When you can’t go to sleep at night, it may be because there are sleep eaters in your area. Sleep eaters are flying monsters, a bit like bats, but with feathers. They have a bad temper because the feathers tickle them. Their eyes glow, but their teeth glow even more, because they never brush them, and bits of sleep and golden dreams get all over the teeth.
Sleep eaters are stronger on hot nights, but even then, they can’t hurt people. They just stop them going to sleep by swallowing up all the sleep in the room. They can be beaten.
Sleep eaters hate mathematics more than any other monster. Grownups sometimes tell you to count sheep as a way of going to sleep, even though they don’t know why this works. Counting sheep makes you go to sleep because as soon as somebody starts counting, the sleep eaters run and fly out of the house to get away from the numbers.
The easiest way to count the sheep is to count their legs and divide by four. The problems start when you have a battering ram in the flock—those have 52 legs on each side—so check your walls for missing bits before you start counting the sheep—if there are holes, you know batterers are there. You also have to be careful not to count merinos, because they are silly sheep who can’t spell, and they keep trying to be marinos instead. Marinos can swim, but merinos can’t. There is nothing worse than trying to count sinking sheep, except maybe counting sinking geese. If there are enough sinking geese around to be worth counting, you should leave. Now.
ORIGINS: Sleep eaters probably developed soon after humans discovered fire, because they are attracted by the light, even though they prefer to hide behind bedroom cupboards until the light goes out. They seem to be afraid of being seen, but they are also afraid of the dark.
SIZE: They have a body the size of a small mouse, and wings with a span of about 12 centimetres.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Very ordinary and batlike, except for the feathers and the mouth, which is only a tiny hole, just large enough to suck in sleep and dreams. They change their colour to blend in with the wallpaper or the paint on your wall. If you discover a new gargoyle hanging on your wall, it is probably a sleep eater. Look for feathers.
IS A THREAT TO: Sleep and dreams. Also, because they are fascinated by gardening tools, they like to go into any shed, garage or other place where garden tools are stored. They take the tools outside to play with and leave them there.
USES: When soaked in wet cement, they make very good paperweights. Aside from that, they don’t really have any uses, except on Christmas Eve, when children like to have a sleep eater around so they can stay awake and say hello to Santa Claus.
HATES: Mathematical challenges and puzzles. Try working out a few of the examples listed at the end of this book in your head, and you will find the sleep eaters disappear very fast! They also hate lamington monsters, who often play a lullaby to people who can’t sleep.
LIKES: People who don’t like playing with numbers. They really enjoy juggling shovels, swinging spades and running over aunt eaters with lawn mowers—or pretending to run over them.
This monster looks like a small feathery bat, but it is very hard to see unless you look for the tiny glowing mouth, and listen for a slight whistling sound when it breathes through its mouth.
If you have embarrassing and tattered relatives, this monster can sometimes be the reason. Aunt eaters don’t eat whole aunts, just their hair, so if you have an aunt with straggly hair that has gaps in it, she most likely has a problem with aunt eaters around her house.
You must never embarrass your aunt by asking her about having aunt eaters. If she has trouble with them, this could also mean she has hairyoddities in the house as well, because if there is one thing an aunt eater likes more than a mouthful of auntie’s hair, it is a hairyoddity. Nobody ever wants to admit to having hairyoddities around the house—people think they are worse than cockroaches.
What happens is that the hairyoddities move in first, and the aunt eaters then track them down and eat the hairyoddities. When the hairyoddities are all eaten, the aunt eaters will attack aunts and nibble their hair to keep themselves from starving until the next crop of hairyoddities hatches out.
If you ask scientists to tell you how aunt eaters can identify aunts, they will mumble and change the subject, because nobody knows. The uncanny ability of aunt eaters to spot aunts at a distance is one of the Three Great Mysteries of Science, while the others are ‘Whatever happened to the missing socks?’, and ‘Er, what was the Other Great Mystery again?’.
ORIGINS: Nobody knows where aunt eaters came from, but there are signs of them existing when humans still hunted the woolly mammoth (animal ones, not knitted ones), because frozen mammoths in Siberia always have hair that looks as though an aunt eater has been in it.
SIZE: About the size of a small orange. They need to find an aunt with weird hair before they become the same colour as an orange, so they are usually other colours.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They change their colour to match the hair they are in, and they coat their bodies with hair bitten from their victims. This helps them to blend in, but also provides a handy reserve of food for times when they get hungry. Young aunt eaters are the only monsters whose parents don’t mind if they get their food all over them.
IS A THREAT TO: Hairyoddities, hair on aunts, hair on almost anything. They often try to eat the hairy tails of longlegged underbed pigs, but they cannot jump high enough.
USES: Keeping down hairyoddity infestations and controlling the occasional plague of woolly mammoths.
HATES: Wigs made of artificial fibres that get stuck between their teeth. They don’t like nose ghouls very much. They really don’t like being run over by lawn mowers, but the only monsters who know this are the sleep eaters. When they are not feeding, aunt eaters like to sleep on a lawn, but the sleep eaters stop them snoozing by driving around the lawn at night.
LIKES: Hairyoddities, hair on aunts, card games. Most of them like to knit, but the only thing they know how to knit is woolly mammoths, so there is probably a message for us in that. It is just possible that they have always done this, and that the last ice age ended because careless aunt eaters kept leaving the finished woolly mammoths lying on glaciers, warming them up. If you ever see an aunt eater on the lawn, it will probably be knitting, because the click of knitting needles helps them to relax and go to sleep.
These monsters look more like a ball of hair than anything else. They have a single red eye, which can be extended on a small stalk to help them see around corners, or to see out from under an aunt’s hat. They have four spindly legs, used mainly to hold on, but two of the legs have nippers so they can cut strands of hair. They have ears that fold down.
If you have embarrassing and tattered male relatives, uncle biters can sometimes be the cause. Uncle biters are small, and have very tiny teeth that they only use to bite uncles. Like a lot of monsters, uncle biters are fussy, and if they accidentally bite anybody else, they will be chased away by the other uncle biters.
In the end, the uncle biter that has been pushed out of the herd usually dives down a drain, where the drain monster finds it a tasty morsel. If you see an uncle biter leaping down a drain, and you listen carefully, you will hear the drain monster say ‘Lord, what foods these morsels be!’
In case you are worried about your favourite uncle, the uncle biter is quite good at picking out unfavourite uncles, but they don’t really hurt them anyhow. The uncle biter only needs a tiny bit of food, and takes little bits of an unfavourite uncle’s face. If your uncle has been bitten by an uncle biter, he will probably tell you he cut himself shaving.
Uncle biters can only bite uncles who don’t have beards. If an uncle has a beard, he may find that the aunt eaters come around and chew it, because aunt eaters aren’t all that good at telling aunts from uncles, even if they can always pick out the aunts in a line of women.
Scientists have asked aunt eaters and uncle biters about this, but they always just mumble and change the subject. Now we know where the scientists learned this trick.
ORIGINS: The uncle biter is actually a miniature breed of mouse. Nobody knows why they pick on uncles, but when they have a choice of several uncles, they will always bite the untidiest one, which is probably a hint.
SIZE: The size of a very small mouse, but they try to puff themselves up so they look bigger.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They have very sharp claws which they use to climb up uncles, or to hang onto them. They also climb up post impressionists. Nobody knows why, but the post impressionists don’t seem to mind. Maybe they like the company.
IS A THREAT TO: Uncles and people who look like uncles, but they have also been known to attack footballs, skating bananas and the tails of swimming foxes.
USES: No known uses, unless you are having a problem with foxes in your bathtub or with noisy bananas in your freezer. If the uncle biters attacked annoying cousins, they would be far more useful, but they never do.
HATES: Aunts, fly swats and uncles wearing loose wigs that fall off when they are hanging onto the wig. They also used to get very annoyed with older uncles who put oil on their hair, and they are very happy that hardly ant uncles do that any more.
LIKES: Untidy uncles, cane chairs, green cheese and ice cream. If you can manage to make a sleeping uncle untidy with ice cream and green cheese while he is asleep in a cane chair, you may be lucky enough to see an uncle biter. Warning: uncles usually do not like being used as live bait, so it is a good idea to do this with help from an adult. Then the adult helper can take the blame. Uncle biters also enjoy going on ocean cruises, so long as there is a sufficient supply of uncles on board. They also get a great deal of pleasure from sneaking up behind sleep eaters and shouting ‘Boo!’.
This monster is usually seen running up the legs of uncles, or leaping onto their shoulders from trees in the garden, which is where uncle biters normally live. They are green, which helps them to blend in with the trees, and helps them to avoid being eaten by owls and crows.
People who have a hairyoddity problem prefer not to talk about it. Hairyoddities live on soap, and they roll around in people’s food as well. This makes them very sticky and the food all soapy. Then they burrow under your carpets and rugs, picking up the loose hairs which they stick all over themselves. Scientists say that this is how they get their name.
This explanation tells us that the hairyoddities were not named by mathematicians, because these monsters always attach the hairs to their bodies in pairs, so there is never an odd number of hairs. A mathematician would have called them hairyevennesses.
Aunt eaters could not care less about the number of hairs. They just like to eat hairyoddities because they are hairy. Hairyoddities do not like to be eaten by aunt eaters, and they know that aunt eaters don’t like the taste of soap. So now you know why they use soap to stick the hairs on. In forests, the hair makes them hard to see, and they are often trodden on by a passing sinking goose or a careless troppo. They don’t enjoy this.
In its resting state, the hairyoddity looks more than anything like a five-eyed hairy golf ball with great big teeth, but it only uses the teeth to defend itself if it is attacked with a golf club.
Hairyoddities can be seen in most cities around full moon, engaging in their traditional white-water sports which include relay badminton and synchronised swimming. This may sound dangerous, but it is quite safe because they do everything in very slow water which turns white because of all the soap that gets into it as the hairyoddities jump around.
ORIGINS: Where the hairyoddities came from is a mystery. Some people think they are the last of the dinosaurs. These people say dinosaurs were famous for being dirty, while hairyoddities like soap, and so would have stayed alive when the rest of the dinosaurs died, rather than eat them. Against that, no dinosaur appears to have ever tried hiding under people’s hats, or to have been spherical.
SIZE: They are very small, about the size of a golf ball, but they are very squishy, and can spread themselves out to hide under people’s hats.
UNUSUAL THINGS: If your pet catches a hairyoddity, it may foam at the mouth, which can be quite worrying to both the pet and its owner. It isn’t all that much fun for the hairyoddities, either.
IS A THREAT TO: Soap factories, which they break into at night so they can dine on fine soap, staggering home, just before dawn, hiccupping and foaming at the mouth. They really annoy music lovers because they form brass bands, but they play very badly. They say they do it to attract troubadours, but nobody with any sense would do that.
USES: They are very handy if you want to annoy golfers. They make bad paperweights because they won’t sit still, and they make an awful soup on account of the soap. Aside from that, there isn’t much you can do with them, because they won’t do tricks, they won’t fetch sticks, and they are very bad at doing crossword puzzles.
HATES: They try to avoid aunt eaters, and the occasional forgetful elephant that thinks it is an aunt eater. They really hate golf courses, because short-sighted people sometimes mistake them for golf balls, and that hurts. Mainly, it hurts the golf club, because they always bite the face of the club with their super-strong teeth, and as they fly away, they take a piece of the club with them. They prefer the taste of irons to woods, but they prefer a quiet life even more.
LIKES: Soap, rolling around, riding under hats, peeping out from under hats and pulling faces at golfers.
This monster is much like a golf ball, but they have five eyes, equally spread around their bodies, which makes them hard to sneak up on, except when they are foaming at the mouth and get soap in their eyes.
These are small bats with tapered cylindrical bodies and wings that wrap neatly around them. They eat ceiling slimers and snickering lizards, and they are really useful for throwing at imps and pudding monsters when they won’t keep quiet. Sadly, the baseball bats do not really like being thrown, and will do their best to dodge the pudding monsters, which usually stink of garlic.
The baseball bat has given its name to a popular piece of sporting equipment, which looks rather similar. In fact, some of the more intelligent members of this species have been known to pay renegade invisigoths or copywrong pirates to paint them with brand labels, so that they can lurk in your room, waiting to spring on a ceiling slimer or a snickering lizard to get some dinner. The small size is a dead giveaway.
ORIGINS: The baseball bats probably originated in a highly intelligent strain of carrots from the island of Hainan. They were taken from there, first to Hawaii, and later to the mainland USA, where they went feral and spread across the continent. During the middle of the twentieth century, they spread to Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia.
SIZE: They are about 15 centimetres long when their wings are furled, and when they are flying, they have a wingspan of around 30 centimetres.
UNUSUAL THINGS: The monster itself has no distinguishing features other than their similarity to the piece of sporting equipment, but they like to wear jewellery when they are not working, and even when they are working, they often wear a few blinking LEDs for safety reasons. If they are flying at any altitude, they wear knitted socks with pictures of luminous fluffy ducks on them.
IS A THREAT TO: Ceiling slimers and snickering lizards, and if they are failing to pay attention and forget to dodge, they are also dangerous to pudding monsters when thrown at them. They have been known to get quite harsh with gobblesocks that try to eat their fluffy duck socks.
USES: Controlling infestations of ceiling slimers, snickering lizards, and pudding monsters.
HATES: Baseball bats loathe the smell of garlic, which is probably why pudding monsters eat so much of it. They also dislike the smell of milk and milk products, which is why some people throw cheese, butter and milk at them.
LIKES: Nobody has been able to work out why baseball bats like eating ceiling slimers, but they do. They also like tennis matches because when they are at tennis matches, nobody picks them up by their feet and smacks them against a baseball. They also like the smell of chocolate, which is probably why the
y like to eat snickering lizards. If you really want to confuse a baseball bat, leave out some cloves of garlic that have been dipped in chocolate. If you want to make a baseball bat very happy, give it some diamonds, because they really love diamonds. Then again, they are also very fond of rubies, sapphires and emeralds, if you have any to spare.
This is the only monster that looks like a very small sporting baseball bat, other than the intelligent parsnips of the Gobi Desert, and they aren’t really monsters unless you are a vegan vampire, the sort that has to be killed by a steak through the heart—or a quick chop in the neck.
The name says it all, really. These are annoying pests rather than monsters, because they like skating upside down on ceilings. To make this work better (and also to catch food), they put a thin layer of slime out, which makes all the other ceiling monsters slip.
The ceiling slimers don’t slip off the slimed ceilings, because they breathe in hot air, and float up to the ceiling. The richer ceiling slimers have little helium tanks, but in their natural state, ceiling slimers just use hot air. If they can’t get hot air, some of them use bamboo scaffolding to reach the ceiling. They also know how to use springboards, trampolines and suction cups to reach and hang onto a ceiling.
The ceiling slimers are a nuisance to all the other ceiling monsters, but they eat flies, mosquitoes and other insect pests that get caught in their slime layer, so we think they are useful, except when they get too noisy while they are ceiling skating, or when the slime drips on people.
The Monster Maintenance Manual Page 10