"Eyeball Lollipops" by Richard F. Yates

Most people started feeling weird a day or two before THEY arrived. By Friday, it was as if everyone had been slipped several hits of acid. The skies appeared to swirl with lights and colors, walls and doors breathed, trees and cars and furniture were all talking (and singing, in some cases,) and although this all should have been terrifying, most folks claim that they felt so GOOD that they weren't worried at all.

The creatures themselves came floating out of the river, right near where the old nuclear plant had been---although no one is sure if they CAME from there are merely LANDED there... (There's still quite a bit of controversy.)

They looked like a cross between an eyeball, a giant magnifying glass, and a lollipop, and they sort of hover-hopped wherever they went. They spoke telepathically---most of the survivors agreed on that point---and they seemed to be very friendly....at first...

But now we know the truth.

THEY FEED ON DREAMS.

They would float about in packs---hovering and watching---until they found an individual, like an elderly man engaged in a humorous conversation with a tree or fire hydrant, and they would surround him. Dozens of giant eyeball lollipops, glancing this way and that, floating and hopping towards their victim, and they would STARE---and the man's dreams and nightmares and hopes and memories would begin to play in the "glass" behind the eyes. And the man would smile a bit too widely, and he'd start to slump and lose his color, growing grayer by the moment, until his mental life was completely consumed by the creatures, and a colorless, lifeless body would fall onto the day-glo green, cartoony grass next to a talking fire hydrant.

And then the eyeball lollipops would float on towards a new feast...

Nine days. Although time gets FUNNY in dreams, most of the scientific minds who were involved in the event (and lived) estimate that the creatures fed for nine days on the citizens of southwest Washington State---taking hundreds of lives and leaving a gruesome trail of corpses that covered an area of nearly a forty square miles.

Outside the ZONE OF INFLUENCE, people were baffled. News crews, investigators, and even troops were sent into the area to see what was happening, but whenever anyone got within a few miles of the EVENT, they would begin to fall under the creatures' psychedelic effects (if the creatures were what CAUSED the effects and not just opportunistically exploiting an unrelated psychic phenomenon.)

To the outside world, the entire event lasted less than 48 hours... And now, folks in Houston have begun to act strangely, saying that they feel really good, but that they're sofa has started to sing or that the old cherry tree in the backyard just told them a knock-knock joke...

---Richard F. Yates

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