The night-gaunts are not evil. They do not speak. They do not harm dreamers in any demonstrable way. They simply arrive, silent, and carry the dreamer elsewhere — and the elsewhere is rarely a place the dreamer would have chosen. Whether this constitutes harm is a philosophical question the file has not resolved, and the dreamers themselves are not generally available to clarify.

Of all the documented inhabitants of the The Dreamlands, the night-gaunts are the most consistently described and the least understood. Three centuries of accounts agree on their appearance, their behavior, and their silence. None agree on their purpose, because the night-gaunts have never explained one and no human observer has ever witnessed the conclusion of a flight from the cargo's perspective.

Appearance

Faceless. The smooth black head bears no eyes, no mouth, no nostrils — nothing that could be construed as a face by any anatomical standard. Rubbery black skin, the texture of which witnesses describe with consistent revulsion. Bat-like wings of considerable span. A long whip-like tail terminating in a barb. A single curved horn rising from the forehead, the only fixed point of orientation on an otherwise featureless head.

Every documented account is consistent in this. From pre-Victorian childhood nightmares recorded in the asylum literature, to the 1931 Ashcroft Dreamlands expedition, to the cluster of cases that came through the Bureau's intake in the autumn of 1922 — the description does not vary. This consistency is not characteristic of dream phenomena. Most dream entities shift in appearance from witness to witness. The night-gaunts do not. Whatever they are, they are the same thing every time, and they are seen rather than imagined.

Behavior

They arrive in groups of three to five. They are silent in flight — no wingbeat, no rush of displaced air, nothing that would alert a dreamer to their approach. The first awareness most subjects report is the sensation of cold rubbery hands on their ankles. The one documented exception to their silence is in the presence of Ghouls, whose meeping-gibbering language the night-gaunts appear to understand and occasionally reply to — the only recorded instance of night-gaunt vocalization in the Bureau's archive, and the only species they are known to communicate with other than their master.

Then they tickle. The night-gaunts tickle their victims into helpless laughter before lifting them. This detail is disturbing in a way that resists clinical description. It is the wrongest thing in any account of the entities, and every account contains it. They do not subdue. They reduce the dreamer to involuntary giggling, and then they fly.

The destination varies: the peaks of Thok, the vaults of Zin in the underworld, the narrow valleys beneath the temple of the moon. What occurs at the destination is not documented because nothing that occurs there is remembered. Dreamers who survive the experience wake with intact memory of the abduction and a complete absence of memory for whatever followed.

Service

They serve. The night-gaunts are not autonomous in the way human beings understand autonomy — they are not predators making their own decisions about prey, and they are not random elements of the Dreamlands ecology. They obey. Specifically, they obey Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, one of the few Dreamlands powers old enough and stable enough to issue them instructions. Nodens is not, however, the only Dreamlands presence the night-gaunts interact with — the Ghouls of Thok and the vaults of Zin are the other, and the relationship there is lateral rather than hierarchical, which makes it the only such relationship in the file.

What Nodens wants with their cargo is unclear, and the Bureau has been unable to develop a working theory. There is one suggestive data point: on at least one documented occasion, a flight of night-gaunts delivered a dreamer not to Thok or the underworld but to the unknown Kadath in the cold waste. The dreamer in question — Randolph Carter — owes his survival to that flight. Whether Nodens directed the rescue, or whether the night-gaunts made an exception the file is not aware of, remains an open question.

The Lovecraft Correspondence

H.P. Lovecraft described night-gaunts from dreams he recorded at age six. His descriptions match every subsequent account with uncomfortable precision — the facelessness, the tickling, the silent flight, the cold rubbery hands. He did not have access to prior accounts. The case literature was not in general circulation, and a six-year-old in Providence in 1896 had no plausible vector for exposure to it.

Two readings are possible. Either his childhood sensitivity allowed direct perception of entities the rest of us only meet in adulthood, or the night-gaunts noticed him and visited repeatedly until he stopped being interesting. The Bureau prefers the second reading because it is testable and the first is not. H.P. Lovecraft's notebook from that period still exists in a private collection. The drawings are accurate down to the position of the horn.