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 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.

Once the unnatural cause of restful sleep is suspected, however - perhaps by connecting the victim's stray remark about a 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 - 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. If it is discovered too late, it might even have had a chance to attach itself to its sleeping, dreaming victim, from which 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 especially hates the scent, taste, and touch of lemon!) It may also be possible to drive a Moontick from your 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!)

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 people" 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.

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). (fan theory)

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Folk Mythos