"The Ten O'Clock People" is a short story by American author Stephen King, published in the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection.
Noticing his reaction, a young black man named Dudley "Duke" Rhinemann stops him from screaming and calms him down.
Rhinemann explains that a unique chemical imbalance caused by nicotine withdrawal is the only way to see the creatures and invites Pearson to a resistance meeting.
Several of King's other stories, most notably Low Men in Yellow Coats and The Dark Tower, feature malevolent creatures called Can-toi, which bear a resemblance to the "batmen" of The Ten O'Clock People.
[1] Servants of the Crimson King, the Can-toi are vaguely humanoid beings with large rodent heads, which they hide beneath masks in order to infiltrate human society.
In Nightmares & Dreamscapes's ending notes, King states that he intended "The Ten O'Clock People" as a Jim Crow analogy about how mainstream society sequesters smokers from the general population: I hope ["The Ten O'Clock People"] says something interesting about a wave of change which has, temporarily, at least, re-created some aspects of the separate-but-equal facilities of the forties and fifties.