My city sells counterfeit sunshine. They kind of have to, I guess, given that I haven’t seen a true, clear sky since I was eight years old. Most people don’t hear the fluorescent hum anymore—they pretend it’s silence, pretend this electric glare is sunlight, that the world is exactly what the city says it is. But I don’t pretend. I hear every pitch of that hum like nails dragged across the soft parts of my brain. 

They call it harmony, this progress-approved shade of white. The color of a perfect future, bright enough to blind doubt. To bleach memories.

Not mine, though; mine would take more than this blissful, false light to be burned out.

I keep my steps light as I move along the edge of the street, close to the pockets of shadow where the lights don’t fully reach. People don’t look into those negative spaces because darkness here isn’t empty—it’s inhabited. Hungry. 

It would be easier to pretend that this, too, doesn’t exist, to stay in the light and avert my eyes from what hides in the shadows. But I chose another path. 

I glance over my shoulder, making sure no eyes trail after me, then slip into the darkness. The Kuker mask strapped to my back beneath my coat bumps softly against my spine with every step. Wooden teeth, a painted snarl, fur around the crown. A mask meant to terrify winter itself into retreat. Meant to keep the things that lurk in the shadows at bay. My grandfather carved hundreds of them long before I was born, before the city outlawed such “primitive relics”. Before progress decreed that rituals and individuality threatened unity. 

They hope the lights of progress will make us forget. But I remember.

This mask, I painted myself. A small, dented copper bell rests at my hip under my coat. Not for the first time, I walk the abandoned streets toward the old city where the shadows grow thicker, and the lights of progress falter. Most days, my mother’s voice still echoes in my head: “Mila, the old city is no place for a young girl.” But she’s gone now, and clinging to the city lights never did her any good.

The lights behind me flicker with a warning twitch. I’m not entirely safe in the dark, but with my mask to guard me, I’m safer than most. The air shifts around me, and I sense the shadows behind me ripple and condense, knitting themself into something with a shape. Something that isn’t human. 

I’ve seen them a hundred times, yet a shiver still crawls down my spine whenever the darkness takes form. Skeletal limbs taper into claws, face swirling like smoke caught in a jar. The spirit clings to the wall, watching me for a long moment, before peeling itself off with a wet, sticky slither. 

I shrug my coat off despite the biting cold and flip the Kuker mask to my chest. 

“Not tonight,” I mumble under my breath. The spirit cowers. 

It won’t touch me like that, they never do, but it still follows. The city keeps them tamed with its harsh fluorescents, but barely. Here, on the shadowed outskirts, the spirits test the boundaries of the artificial glow with a growing boldness. People pretend not to see them as if ignorance could shield them when they face one. But the city tells them the spirits don’t exist, and they believe it, swallowing the lie whole. Anything to keep their spotless, orderly future intact. 

The truth is, the spirits have always been here. They are the night pulse, the counterweight to the Kukeri. The city lights never banished them; they only shattered the natural balance. 

I cross the deserted boulevard and slip into another alley. The spirit glides behind me, twitching each time the copper bell on my hip shifts enough to make a sound. 

The Kukeri cemetery awaits at the end of the abandoned street, a cluster of stone and wood, fully swallowed by the dark. It’s not a real cemetery, but this is where the Kukeri froze in time. Forever forgotten and calcified into sleeping statues. 

I keep my steps steady. The spirits never follow me inside the cemetery. Even asleep, the Kukeri hold them away—or perhaps the shadows fear something older than the sound of bells: the memory of what those frozen figures once were, and what they still mean. 

There is no door to the cemetery, only a makeshift threshold of crumbled stone. Beyond it lies a field of frozen guardians—sheepskin-clad bodies carved with monstrous faces, masks cracked and decaying, their bells long gone. They were meant to dance. To roar. Now they stand abandoned by their city. 

I walk between them as if I’m walking through a library of silenced gods. The spirit hovers at the cemetery threshold, trembling at the border like a child testing the rules of their older sibling. It stretches a limb toward me, smoke elongating and fingers twitching, and then shrinks back with a hiss. Moments later, it dissolves into the darkness, leaving nothing but the echo of its presence and the icy chill it carried.

I move deeper into the cemetery until I find him—the Kuker whose mask once mirrored the one strapped against me. My grandfather carved him too, decades before the revolution. A towering figure, wolf-faced, horns curling like melting iron rods. His wooden eyes follow me with a glint that feels alive, patient in a way only the perpetually forgotten can be. Waiting for the world to remember him. 

“Your turn,” I murmur, unstrapping the mask from my chest. The Kuker keeps his eyes on me, and he feels so very alive. So very human. I lift the mask, letting the faint glow of the city’s false night sky catch the lines of its paint. The moon has long been devoured by the never-fading veil of murk, but this ghostly illumination makes the fresh paint gleam like wet stone.

I take out the bell and press the mask to the Kuker’s face. I ring it once, the chime cutting sharply through the stagnant air. 

The Kuker shudders. Wood cracks, old joints splintering free from decades of stillness. The sheepskin cloak trembles like muscles waking up after a long-winter sleep. The statue inhales, and its head tilts toward the bell. 

He shifts, testing his feet, and dust drifts from his cloak like ash off a burned pyre. When he straightens fully, he towers over me—a silent behemoth awakened. 

The mask settles perfectly onto his face. He says nothing, but his eyes watch me with the patient stillness of a guardian waiting for instructions. 

“You’re not staying here,” I tell him.

His head tilts. 

“You will walk away. Hide where the city has forgotten to look. And when you hear the bells, you will come back.”

The Kuker stares for a long moment, shifting his gaze between my face, the dented copper bell in my hand, and the darkness behind me. Then he slowly turns and steps past me, moving through the frozen forms of his dormant brothers. The night folds around him, heavy as a cloak, and then he’s gone, swallowed by the labyrinth of streets that belong to the old city. 

I look around the still-frozen guardians and feel the weight of their lifeless eyes on me. They’re all waiting. I slip the lonely bell into my pocket and pick a Kuker at random. The ritual is the same every time. Pulling a pen from my coat, I trace the pattern of his mask onto the back of my hand, following every line, every curve I can make out in the dark. Some shapes are blurred and broken, but I fill the gaps with imagination. It’s a muscle memory, a hereditary instinct that lets me complete what the years have worn away. 

When the ink dries, I turn and retrace my steps, moving back toward the sterile glare of the city lights. The moment I cross the cemetery threshold, the dark shifts around me. Shadowy limbs stretch along the ground, reaching toward my hand where the Kuker mask is inked into my skin. The spirit doesn’t touch me; it only hovers there, its smoky fingers trembling close enough for me to feel the faint pull, something almost… wishful. They are bound to each other in the end—light and dark, guardian and shadow, each shaped by the other’s existence. A primal equilibrium drowned beneath artificial lights and sanctioned amnesia.

As the first harsh flicker of fluorescence catches my shoulders, the spirit recoils, folding back into the deeper dark.

Back into my grandfather’s old workshop, I lock the door and drag the blackout curtains across the windows, cutting off the city’s too-clinical lights from the room. The shadows immediately stretch, pooling at the corners like dark water. I barely remember what a true night feels like, but here, in this amber-lit room, the memory hovers to the surface.

I kneel beside the crate hidden beneath the floorboards and count the bells inside. Twenty-three in all, each one the pulse of a Kuker already awake. Each one a heartbeat waiting to be called. I toss the twenty-fourth bell in.  

At my worktable, atop sheets of copper that smell faintly of fire and dried blood, lies a blank wooden mask. I take up the paint kit and begin tracing the patterns from the back of my hand. The lines flow easily now, as if my hands know what to do without needing directions. 

Maybe it is all muscle memory—or maybe it’s a piece of my grandfather still lingering, his calloused hands guiding mine the way they used to, teaching me the rhythm hidden inside the wood and the resonance of copper. The mask warms beneath my fingertips, a soft pulse rising through the grained surface like a heartbeat waking from sleep. It chooses me, steadies me, reminds me who I am. And in that quiet surge of life, I know I’m doing the only thing I was ever meant to do.

Sixteen masks remain to be completed, sixteen bells to add to my quiet revolt. 

And when the last one is finished, I will ring the bells. All of them. 

END

J. Mildanoff

J. Mildanoff is a speculative fiction writer and Bulgarian immigrant based in Canada. Her work blends fantasy, horror, and twisted folklore, echoing her passion for the dark and uncanny. Her short fiction has appeared in the Moss Puppy Magazine and The Selkie's "Rebirth" anthology.