Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Of all the world's blood-drinkers — the fanged counts of the Balkans, the skin-shedding fireballs of the islands, the flying heads of the Malay night — the strangest by any honest reckoning lives in the wild fig trees of southeastern Australia, and he is four feet tall, bright red, and has no teeth at all. The elders of the old Aboriginal communities described him to their children with a detail that has the unmistakable ring of a story polished by ten thousand tellings: the yara-ma-yha-who , a little man the color of red ochre, with a head too big for his body, a vast frog-like mouth that could swallow you whole — and, at the tips of his fingers and toes, round suckers, like the arms of an octopus. He does not hunt. He does not run — his legs are too small and his belly too round for running. He waits , up in the dense crown of the big wild fig, in the deep shade that travelers love — and everything he does when a traveler stops beneath him is so unlike anything else in the world...

The warning arrives through the nose. You are walking home along a barangay road in the Philippine dusk — past the rice paddies, under the mango trees, the air thick with jasmine and woodsmoke — when suddenly, from nowhere and everywhere, comes the rich, unmistakable smell of tobacco. Strong tobacco, hand-rolled, the kind a grandfather might smoke. But there is no grandfather. There is no one on the road at all. There is only, at the bend ahead, an enormous old balete tree, its trunk a cathedral of tangled roots, its crown black against the last of the light. And up in that crown, if you dare to look — many do not — you may see two points of ember-red, like a cigar being drawn upon, and the outline of something man-shaped but far too large, sitting at its ease on a branch that should not bear such weight, one leg swinging, watching you pass. That is the kapre: the giant of Philippine folklore, the great dark smoker in the tree. He stands seven, eight, nine feet tall in the tellings, ...