Then the light went on again, and something was suddenly there, frozen in the brightness. Lee couldn’t see it properly, half behind a tarpaulin. The light was so bright that it leached away detail. Most likely it was some art student’s CGI project and everyone’d been had. But something was there, bigger than a bird, a little smaller than a man, insofar as there was any frame of reference. They both saw it: a hunched, prickly shape, with a suggestion of limbs, of wings that were more like arms despite the ragged sleeves of plumage. A head lifted high on a serpentine neck—or maybe it was just an arm inside a puppet.

It bolted, shooting between the Range Rover and the house’s wall, knocking over a crate as it went. That was the thing that had hooked Mal and sent a thrill down Lee’s spine. It didn’t move like anything they’d ever seen. It wasn’t flying or hopping like a garden bird. Not the long lope of an ostrich, or a bloke in a chicken costume. The whatever-it-was legged it straight across that narrow alley and into the concealing shadows. There was nothing of man to it, and precious little of bird. Lee was left with an afterimage of a feathered body covered in ragged plumage and a whirl of legs—its long tail almost a blur, emphasizing just how damn fast the beastie was. And that head, heavy on the muscular neck, looking back at the camera. It was as though it knew it was being watched, the eye flashing a rapid tapetum reflection before it vanished.

There are certain codings for how a creature moves that are designed to awaken a deep and ancestral unease. Lee had seen them all in those fake videos. Make something that’s too close to human for comfort; make something that jolts into sudden, scurrying motion like a spider. Design something that bends and flexes wrong, but not too wrong. There was a language of horripilation in creature design; ask any SFX studio that’s done a horror film or two.

This thing, the Birdman, displayed none of those tricks. Its body was built from a different alphabet, another language entirely. That was what caught them both. It was a fake—obviously it was a fake. But so long as neither of them said as much, they could pretend it might be real.

By that evening they’d booked a hire car and a bed and breakfast in a small village called, delightfully, St. Teath. They were going to Bodmin to hunt—not for its infamous Beast, but the Birdman.