The natural history gallery has motion sensors for the alarm, and they log what they see, with a height, because the system is built to tell a person from a pigeon. Every night at half past eleven they log something at about a metre high, moving between the cases in a set order, stopping at each, and stopping longest at the case with the fox in it, and the fox, in the morning, has been touched.
I am the security supervisor at a museum with a natural history gallery, which is the room with the animals in the glass cases that every child in the town has been taken to, and the sensors in it are the reason I know about the visitor.
The sensors.
Motion sensors in the corners, for the alarm, that log every detection with a position and a height. A metre eighty is a person. Thirty centimetres is a pigeon that has got in, which has happened. They log all night and the log is the first thing I read.
At half past eleven, every night, they log a metre.
The route.
It starts at the door. It goes to the case with the badger, and stops for about ten seconds. The owls, stops. The otter. The heron. The deer, longer. Then across the room to the fox, and stops for about two minutes. Then the door.
It is the order the cases are in if you go clockwise from the door, which is the order a child goes in, because a child goes to the nearest thing and then the next nearest, and the fox is the last, because the fox is at the far end, in the case by itself, and the fox is the one every child in the town remembers.
The fox.
It is old, the fox. Victorian, in a glass case with a painted background, a red fox standing on a bit of moss with one front paw raised. It is behind glass and the glass is locked and the case is alarmed.
In the morning the glass has a mark on it, at the height of a small hand, in front of the fox's face. A hand print. Small. The cleaner takes it off every morning and it is there every morning, and it is not in the log of the case alarm, because the glass is not opened, and it is not on the camera, because the camera shows the case and shows nothing put a hand on it.
What has been checked.
The sensors, recalibrated. They log a metre.
The gallery, at half past eleven, by me, sitting on the bench by the deer. The route went past me. I felt it go past, at the height of my shoulder, as a child goes past a person in a crowd who does not look down. It went to the fox and stopped. And I looked at the case and the glass, in front of the fox's face, fogged, in a small patch, and cleared, and fogged, the way glass does when a child has their face right up against it and is breathing on it, and then the small hand print came, from the inside of the fog, and stayed, and the sensors logged the metre going to the door.
Who.
I do not know. I have not been able to find out and I have stopped trying. The gallery has been there for a hundred and forty years and every child in the town has been through it, and one of them, at some point, did not grow up, and comes back at half past eleven to see the fox, and I do not think it matters which.
What is done about it.
The route is on the alarm log as a false activation at one metre and the alarm company has been told there is a pigeon, and there is not.
What I do.
I run security.
The fox's case has a label, like all of them, at adult height, with the Latin name and the date. I have had a second label made, at a metre, at the height of the hand print, and the label says, in the words the old labels use for children, this is a fox, he lives in the woods, he is very clever, and under it, put your hand here, and a small outline of a hand, printed on the glass, where the print comes.
The print is in the outline now. Every morning. The cleaner leaves it. And the sensors log the two minutes at the fox as three, and the deer as longer, and I have had a label made for the deer as well, and the owls, and I am going round the room, at a metre, one case a week, and the route has started to go anticlockwise on some nights, to get to the new ones first, and I think that is what a child does when there is something new, and I think that whatever it is, it is still a child, and I am going to keep it interested for as long as I can.