Yulen: Return of the Beast – Mystery Suspense Thriller (Yulen - Book 2)

by Luis de Agustin

  “Sammy,” Leeda chastened.

  “Your animus, sir!” Gus said to him.

  “Sorry, Herr Baron.”

  Nathan shook his head to Gus so he’d back down, his own thoughts traveling well beyond the foggy place.

  The rain kept on all morning and afternoon. When it started seeping through parts of the roof, the yulen bunched together, several standing, the others kneeling below them. Sammy thought that when the rain ended—if it ever did—he’d leave and return to Vienna. If not, he’d head somewhere else, anywhere with the few coins he hadn’t thrown away on this madness. His virtuous idea to improve his character by joining the group was too much for him. Virtuous he already was, as were all his kind. There’d be no shame in leaving this endeavor that he’d let himself fall into. He’d been captured by a silly, idealistic hope of realizing better character. It sounded dumb to him now, he thought.

  Truth was he did wish he might be gentler, kinder, maybe like Shawn and the others. He didn’t want to be cutting, sometimes closing on cruel—as he’d been toward Russell earlier. He really did want to be closer to and become part of this group—who truly were virtuous. But oh that he was so often hurt, been hurt, felt hurt, and therefore reacted as he did. Maybe it was to hide his hurt, his pain, not let it show. He looked at Gus standing stoically, surely, as tired as he was, but not complaining, and wouldn’t complain the next day or the next or the next. He looked at Shawn standing over Russell and Leeda with his arms folded should the roof leak. The big guy’s happiness was just from being there, with them, no other aim.

  Leeda, who he would love to lie down with, and oh so much then in a warm dry bed. She sat there quietly comforting Russell. She, of bewitching style and class, though damp from the rain, remained un-dampened. And as for Russell—just a wild teen he’d be if human. Who anywhere, man or yulen, didn’t want to be freer, rebel, try everything, have the power of lightening in their hands, and let it out against enemies, or use it to shape their deepest desires. Nathan? Oh Nathan. He had certainly persuaded him, but unlike the others, he hadn’t been taken by Nathan, not by a long shot. Nathan’s passion had not ruled him, although that fire, that zeal, they were something, and enough to make you want to rebel yourself and dare and not fear.

  So then, what had he wanted from coming with them? When they made it to Never Never Land, had The Book in their hands, the secrets to their distresses, sufferings, and limitations unlocked—what then? When he tossed in his lot, the answer was simple, riches, of course. Surely, The Book of Yulen would explain, lead to, or show them how to easily become rich. From those riches, he could then live a long life of ease and simply buy protection against men. But had he really come for the money?

  Maybe not as much as other yulen, he’d always managed to make enough. If he hadn’t made more money, it was only because he wasn’t the hardest working and determined yulen, as say Nathan was. And now that he was on the verge of leaving the group and passing up the riches he didn’t care about that The Book might reveal, why was he doubting his departure?

  The time since the killkin attack may have been the most ridiculous time he’d spent in a long while, but his usual boredom was gone. His sense of weakness and powerlessness toward the world also was less. For as long as he could remember, he had not felt complete or satisfied. He was usually the most frail, lazy, doubtful, questioning, underappreciated yulen around. His inferior feelings turned him to act the way he did, and even he didn’t like himself sometimes. Why would he? Bickering, bating, teasing—cutting really.

  The chance to be with others of his kind, acting for the first time in a cause, he’d never known such a thing. Encouraged by someone who didn’t judge him or seem to doubt their purpose, and who never felt inferior, that was the power he wanted. It wasn’t the power to defend or destroy that he wanted. It was the power just to not feel—ashamed.

  Sammy faced the lean-to’s open side, his head hanging. Hurt, he would say, was how he usually felt. He didn’t know if by finding this book anything would change in the way he was. Leave? Where would he go but back to bear more hurt, more shame. This was the right place to be, with these others. He understood then what Shawn had said and felt—that it was enough to be on the journey. Now . . . a sack of gold coins would certainly be nice, the secrets of the ages, cool, very cool. He would likely resent his decision to remain, but hey, maybe I should learn to enjoy things, even failure, he quipped. Look at that, I’m feeling better already. Maybe, he wondered, part of the answer lies in being a little insane—like our fearless leader.

  “You have a smile on your face,” Gus said to him. “Is it the Sun breaking through the gray ahead?”

  “No, Gus. I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it’s seeing myself in the mirror and thinking it’s pretty damn funny.”

  “Russell, look,” Leeda said. “The rain’s stopped and sun is breaking through.”

  Russell looked up and nodded. “I’m gonna make it. I’m gonna make it, hear? Gonna make it, Shawn.”

  “You are, Russell, you are,” Shawn said, pressing Russell’s shoulders.

  They remained under the lean-to several hours while warming rays dried the ground they’d have to cover. Soaked wet grass would pipe through their footwear and burn their feet, Nathan figured.

  It was still only midday when they set out with plenty of daylight ahead for a partial day’s trek. “You seem a changed traveler, Sammy,” Gus said, watching Sammy’s sprightlier step than the plodding he’d seen from him.

  “No, Gus. No chance of that. I’m still the lovable scamp I’ve always been. And no change into a black winged avenging angel either. It’s not in my character.”

  Nathan smiled, pleased that harmony was returning.

  “Everyone, it’s Hain!” Gus called, as he paused to look at his device, and the others came and gathered ‘round.

  “I’m sorry, Russell, for what I said to you earlier,” Sammy said to him.

  Russell nodded and then crowded in to look at the small screen.

  “Are we having fun yet?” Conrad Hain smiled from his habitual setting. “I know I am. But oh darn—let’s see, three, four, you’re all still alive. We really must do something about that.”

  “I really think he means it,” Sammy said.

  “Nonsense, sir. Really, your success is my success. Narrow escape at the bells, Gus?”

  “Most narrow.”

  “You’ll be better yulen for it.”

  “And much more worn, Mr. Hain,” Nathan said.

  “Yes. The wear and tear. It should make for frightful end of seasons for each of you.”

  “You devil!” Russell forced out. “Devil!” he said, grabbing the device from Gus, and tossing it.

  “Russell! My boy!” Gus called, hurrying to it with several of the others, Leeda staying to hold Russell up.

  “Conrad. Conrad,” Gus said, Shawn handing him the device.

  “Is someone upset with me?” Hain said, in mock surprise. “After all I’m trying to do for you?”

  “Where are we headed, Conrad,” Gus demanded.

  “As soon as we say goodbye, Gus, directions will arrive.”

  “How much more?”

  “Oh, you still have a while in the wilderness. I thought you liked nature. Nature is virtuous—as you are, yulen I mean. The most virtuous. The most good. Isn’t that how you think of yourselves? Goodbye, Gus, boys, madam. I hope to see fewer of you next time we chat ha-ha-ha-ha.”

  “Devil . . . Devil . . .”

  “Russell’s almost at the end,” Nathan whispered to Gus consulting the GPS. “A settlement, farmhouse, anything with people ahead?”

  “Nothing. Nothing ahead for the ten kilometers I can see. Straight due east the way we’re going.”

  “We’re going to find something ahead, Russell. Hang in there. Keep going,” Nathan said.

  “Here Russell, let me carry you, you’re light as a lamb,” Shawn said, taking the shrunken body and straddling Russell on his broad shoulders. “No heavier
than a lamb.”

  “Baaaaaaaa . . . ,” Sammy bleated. “You’ll be okay, Russell. And that cloak you’re wearing, makes you look like, who’s that character?”

  “Batman,” Shawn said.

  “Exactly. Our own little batman yulen.

  “Sammy, when I’m whole again, I’m going to kick your ass,” Russell said straining.

  “I’d love to see that, Russell. I would,” Sammy said smiling.

  >

  The six yulen trekked most of the afternoon, and not a farmhouse, boardinghouse, outhouse, lodge, or inhabitant did they pass.

  “Up ahead,” Gus said, looking into the GPS, “there’s an indicated structure of some kind. Unidentified, but marked by Hain.”

  At Russell’s level of desperation, Nathan welcomed anywhere there might be a person. However, that Hain marked a place on the trail he set, concerned him.

  Shawn and Sammy continued behind the others carrying Russell between them. A tall, grayish stone wall with towers stood about a kilometer straight ahead.

  Soon they identified the long flat wall belonging to a church. As they neared it, they saw no other structures occupying the country leading to or around the abandoned looking place. It sat atop a knoll apparently created for it.

  Approaching the Romanesque style structure, the ground’s gradient began to steepen. A ten-foot retaining wall surrounded the clearing around the old place.

  “Are we supposed to just keep walking straight?” Sammy asked Gus.

  “That’s how the device points, sir,” Gus replied.

  “There’s like a wall ahead of us?”

  “Sammy, we follow until we can’t.”

  “How old do you suppose the place is?”

  “Romanesque style, ninth tenth century.”

  “You think anybody’s inside?” Shawn asked.

  “Maybe,” Gus said, although clearly the grounds and place looked abandoned and unvisited. Regrettable, he thought, how ill fated were man’s creations. The building ahead, an accomplishment of medieval civilization when so much of the artistic beauty of subsequent centuries dawned, now forgotten. Song of the Nibelungen, the golden age of troubadours, grafting roots from which the arts would develop to Gothic, lost as well.

  “I wonder,” Sammy said, continuing toward the supporting wall, “if that wall’s going to explode as we reach it, boulders tumbling down on us. Or if shoots of flames will fire from the building and hit us. Maybe even the trees of that forest behind will spring to life and attack us.”

  “We can expect anything from Mr. Hain but I don’t think even he could bring us to as fantastic a place as you imagine.”

  “Just making conversation, Gus.”

  “Oh.”

  At the base of the retaining wall, they stopped.

  “Gus?” Sammy asked, Gus checking his device.

  “Forward,” Gus said.

  “And do we dig, or fly?”

  “Come on,” Shawn said, putting his broad back against the flat concrete blocks smoothed by weather and time.

  “You know,” Sammy said to Shawn, “I’m capable of helping too.”

  “Okay, then get next to me and hold your hands out in a stirrup like this. Everybody step into Sammy’s hands and boost up to my shoulders.”

  “Russell first,” Nathan said, helping him to Sammy and Shawn.

  “You know,” Sammy said, Nathan placing Russell’s shoe into Sammy’s cupped hands, “there’s no telling what those shoes may have stepped in.”

  “What a baby!” Shawn laughed.

  “Oh, okay. Come on, Russell,” Sammy said, everyone helping the debilitated Russell up. “I hope this book has something about a dry powder-based hand sanitizer,” he added, struggling with Russell’s instep.

  Russell scraped along the wall as they helped him onto Shawn’s shoulders. From there, his feel level in Shawn’s palms, Shawn’s extending arms lifted Russell skyward along the wall. When Russell’s arms reached the wall’s ledge, he pulled himself up onto the grass.

  “See anybody?” Leeda called to him.

  “He has hours, no more than a day,” Gus turned to Nathan. “He must find someone. Anyone.”

  “Russell?”

  No answer.

  “Russell, you okay?” They waited, but no answer.

  On the meadow leading to the tall flat wall of the large church, Russell stammered toward a side door opening where he was sure that the waving figure he saw standing there was real.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Nathan said. “Leeda.”

  “Ahh, the fair Leeda,” Sammy smiled. “Step your dainty little feet into my firm hold.”

  Her long dress hid her boot sliding into Sammy’s cupped hands. “I’m not heavy but are you sure you can manage, Sammy?”

  “Manage? Leeda, I could lift you with my—manhood,” Sammy quipped. “You could stand on it like on a springboard and spring up onto the grass.”

  They were laughing.

  “I’ll take your dirty hands over your dirty mind, Sammy,” Leeda smiled, quickly stepping from Sammy’s boost onto Shawn’s shoulders.

  “Reach up,” Shawn said, pushing up her feet standing in his palms.

  “Come on Gus,” Nathan said.

  “Russell’s not here!” Leeda called down. “Russell,” she called. “Russell.”

  “Stay there,” Nathan said. “Wait for us.”

  After Gus rolled onto the top of the wall, with a fast boost from Shawn, Nathan gripped the wall, grabbed the top edge, and Shawn pushed his legs up.

  “Russell!” Leeda and Gus called, Nathan helping Shawn after Shawn made a running leap to the wall, sprang up it and his hands grabbed the top edge.

  “Russell!” they called, walking toward the wall’s corner with the front of the church, and the only opening in the wall facing them.

  Screams shrieked from inside the church.

  “Russell!” they called, starting to run to the entryway.

  The blood-curdling screams rang out deep from within the big building.

  “Russell!”

  Shawn was first in, the others close behind. “Russell!” he called. “Russ!”

  “Russell!” the others called, reaching Shawn in the church vestibule, the three large entrance arches behind, stripped of their doors.

  “Stay together,” Nathan said, leading them through the vestibule.

  Inside the church proper, the vaulted walls reached high to a ceiling honeycombed with holes through which shafts of daylight beamed to the cracked stone floor.

  “Russell!”

  No one answered, but neither did the screaming echo any more.

  “Hold on,” Nathan said, stopping. “Does anybody hear a strange chipping sound?” They listened closely at the hollowness of the abandoned house of worship, puffs of wind whisking through the creaking roof.

  “No, but do I detect the smell of petrol?” Gas said.

  “Definitely,” Shawn answered, whiffing the air.

  “Let’s go,” Nathan said, and they continued.

  As they walked the long wide nave of the church, the ceiling heaved, and it startled them. They passed niches set along the massive walls, and passed to check these, but found only dark space where furniture, maybe confessionals, had been stripped long ago.

  They crossed the church bay, looking around, and passed into the transept where the floor widened and spread right and left. “You hear that?” Leeda said, her eyes bouncing. “Shush! There,” she pointed.

  “Coming from ahead.”

  “No, the left,” she said.

  “Left.”

  “Yeah.”

  They quietly stepped along the transept away from the main altar, and toward the faint sound that several of them already hoped was what they thought. Along the corridor, they neared a rounded arch. The quivering hum they heard came from behind it. Shawn turned and looked back thinking he heard something else, but saw nothing, except several rats.

  Turning the corner to the rounded arch set in the t
ransept, the distinct murmur they identified raced their excitement. When they looked onto the side chapel, they gladdened immeasurably.

  There before them they’d found Russell. His lowered face dug into a short man’s rimmed scalp. Its owner stood facing him. Russell’s arms and hands pressed against the torso. The yulen’s head sucked the soft brains as if boiled cabbage. It then pulverized and inhaled the harder bony skull as if candied apple. The man’s head consumed, the yulen head swung gently side-to-side like a pendulum over the shoulders. Leeda’s hand took Nathan’s, and smiling she turned to him, which he happily greeted, a great weight lifting off him.

  They continued watching the laterally moving head mow the standing body. Only when the taking instrument hit a large joint or perhaps a cell phone or metal object on the person, did the hum strain an instant, but then continued its transit along the vanishing corpse.

  Although dimness mostly filled the church, sufficient light passed through the breaks in the ceiling for them to see Russell taking the sustenance he dearly needed, and without which, he would have perished within a day. A satisfying comfort passed through his friends. For a moment, they forgot the travails they’d passed and those that might still lie ahead.

  Blood by the pint flowed from the body as the yulen’s facial cavity passed along it, but the humming vacuum rigorously sucked the fluid before it could fall away. Flesh, bone, organs, the man’s clothes, bodily possessions, all succumbed to the insatiable cavity. The whole animal would be taken, cleaned of tumors, gristle, eyes and their sockets, all liquefied into a life replenishing stew.

  This taking, they knew, would complete Russell’s late season, and his life would be redeemed. From the living substance, his body would regenerate and start a new cycle. Replenished, his early season would thus begin again. Joyful strength would be his once more. Feebleness and wasting would also eventually follow in the new cycle as nature governed it must, but that ugliness was not in their minds. For now, their eyes filled with gratitude at the seeming miracle.

  Having finished to the man’s groin, the already strengthening yulen lifted the barely attached legs, and his head beginning to uncurl. He pushed the thighs into the opening. Several snaps of knee bones rang off the church walls, but the progress continued down the shins and to the crackling angles.