Sand Man (race)

The Sand Men, dream-agents of the Thing Hanging in the Void

Origin: American Folklore

Description

The "Sand Man" or "Sand Men" are a race of dream-things, not quite sentient or independent, acting as agents or servitors of the dreaming Thing in the Void, which the Sand Man may be unconscious aspects or avatars of. The Sand Man appears as a faceless shade with soft, puffy, grubby white skin and dark, ragged clothes, the place where its face should be a strangely boneless and featureless moist whitish blank, and its fingers like boneless, rubbery white claws. The Sand Men are repelled by bright light, but invisible to human beings there, and can only really be seen by humans the dimmest of lights, such as starlight or moonlight.

The Sand Man are messengers from the Dreamlands, bringing strange dreams from the Thing Hanging in the Void to sleepers in the waking world by slipping through the thin spots between Dream and Day, creeping into bedrooms to stand over beds, slowly and gently prying open a sleeper's eyelids, and sprinkling in a little of the "sand" concocted in some way by the Sand Men to impart the Thing's weird dreams, dreams which only draw the sleeper closer to the Thing's ultimate but unguessable plan. The dreams are typically elaborate, vivid, enigmatic, and bizarre, but if there is any deeper meaning to them, that meaning is unknown: how the dreams fit into the greater plans of the Thing Hanging in the Void is unknown to anyone except the Thing and its agents, and none of them have ever been known to communicate their purposes or wishes or thoughts in any meaningful way to the likes of men - nor even to communicate meaningfully with any known Mythos monsters.

Some unnatural creatures closely linked to the Dreamlands - Cats and Zoogs, for example - can see Sand Men quite clearly, and many cats will try to drive Sand Men from the room, or awaken human sleepers who are being troubled by a Sand Man, often by such tricks as knocking small objects from furniture and shelves, leaping suddenly onto the bed, scratching at doors or windows, or other favorite cat tricks, and if necessary even by loudly crying out or hissing in the night to startle a sleeper awake. Zoogs, it seems, hold a long-standing treaty with the Thing Hanging in the Void and its agents: it leaves the zoogs alone, and the zoogs trouble no home where they encounter Sand Men or other agents of the Thing, leaving them and their victims well alone.

House of the Void

When not haunting the troubled sleep of human dreamers, the Sand Men dwell in a strange, tall house in the Underworld of Dream. The house has no rooms inside, nor walls nor a proper floor, only the scaffolding of heavy wooden beams and planks to support the structure, descending up into the higher reaches of the house, and down into the blackness of the house's foundations, and rough wooden platforms and staircases leading down into the shadows below; down to the bottom of several flights of these shadowy stairs is the rough stone floor of the house's lowest basement, blanketed thick with the dust of ages, where the Sand Men dwell, seated silently about a long, stone table set for a decaying feast that they cannot eat, or shuffling about among the houses other roughly-hewn stone furniture: thrones, benches, tables, basins and vats, and other structures whose uses may be known only to the Sand Men.

At the far corner of the basement, set in a place of honor, flanked by shelves holding a random collection of strange and mysterious objects sacred to the Sand Men, perhaps trophies collected from the rooms of sleepers in the Daylands, is a large, wide stone well, leading down further into the Underworld, via a spiraling staircase, a spiral that starts narrowly at the mouth of the well, but spirals downward more and more widely, until opening at the bottom to an altar hanging on the edge of the Void where the Thing the Sand Men serve hangs forever in strange slumber; it is at this alter that the souls of lost dreamers are offered up to the Thing, the faces of those souls that are acceptable to the Thing joining the other tormented faces that writhe and creep across the Thing's flesh. The Sand Men, then, could be said to be the Thing's only known "cult", though the Sand Men do not seem to show the autonomy or individuality to form any genuine cult: they seem to exist as an extension of the Thing's dreams, created only to serve the purpose of delivering the Thing's dreams to the waking world, and retrieving lost souls to drag down to the Underworld to join the Thing forever in its awful and unknown Dream.

Explorers of the House of the Sand Men who have returned to tell the tale may have survived by driving the Sand Men back to a safe distance with candles, lanterns, and other lights dragged down into the darkness around the well in the basement, as the Sand Men will avoid the light. Should those lights be extinguished, however - perhaps by spells cast by the Thing or its agents - the fate of any investigators in the darkness is unknown, but probably awful, and few explorers of the house are known to have ever returned. The upper reaches of the house are assumed to be empty, but have never properly been explored for unseen attics and the like; there are rumors that these upper reaches of the house are roosts for Urhags, but who has ever seen an Urhag or its roost, and who has ever fully explored the house and returned to say for sure what can be found there? There may also be other rooms deeper in the house, some where in the shadows of its cavernous, hollow interior, which are likewise unexplored save by the Sand Men and other agents of the Thing Hanging in the Void, with unknown wonders and horrors concealed within.

Associated Mythos Elements

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