In the morning they put their hiking gear in order, buying maps, water bottles and sandwiches from a local garage. There was a track that led to Roberts’ place, but they’d been told authoritatively that their little hire-car hatchback would not survive the trip. They planned to take the road as far as they could, walking the rest of the way and aiming to be at the farmhouse by noon.

They could, of course, have gone trespassing, looking for Birdmen. But farmers tended to own shotguns, especially those with possible cryptid interlopers. And they had a secret weapon, should Roberts think they were part of the village gaslighting brigade, out to poke fun at him. They had a copy of the Fortean Times from January that year, in which Lee had an article about The Beast of Gévaudan. It was her first published piece, and she was inordinately proud of it. Roberts would see they were serious cryptid-hunters.

The walk took longer than they’d thought. They were having such fun getting away from all the nonsense that was most of their lives that they didn’t notice it was well past noon until they spotted the farmhouse. There was a chill in the air, too, that had been absent the previous day. The country was beautiful, but you had to like bleak to really appreciate it. It was all ups and downs, with plenty of places where the rocks had clawed their way right out of the earth. The land was scrubby too, green and yellow. The occasional houses were all grey stone boxes with too few too small windows, as if purpose designed for storing mad wives in the attic. And they were ruinous; most of the buildings Lee and Mal saw had been abandoned generations before. The Roberts family obviously had more staying power than most.

Later, Lee had to acknowledge that the whole venture was a spectacularly stupid thing to do, for entirely quotidian reasons. They never considered the possibility that Roberts would be an axe-murderer, or even that a random non-Roberts axe-murderer might happen upon them. They were after monsters, and weren’t frightened, because neither of them expected to find any.

Knocking on the door didn’t yield any results, and they decided Roberts was probably off on sheep-related business, which they really should have thought of earlier. At that point, though, their options were to wait an undefined length of time for permission or to seek forgiveness later, so they went around the house to find the vista the video had shown. They weren’t being stealthy—chatting away nineteen to the dozen, in fact, because it was an adventure and they were doing it together.

They found the spot almost immediately. Some of the junk had shifted, but there was the alley between house and barn, and, there, the actual CCTV camera. They took their own photos and examined the muddy ground, as though expecting to find incriminating footprints.