Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the middle of the old German city of Hildesheim, on a busy shopping street, stands one of the strangest public monuments in Europe. It portrays a boy hurrying along with a sack of stolen apples — and, landing on his back at the moment of the sculpture, claws dug into his shoulders, a wiry, grinning goblin. The townsfolk have called the creature the Huckup — Low German for "jump-up" — for centuries, and the verse carved beneath addresses every thief in the dialect of their grandmothers: the stolen goods weigh light in the hand, it warns, but the Huckup rides heavy. The statue is beloved, photographed, patted by children — and it is the domesticated, municipal face of one of the oldest and most widespread terrors of the German-speaking night: the Aufhocker , "the one who crouches on" — the being that waits beside the dark road for the solitary walker, springs silently onto his back — and then does the one thing that makes it unlike every other monster in Europe. ...

The Basques, the oldest people of Europe, keep the oldest law of Europe, and it fits in one sentence. Gaua Gauekoarentzat, eguna egunezkoarentzat — the night for Him of the Night, the day for those of the day. It is not advice. It is a property line. In the mountain valleys of the Basque Country, where a language older than every empire around it preserves beliefs older still, the night was never understood as the day with the light turned off — an emptier, dimmer version of the same world, free for humans to use. The night is a jurisdiction . It has an owner, a population, and a code; and the owner has a name that is simply his title: Gaueko — "He of the Night" — the power that takes possession of the world at dusk, every dusk, and returns it at cockcrow, and enforces, upon any human found violating the boundary, the full penalty of trespass. He is one of the strangest figures in European tradition precisely because he is barely a figure at all. Gaueko has no face that th...

Ask why, in countless South African households through the twentieth century and into this one, the bed stood raised on bricks —one brick or three under each leg, lifting the sleeper high above the floor—and the answer is a name known from the Cape to the Limpopo: the Tokoloshe (Tikoloshe, uThikoloshe), the night dwarf of Zulu and Xhosa tradition. He is small—knee-high to waist-high; hairy, wizened, ugly with an impudent ugliness the descriptions relish; gravel-voiced; and equipped, in the fuller accounts, with attributes that mark his uncanny nature: a body that can become invisible at will —by swallowing a pebble, or by the magic water of his river home—one arm or leg sometimes withered, and an obscene vitality that makes him, among other things, the accused correspondent in generations of scandalous stories. His repertoire runs from prank to predation: he sours milk and steals food in the night kitchen; he pinches, bites, and chokes sleepers —the pressure on the chest at midnight,...

In the old lanes of Guatemala City and the cobbled towns of the highlands, the night has a dandy. El Sombrerón is a very small man—child-sized or less, the tellings agree—dressed all in black, with a thick belt of shining silver, boots that ring on the cobbles, a guitar slung at his back, and, crowning and dwarfing the whole figure, the feature that names him: an enormous black hat , broad as a cartwheel, under which his face is never quite seen. He leads a train of four mules loaded with charcoal, which he ties at midnight to the posts of the houses he intends to visit; and his visits are of two kinds, both famous. To the stables and the patios he comes as the braider : horses are found at dawn with their manes and tails woven into hundreds of tiny, perfect, maddening braids that no comb can undo—and the dogs that barked all night, and the tangled hair of sleeping girls and even of men, bear the same signature. And to the windows of certain houses he comes as the suitor : for the S...

In Paraguay, in the Argentine northeast, in the Guaraní-speaking country of red earth, maize fields and monte, the night has a proprietor, and every household knows his tariff. He is El Pombero — Pomberito , the affectionate-wary diminutive; Karaí Pyhare in Guaraní, a title that translates with full feudal weight: Lord of the Night . He is short and powerfully built, covered in dark hair, with hands and feet—in many tellings— woolly , so that he moves in total silence; he walks the paths, the patios, and the maize rows from dusk to first light; he can make himself invisible, slip through keyholes, walk between the raindrops of a storm; and his voice is a whistle —a soft, directionless whistling in the dark that is the sign of his rounds and that must never, on any account, be imitated . For whistling back at the Pombero is a summons, and he answers summonses. The whole culture of his territory carries, to this day, a body of etiquette about him as detailed as traffic law: what to lea...