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.
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.
*
At the B&B they were told, to their faces, that breakfast wasn’t included. Neither of them dared ask what the other “B” was for, though they had fun inventing options. Lee remembered nobody cared that they were two girls booking into a room with a double bed. She didn’t know if their hosts were pleasantly broad-minded or if they, like Queen Vic, honestly didn’t think of women as being that way inclined. Next up was to work out where they were going. The thing about dodgy YouTube videos of fake cryptids is how many important details they don’t include in the description, and Lee and Mal weren’t about to go wandering Bodmin Moor looking for “the farm.” They spent a day travelling from village to village, showing stills from the video and asking if people recognized it, until in a pub, one sunny lunchtime, someone gave them a queer look (so to speak) and asked if they were there for the beastie. Straight out with it in broad daylight, like they’d never seen a horror film in their lives. This was a prime opportunity to put the wind up some tourists, and yet here was this cackling old boy just telling them about the local bogeyman without any ominous build up or They do say…
Thinking back, four years on, she could laugh. However, when things went to crap this encounter had felt like the awful warning they’d ignored.
The old boy had been so helpful because the farmer in question was known locally, and not in a good way. A weird loner who didn’t get into town much, and enjoyed bitter boundary disputes with anyone luckless enough to be his neighbour. So when he’d turned up months before at the local police station, claiming there was a monster on his farm, everyone leapt on this opportunity for fun. The old boy spent a half hour talking about it and bought some decent local perry to go with the story. He also marked the farm on their maps and provided the name of its owner—one Cador Roberts. He sounded like a Welsh hill chieftain, except apparently he was mostly a grumpy middle-aged man, stuck out on a sheep farm on the edge of the moors.
They returned to the B&B to spend the evening inventing lurid tales of what might be found on Roberts’ land. They wondered whether he had faked the video himself or if someone had been gaslighting him—there seemed no shortage of suspects, from the way the old boy had gone on. Roberts had given his CCTV tapes to the police station, apparently. But they’d ended up leaked to a YouTube channel—so maybe the whole online exercise was to piss off Roberts should the man ever get near a modem.
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.