Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the townland of Slaghtaverty in County Derry — the name is Leacht Abhartaigh , "the Abhartach's sepulchre" — there stands, in a field, a great old thorn tree with a heavy stone half-sunk beneath it; and the people of the district, when they still spoke of such things freely, would tell you not to disturb either the stone or the tree, because of what lies under them, and what it did, and how hard it was to make it stop. The story is one of the oldest recorded vampire-tales of the British Isles — set down by the antiquarian Patrick Weston Joyce in the nineteenth century from local tradition, and argued by more than one scholar to be a source, or at least a sibling, of the great vampire that came out of Ireland's own Bram Stoker a generation later. It concerns the Abhartach: a dwarf — the word means a small person, and the tradition makes him small, deformed, and correspondingly cruel — who was a chieftain, or a wizard-chieftain, of that country in the deep past: a ...

In the mountains of southern Catalonia, behind the coast of Tarragona, sits a village whose very name carries a monster in it: Pratdip — the prat , the meadow, dip , of the Dip — the field where the devil-dog runs. For the Dip is Catalonia's own entry in this chronicle's long kennel of black dogs — cousin to the Barghest of the Yorkshire moors and Black Shuck of the English coast — and, like the best of that tribe, he is a creature of one savage and specific function: he is a vampire . An enormous black dog, shaggy and red-eyed, an emissary of the Devil sent up into the world to do the one thing the black dogs of Catalonia do — fall on the flocks by night and drink the blood of the cattle and the sheep , leaving the herd in the morning intact and bloodless, the drained beasts standing or fallen in the fold without a wound worth the name, white and empty as the Guajona's victims far to the west . He is the herdsman's terror in a land that lived by its flocks; and the v...

The deep forests of southern Chile — the Mapuche heartland of the Araucanía, and southward into the island province whose unicorn this chronicle has just lassoed , where the creature's Chilote cousin is the piuchén — hold a being whose first recorded quality is that description slides off it. The peuchén is a shapeshifter before it is anything: the tellings, asked for its form, answer with a list — a huge serpent; a serpent with bat's wings , leather-sailed, flying heavily between the treetops; a monstrous bat outright; a bird that is wrong; a thing part fish, part beast, glimpsed changing — and the elders' honest summary is that the peuchén looks like whatever it was when you saw it : its essence is not a body but a method , and the method never varies. First, the whistle: a sharp, sibilant, carrying note in the night forest — the sound is the creature's true name made audible, peuchén being, by the old etymologies, close kin to the whistling itself — heard once, fr...

The green mountain country of Cantabria has given this chronicle its one-eyed giant and its three-eyed cradle-thief; it remains to introduce the quietest member of that formidable provincial family, and in some ways the most unsettling, because her whole legend fits inside a bedroom. The Guajona is a night visitor: a hag of the deep valleys, described by the tradition with the miniaturist's precision Cantabria brings to all its horrors — an old woman, small and stooped, wrapped entirely in black, her hands and face the only flesh showing, and that flesh yellow : sallow as old wax, drawn tight over the bones; her nose long and hooked till it nearly meets her chin; her eyes small, black, and quick. And her mouth holds the single feature by which every Cantabrian child could draw her: one tooth. One only — long, black, sharp as an awl, standing alone in the empty gums — and that tooth is not for eating. The Guajona comes by night, silent as settling dust, into the rooms of the sleep...

The men who worked the edges of the Colombian wilderness — the woodcutters, the mule-drivers, the rubber-tappers and hunters camped for weeks beyond the last farms of the Andes and the upper Amazon — knew that the most dangerous sound in the forest was not the jaguar's cough. It was a woman's voice. Far off among the trees at night, weeping; or singing, low and sweet; or calling — help me, I am lost, I am alone. A camp of lonely men, months from their wives, would go quiet around the fire. Some remembered the stories. Some — always — did not, and one of the forgetful would take a torch and go, and the voice would recede as he advanced, deeper and deeper into the dark that has no paths, always a little farther, always almost there. And when at last he reached her — a beautiful woman, dark-haired, half-turned away in the gloom — she would turn the rest of the way around. What stood before him then, the tales agree, was on one leg. A single leg, ending the body's center-lin...

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...

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...

In the deep forest of the Akan lands — the old Ashanti country of Ghana and its neighbors, where the canopy closes overhead like a green midnight — the most dangerous thing a hunter could do was walk under the wrong tree. Not because of what might fall. Because of what might reach . High in the crown of the great silk-cotton tree — the onyina, the towering ceiba whose buttressed trunk rises grey and colossal above every other tree in the forest — something sits with the patience of the tree itself, and lets down its legs. Long legs, hanging among the lianas, indistinguishable from them in the gloom; and where feet should be, hooks — curved like hawsers, hard as the iron the smiths work. The traveler brushes what he takes for a vine. The vine closes. And the sasabonsam has him: hauled upward into the crown, into the embrace of a body covered in coarse black hair, into the gaze of huge bloodshot eyes — and into the teeth. For of all its terrible equipment, the tellers always dwell on t...

The classic tale is always told the same way, and it begins with a wish. Four hunters — young men, far from home in the deer forests of the northern Highlands — are benighted in a lonely glen and take shelter in an empty bothy, one of those bare stone huts that stand in the emptiest country in Britain. They build a fire. They eat what they have. And as the night settles in, they begin to entertain themselves: one hums a tune and the others dance to it, and someone — there is always someone — says the fatal thing aloud. All we want now are partners. If only our sweethearts were here. In the old Highlands, you did not say such things after dark in an empty glen. A wish spoken aloud at night is a door left open. Within the hour there comes a soft knock, or no knock at all — merely four women standing in the firelight, tall and lovely, dressed all in long gowns of green. They are welcoming, they are charming, and they are exactly the number wished for. Three of them join the dancers. Th...

Most of the beings in this chronicle are old. They come to us worn smooth by centuries of telling, their origins lost in forests that were cut down long ago. The chupacabra is different, and that is precisely its fascination: it is a monster whose birth certificate we practically possess. We know the island where it first drew blood, the year — 1995 — the town, the name of the woman who described it, and even the joke that named it. It is the youngest great monster in the world, folklore caught in the very act of being born — and for that reason it may teach us more about where the Wild Hunt and the werewolf came from than any creature in the old bestiaries. If you want to know how legends began in the darkness of the tenth century, watch closely how one began in the electric light of the twentieth. Eight Goats in Canóvanas It started with dead animals. In the spring and summer of 1995, in the hill towns of eastern Puerto Rico, farmers began finding their livestock dead in the morni...