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

by Luis de Agustin

  “That it does,” Nathan said, pulling his woolly coat over himself like a blanket. “Sleep tight, Gus,” he said, his eyes closing.

  Leeda called it a day as well. Laying her long body along Sammy’s, her touch soothed the tortured pain of his late season. They sank into their piles of straw, each seeking respite, and like the others, all trying to not think of anything said or that could be said. Clearing their minds and resting was the answer.

  For several days, the ice storm lashed the hut and the trekkers remained resting, but each day made Sammy increasingly feeble. His was a wasting away from self-consumption. His core consumed the body like a cannibal working from the inside out, and every cell attacked its neighboring cell in order to itself not die, but die they did by the tens of millions. What survived at each day’s closing would battle through the night. Sammy’s moans of agony filled the cozy huts they stopped in, and they pained his friends to hear. About the time the storms ended and uplifting rays of sun returned, directions from Hain without a destination appeared on the GPS.

  They followed the directions slogging up the mountain, always straight or on goat paths, bypassing the gentler single lane road winding up the mountain. In this way across the steep rougher terrain, they tired and scraped themselves as Hain surely wanted.

  Sammy no longer climbed without help from Nathan aided in turns by Gus and Leeda. “Do we all turn into mountain goats at the top?” Sammy said, trying to smile through missing teeth. The face that in early and even mid seasons attracted women and men like Swiss bankers to money, or politicians to power, would now turn them away in disgust or pity. “We still don’t know what we’re supposed to do at this destination. That is, after Hain has us milk all the Billy goats within a hundred-kilometer radius,” he kidded.

  “Maybe just the ewes, Sammy,” Gus smiled, holding him between Nathan and himself.

  They may not have known what they were to do, but Hain had sent word to the mountain village ahead about their coming. He did not simply describe them as travelers, but as potentially dangerous evil ones with intentions to harm the town. When the mayor of the idyll village of simple mountain folk convened the town council, most of Council become alarmed. They called for measures to protect their little town. Hain had used the word demons, and many of the myth-raised folk already referred to the coming strangers as yeti, mountain or herd spirits.

  The mayor suggested calm and avoiding conclusions. The coming travelers were more likely some troublemakers or pranksters from the valleys or some city. They likely heard about the merriment of their coming Harvest Festival, and sought an evening or two’s fun around bonfires with dancing, drinking, and singing.

  What about the message’s reference to the visitors raping and seeking blood, one of Council said. Others warned that on the harvest festival’s Days of Saints, succubus and other woodland creatures were known to lurk in search of people to possess.

  By almost unanimous vote, Council agreed to organize patrols of men armed with heavy wooden poles to scout the surrounding areas and guard every part of the village. The herdsmen and farmers celebration that everyone looked forward to each year at that time would go on as it always had. People from outside were welcome to attend and enjoy their traditional festivities, but any sign of troublemakers, and they’d be set upon as if wolves coming to attack their herds.

  The dissenting votes to cancel the celebration were dismissed. The people worked hard the seasons leading up to brining in the harvest and realizing the sales of their hard-raised flocks, and they needed to celebrate what work and nature had provided. The coming days marked a turning point from light into darkness as well. The zenith neared when nights would lengthen and days became dark and bitter cold. Before the darkest time of the year, what better way to celebrate than a feast of light?

  Their celebration coincided with the Days of Saints. It was a time when spirits of the dead sought to return to their families. What better way to make them feel welcome than to light bright fires and sing old songs for them to find their way back. But it was also the time when crafty supernatural forces with ill intent crossed to the realm of man.

  The simple mountain people may have owned smartphones but they still believed in ancient myths, and accepted fantasies to explain events they could not resolve. Many believed that during the coming days of merriment and observance, supernatural creatures or their spirits emerged from caves in the ground. The beings and spirits passed from those gateways of the Otherworld and then returned and hid there until the following year, sometimes taking victims.

  Hain relied on the villagers’ superstitious minds to act as he hoped with the coming strangers. A trap for his yulen he’d planned and encouraged the village to unwittingly spring for him.

  >

  The yulen gazed over the mountain town’s dwellings set on a sloping cliff-side. Yellow lights glowed from the many hutch windows like fireflies over a white flowered field. From an opposite hill, Nathan studied the terrain and movement in the mountain hugging town. Billowing wood-smoke told him there was lots of activity being prepared. He was unsure of what it could be, but concluded that on entering the village that evening they should remain in the open and partake of the folk traditions.

  Nathan knew by then to be suspicious of Hain, and he decided they should break up. Really, it was as much from necessity as suspicion. Sammy was at the point of taking and needed to enter the town, but the four together would call attention in such a small village. Gus and Leeda would go in together first, and in fact, make their presence known. That might take attention away from him and Sammy so Sammy could roam and successfully complete his end season.

  The snow-vested sky sprinkled flakes on their woolly garments as they set out for the village. However, just as they entered the town, a posted sentinel spotted the group’s movement, and followed it eagle-eyed. When the moving phantom threw a shadow from the town’s lights, a chill went through him that said they come, and he hurried to tell a patrol. But losing sight of them a moment, he failed to see the shadow separate, and lost track of Nathan and Sammy, continuing only to spy only Gus with Leeda.

  Sammy soon smelled the wondrous answer that would become his salvation. Soon he would hear something like a furnace click on in his belly. His waxen skin would begin to warm and turn pink. His tool for continuance would flare and prepare to bring him from the season of near death into the season of rebirth. Everything in him now commanded he take the offering of Earth. She would pit one of Her cherished beings close to death against another with plenitude of life. One would transfigure from life to death, and one from death to life. One life, one human victual was all that yulen asked. That was all that was required. Was it really too much to ask or expect? Nature may have had its preference of victors, but to yulen mind what could it matter to Earth one less among billions against so few of yulen? The preference should be with yulen.

  That would not be the opinion of the young girl that Sammy, held by Nathan, watched from the top of a narrow sloping path lined by tightly packed two-story houses.

  “They come,” the sentinel said, running up to a group of men holding thick wooden poles and watching a bonfire around which musicians played and people danced and drank. Their faces bright from firelight and hearty beers turned to the approaching sentinel. “They come,” he repeated agitated, pointing toward the edge of town. Calling other watchmen, the group quickly doubled and followed the messenger.

  As he must, Nathan stayed away from Sammy’s taking. Near the top of the street, he watched Sammy amble down the path. He saw Sammy approach a mountain-festival costumed girl seeming to wait for someone at the path’s end. He could not help Sammy further with his taking. To his yulenness that meant harm against another, and it forbade him to do more. Sammy was on his own and he would need to be perfect. Any mistake, and the village would come down on them and they’d never get away.

  “Greetings friends,” Gus said, stopping with Leeda at one of several long stands set outdoors serv
ing beer and food. The suspicious barmen signaled to men holding staffs, and Gus and Leeda exchanged worried looks. “We’ve come to celebrate your famous happy festival,” Gus said in his most amiable German, and poking Leeda to smile. “My name is Gustav and this is my wife Leeda. Please, honor us with allowing me to buy everyone drinks and cooked lamb. It’s the custom from where I come, for the visitor to treat his village hosts.”

  The bar owners hesitated.

  “Seriously. Please,” Gus said, tossing down several large bills. “Please don’t dishonor me. Madam, girls,” he said to the confused counter girls. “Go ahead, lamb and beer, beer for everyone. For everyone!” he said, taking a stein with bravado and toasting before he made as if to drink. “To everyone’s health. Happy harvest. Happy gathering. Happy festival!”

  With that, the women started dishing out plates of lamb, and the barmen filled steins that they handed to an eager growing crowd. Leeda did her best to project her comely looks, smiling to the girls taken by her beauty, and flirting with the herdsmen looking her way. She was the floorshow to Gus’ bribe of free victuals and brew for the rough country folk. “Eat up. Drink up, everyone,” Gus cheered. “You’ll tell us about what’s ahead tonight on the calendar,” he encouraged the hungry people downing meats and drink.

  Sammy’s stomach quacked. The girl watched him, approached awkwardly. Even in that sheep teeming element, she smelled something awful, and it grew as the mutant like walking figure neared. Already, thoughts of dead spirits conjured in her head. As he walked and his gaze focused on her, she imagined him as of the undead, free to wander among the living on those strange and holy nights. Maybe he might even enter her body and slowly consume it until she became one of them. Could he be a monster? Her voice caught as she was about to ask who he was. Something else, a lovely chorus of singers, she heard. It was not the mountain song that she knew and was being sung up the hill where everyone gathered. Thoughts of flesh meat crossed her mind. Flesh meat, the food that bad spirits sought. Not all spirits returning to their place of family were good. The man now close to her, the smell was his. The sound, that of an angel choir lulling her, was his. The sweet sound subdued her strength from pulling from hands that held her wrists, or from the body pushing against hers. “Angelica,” she heard her name. “Angelica?” Was it coming from the hideous widening mouth lifting to settle on her crown? “Angelica . . . Angelica? . . . Angelica!” her mother screamed, from her home’s second floor window. “Angelica! Help! Help! The intruders! Here! My daughter! Help!”

  The girl roused from the lulling spell and pushed the frail body that refused to let go or move away.

  “Angelica! The demon! Here!”

  The girl pushed the menace away and freed her hands from its grip. As she fled up the path toward the center square, it limped after her. “The demon! He’s here! The demon!” the girl called running up the path, passing Nathan watching from the doorway of a house. “Help!”

  Sammy continued after her, his calling provoked to such an extreme that he was unmindful of the consequences. Until her scent left him, he would follow. Men, backlit by bonfires from the square, came into view at the head of the hill the girl ran to, and they started toward her. Crying, she ran into their embrace. Men ran past Nathan crouched and winding up the sides of the houses toward the square.

  “What’s all the excitement?” Gus called to his drinking friends at the bar, he and Leeda each dancing with a partner around the main bonfire.

  “I think they found a demon,” a man answered.

  “Oh they see fairies and mountain spirits everywhere,” a bleary-eyed villager chimed in.

  “We received a warning that troublemakers were coming.”

  “Well I don’t believe in demons, or Abominable Snowmen,” Gus laughed. “Everybody drink up. This lamb is terrific!”

  “Oh, but there are such creatures,” an old woman said, going to Gus. “I’ve seen them.”

  “We’ll I won’t contradict you, madam, but when I see one, I’ll put my boot to his head!” Gus said with gusto.

  “They have Sammy,” an agitated Nathan breathed to his partners, as he slipped up behind them, everyone else’s attention on the group of pole wielding men approaching the lighted square.

  “Bring him here. Into the light.”

  Dragging Sammy between them, the men dropped him on the ground, plaintively moaning, even howling from his calling to take. He tried to stand, and when his uncovered head lifted to the light, the hideous appearance of prominent skull and facial bones, oozing scabs, and spindly hands, sent a shudder through the crowd. Like an animal, he moaned, and in between breaths, like a man he cried. Grim, like ready for the gallows he looked. His teeth mostly missing, and his hair only thin clumps, a sense of needing to destroy this demon, hapless devil though he may be, formed in the mountain minds accustomed to harsh realities of survival.

  “Who has a lynching rope?” Nathan called out.

  The shocked townspeople watching the ungainly, malevolent clump from the Otherworld struggling on the ground were slow to turn to the caller.

  “Who has a strong rope?” he repeated.

  “And who are you?” a large man with a pole asked.

  “I’m with this folks, visiting the festival.”

  “Or maybe with him!” some said, pointing to the ground.

  “With him? With that? I’m a huntsman, as is my friend here. We hunt boar. We hunt bear. We hunt stag and salmon and trout and anything that flies. And we hunt demon. That!” he pointed at the creature holding its sides and rolling on the ground. “And I say to you, a rope, so we string him up and never allow him afoot again to do what he was about to do to that child. A lynching rope! Who has a rope?”

  “You don’t give orders here.”

  “I don’t mean to give them. I’m sorry. I only thought you should know what should be done with this. I, well, we, have experience with it.”

  “We don’t have a gallows here.”

  “A tree limb will do, before he escapes back into his cave.”

  “He’s not going anywhere.”

  “How can you stop him? They fly.”

  “Well we’re not going to hang him, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “Then what?”

  “Tie him up and put him in—in—”

  “Not in my house.”

  “Nor mine.”

  “Or mine.”

  “Then return him to the cave he came from,” Nathan said.

  “And where’s that?”

  “On the far side of the mountain across yours. We passed one, a cave, on our way here.”

  “This is all untrue,” another man said. “These people are with him. He’s trying to trick us into letting him go. You’re all with him there, poor beast.”

  “We?” Nathan laughed. “Do we look like we could be with him? Do we look like him?”

  “Who can say what forms any of you can take.”

  “Matching us to that thing is like comparing a lamb with a rat.”

  Sammy finally got to his feet.

  “Move away from him,” the men with the poles said. “Don’t let him near you,” they said of the moaning, white eyed demon, its repugnant odor and disfigured mouth of missing or rotting teeth forcing them to move away.

  “Hang him or let us take him out of here. Anywhere you put him, he’ll escape, and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do on entering the bedroom of a woman or child,” Nathan warned.

  “Sounds like a capital offer,” Gus said to the villagers, who warmed to the idea of getting the thing off their hands.”

  “I know I’d sleep a lot easier,” Leeda said, nonchalantly mimicking to drink from a stein.

  “We’ll take care of him here,” the large man said angrily.

  “Let them take him, Wolfrik,” another said.

  “He hasn’t done anything, and I’d just as well not have him, or it, in the village another minute.”

  “I can get a rope to tie his hands.”
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  “Here, take a rope from the show pen,” a smaller man said, untying a slung rope separating an animal pen. “Here, I’ll tie him,” the man said, but when he stopped next to Sammy, Sammy’s fingers gripped his wrists, pulled the startled man, and his yulen call began to spread his lips, his mouth enlarging grossly to disfigurement.

  “Grab him!” the large man called, women screaming as the demon’s mouth spread to half his face and a black hole formed, nose and other features pushing up and back on his head.

  “Monster! He is a monster!”

  “He’ll kill Carl”

  “Kill it! Kill it before he kills!”

  “Kill him!” the four yulen heard ring in their ears.

  “Kill it! Kill it now!” the villagers continued screaming, closing in on Sammy after they pulled their neighbor free. “Kill it! Kill it!” they screamed. “Kill him! Kill him!” Swiftly they raised their heavy poles and brought them down on Sammy’s head, crushing the thinned membrane, brains pushing out. “Kill it!” Kill it!” the mob screamed, striking the beast, smashing its body.

  “Kill him! Kill him!” the last cries sounded in Nathan’s bursting ears. “Kill it . . . Kill it . . . Kill it . . .”

  When the circle parted, dry of liquids and blood as the yulen was, they saw the body did not bleed.

  “A witch, or warlock, bloodless,” a woman said.

  “Right to kill it. It was a demon.”

  “No doubt.”

  “None.”

  “None at all. A demon or devil ready to harm us.”

  “Almost killed the girl.”

  “And Carl.”

  “We had to defend ourselves.”

  “And families.”

  “Killing it was right.”

  “It was good.”

  “Good . . . ,” many nodded, looking at the rag-covered pile.

  Nathan gazed at the heap as well and saw mush where brains had been. He saw carnage where yulen eyes had seen, eyes that saw lies and called them so, and mind that had once told truth, always truth, always truthful. Limbs that walked upright and once carried the divine, they too served no further use but as feed for the insects that would fatten on them. He held back pangs to cry out and declare that this was not a demon and not a beast. This was almost man, all that men were and even higher than man. He was blessed and worthy of life but condemned to suffer as animal or almost-man.