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.