Should he have told Chloe? Maybe together they could have purged the facts of falsity. But what if it meddled with their report? Ben needed Sparling’s money more than he needed answers.

It was nothing, just a fault in the reel. His recorder was long past its best. And besides, it had happened before; a day’s worth of interviews garbled and lost because he hadn’t loaded the cassette properly. There was no logical reason to fear it. The sound was merely an excuse for those who wanted to believe, as a door moving in a draught is proof of a presence.

It was some mutt or one of those androgynous kids from the village. When they weren’t admiring each other’s dresses, they were probably out for mischief. The logical explanations far outweighed the absurd.

‘Where are we?’ Chloe asked, wiping her eyes.

‘And there was me thinking my co-pilot was going to sleep the entire way,’ he replied, fronting a smile as best he could. ‘We’ve a long way to go yet.’

‘You did volunteer to be my driver, you know.’

‘Did you just say your driver?’ he asked.

‘I don’t see anybody else in the car, do you?’

*

The creeper must have derived from another folk tale. That’s how it worked. Stories changed from place to place, between villages and counties, like a criminal seeking a new identity. Details were omitted. New ideas were added in. Landmarks and local names were attached, and in time the provenance was forgotten. Ben had said as much in his thesis.

He wanted to substantiate Sparling’s report with some theories as to its origin but his mind was running on fumes. The early tremors of a headache rumbled somewhere in the back of his skull. A name like the creeper would have survived. It was too distinctive. And if it had reached anywhere beyond Tír Mallacht, Ben would have encountered it. Since turning the key in the ignition it’s all he had thought about, and he could feel his ideas leaking like oil with every mile.

Three times you see him.

‘Always with the number three,’ he whispered, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes as he stared at the taillights stretching ahead like a landing strip.

What Ben saw the night before went against the grain of convention. The villagers had sent someone to scare them into thinking that the creeper was real. But if they believed in his existence, why would they impersonate him?

None of it mattered. They had gone to Tír Mallacht to gather information. This they had done to the best of their ability and the proof of their efforts would be in Sparling’s report. And what Ben heard on that recording was probably the cassette again. Maybe it was time for an upgrade.