As if, Martha thought, they were patiently hearing
out the imaginary story of a feverish child. "What bus did you jump out of?" the woman asked, laying a cool hand
against Martha's forehead. "The midnight bus," Martha replied. "I was visiting a friend on
Coverton Street. I got the last bus--the midnight bus--just after
twelve." The woman smiled gently. "The last bus on Coverton Street runs through
at eleven. The midnight bus was discontinued a year ago. Nobody used it
much and then after the crash--"

"What crash?" interrupted Martha with an eerie feeling that she knew
what the answer would be. "A year ago," the woman explained, "the driver of the Coverton Street
midnight bus ran off the road into a wall and was instantly killed. Luckily, no passengers were on the bus. It happened not far from here. There were no witnesses to the crash, but someone claimed later that
the bus had been seen speeding along Coverton Street through the fog
without any lights--"

Suddenly the woman turned pale. She stared at Martha. "And you were
saying--your bus--no lights--"

Remembering the cold, grim interior of the bus, the white face of the
driver and the one feeble headlight which had finally gone out, Martha
felt an icy thrill of fear. She saw her bag lying on the couch, and she pointed to it. "My bus ticket," she told the woman, "is in there." When the woman drew out the bus ticket and held it up to the light, her
pale face seemed drained of every drop of blood. She stared at her husband and then at Martha with round frightened eyes. "I had forgotten," she said softly. "The date on your ticket reminds
me. That crash was just a year ago tonight!" 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 it_ I 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.