THE VAMPIRE BAT
I was in the Amazon collecting background material for a projected series of stories and travel articles and I was to join a government exploring party at a small native settlement two hundred miles north of Cuyaba.
When I arrived at the settlement I was very much surprised to see a white man sitting on the screened-in veranda of a shack some distance from the huddle of native huts. The government party was not due to arrive until the next day, and I had no idea that a white man was living at the settlement.
He walked out to meet me and introduced himself as Cecil Hubbers. He said that he had been staying at the settlement for nearly six months and that he represented a South American pharmaceutical firm which was endeavoring to establish a permanent base in that area.
He was middle-aged, gaunt and faded-looking, with an expression of chronic weariness etched on his wan face. A huge, high-crowned straw hat accentuated the strained lines of his pinched countenance. He acted jumpy and nervous.
He was certainly a pathetic figure, and I felt sorry for him, but he seemed sincerely glad to see me and he was hospitable enough.
After I had washed and taken some food, I sat on his screened porch and he talked. He said that except for the natives he was alone for months at a time. The company he worked for had parties further in the interior but they remained in the jungles for long periods, collecting roots and herbs and bark which were used to concoct precious drugs.
He had come down from Panama some years before with a fair grubstake, he said, but he had lost his money in a mining venture and since then he had drifted from one poor-paying job to another. When the pharmaceutical company offered him work at the settlement, he was flat broke and he had accepted it.
His job was easy enough. He had to store and check supplies, list and pack outgoing raw materials and recruit and pay the native guides. But it was obvious to me that there was some aspect of the job, or of the locale, which he detested.
After he had talked for nearly an hour, I finally learned what was preying on his mind. He lived in constant fear of a vampire bat which he said was systematically draining him of blood and life. I say bat, not bats, because he had a weird conviction that a single bat was to blame.
When he first mentioned the bat, he made some effort to describe his predicament in a detached and objective manner, but it was impossible for him to do so. He became emotional. His voice grew shrill and I thought that he was about to leap out of his chair.
"If I don't find out how it's getting to me, that bat will bleed me to death!" he cried. "I've already lost half my blood!Half of itI tell you!"
He became so agitated at one point, I thought I might actually have to restrain him from some violent action. Finally he calmed down a little and I managed to change the subject.
He certainly looked anemic, but I found it hard to believe that he was not exaggerating about the bat.
Contrary to much popular superstition, vampire bats are not immense flapping horrors which rob their victims of quarts of blood in a single night. The vampire bat is a small creature, scarcely two inches long. Its capacity is obviously determined by its own dimensions.
This is not to say that the vampire should be considered a gruesome but harmless pest. Although the vampire's capacity is limited, this little light-hating bat makes a circular incision in its slumbering victim's flesh with such precision and stealthy finesse that the sleeper rarely awakens. After the vampire laps up its fill of blood and flies away, blood usually continues to flow from the wound. It is this continuing flow of blood which ordinarily awakens the victim. By the time the victim becomes fully alert, however, he may have lost much more blood than the bat itself has actually absorbed.
Although I knew of well authenticated instances in which both animals and men had been seriously weakened by attacks of the vampire bat, I decided that my host's fear of being bled to death was largely groundless. I felt that he actually had been attacked by a vampire bat some time in the past and that the experience had proved so revolting and even terrifying he had suffered a kind of traumatic shock. Now the vampire bat had become an obsession which was never out of his mind. Loss of sleep and morbid nagging fear had turned him into a physical and mental wreck.
I accepted his invitation to set up my cot and mosquito net in his shack that night. Before he blew out the kerosene lantern, I witnessed a prolonged performance which was both ludicrous and disturbing. For the space of two hours my host inspected the floors, walls and ceiling of the screened shack. Inch by inch his eyes searched every plank and every screen. He had apparently done this many times before and although at the end of his inspection he had not found a single crack or aperture of any kind, he did not appear to be particularly relieved.
Certainly if any means of ingress originally existed, it must have long since been sealed up. I did not see how a fair-sized insect could squirm inside.
But when my host finally—for the first time I believe—removed his huge straw hat, placed it on a shelf, and crawled under his mosquito net, he still wore a worried frown.
I had had a tiring day and I fell asleep soon afterwards. About three hours later I was awakened by a hair-raising scream. I sat up and stared around in the blackness. My heart was pounding. I thought that a bushmaster or some other deadly kind of snake had gotten into the shack.
Cecil Hubbers moaned in the nearby darkness. "The vampire!" he cried. "It's been at me again!" He began to whimper like a sick child.
I felt sure that he had merely experienced a recurrent nightmare, but nevertheless I got up and lit the kerosene lantern. When I brought it to his cot, I gasped. He was staring down at a tiny circular incision on the top of his foot where the blood was still flowing.
I was more shaken by the sight of blood trickling out of that little hole than I have been at the sight of gory accidents.
I suggested that we both undertake an immediate search of the shack. If the bat was still inside, we would find it and kill it.
He shook his head and moaned again. "It's no use. They can't stand light. As soon as you lit the lantern, it got out."
He finally arose, bathed and bandaged the puncture on his foot and sank back on his cot. He left the lantern lit and he lay there with his eyes wide open. He looked so haunted and unhappy I wished I could say something to cheer him up, but for the life of me I couldn't think of anything that made sense.
I stayed awake for a while trying to figure out how the bat had gotten in. But I had watched Hubbers inspect the interior of the closely-screened building inch by inch a few hours before and I couldn't think of a single corner or chink that he might have missed. Finally sleep overcame me again.
When I got up the next morning, my host was sitting on the veranda. He looked even worse than he had the night before. His face was ghastly, really grey and drawn, and his eyes appeared feverish. I knew without asking that he hadn't slept again after the vampire's attack.
After breakfast I suggested that he ask the pharmaceutical company to transfer him to some other locality.
"I haven't enough strength left to go out in the jungle with the gathering parties," he said. "And there isn't anything else."
He said nothing more. His tense agitation of the previous day appeared to be changing into a sort of fatalistic apathy. I felt seriously concerned about him and I wished I might help, but I didn't know what I could do.
The party I was to accompany arrived by mid-morning and soon afterwards I bid Cecil Hubbers goodbye. He wished me good luck and shook hands in a perfunctory manner.
At the edge of the jungle I turned around. He was slumped down in his chair on the veranda. All I could see of him was his pinched white face under the brim of his immense cone-shaped hat. He didn't bother to wave.
Nearly two months passed before I returned to the settlement on my way back to Cuyaba. I had separated from the government party several days before and I arrived with my own Indian guides.
I immediately crossed to Cecil Hubbers' shack. He was not on the veranda. I went up the three steps and rapped on the screen door. A short swarthy man who looked part Indian and part Portuguese got up from a cot inside and came to the screen. I asked for Mr. Hubbers.
"He's dead," the dark man said in good English.
Somehow I had expected it, but still I was startled.
"What happened?" I inquired bluntly.
The man rolled his thick shoulders as if explanations were distasteful to him. "The little bat took too much blood," he said. "One morning they found him dead on his bed."
"How horrible! I'm very sorry," I said. And I meant it.
There was something more I wanted to know. "Did they ever find out how the bat got in?" I asked.
The man rolled his shoulders again. "It didn't get in," he said. "Itwasin—all the time. It was living in his hat."
I stared at him and I suspect my mouth fell open.
He nodded. "The bat clung by day in the top of Mr. Hubbers' funny big hat. He never took his hat off except at bedtime; it was always dark inside. At night the vampire came out and fed on him. After he was dead, we found the bat asleep in the top of his hat, on the shelf. It was a very fat bat and we killed it."
I stood there on the porch remembering Cecil Hubbers' huge high-crowned, cone-shaped straw hat—the hat that left his head only just before he crawled under his mosquito net at night.
In spite of the close moist warmth of that clearing, I felt myself enveloped by an eerie chill.
"It's—unbelievable!" I murmured, half to myself.
The dark man turned from the door with a shrug. "He's dead!" he grumbled.