Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [3]
Then there are the truly bizarre sanguivores—blood-feeding finches and vampire moths. And, of course, there’s the candiru—a tiny Amazonian catfish whose reported habit of swimming up the human urethra makes it far more feared by locals and tourists alike than its notorious river-mate, the piranha.
Here are the blood feeders—their stories, their strange feeding habits, and the often-devastating effects they can have on the humans they count as food.
This might get a little rough, so grab a glass of red wine and let’s get started….
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked liked huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going around a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
—Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
1.
WALLERFIELD
( Nine years earlier )
The ceiling tiles in the abandoned icehouse had fallen long ago, transforming the floor of the cavernous building into a debris-strewn obstacle course.
“Hey, it’s squishy,” I said, stepping gingerly onto a slime-coated chunk just inside the doorway. “Some sort of foam.”
“It’s probably just asbestos.”
My wife, Janet, was a terrific field assistant, but I could tell that this place was already giving her a serious case of the creeps.
“Yes, but with a protective coating of bat shit,” I added, trying to cheer her up. “Let’s check it out.”
Wallerfield, in north-central Trinidad, had been a center for American military operations in the southern Atlantic during World War II. The land on which it had been built became part of the same Lend-Lease program that had brought Churchill’s shell-shocked government fifty outdated American destroyers. Once, it had been the largest and busiest air base in the world, but the English were long gone, as were the Yanks (most of them anyway), and now Wallerfield was an overgrown ruin. Row upon row of prefab buildings had either been carted off in pieces by the locals or reclaimed by the scrubby forests of Trinidad’s Central Plain, but because of its cement construction the icehouse was one of the few buildings still standing. Stark white below a mantle of tangled green, the icehouse belonged to the bats—tens of thousands of them.
With help from the Trinidad’s Ministry of Agriculture we’d been collecting vampire bats around the island for nearly two weeks—and things had gone incredibly well. So well, in fact, that when our friend Farouk suggested that we visit the cavernous and somewhat notorious ruins of Wallerfield, Janet and I jumped at the chance to accompany him.*3
The icehouse wasn’t completely dark yet. Daylight streamed through a window frame that in all likelihood hadn’t held glass in fifty years. The light fell obliquely onto the floor, illuminating the base of a cement pillar that rose a dozen feet to the ceiling. The only movement was from the dust that swirled into and out of the sunlight. We passed single file through a shaft of motes before continuing on into deepening shadow. The room we were crossing was huge, perhaps two hundred feet long and half as wide, and it took us a good five minutes to pick our way across the slippery rubble.
We stopped at what looked to be a high doorway leading into a smaller room, around fifteen feet square. But instead of entering, our companion put his arm out, stopping us before we could go farther.
“You don’t want to walk in there, boy.” The Indo-Trini accent belonged to Farouk Muradali, head of his government’s Anti-Rabies Unit. Farouk would also become my mentor for all things related to Trinidadian bats and a collaborator