Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Every child in the old West Riding of Yorkshire knew the rule, because every mother made sure of it: do not stand at the edge of still water. Not the beck, which chatters and moves and can be seen through. The still water. The mill dam with its skin of green weed, the flooded marl pit behind the hedgerow, the black peat pool on the moor that seems no bigger than a table and has no bottom that anyone ever found. Stand too long at the brink of a pool like that, leaning over your own reflection, and something that has been watching from below — patient, folded, the color of drowned leaves — will unfold. Two long, thin, sinewy arms will break the surface without a splash. Cold fingers will close around your ankle. And that, as the grandmothers said, will be the end of the tale. The creature was called the grindylow, and it belongs to Yorkshire and Lancashire the way the Kelpie belongs to the lochs of Scotland or the Vodyanoy to the millponds of Russia. It is a small legend, in one sens...