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.
They did find footprints. And they weren’t human.
Lee still had the photos on a datastick somewhere. They weren’t exactly a smoking gun though. None of the footprints were complete, and they overlapped one another—but if someone had made them with a fake wading-bird foot, they’d really gone to town. The prints had two long toes and one short one, as though the inner toe had broken off halfway. Mal and Lee exchanged looks, and there was something between elation and terror in the air. Even messy and infinitely interpretable, this was new. This would get them in the Fortean Times. This would get them a speaker’s spot at Weird Weekend or even air fare to a big symposium in the States. This would make their names in the field—they knew it.
Mal picked up a bad smell beyond the general farmyard odour and followed it round the side of the barn. Lee’s subconscious was busy comparing reality with her memories of the video, feeling something was missing.
When Mal let out a horrified noise, Lee dashed over, already feeling sick in her stomach. The scent of dead meat was overpowering even through her hay-fever, sweet with rot. Most definitely she could hear the legion of busy flies. She was horribly certain it was Roberts.
It was sheep, though. A little flock had been penned in here, in what looked like decidedly makeshift accommodation, and something had got in amongst them. They were very dead, and for a moment that was all Lee could think about, because there was blood everywhere, painting the walls even, and some of the bodies seemed to have just about exploded. Mal lost what was left of her lunch right then, staggering out of the barn and retching, but Lee just stared. She’d seen roadkill before, and her neighbour’s hamster, when it did that hamster trick of dying for no reason. Now she was looking at the brutally torn-up carcasses of at least seven sheep. She felt almost clinical about it, like she was Sherlock Holmes ready to make gnostic pronouncements about the murderer. And the more she stared, the more she really did think like that, because she was noticing things, even as Mal called for her to come away. Horrible as the sight was, this wasn’t just death for death’s sake. There were far too many visible bones, and they were hacked about, not torn by the teeth of animals…
“Flensed,” she said, and Mal gave her a baffled look. Then Lee lost her nerve and didn’t explain the thought sitting in her head like a toad: this is what you get when you butcher bones, not when you gnaw on them.
She looked at the horrible, crimsoned walls, seeing places where the blood hadn’t just spattered. She took one photo before she had to get out into the air: a few smears and lines, really. Nobody would have thought anything of them, save that there was purpose there. Something had made those streaks, way past the high-water mark of the killing. And they’d see marks like that again.
Lee’s theory was right then: some sadistic bastard really was gaslighting poor Roberts. Someone had come in and cut up his sheep and put fake footprints about, or maybe it was the man himself, after the insurance.
At that point something bolted from the barn. It shot past them at such speed that it was almost gone around the building’s edge by the time they spun round to watch. Lee was left with an impression of it, a sense of something grey and ragged with a long tail. But of course that was what the video had primed her to see, and the next moment she didn’t know whether it had been real or just in her head.
Mal looked horribly pale, but also determined. She wanted to find something more, now. Lee was right with her, her brain belatedly stepping in to hand her a note about what they hadn’t seen yet.
“Range Rover isn’t here.” Roberts must be doing farm things, and there was a set of tyre tracks heading away from the house, over the rugged moors. They exchanged looks, wide-eyed. They knew they were crossing a line, but that was what the cryptid-hunting game was about, after all. Being on that brink, feeling the chasm of the unknown yawn at their very toes—before taking that prudent step back.
With daylight left, they went to find Roberts, armed with nothing but a hiker’s guide and a personal alarm that, out on the moors, nobody could possibly hear.
After an hour of walking they saw Roberts’ big grey-blue car, muddy and battered and in the middle of a field. No sign of the man himself, nor any potential Birdmen. However, they had also apparently stumbled upon a Site of Special Historic Interest. Three standing stones stood in what Mal’s guidebook charitably called a circle, yet was only ever going to be a triangle.
“The Six Brothers,” Mal read out, looking at the trio of monoliths. “That’s what the locals call ’em. Hello? Mr. Roberts?” Her call fell away weirdly into the air, seemingly swallowed up before the sound could travel. She turned to Lee. “Is it colder?”
It was colder. They stood there in shorts and T-shirts and shivered, dickering over whether to get more clothes out of their rucksacks. Lee looked up at the early afternoon sun, seeing it bright and fierce in a clear blue sky. The cold seemed something other, as though it was leaching in from elsewhere. Or so Lee remembered later, with the benefit of hindsight.
Mal approached the nearest stone, which wasn’t much taller than she was, flat and irregular, nothing like the decent workmanship of Stonehenge. “Six brothers,” she said derisively. On the inner faces of all three were lichen-clogged scratches that might have been local graffiti or Stone Age ritual magic.
The Range Rover’s door was open. Lee slowed her approach, sniffing frantically through her allergy-clogged nose in case it was another murder scene. There was no body slumped half out of the driver’s seat. There was no sign of Cador Roberts at all. She even got down on her knees to look underneath, finding only that the ground was somehow freezing cold and soaking wet.
“Lee,” Mal said. She was standing by the stone, not quite touching it, and she was very still. “You can see forever.”
“Hmm?” Later, Lee would try to reinterpret that pronouncement into something profound and prophetic, but probably Mal just meant the view. The stones marked out a rise in the moorland, and they could see for miles. What they could not see, however, was any sign of Roberts. The thought was almost as frightening as the sheep slaughter. Why would someone dump their car here and walk off into the tawny forever of the moors?
“I think we’re out of our depth here,” Lee decided, and then a rolling line of shadow raced over, as if clouds were obscuring the sun. That sky had been entirely clear a moment before, but weather could turn suddenly on the moors, Lee told herself.