It started off passively, reading the Fortean Times, watching old reruns of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, trawling the internet. There they found rumours of yetis, Mokele-Mbembe, the Jersey Devil and stray big cats. Two years before, though—before The Thing That Happened—they had started holidaying together. They had been seventeen, and Mal could always cadge some travelling money from her parents. They thought Lee was a good chaperone who would prevent their daughter from getting into compromising situations. In this they were absolutely and exactly mistaken. But it meant that when the pair of them wanted to go backpacking in Scotland, or visit Gévaudan to practise French, it all sounded perfectly respectable. Nobody knew they were casting themselves into the wilderness, desperate for a look at beasts that almost certainly didn’t live there.

Looking back, Lee couldn’t have honestly said whether they believed any of it. She could never quite recapture the mindset they’d had, not after what happened. They weren’t seriously looking to actually find proof, not exactly. They wanted to be the ones to take that vaunted blurry photo that might, in a certain light, look a bit like something was there: the ripple on the loch, the faintly anthropoid shadow in the woods.

And then, after we’d done it a couple of times, Mal picked a target for our next jaunt, and we actually found our monster.

Later, making a tenuous living writing cryptozoology articles for magazines and websites, Lee would explore the literary tradition where “monster” was a metaphor: the monstrosity inside us all along, the true villain being human nature, all of that. And she would feel like a fraud, because that wasn’t the kind of monster she and Mal had encountered. They met the other kind, with terrible claws and savage teeth. And how many other cryptid-hunters had experienced that moment, confronting the fugitive panther, standing before the ape-man, realizing that the true joy was in the quest. The actual finding holds only terror and loss.

Lee had been away from Mal for most of the summer term, sending her mournful emails and indulging in lonely midnight Skype calls. Mal had settled in better, up to her eyeballs in LARP and the university debating society. They’d been an item for years, but now they were apart and in that stage in a relationship where you constantly wonder, Is this more important to me than to her? Am I too needy? Am I trying to tie her down? These worries always disappeared the moment Lee actually got to speak with Mal. Nevertheless, every day she was away, Lee was newly terrified that Mal would suddenly remember she was white and posh—and go back to her own people, like some brief alien visitor to Earth.