She’d scoffed at the time. Not so hard as to get on Mal’s nerves, but that was how the Forteana side of their relationship worked. One of them would propose something and the other would gently knock it down. And this video had been a classic, in terms of the cryptid cock-tease. Fixed camera angle, so things could be happening just off-screen, plus bad-quality images full of ghosting and phantom movement. The viewer could read in a whole conga line of Sasquatches.

The camera was supposedly attached to the house of a sheep farmer on Bodmin Moor, down in Cornwall. The video’s description went into impressive amounts of detail about the lonely farmer whose livestock was being attacked by a mysterious (note the correct use of the letter y!) animal. And that was also a red flag in the credibility stakes. When someone went to these lengths to embroider a narrative, it tended to be because the facts resolutely refused to speak for themselves. Much of the original footage was steeped in gloom: moonlight filtering in to show the outlines of things, but nothing definite. There was no sound. Then the motion sensor triggered and everything lit up, but nothing was there—someone had misaligned the camera and sensor, no doubt. It was another absolute standard in the “fake videos of spooky things” oeuvre. The more you could make the viewers’ imaginations work for you, the better.

This happened a couple of times. And maybe the farmer was going nuts, or maybe he was asleep or off in the big city displaying his prize trick-performing pig. Lee remembered getting a bit fidgety after the second jump-scare-ha-no-false-alarm, and started rolling her eyes at Mal, who poked her in the squidge at her waist and told her, look, here it is.

Everything had been gloom for a minute and a half, and in that gloom Lee could see movement, if she was so inclined. Truthfully, she could have seen anything. Squint and that suggestive shadow was creeping forwards, slow enough to fox the motion sensor. Blink again and it hadn’t moved a pixel. Or was that something occluding the Range Rover’s licence plate, a hunched shape that might be a dog or a humanoid figure on hands and knees? Birdman of Bodmin? queried the title, and that alone peopled the darkness with all manner of outlandish shapes. Bird cryptids were rare, after all, and what was a “Birdman”? Lee remembered the flywheels of her imagination spinning, denied anything solid to sink their teeth into.