Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
The air we breathe is actually an extremely hallucinogenic substance that affects all of your senses. One day, you stumble upon a strange-looking gas mask sitting on a bench in a park, when you put it on you slowly start to see and feel the world the way it truly is.
Response:
Buckshot Jerry flailed his arms madly as he skipped about, swatting the air with open palms.
“Yah! Yahhh!”
He practically lived in the Maple Way Park, as far as anyone knew, and the story on the streets was that he never slept, just kept dancing about on the lawns. That was impossible, obviously. His monicker wasn’t that imaginative – the guy’s mutilated visage was due to taking a load of errant buckshot across the entire left half of his face, leaving him with a deformed concavity of the skull on that side where he’d been pieced together, and only one good eye.
“How’s the dancing coming there, BJ?” I called out.
One bloodshot eye leered at me for a moment. “Go! Just go!” he drawled from his misshapen mouth.
“Right away, sir.”
A curiosity nearby grabbed my attention: there was what appeared to be some dull-colored toy or piece of tech sitting on the bench I was coming up on. It had three circular depressions, two with glass in them – mirrors, actually – and one filled with a fine mesh. I glanced around, but of the several people strolling down the nearby paths, no one was looking in my direction or indicating any kind of ownership of the object.
I sat down on the bench and prodded it with a finger, only realizing, as I saw it from a new angle, that it was in fact a mask. Concealed beneath it was the strap that would go around the back of one’s head.
From a distance, Buckshot Jerry shouted something that sounded like “ZABIGAN! ZABIGAAAN!” As he kept hollering, increasing his flailing, whatever he was trying to say refused to take correct form from his once-shredded, terribly scarred lips.
I lifted the mask to my face, let the strap fall across the back of my head, and pulled it tight. The rubber seal, as though it were alive, sucked tight to my face, and then I was looking out through those one-way mirror eye pieces at the park, and everything was very clear, but…no, something was off.
Before me was the path I’d stepped off, and the wide adjacent lawn dotted with towering maple trees in their summer prime, the early afternoon sunbathers and picnickers walking about them looking for the perfect spot to put down their blankets and towels. There were kids playing frisbee in the near distance, and in the other direction flailed and swatted crazy BJ.
What was off were the colors. The chlorophyll green of the leaves and grass was decidedly a more bluish color. The sky itself, cloudless and sapphire blue a moment before, was gaining a dusty orange hue, as though sunset were rapidly approaching.
The trees were black. I stared agog. Black, or grey. Charcoal, the color of trees that have been torched in a forest fire. Impossible, though, because the leaves…
I looked up. The leaves were vivid blue. The grass was vivid blue.
There was a happy shriek from somewhere to my left: the frisbee players. I saw the kids – but not as they had been. They were there in profile, but they consisted entirely of bright white light: perfectly human-shaped beings of light.
“I’m tired, mom.” A little girl, whining, somewhere ahead of me. I looked to the glowing light-beings, the people, walking among the great black trunks of the trees. Above them the sky was pure pumpkin orange.
I spied the shape of the little girl. She was tugging at her mother, though the clothing was no more than a hazy shadow at the edge of the light.
Something was terribly wrong. A creature that I can best describe as an insect, though that’s not really what it was, was latched to the back of the girl. This was not a creature of light, but as solid-looking as the black trees and blue grass. It had too many legs to be an insect, though great veined wings fluttered lazily from its topside, seeming to keep its cat-sized body pushed up against the girl’s back. A proboscis of some sort, as shiny and maroon-tinged as the rest of its body, disappeared into the girl’s light-body.
“Mommmm,” she whined. “I said I’m tired!”
Inside that proboscis, I now saw, was light. Light moving out of the girl’s body and into the grotesque flying creature. Slowly, like a mosquito’s belly filling with blood, the underside of the thing began to glow dimly with the meal it was gorging itself on.
“We’ll put the blanket down here then,” said the mother. “And you can take a rest.”
No facial features were visible in the bright glow, save for orbs of blue – blue that was supposed to be the color of sky – that marked their eyes.
There was a whirring, flapping, buzzing sound now. I looked up to the blue leaves of the maples, and saw that there were far more than just leaves in the canopy: they swarmed with the maroon parasite creatures, hanging from the branches, flapping lazily, hungrily, from tree to tree.
“ZAAABIGAN! ZA BIG WAN!” choked out Buckshot Jerry, but I was staring now at the frisbee players. They’d retired from their game and were sitting on the grass, seemingly exhausted from their playing, and on each of them were perched two or three of the creatures, their belly’s glowing with stolen light.
“Hot day,” said the mom nearby. “Think I’ll take a little nap myself, sweetheart.” I already knew what I’d see: one of the beasts had descended from the trees and was pushing itself against her with thrusts of its hideous wings. She felt nothing, though. No one could. This mask was…
A jogger ran past on the path.
Wup-wup-wup-wup-wup. The voracious flap of wings as two of the creatures migrated through the air close behind him in hot pursuit. As he slowed at the end of his run, and as they caught him, he’d start to feel tired, not knowing that he was a being of light, of energy – that he was not supposed to get tired. It was only when they caught you!
Every sleep, I thought wildly. Every sleep was done out of our need to replenish, after a day of being fed upon. We can only handle a day of being prey – and these creatures leave us be while we rest, geared by evolution or some sick, parasitic intelligence to let their food replenish.
Buckshot Jerry was still screaming. I looked to him at last and couldn’t believe what I saw: it was like he was made of burning magnesium, so luminous it almost hurt. Swarming around him were dozens of the maroon creatures – and he was fighting them off!
He can see them. My God. He can see them!
All Buckshot Jerry’s flailing, his swatting… He was locked in eternal battled with these things – and he had been winning!
It’s why he never sleeps. He’s never drained. He can fight forever, unless they manage to latch on.
“THE BIG ONE!” screamed Buckshot Jerry, smashing to the side another of the creatures in his private war. I could hear him enunciate it now, as clear as day. The problem had never been with his mouth, but with my own ability to hear, out there breathing the atmosphere, before the filter of this mask helped me see the truth.
I saw the big one, and I saw its prey at the same time. If the creatures were the size of cats, the big one was the size of a mountain lion. It trundled down out of the tree, too heavy, it seemed, to fly.
An elderly couple, making their way down the path, their advanced age identifiable even through the glow of their light by their diminutive and stooped postures.
The great beast scuttled toward them, taking its time, but too fast for me to get there. BJ didn’t bother: I knew now he must have seen this before. Perhaps these big ones were far too powerful to risk fighting.
This old couple, I thought, were old precisely because of the creatures. Thousands and thousands of drainings over the course of their life, over all those years, and for every draining another sleep.
It was happening to all of us, I thought sadly. We were meant to be unlimited. We were meant to be forever…
As “the big one” came up behind the couple, the two remained blissfully unaware. They had heard BJ’s desperate warning, no doubt, but only a weird sound through his buckshot-mutilated lips: ZABIGAN.
I reached up and ripped the mask from my face, unable to watch. As the colors of our shared hallucination flooded back into my sight, the old man, seemingly flesh and blood, stopped suddenly, raised a hand to his temple, took a half step and collapsed. His wife called his name, but there was no response.
