Three Of Us Heard It. Only One Of Us Remembers It The Same Way.

We were camped at the top of a valley, three of us, all in our thirties, all sober, all boring.

Something came through the camp at about 03:30. We all woke. We all heard it. It went between the two tents, and it took, I would say, twenty seconds to pass.

In the morning we did the sensible thing, which was to argue for an hour and then do something clever: we each wrote down what we remembered, sealed it in an envelope, and agreed not to talk about it for a year.

We opened them last month.

Mine says: heavy, bipedal, breathing like a man carrying a fridge upstairs. It stopped by my tent. It smelled like a wet dog and hot brakes.

Tom's says: four-legged, cantering, sounded like a horse got loose. He says it did not stop. He says the smell was "nothing, just tent".

Ellie's is one line, and it is the reason I am posting this. It says: "It said Tom's name and Tom answered."

Tom does not remember answering. Tom does not remember it saying anything. Tom, when he read that line, put the paper down and went and stood outside the pub for ten minutes.

I do not remember it saying anything either. I remember breathing.

Three people, one event, twenty seconds, and one of us has a memory in which one of us had a conversation.

The obvious answer is that Ellie was half asleep, and that is a good answer, and she is the first to say so. She is a doctor. She is not a woman who wants a monster.

But she also says — and she said it very carefully, in a pub, with her hands flat on the table — that she has never in her life been more certain of a thing, and that the voice was not a growl or a hoot or any of the noises the internet has ready for us.

It was a normal voice, she says. Polite, even.

That is the word she used. Polite.