Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the villages of Trinidad, and across the whole arc of the Caribbean under her various names, she is the neighbor no one accuses by daylight. An old woman, quiet, solitary, living at the edge of the settlement in a small board house; she buys her provisions, gives good-day politely, and troubles nobody. But at night — say the stories that every Trinidadian child has heard from a grandmother's rocking chair — she goes home, bars her door, and takes off her skin . Folds it, carefully, like the garment it is, and hides it in a mortar, or a calabash, or behind the bedroom door. And what steps out of the skin rises through the roof as a ball of fire — a hurtling orange light that veterans of the old villages swore they had watched crossing the canefields at midnight — and goes hunting. She flies over the sleeping houses, picks her mark, and enters as the Alp of the German nights enters: through the keyhole, the crack under the door, the gap in the boards — for no lock in the islands...