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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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