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, ...

The vampire of the theatre leaves its grave to hunt. The vampire of the north German villages—older, stranger, and in its way more frightening— never leaves the grave at all . The Nachzehrer —the "after-devourer," the one who consumes from beyond —lies in its coffin exactly where the parish put it; and there, in the dark, it eats : first its own shroud , drawing the linen into its mouth fold by fold; then its own hands and flesh; and with every swallow—this is the creature's terrible mechanism— someone it loved sickens . The Nachzehrer devours by sympathy : as the shroud shortens, the family shortens; its chewing in the earth drains husband, wife, children, kin, one by one, the whole household dying after it as if pulled down a rope—and in the strongest form of the belief, the creature's power grows until its ringing of church bells kills all who hear , and its shadow blights whom it crosses. The sexton, called to a grave where deaths had clustered, would put his ear...