Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Swahili coast of Tanzania — the old towns of the mainland shore, Lindi and the villages of the south — keeps a monster that is, uniquely in this chronicle's whole bestiary, attested in both the deep folk tradition and the sober twentieth-century game-warden's report, and the two archives agree with a precision that has never been comfortably explained. The mngwa — the name means simply "the strange one," and it is also called the nunda , "the fierce one" — is a cat : but a cat larger than a lion , the size of a donkey, grey (not tawny) with faint dark stripes or brindling like a monstrous tabby, and it hunts, unlike any lion or leopard, human beings by preference, coming into the villages by night to take people from the very doorways and the sleeping-mats, and killing not with a clean lion's method but with a savage tearing of claws that leaves its victims horribly mauled. The mngwa appears in one of the oldest of Swahili poems — the Sultan Majnu...

This chronicle has watched legends be born — the chupacabra under television lights , Madam Koi Koi in the boarding-school dark — but the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, gave the world a monster with a stranger property than any of them: a terror that comes in waves , sweeping the islands in documented panics — 1965, the 1970s, and above all 1995, when whole villages of Pemba stopped sleeping indoors and camped in their yards by lamplight for weeks — and that possesses, alone among the world's night-things, a demand : it wants to be believed in , and punishes the skeptic worst of all. The popobawa — the name is Swahili, popo "bat" and bawa "wing," the "bat-wing" — is described, when it is described, as a shadow with membranous wings and a single Cyclops eye, sometimes a smell of sulfur, more often no shape at all: an arriving pressure in the dark room, a weight on the sleeper, the door that was bolted, at dawn, standing q...