Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

On the night roads of El Salvador and Guatemala—by the river fords above all, and the public washing-places, and the ravines where the road dips away from the houses—a man riding late may see exactly what a man riding late most wants to see: a woman bathing in the moonlight , or walking ahead of him with a washerwoman's basin, long black hair to her waist, figure flawless, face always somehow just turned away. If he is the kind of man the night is fishing for—the married man out prowling, the seducer, the drunk with appetite—he follows. She lets him. She leads him off the road, ford by ford, ravine by ravine, always a little ahead, always about to turn—until the settlement lights are gone and the dogs are out of earshot; and then she turns. Under the beautiful hair is the face of a horse —or a bare skull, in the harder tellings—and the scream, the pounce, or the sheer sight of her does the rest: men are found days later mad, mute, fevered, jugados —"played with"—or found...

From Chiapas down the isthmus through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and into Costa Rica, the night roads are patrolled by a double apparition that the whole region knows by one name: El Cadejo . It is a dog—but a dog the size of a calf, shaggy, chained or dragging a chain that clinks in the dust, with burning eyes : red coals in the dark of the cane-fields and the cobbled colonial streets; its hooves, in many tellings, are a goat's, and click on the stones. And it is two . The Cadejo is white, and the Cadejo is black; and between the two dogs the entire moral cosmos of the Central American night is divided. The white Cadejo is the protector: it appears beside the late traveler—the drunk swaying home from the cantina above all, the tradition's favorite ward—and walks him to his door, unseen or half-seen, standing off robbers, snakes, and the other dog. The black Cadejo is the peril: it stalks the same roads and the same drunks, and the man it overcomes—the tales...