Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the museum cases of the world — Helsinki's Etholén collection, the Smithsonian's Alaskan halls — rest the slender kayaks and carved dishes of the Yup'ik people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta; and along the hulls and around the rims of a striking number of them runs a painted creature that no zoology of the region has ever contained: a long low body like a monstrous otter's stretched past reason; jaws like a toothed trap opening the whole length of a narrow head; a ridged back; and — count them, for the painters were consistent — six legs , and within the outlined body, rendered in the Yup'ik art's transparent style that shows the inside of a being along with its outside, three stomachs , drawn as chambers down the body's length, sometimes with the painter's grim wit visible in their contents. This is the palraiyuk, and the elders who explained the paintings to the first collectors explained a creature of the old warm time : in the ancient days, they sa...

Where the Murray River ends its long crossing of Australia — spreading into the great shallow expanse of Lake Alexandrina before it finds the sea — the Ngarrindjeri people, whose country those waters have been for uncounted generations, have always known that the lake is inhabited. Not figuratively. Beneath the brown water and among the drifting islands of weed lives the Muldjewangk: a being — or, in some tellings, a whole race of beings — of the deep channels: immense, man-like above and fish-like below in the accounts that give it shape at all, though the deeper tradition prefers it shapeless — known not by its outline but by its grip . For the Muldjewangk's signature, the thing every telling keeps, is the hands : enormous hands, rising without ripple from beneath, that seize — a fishing line, a dangling foot, the rudder of a boat — and pull . Children of the lake country were raised on it in the plainest terms: the water's edge after dusk belongs to the Muldjewangk; swim wh...

Most monster-tales end with a hero. The peoples of the Murray River country of southeastern Australia — the nations of the Riverina, whose traditions the collectors set down early in the last century — kept a great tale that ends with something rarer and, on reflection, far more instructive: a committee . It concerns the Whowie, the terror of the river's bends in the deep story-time: a creature the tellings describe with an anatomist's relish — twenty feet and more of him, built low like a monstrous goanna, with six legs , a huge head like a frog's swollen to nightmare gauge, and a mouth that could take a child at one movement, which is precisely what it was for. The Whowie was slow — the tale is honest about its monster's limits: nothing about him could chase down a healthy adult in daylight — but he was silent , uncannily silent for his tonnage, and he hunted accordingly: by night, at a crawl, into the camps along the river, where he took the sleeping — a child here,...