Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Of all the vampires in the world's night, the Malay Peninsula keeps the most anatomically audacious. The Penanggalan —from tanggal , "to detach"—is, by day, a woman: ordinary, often handsome, frequently (the tellings insist, with a professional cruelty we shall return to) a midwife . By night she performs the act her name records: her head detaches from her body —and rises into the air trailing her internal organs : stomach, intestines, the lungs and dangling ganglia, a comet of viscera glowing faintly, the tellings say, like fireflies as it flies through the dark. The abandoned body sits at home, headless and tended—soaking, in the classic accounts, in a vessel of vinegar , which shrinks the flown organs so they can be drawn back in at dawn (the sharp vinegar smell about a woman was, accordingly, a thing the villages noticed). And the flying head hunts what all her sisterhood across Southeast Asia hunts: the blood of childbirth —the newly delivered mother, the newborn, ...