Moontick

Moontick, AKA "Moon-tick", "Moon Tick", "Deathwatch", etc.

Origin: American Folklore

Description

A moontick is a nocturnal, blind, roughly hemispherical, insect-like creature about the size of a large soup bowl, with soft, grubby, pale-whitish, ice-cold skin, and a thin, high, raspy, clicking voice somewhere between the ticking of a watch, a waspish droning, and a cicada's rattling song. The Moontick is almost invisible in daylight or most other forms of light, but just visible enough to detect by moonlight, giving the creature its name. The Moontick rides down to earth on lightning during storms to slip, cold and wet with rain, into the house of its victim, where the Moontick will wait, gently and soothingly ticking down the hours by night until the chosen hour of its victim's death on full moon's night, on which the Moontick sings its sleeping victim into a trance with its droning voice, creeps up into the bed next to the victim, and drinks away its victim's dreams, and then creep away into the night and back to the moon, leaving its victim behind as only a joyless, empty husk in the shape of a human to awaken the next morning and live out the pitiful, dreamless, restless remainder of is human existence. While the Moontick is present, until that full-moon night, the victim will experience a few nights of the deepest, most fulfilling sleep of his/her life, thanks to the soothing voice of the Moontick, a difficult-to-detect clue that something is wrong. It is usually subtle clues that must tip off wise folk to the activity of a Moontick: perhaps by connecting the victim's stray remark about an abnormally great night's sleep with the lightning storm a couple days ago, or perhaps by a bystander awakening at night to hear the voice of the Moontick, or perhaps by accidental discovery of the Moontick creeping through the shadows by night.

Once the unnatural cause of restful sleep is suspected, however, the Moontick's hiding place should be hunted down, the creature discovered, and then removed from the house and staked to the ground and burned to ashes. This will not be easy to do, as the Moontick, once discovered, will fasten itself tightly to the wooden floor or walls of its hiding place, where it will be difficult to lift, scrape, or pry the creature free; for some wise folk, the better solution in any Moontick infestation is to burn the entire shack, just to be safe. If the creature is discovered too late, it might even have had a chance to attach itself to its sleeping, dreaming victim, and then it will prove especially difficult to remove it; many hill families have a recipe, handed down generation by generation from one woman to the next, for the removal of a Moontick in this case, usually a concoction of moonshine whiskey, sassafras, ginger, honey, and especially lemon (the Moontick is said to especially hate the scent, taste, and touch of lemon!) These recipes are of dubious effectiveness, though many will swear by them. It may also be possible to drive a Moontick from a home by brightly lighting it's would-be victim's room and making loud noises on the night of the full moon, by playing music on guitars and fiddles, and hooting and hollering, and clapping and stamping till dawn: Moonticks prefer dark, peaceful and quiet nights (which is why they don't often trouble city-folk!) This does not guarantee that the Moontick will not eventually return, even years later, to re-infest the sleeper.

A Moontick that has attached itself to the victim will drain the body of vitality over the course of a few nights, the victim looking increasingly wan and haggard, until eventual death; through this phase of the infestation, the presence of the Moontick might be detected during increasingly unpleasant nights of sleep, in experiences that might be mistaken for Sleep Paralysis: the victim, half-awakening paralyzed in the dark, may feel the cold, moist weight of the increasingly bloated Moontick on his/her chest or torso, and see the dimly white, glistening form of the Moontick in the moonlit darkness, before falling asleep again from the exhaustion of the creature's feeding. Fitful memories of such unsettling "dreams" are another, if late, clue that a Moontick has infested the sleeper's dreams.

Moonticks do possess a low level of intelligence and, being capable of speaking and understanding limited amounts of human speech learned in the Dreamlands and on Earth, can sometimes be reasoned with to some degree, and there are stories of Moonticks that have been persuaded, in exchange for the dreams they seek, to carry messages into Dream - for example, a popular legend tells of a woman who traded her drunken husband's dreams to a Moontick in exchange for delivering a message to the "Little Folk" who had carried her daughter off into the shadows of Dream, convincing them to return the child - years older than she should be, and stark staring mad, but otherwise intact; the results of such desperate bargains are rarely happy, but a positive outcome is not completely unheard of, so the slim hope still leads folk into the temptation to arrange such bargains.

The Moonticks may serve in some obscure way the Thing Hanging in the Void = the "Sand Man" - draining its victim's soul away into the Void to join forever the Thing over its nameless abyss in some everlasting tormented dream of deeper slumber.

Keeper Notes

• The life-cycle of a Moontick has it cross between the Dreamlands (where the Moontick's eggs are laid and hatched and fertilized) and the Daylands (where the Moonticks ride to by lightning to choose and feed on a victim's dreams, before returning to the Dreamlands by full moon light). (YSDC)

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Folk Mythos
• deity: Thing Hanging in the Void
• race: Sand Man (race)