The Nachtkrapp: The Eyeless Night Raven of the German Nursery
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...