Chapter Text

The Buffalo Boy

Part I: The Museum of Unverified Things

Dr. Elspeth Vale had spent enough of her professional life examining impossible objects to know that most of them were disappointingly possible.

Saints’ finger bones belonged to goats. Spirit photographs contained double exposures. Medieval grimoires had often been printed in Birmingham in 1927. The bloodstain of a murdered queen proved to be furniture polish, the cursed Egyptian mirror came from a department store in Leeds, and a supposedly seventeenth-century witch bottle once surrendered, under X-ray, the unmistakable outline of a modern bottle cap.

Elspeth did not resent fraud.

Fraud was human. Fraud had motive, material, opportunity and usually an invoice.

It was the things that resisted explanation she disliked.

The Museum of Frontier Zoology stood beside an abandoned grain elevator outside the town of Bellwether, Nebraska, beneath a sky the colour of old aluminium.

It had been closed for eleven years.

The sign remained.

MUSEUM OF FRONTIER ZOOLOGY

And beneath that, in smaller letters:

THE ANIMALS AMERICA FORGOT

Someone had shot the word animals twice.

Elspeth parked the hired Ford beside a rusting cattle trailer. There were no other vehicles.

Her telephone showed one bar of reception, then none.

She looked at the building for a while.

It was larger than she had expected: a converted agricultural college laboratory from the 1930s, two storeys of pale brick with narrow windows and an entrance decorated by carved bison heads.

One horn had fallen off.

She took a photograph before going inside.

She always photographed entrances.

Later, when things became complicated, it was useful to remember precisely where you had begun.

Her client called himself Mr. Rook.

That was almost certainly not his name.

They had met three weeks earlier in a private reading room beneath an auction house in London, where a dealer had been showing Elspeth a collection of alleged nineteenth-century photographs of supernatural manifestations.

Rook had waited until the dealer left.

He was somewhere between fifty and seventy. His clothing was expensive without displaying any identifiable brand. He wore an old mechanical wristwatch and carried no visible telephone.

“You are Dr. Vale.”

“That depends whether you owe me money.”

He had smiled.

“I understand you authenticate anomalous historical materials.”

“I authenticate historical materials. The anomaly usually disappears.”

“Yes. That is precisely why I want you.”

He placed a brown envelope on the table.

Inside was a photograph.

Black and white.

Approximately eight by ten inches.

American manufacture. Kodak paper.

The image showed a field.

Cattle were scattered across it.

At the edge of the frame stood something that initially resembled a boy.

Elspeth brought the photograph closer.

The figure was perhaps five feet tall. Naked or wearing something tight against the body. The shoulders were disproportionately broad. The head appeared elongated.

There was something wrong with the legs.

Not anatomically impossible.

Simply wrong enough to make her look twice.

“What am I authenticating?”

“The photograph.”

“That is rarely an interesting question.”

“Then authenticate the event.”

He slid another envelope across the table.

Inside were six typed witness statements.

All described essentially the same thing.

A child-sized figure seen near cattle.

A smell like stagnant water.

Animals behaving violently.

Electrical failures.

Sudden illnesses.

And, repeatedly, misfortune.

A tractor overturned.

A barn burned.

A woman miscarried.

A farmer hanged himself.

Twenty-seven cattle died.

A boy disappeared for nine hours and was discovered sitting naked in a drainage ditch, unable to remember his name.

On the first page someone had written in pencil:

BUFFALO BOY

Elspeth looked up.

“Cryptid folklore.”

“Perhaps.”

“Where?”

“Nebraska.”

“I don't investigate monsters.”

“You investigate provenance.”

“That is a more expensive word for paperwork.”

Rook smiled again.

“Yes.”

The museum door was unlocked.

That bothered her immediately.

Someone had known she was coming.

Inside, the air smelled of dust, plaster and something medicinal.

A reception desk stood beneath a suspended skeleton labelled American Lion — Reconstruction.

Beside it was a gift shop containing mouldering postcards, ceramic Bigfoots and several boxes of souvenir pencils.

A handwritten sign read:

NO PHOTOGRAPHY BEYOND THIS POINT

Elspeth photographed it.

“Dr. Vale?”

The voice came from the darkness behind the reception desk.

A man emerged.

Seventy, perhaps older. Thin, stooped, with nicotine-yellow hair combed carefully across his scalp.

“Professor Marcus Heller.”

His handshake was cold.

“You run the museum?”

“Ran.”

“You live here?”

“Somebody has to.”

He smiled apologetically.

It was not reassuring.

Heller had been the museum's last curator. Before that he had taught mammalian biology at the University of Nebraska.

“You're British.”

“I usually am.”

“Rook didn't say.”

“What did Rook say?”

Heller's face changed slightly.

“Nothing much.”

That interested her.

“Does Mr. Rook have another name?”

“Not that I've heard.”

They stood beneath the dead lion.

Somewhere deeper in the museum, metal struck metal.

Elspeth looked towards the sound.

“Heating pipes,” Heller said quickly.

There was no heating.

The Buffalo Boy occupied Archive Room Four.

That, Elspeth thought, was unusual.

Cryptids generally occupied exhibitions.

Archives were for evidence.

Heller unlocked three doors.

The first led from the public museum into offices.

The second into a basement.

The third required both a key and a numerical code.

“You take your Bigfoot seriously.”

“We never had Bigfoot.”

“Everyone has Bigfoot.”

“Not here.”

The archive room contained eight steel cabinets, a microfilm reader, two filing tables and a commercial freezer.

Elspeth stopped.

“What is in the freezer?”

“Nothing.”

“You answered quickly.”

“Old biological specimens. Mostly tissue slides.”

“Mostly?”

Heller avoided her eyes.

She noticed a yellow sticker on the freezer.

BIOHAZARD

It had been scratched repeatedly with something sharp.

Elspeth said nothing.

Heller opened Cabinet Three.

There were approximately two hundred files.

“Everything we have.”

“About the Buffalo Boy?”

“Everything anyone admits to having.”

The earliest sighting occurred in October 1956.

A cattleman named Otis Mullen reported seeing “a coloured child or burnt person” walking through his herd shortly before eleven animals developed haemorrhagic lesions.

The local veterinarian diagnosed poisoning.

No poison was identified.

In 1961, three schoolchildren described a “brown boy with a cow face” beside an irrigation canal.

Within forty-eight hours, a respiratory illness passed through two nearby farms.

Four hundred cattle were slaughtered.

In 1964, a police officer photographed a naked figure beside Route 83.

That was Rook's photograph.

Elspeth examined the original beneath magnification.

No obvious manipulation.

Correct paper.

Correct emulsion.

Correct ageing.

She turned it over.

There was a stamp.

PROPERTY OF BELLWETHER COUNTY SHERIFF

Underneath:

14 OCT 1964

And beneath that, almost invisibly, a second stamp had been violently erased.

Elspeth adjusted the lamp.

Three letters remained.

US—

“Federal agency?”

Heller did not answer.

She looked at him.

“Professor?”

“You wanted provenance.”

“Yes.”

“Then provenance is what you should stick to.”

It was an odd sentence.

“Is that advice?”

“Yes.”

“Or a warning?”

Heller closed the door.

“Dr. Vale, people around here believe the Buffalo Boy brings bad luck.”

“You don't.”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I think that's worse.”

By four in the afternoon she had constructed a chronology.

The folklore was remarkably consistent.

The Buffalo Boy appeared near livestock.

Livestock became ill.

People became frightened.

Then someone attempted to suppress the story.

Newspaper articles disappeared.

Veterinary records were amended.

Photographs were lost.

Witnesses retracted statements.

One elderly farmer had written across his own testimony:

I NEVER SAW THIS.

Underneath, in different ink:

THEY HAVE MY DAUGHTER'S ADDRESS.

Elspeth photographed the page.

Heller watched her.

“Who are they?”

“Everybody asks that.”

“And?”

“Nobody gets an answer.”

She continued through the documents.

The sightings diminished.

Then stopped almost completely.

Until 1999.

A cattle mortality event outside North Platte.

A ranch employee hospitalised with unexplained pulmonary bleeding.

Seventeen cattle found dead beside a drainage reservoir.

And then the final folder.

Elspeth opened it.

Inside was a colour photograph.

Modern.

Digital print.

A game camera image.

The figure was closer.

Much closer.

She felt something cold move across the back of her neck.

The Buffalo Boy was standing approximately fifteen feet from the camera.

It was not a boy.

That was merely the shape into which frightened observers had forced it.

The skin was hairless, brown-grey and covered in irregular plaques. The torso was narrow. The arms were disproportionately long.

Its face was recognisably human.

That made it worse.

The eyes reflected infrared light.

The mouth hung open.

There appeared to be blood across its chin.

Behind it lay a dead calf.

Elspeth stared at the photograph.

“You said this was folklore.”

“I didn't.”

“You allowed me to assume it.”

“Yes.”

“Who took this?”

“A rancher named Silas Creed.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead.”

She waited.

Heller said nothing.

“How?”

“Car accident.”

“When?”

“Three days after he gave me the photograph.”

Elspeth looked again at the image.

“What happened to the memory card?”

Heller rubbed his face.

“They took it.”

“Who?”

“Men.”

“Excellent. We're narrowing it down.”

“They weren't police.”

“Federal?”

“I don't know.”

“Military?”

“I don't know.”

“Corporate?”

At that Heller looked at her.

A tiny movement.

But enough.

Elspeth leaned back.

“There we are.”

“There we are what?”

“You know something.”

“No.”

“You reacted.”

“I did not.”

“You're a terrible liar.”

“So I've been told.”

Elspeth closed the folder.

“Who paid for this museum?”

Heller became very still.

The Museum of Frontier Zoology had opened in 1973.

That was odd in itself.

The craze for roadside cryptid museums came later.

Elspeth went upstairs and found the administrative ledgers.

Funding had come through a charitable trust called the Great Plains Natural Heritage Foundation.

The Foundation had apparently possessed considerable money.

There were grants for construction.

Salaries.

Acquisition budgets.

Laboratory equipment.

A walk-in freezer.

Veterinary isolation facilities.

An electron microscope.

Elspeth read the equipment list twice.

“This wasn't a cryptid museum.”

Heller said nothing.

“This was a laboratory pretending to be one.”

He walked away.

“Professor.”

“I need coffee.”

“What was studied here?”

“Animals.”

“What animals?”

“Strange ones.”

“That answer may work on tourists.”

He stopped.

The old man seemed suddenly exhausted.

“Do you know why museums are useful, Dr. Vale?”

“For storing things.”

“For making things harmless.”

He gestured around them.

“Put a monster in a glass case and it becomes folklore. Put a photograph beside it and it becomes entertainment. Sell a postcard and you've killed it completely.”

Elspeth considered this.

“What needed killing?”

Heller looked towards the basement.

“Belief.”

They drank coffee in what had once been the staff room.

It tasted of rust.

Rain began outside.

The Great Plains disappeared behind grey water.

Elspeth's telephone briefly acquired reception.

Seven messages arrived.

Six were spam.

The seventh contained no sender identification.

LEAVE BELLWETHER.

She read it twice.

Heller watched her face.

“What?”

Elspeth handed him the telephone.

He looked genuinely frightened.

“That happen often?”

“No.”

“You should listen.”

“To anonymous text messages?”

“Yes.”

“Professional weakness. I usually archive them.”

She took the phone back.

Another message arrived.

This one contained a photograph.

Elspeth opened it.

For several seconds she did not understand what she was seeing.

Then she recognised the room.

Her hotel room.

The bed.

Her open suitcase.

Her notebook lying beside the lamp.

The photograph had been taken that afternoon.

While she had been at the museum.

Heller whispered:

“Oh Christ.”

A third message arrived.

YOU HAVE BEEN EXPOSED.

Elspeth read it.

Then read it again.

The wording troubled her more than the photograph.

Not seen.

Not warned.

Not identified.

Exposed.

She looked across the table.

“Heller.”

The professor was crying.

Very quietly.

“What is in the freezer?”

He shook his head.

“What is in the freezer?”

“Samples.”

“From what?”

“I don't know.”

“You're lying.”

“I never knew.”

“From the Buffalo Boy?”

Heller stood abruptly.

“We need to go.”

“To the freezer?”

“No. Away.”

Lightning illuminated the windows.

For perhaps half a second the whole museum became white.

Elspeth saw something standing outside.

Across the road.

Beside the grain elevator.

Small.

Naked.

Watching the building.

Then darkness returned.

She stood.

“Heller.”

He had seen it too.

“No.”

His voice was barely audible.

“No, no, no.”

Elspeth moved towards the window.

Heller grabbed her arm.

“Don't.”

The figure emerged again when the lightning flashed.

Closer now.

Perhaps thirty yards away.

Human-shaped.

Motionless.

Its head tilted slightly to one side.

Then the lights went out.

Somewhere in the basement an alarm began to sound.

Not a burglar alarm.

A pulsing electronic tone.

Heller froze.

Elspeth heard another sound beneath it.

A compressor shutting down.

The freezer.

Heller whispered one word.

“Run.”

Then something struck the locked front doors from outside.

Once.

Twice.

And a third time.

The glass cracked.

Elspeth stared through it into the rain.

There was nothing there.

Only muddy footprints.

Small footprints.

Almost human.

Leading from the road to the museum.

None leading away.

And from beneath the basement door came a smell Elspeth recognised only after several seconds.

Disinfectant.

Wet animal hair.

And blood.

Professor Heller began backing away.

“It wasn't supposed to survive,” he said.

Elspeth turned towards him.

“What wasn't?”

Heller looked at the alarm flashing red above the basement stairs.

His face had become grey.

“The delivery system.”