Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Ask why, in countless South African households through the twentieth century and into this one, the bed stood raised on bricks —one brick or three under each leg, lifting the sleeper high above the floor—and the answer is a name known from the Cape to the Limpopo: the Tokoloshe (Tikoloshe, uThikoloshe), the night dwarf of Zulu and Xhosa tradition. He is small—knee-high to waist-high; hairy, wizened, ugly with an impudent ugliness the descriptions relish; gravel-voiced; and equipped, in the fuller accounts, with attributes that mark his uncanny nature: a body that can become invisible at will —by swallowing a pebble, or by the magic water of his river home—one arm or leg sometimes withered, and an obscene vitality that makes him, among other things, the accused correspondent in generations of scandalous stories. His repertoire runs from prank to predation: he sours milk and steals food in the night kitchen; he pinches, bites, and chokes sleepers —the pressure on the chest at midnight,...