Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Belize — the small green country where the Maya world runs down to the Caribbean — keeps as its national goblin a figure whom every Belizean child can draw before they can spell, and whose portrait contains the strangest single detail in the whole hemisphere's little-people lore. Tata Duende — "Grandfather Goblin," the Spanish duende adopted and promoted to elder — is the dwarf of the deep bush: three or four feet of him, aged and bearded, in a wide-brimmed hat (red in most tellings) of the same family millinery his cousin the Cipitío wears in El Salvador ; his feet, in the widespread tellings, are set on backwards , printing his trail away from himself in the trademark of all the untrackable ones from the Curupira's Brazil northward; he whistles in the dark heart of the forest — loud when far, faint when near, by the same treacherous acoustics this chronicle has now charted through half the world's night countries — and he is, in his core office, a guardian : ...

The hunters of the western Amazon — Brazilian rubber-tappers, Bolivian nut-gatherers, the Karitiana and Machiguenga peoples who have read the forest for a hundred generations — describe the encounter with a consistency that has unsettled more than one visiting scientist. First comes the smell: a stench like carrion and crushed garlic, so foul it dizzies a man, arriving through the trees before any sound. Then the cry — a roar, or rather a slow, deafening moan, like wind forced through a cavern, that silences the birds for a mile. And then the thing itself, shouldering through vegetation that a tapir would go around: a giant, taller than a man even when it drops to all fours, covered in matted reddish hair, with claws like scythe blades turned inward, a hide that shrugs off buckshot and arrows — and, in the most unsettling tellings, a wet red mouth opening not in its face but in the middle of its belly. The people of the forest call it the mapinguari, and they will tell you two more th...

Colombia's Andean countryside—coffee slopes, cloud-forest, the wild montes between the farms—answers to a mistress, and the campesinos of Antioquia and the old Caldas country can describe her exactly. La Madremonte —Mother Mountain, Mother Forest; Marimonda or Madre de agua 's inland sister in some districts—is a towering woman dressed entirely in living vegetation : robes of leaves, branches, moss and vines, a hat or crown of green from under which glowing eyes burn in a face no one sees clearly—and those who have seen more report they wish they had not. She dwells in the deepest thickets, at the springs and the sources of the quebradas; her cry in the storm—a shriek riding the wind on the wild nights—is the storm's own voice; and her jurisdiction, exercised with a matron's implacability, is threefold. She punishes the trespassers of boundaries : the land-thieves who move fences and markers, the squatters on others' titles, the shifters of boundary-stones—these...

The Peruvian Amazon's master of disguise is undone, every time, by his shoes—or rather, by what no boot can hide. El Chullachaki —the name is Quechua, chulla chaki , "unequal foot," "odd foot"—is the forest's own goblin-guardian in the rainforest around Iquitos and up the great rivers: a small being, gnarled and brown as a root when seen in his own form, dweller and lord of the supay chacras , the "devil's gardens"—those uncanny groves, real and botanically famous, where a single tree species grows in pure weeded stands as though tended by an invisible farmer, which is precisely what the tradition says they are: the Chullachaki's plantations. But his own form is the rarest thing about him, for the Chullachaki is the Amazon's great shapeshifter of persons : he appears to the hunter, the tapper, the child at the chacra's edge as someone they know and trust —the friend, the uncle, the compadre, waving from the trail's bend, callin...

The oldest written monster of Brazil entered the European record in 1560, in a letter from the Jesuit José de Anchieta, who reported—with the weary precision of a missionary listing his competition—that the Indians of the coast lived in terror of certain demons of the woods that assaulted them on the trails, and that they left offerings of feathers, fans, and arrows on the high paths for them. The name he recorded is the name the whole country uses still: Curupira . Four and a half centuries later, the figure is unchanged in its essentials, which are three, and unforgettable. The Curupira is small—a boy-sized dweller of the deep forest; its hair is flame : bright red, in the strong tellings literally afire; and its feet are turned backwards , heels forward, toes pointing behind—so that every track it leaves runs the wrong way. The hunter who finds the small footprints and follows them away , believing he is escaping, walks straight to their maker; the posse that tracks the creature pu...