Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The green mountain country of Cantabria, which gave this chronicle the one-eyed Ojáncanu and his child-eating mate, kept in its bestiary a smaller and in some ways stranger horror — a creature that the herding families of the high valleys, the people of the scattered stone cabañas , feared with a particular domestic intensity, because its hunting ground was the cradle. He is the Cuegle, and his anatomy, recited by generations who needed children to remember it, sounds like something assembled from spare parts on a dark afternoon: a small being, no taller than a low man, walking upright on two legs, with skin black as a hearth-back; a single stubby horn on his forehead; a mouth crowded with five rows of teeth ; three arms — with no hands , ending in blunt stumps; and, crowning the whole impossible inventory, three eyes set in a row across his face — one green, one red, one blue — that never blink together. He is hideous, he is strong far beyond his size despite the handless arms, he ...

In the villages of southern Germany and Austria, when the lamps were lit and a child would not settle, there was a warning that worked where all others failed, and it needed only three words: der Nachtkrapp kommt. The Night Raven is coming. Somewhere out in the dark — from its roost in no tree anyone could name — a raven the size of the night itself had already taken wing: black past blackness, huge enough that its passing blotted the stars from a window, absolutely silent. It flew the village rounds looking for exactly one thing: children awake after dark — crying children, wandering children, children out of bed at the window watching for it, which was the worst thing of all to be. For of the Nachtkrapp's two terrors, the first was ordinary, as nursery terrors go: it takes children — snatches them up in beak and talons, or bundles them into the sack some tellings give it, and carries them away to its nest, and the tale does not bring them home. But the second terror was the on...

It is one of the strangest artifacts in all of human culture, and hundreds of millions of people were raised inside it: a lullaby with a monster in it. Duérmete niño, duérmete ya... — sleep, little one, sleep now — sung in the darkened rooms of Spain and Portugal and all of Latin America, in the softest voice a child will ever hear, down to the closing lines that every Spanish speaker on earth can finish from memory: ...que viene el Coco y te comerá. For the Coco is coming — and it will eat you. The melody is honey; the words are a threat; and the two together, hummed over cradles for at least five centuries, have installed in the hispanic imagination its oldest and most universal terror: El Coco — el Cucuy of Mexico and the American Southwest, o Coco of Portugal, a Cuca of Brazil — the thing that comes for children who will not sleep. And what is it? Here the legend makes its masterstroke, the choice that has kept it alive while gaudier monsters faded: nobody knows. El Coco has n...

Every child in the old West Riding of Yorkshire knew the rule, because every mother made sure of it: do not stand at the edge of still water. Not the beck, which chatters and moves and can be seen through. The still water. The mill dam with its skin of green weed, the flooded marl pit behind the hedgerow, the black peat pool on the moor that seems no bigger than a table and has no bottom that anyone ever found. Stand too long at the brink of a pool like that, leaning over your own reflection, and something that has been watching from below — patient, folded, the color of drowned leaves — will unfold. Two long, thin, sinewy arms will break the surface without a splash. Cold fingers will close around your ankle. And that, as the grandmothers said, will be the end of the tale. The creature was called the grindylow, and it belongs to Yorkshire and Lancashire the way the Kelpie belongs to the lochs of Scotland or the Vodyanoy to the millponds of Russia. It is a small legend, in one sens...