Visitor of Light

Some nights, not every night, an otherworlder visits the corner at the foot of our bed.  I will wake and discover it silently and inscrutably standing.  Who knows how long it stares down at us as we sleep.  Usually, it is a short thing of shadow that walks backwards and away through the bedroom door and away through the hallway, or it's a manikin smudge with glowing eyes that folds itself into some dimension orthogonal to ours.  But its latest manifestation was filled with light.  

This time, its head was a featureless white globe of light.  It lit up the closet doors and the bedroom door and the bookshelves.  Around its wiry, curving neck and over its head was a frill like a dowdy lampshade or a dusty bonnet filched from Laura Ingalls.  Its body -- or at least its arms, possibly its legs -- were covered in thick grey skin, like an elephant's or a rhino's, with short squat triangular nails at the ends of its hands? Hooves?  

It stood at the corner of the bed by my feet, light streaming from off of its head, with an attitude of curiosity possibly more malign than inscrutable.   Then it stepped backwards, and, as if multiple, overlapping irises of gauze closed it off from the bedroom, it and the light shuttered itself away, leaving me, Mark, and the dog in darkness.

I've gotten used to it.