Where do the Yuldikars play when all of the people go away?
What is left in the dark when the lights go out?
We think there is nothing, an empty room or solitude. But silence is peace and the still of the quiet pounds out a rhythm with the thump of each beat of the heart. They wait in silence, in the dark, in the shadows, waiting to see if the people will come back. Once it is decided that the people will not be back, that no one is watching on cameras or microphones, they emerge, one by one.
“Come out!” calls Tinee.
“They’re gone!” barks Feasle
The shadows take form, the harmless black swell of the desk and chair, the corner where the plant sits, dusky cast shapes that move across the room. One at a time the Yuldikars peel from the wall, extrude from the floor, their dark eyes, black holes absorbing all light staring with intent at the world around them. Having watched the people all night, all day, they now have the ability to move and play.
Their play is not innocent, happy and pure, not that of children, but of what can only be described as blackness and glowering. They swoop over the border collie in his bed and hover over him, while he looks around with fear. He knows these beasts, for they always return when his family is not here. The creatures that humans do not know, the darkness that rules the world just out of sight. He knows they can’t harm him, but they stare at him with their tenebrosity overbearing, knowing they would pull the life out of him as they had done to so many people, if only they could. They cannot harm the canine, but he saw what they did to his master’s wife when she was ill.
He sat in the corner watching the woman as she lay in her bed with labored breathing. The man, sat next to her, holding her hand as the children played in another part of the house. The collie had watched the Yuldikars come into the room, unseen by the man. How had he not seen them? Why won’t the humans see the creatures which always come for them? They see them as shadows, as play on light, but they are not. The collie saw as the sinewy creatures of darkness seethed over the woman, moved across her and as the man put his head down on her abdomen and wept with his eyes closed, they moved quickly, entering her mouth, eyes and nose with a rapidity that prevented the man from even seeing. They moved in and extruded, pulling and leeching what life was left in the woman. They consumed her warmth and pulled her soul out through the back of her head. The dog saw as they seethed through the bottom of the bed as if it were nothing but air to them and the pale essence of the woman screaming in silence as she was forcibly absorbed into the wall but several of them.
Why? Why did they take the woman? Why do they take what’s left of the people and disappear with them?
People stand in a room by themselves and talk. They think they are talking to themselves, but the collie knows the truth. They are talking to what they cannot perceive. To what they know is there on a very low level of consciousness. The Yuldikars as they watch, for they are experts in hiding and always watching.
Where do the Yuldikars play when people are away? In the walls, in the corners, in the shadows of the living, in the darkness of existence and just beyond the perception of people. But the collie knows, yes, he knows that all too soon they will all know about the Yulidkars, for they will be forced to play with them in their dark penetralia just out of sight. They will know, but not until it is too late.