Dark Banquet Read Free

farther.
    â€œYou
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 on a project to study quadrupedal locomotion in vampire bats.
    â€œWhy’s that, Farouk?” I asked, as Janet and I flicked on our headlamps.
    â€œThat is not a room,” he said.
    As I trained my beam inside the chamber I couldn’t help noticing that the floor had a weird shine to it. “What the—?”
    â€œIt’s an elevator shaft.”
    â€œA what?” Janet said, pulling up beside me.
    I kicked in a small piece of debris past the threshold and it hit the dark surface with a plop. “Jesus, it’s completely filled with water!”
    Janet edged closer, the light from her headlamp focused at a point just beyond the doorway. “That is
not
water,” she said.
    The “floor” of the shaft was a debris-strewn swamp. There was indeed some type of filthy, tar black liquid filling the shaft, but Janet was right—it certainly wasn’t water. *4
    Scattered across the surface of this scuzzy brew were tattered blocks of dark-stained ceiling material as well as unidentifiable rubbish that had been chucked in over the past fifty years. The scariest thing to me was that all of it looked
remarkably
like the rubble-littered cement floor we were currently standing on.
    â€œA group came in here to see the bats some time ago and one of them, a woman, turned up missing.” Farouk pointed to a spot near where the
real
floor ended. “They found her there, clutching onto the ledge. Only her head and arms were above the surface.”
    I could see my wife give a shudder and she took several steps back from the edge.
    Carefully, I moved a bit closer, kneeling at the entrance of the shaft. It still looked like a solid surface. “Farouk. How deep is this friggin’ thing?”
    â€œIt goes down several floors,” he said, a bit too matter-of-factly. “And off the main shaft—a maze of side tunnels.”
    As the light from my headlamp moved across the glistening surface, something the size of a football catapulted itself through the beam. My reflexes sent me backward onto my butt as the object landed with a loud splash. Three headlamp beams hit the impact point, but by then whatever it was had disappeared below the ink black sludge.
    â€œWhat the hell was that?” Janet asked, her voice an alarmed whisper.
    â€œI
think
it was a toad,” I responded. “A big mother.” And as I turned back to Farouk, he nodded in agreement.
    â€œThey feed on the bats that fall in from above,” he said. “The babies and the weak ones.”
    With that, the Trinidadian directed his light upward, until we could just make out the ceiling of the elevator shaft, twenty feet from where we stood.
    As I squinted into the darkness, Farouk moved away, motioning us to follow. “You can see the bats much better from upstairs.”
    Our companion stopped before a narrow stairway leading to the second floor. The railings had either collapsed long ago or been carted off by the locals, leaving only small circular holes in the cement. Three separate beams moved across the steps, each of us searching for any indication that the stairs might not be safe.
    I was on the verge of saying something about the strong smell of ammonia when I heard Farouk’s voice. His tone had grown more serious. “Janet, maybe you should remain down here.”
    â€œYeah, that’s gonna happen,” I said with a laugh. My wife had recently spent three hours exploring Caura Cave, the floor of which was slick with guano and crawling with enormous roaches, all without a complaint. Only later did I learn that she had had a migraine the entire time. So it came as no shock when she politely waved off Farouk’s