling out of the crumpled, open mouth of the upended cardboard box. A skull, a pelvis, some small bits that might be fingers, or maybe toes. Unequivocally human. They’re filthy, but intact, and Austin lingers over one for a moment before picking it up and holding it in the moonlight so he can get a better look at it. It looks like an arm bone, or maybe a leg, but it seems too thin. Too short. Too small.
No. Austin feels a wave of hot nausea rise up in his throat, and drops the bone back on top of the pile like it electrocuted him.
“How long have they been here?” he asks. His voice is so dangerously soft that he can barely hear it over the sound of blood rushing in his ears. Whoever did this, they’re going to pay for it. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to stuff them in a box and see how they like it.
“No idea,” Richard says quietly.
“Probably a while,” Mac adds. “Judging by the way they look, and the state of that box. Ten, maybe fifteen years old?”
Austin squeezes his hands into fists, feeling his nails bite into his palms. “We have to tell Monty about this.”
“Whoever put them there has probably skipped town by now,” Mac says. “I mean, it’d be good to tell her in case it happens again, or in case other bodies have been turned up like this, but…there’s not much we can do.”
“I hate this,” Austin says. His throat hurts, like the words are clawing their way out of him. “This isn’t - who does that? To a kid? That’s - I -”
“Yeah,” Richard says. “I know.”
Mac drifts a little closer to Austin, looking at the box that the bones spilled out of. “Someone must have knocked this over at some point. Or it just came down by itself and popped open, and no one noticed. Isn’t that sad? They’ve just been sitting down here, waiting for someone to discover them.”
Austin takes a deep breath, inflating his lungs as far as he can without his chest aching and letting it back out slowly. He blinks once, twice, and tries desperately to collect himself. You can do this. Tonight has snowballed into a terrible daisy-chain of absolute garbage, but if you can keep it together for a few more hours, you can go to bed for as long as you want. Just finish what you came here to do.
“Maybe the bones getting disturbed was what started the haunting,” he suggests. He still feels loosely tethered to his own body, controlling his actions from somewhere vaguely outside of himself.
“That’s what I thought,” Richard agrees. He comes around on Austin’s other side, and cocks his head like he’s concerned about Austin, but doesn’t change the subject. “If we could figure out when they got knocked out like that and compare it to when people started feeling the ghost around the library, we’d probably be able to know for sure.”
“Jesus,” Austin says flatly. “I still can’t believe someone would just…put this down here like that. And nobody even noticed.”
“You might not have lived here long enough to pick up on it yet, but people in Antlers are great at overlooking all kinds of stuff.” Mac sounds resigned, defeated almost. She folds her arms over her chest and draws into herself a little. “They just act like it isn’t there, or that there’s some other explanation for it. I didn’t even notice until I started working with Monty. Sometimes we’d run into weird stuff - stuff we couldn’t explain - and no one else would really care when we brought it to them. It’s why she was so relieved to meet you, I think. Because you don’t just ignore it like most people here do.”
“A child was murdered,” Austin says, “and their bones were put down here. Who ignores something like that?”
His face feels hot again. He can feel a ball of rage sitting low in his stomach, twisting itself into a tight knot. This isn’t just going to go away. You can’t make nice with this one, and go to sleep happy. The sick fuck who did this is still somewhere out there, and he’s probably killed other children too, or at least thought about it.
“Yeah, well, how do you think I feel?”
The voice isn’t Richard’s or Mac’s, and it startles Austin enough to ground him back inside of his body. He twists around to see who spoke, and nearly trips over his own feet, grabbing the edge of the lopsided table to keep his balance and accidentally filling the air with dust as he jostles into it.
A harsh, blue glow emits from the stairs for a moment before it grows softer, and Austin can see a human form in the midst of it. A lanky girl with dark skin, coke-bottle glasses, and a huge mass of tangled hair. She’s wearing a sweater that looks too small on her, with sleeves that only reach halfway down her forearms. She can’t be any older than thirteen.
Austin swallows, very conscious of the weight of his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “These are your bones?”
“Yeah,” the girl says, placing her hands on her hips. “Took someone long enough to find them. I thought I was going to have to start writing messages in soap on the bathroom mirror, or ripping pages out of books. So bravo to you, I guess. What are you, some kind of Hardy Boy or something?”
i've known this ghost girl for one paragraph and i've never loved any character more