Henrek boggled. For a moment, he lost full control, and just gaped open-mouthed at the screen.

Sure enough, a warm green filled up the screen, unmistakably in the form of the gentle wood ape he had been peddling merch of for the last week during his stopover in this Canadian town in the middle of nowhere.

But it wasn’t his wood-ape. It wasn’t Frank all costumed up, no, because then there would be the tell-tale cold spots in the sides where they couldn’t get the suit they’d crafted to glow in the infrared in the autumn Canadian nights.

No, the head was wrong, too. It was all wrong. Or, un-wrong, it was -

“AWOOOOAAAAAUGGGHghghUgHHG!”

The scream startled Henrek, making him jump out of his seat. The teenager next to him startled at Henrek’s startle, then said, “Oh, sorry, was that a bad call? I had been practicing what you taught us and I thought it was pretty close, and I thought maybe we could call him-”

“No, no, it’s fine my good boy, a fine call,” said Henrek, placing his arm on the boy’s shoulder with a brief reassuring pat, more to prevent Henrek from stumbling over as his blood pressure did loop-de-loops.

Henrek decided in the moment that, short of other options, he would simply play this as he was going to play it before a mythological cryptid actually appeared in the night.

“Umm, yes, try another call,” Henrek said after a moment. “You’re very good.” The boy resumed the trilled yell Henrek had shamelessly appropriated from Star Wars’ Wookies, and Henrek grimaced, then turned to the woman closest to the camera setup - Lauren, he remembered.

“Lauren! Lauren, it is recording, yes?”

Lauren looking at him with wide eyes, then to the camera briefly, then back. “Yes, yes it is recording! And, um, for backup-”, she pulled out her cellphone and began using it to record the television they were watching. Under her breath, she was muttering “oh my god, I can’t believe this is happening” on loop.

On the screen, the green Sasquatch stilled for a period, almost worrying Henrek that the camera had frozen. But as the boy followed up with a third call, the monster startled back into action, and leapt out of the screen.

“We should follow it!” said the boy immediately, facing his body leftward in imitation of the monster’s off-screen leap. But there was the problem, and Henrek hadn’t intended to tell them this: Henrek had lied about how he had placed the camera. He “thought” - as would anyone, and as far as the crowd knew - that the apparition had just sprinted left, relative to them, and as it looked on the camera. But he knew that actually, because of his setup, the creature was rushing off to the right.

The whole jig was to be that Frank, after making his appearance, was supposed to go off-camera to the right, and then Henrek was supposed to lead the crowd away to the left without anyone realizing they were headed the wrong way - and everyone would think they’d made a good try of it, oopsy-doodle, what a wily creature and a night to remember, etc.

But here Henrek had an honest-to-god chance to catch a cryptid. Not to mention -

“We have to get to the creature as fast as possible,” said Henrek. “Before it runs into Frank,” thought Henrek.

He began running to the right as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Wait!” Shouted Lauren, “shouldn’t we go-”

“The video image is mirrored!” Henrek shouted back, the first true thing he’d said all day.

He kept running, angling towards the right of the camera, and soon heard a crowd behind him trampling in pursuit. Before long the boy was ahead of him, and he estimated they were past the camera. “Now just turn right, follow the path there!” he yelled to the boy, indicating a deer path Frank and Henrek had scouted the day before, and that he could only presume the Sasquatch was taking advantage of.

Then there were two screams. Both were ahead in the woods, in the right direction. One was very clearly Frank. The other was very clearly not human.

A second wind caught in Henrek’s chest, and he was past the boy in moments, rushing towards the screams. The boy had paused, clearly scared, but followed Henrek’s example after he was brushed past.

Henrek found himself in a small valley, and his headlamp lit up a small stream. In the stream was Frank, bulging Sasquatch bodysuit on, the suit’s head a few feet from where he lay, partially submerged and leg caught in a branch.

“Frank! Frank, did you see it?”

Henrek was relieved to see Frank look up at him. But Frank’s response was a dazed “huh?”

Then the rubes had caught up, and had surrounded them.

The teenager looked at Henrek. The look was a vicious sneer.

“What the fuck is this,” asked the boy.

Henrek paused to think. It was all the crowd needed. They rounded on him simultaneously, demanding refunds, throwing mud and rocks at him, and casting their “Sasquatch lives!™” shirts on the ground.

“No, no, no” said Henrek pitifully, “it was real. This is… a lure, a planted lure, like ducks…”

But the crowd did not listen. They walked away from the small, broken man, and his friend who was dressed as a Sasquatch. He lived the rest of his life continuing to claim the Sasquatch footage they had captured was real, but his reputation was ruined, and he was not believed. Frank unfortunately died of a previously-unseen infection after having broken his femur in the fall, and it was another hundred years before a real Sasquatch specimen was caught - long enough that Henrek and Frank’s story were forgotten, and for Henrek, true validation never came.

Reminds me of that series of novels that had a knight and dragon team up to fleece villages. Dragon would come in, terrify folks; then folks pay knight to kill dragon. Repeat a few dozen times

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