Lair of the Bat Monster Read online

  “It’s like the state fair . . .” said Danny. “When you’re up on the Ferris wheel, and you look down, and there’s all those tiny people everywhere, and there’s just so many of them. Except it’s bats, not people. But you know what I mean.”

  Wendell nodded. That wasn’t quite it, but it was closer than anything else he could think of. There were just so many of them. He’d never seen so many of anything in one place.

  It was starting to get dark, although the stream of bats showed no sign of slowing. Steve pulled out a flashlight and said “C’mon, let’s go toward the cave. I’m not trapping tonight, so it shouldn’t take long.”

  They scrambled down the rocky slope.

  When they got to the mouth of the cave, it was much larger than Wendell had expected. The bats were ten or twenty feet overhead, rushing by like a river and paying no attention to the three reptiles underneath them.

  It stank.

  It stank worse than anything Wendell had ever smelled, even worse than the storm sewers that he and Danny had visited, and which had stood as a pinnacle of stink he’d hoped never to see equaled. The smell was eye-watering and pungent, and it crawled up inside your nose and your mouth and burned your eyes and your tear ducts and the roof of your mouth. It was like old cheese soaked in cat urine wrapped in gym socks dipped in boiled cabbage.

  “You get used to it . . .” said Steve unconvincingly.

  Wendell couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less. It was an epic stench. If you could get used to this, you’d probably never be able to smell anything again. If the world ever ended, it would probably smell like this.

  “The air’s so bad in some bat caves that you can’t go very deep into them,” said the researcher. “This one’s not quite that bad—I mean, it won’t kill you.”

  “Ready to go on?” Steve shined a light into the cave. “It’s worth it, really. Well, it’s actually pretty gross and a little spooky, but—”

  There were few descriptions that could have gotten Danny to walk willingly into that smell, but that was one of them. Wendell followed, partly out of curiosity, mostly because the light was going deeper into the cave, and standing around in the stinky dark with the unseen jungle all around him was even worse.

  The ground turned strangely crunchy underfoot. Wendell tried to see what he was walking on, but the flashlight was bobbing around too much.

  “What’s on the ground?” Danny wanted to know.

  “The reason I had you wear boots,” said Steve, and shined the light across the floor.

  The floor was alive.

  It seethed with life. Wiggly crawly things squirmed and roiled, and big dark beetles crawled over them. Danny had seen a trash bag split open midsummer once, and there had been squirmy bits, but this was a squirmy bit the size of a parking lot.

  Wendell clamped both hands over his mouth and felt his stomach heave.

  “They’re called guano beetles,” said Steve. “They eat all the bat poop that falls from the ceiling. There are a couple million bats, so that’s . . . well, a lot of poop.”

  “They’re a good thing, really. I mean, it’s gross, I know, but if they didn’t do it, the poop would be over our heads. They actually keep the cave clean.”

  Steve turned the flashlight away from the floor and played it across the ceiling. It was alive too, with the furry bodies of bats. They clung to the stone roof, flapping their leathery wings. Some of them hung motionless, apparently resting, while others launched themselves into the air and flew toward the cave entrance.

  After the horrifying spectacle of the cave floor, the bats looked positively friendly. A number of them were cuddling together, wings wrapped around each other, and others were happily grooming each other’s ears.

  “There’s a couple of different species here,” said Steve. “I’ve been trapping samples of . . . hmm. That’s odd.”

  “Odd?” asked Danny.

  “The bats are coming back in,” said Steve, puzzled. “They don’t usually do that until sunrise.” He pointed up, and indeed, bats were streaming back into the cave, circling over their heads and landing on the walls.

  “Yeah . . .” said Steve. “Yeah, let’s get out of the cave.” He followed them, still craning his neck up at the bats. “Something’s scaring them. Maybe there’s an owl or some other predator just outside . . .”

  The humid jungle air tasted wonderful. Wendell sucked in a lungful, promptly inhaled a gnat, and doubled over coughing.

  “Do you hear that?” asked Steve.

  “I think he just swallowed a bug,” said Danny, pounding on the iguana’s back.

  “No, not Wendell. It’s a kind of . . . crashing noise. I wonder if somebody’s cutting trees.”

  “At night?”

  “Illegal logging is a big problem out here,” said Steve. “The wood’s worth a lot of money. Listen, it’s getting louder.”

  Danny listened. Once he straightened up, so did Wendell.

  “I think it’s coming closer,” said Danny.

  Steve nodded.

  Wendell listened as hard as he could. The jungle made a lot of sounds at dusk, all squawks and buzzes and chirps and hums, but the crashing did seem to be getting closer.

  Funny thing . . . all those jungle noises were dying away too, the closer it got. And the trees were rattling and rustling and swaying, as if there was a very small localized windstorm.

  “It sounds big,” Wendell said.

  “The bats have all gone,” said Steve, sounding a little lost. Wendell gulped. Steve was a grown-up, and grown-ups weren’t supposed to sound like that.

  Something burst out of the trees.

  Danny’s first thought was that maybe it was something to do with logging, or maybe construction, because it was huge. It wasn’t an animal sort of huge, it was the huge he associated with cranes and bulldozers and building equipment. The elephants at the zoo were big, but this was the size of a house, and it wasn’t moving like anything he’d ever seen.

  Then it stepped forward, and he thought of a gorilla the size of a building, like King Kong, because that was how it moved, big shoulders and arms crashing down, and smaller hindquarters swinging forward.

  Except that it wasn’t a gorilla.

  “Holy crud,” breathed Danny, “it’s a bat.”

  THE DRAGON-NAPPING

  The bat was the biggest creature Danny had ever seen, at least on land. He’d seen a whale once, and it had been bigger, but it had been in the water. This thing looked much too large to be real, certainly too large to move, as if it should fall over when it tried to take a step.

  It seemed to walk on its wings, its little hind legs barely touching the ground. (“Little” was a relative term. Each one was bigger than Danny’s dad.)

  It was hard to make out details in the late evening light, but when it turned its head, it looked almost exactly like the false vampire bat Steve had shown them—only a thousand times larger.

  “Camazotz . . .” breathed Steve.

  A few late bats were still swirling out of the cave entrance. The giant bat snapped at them, apparently hungry. The bats fled.

  Frustrated, the monster lifted its head and let out a shrill squeaky roar. It was an absurd noise to come out of a body that size. It sounded like a lion inhaling helium.

  Danny couldn’t help it. He laughed.

  The giant bat heard him.

  Its head jerked down, the fleshy pad on the end of its muzzle wiggling, the sailboat-sized ears swiveling. Danny stopped laughing immediately.

  Camazotz peered at Danny and squeaked thoughtfully. It was holding him in one of its hind paws, and the grip was tight but not painful. Its claws were blunt and had cuticles an inch thick. There was coarse hair over the fingers.

  Everybody said to wear gloves when handling bats, but apparently it didn’t matter when the bat was handling you.

  “Squeak?” Danny tried. “Errr . . . no habla squeak?”

  It made a noise somewhere between a growl and a chitt
er, like a bus trying to purr. Danny didn’t know if that was Giant Batspeak for “Hi!” or “I will enjoy devouring you with ketchup.”

  The big leaf-shaped pad on the end of its nose was almost as big as Danny, and its nostrils looked like subway tunnels. He could see the edges of enormous teeth protruding from under the lips.

  The teeth didn’t bother Danny that much—he had lots of relatives with enormous teeth—but the wet, cavernous nostrils were kind of disturbing. It had a booger halfway up one the size of a small dog.

  The bat tilted its head thoughtfully. Its jaws yawned open.

  Well, this is how I die, I guess, thought Danny. On the one hand, he didn’t really want to die, but on the other hand, being eaten by a giant bat out of legend was certainly an interesting way to go.

  A tongue the size of a beach towel came out and licked him.

  Camazotz made a high-pitched noise, almost like a giggle, and turned. Danny clutched at the foot holding him as the world lurched.

  The bat monster entered the trees, carrying the dragon into the jungle.

  On the slope below the bat cave, Steve and Wendell stared after them.

  “Look at it!” cried Steve. “It’s walking on its wings—well, that makes sense, it’s far too big to fly, and the wings are so much stronger, so it’s using them like legs, and its feet are like its hands! That’s amazing!”

  “Do something!” yelled Wendell.

  “I am doing something! I’m taking notes!”

  “Oh. Um.” Steve bit his lip. “Oh, maaaaaan . . .”

  “What? What?” asked Wendell.

  The iguana and the feathered reptile stared at each other for a minute, then stared out into the dark jungle and the trail of ruined trees left by Camazotz.

  “We’ll go back to the research station,” said Steve. “There are better flashlights there, and rope, and I’ve got a map of the area. The bat’s left a pretty big trail. We’ll follow it. It has to stop moving at dawn to go to sleep.”

  Wendell stared hopelessly into the jungle. The insect and animals noises that had fallen silent were beginning to buzz and squawk and rattle again.

  “We’ll get him back,” Steve said. “I promise.”

  BAT MONSTER MAMA

  “It’s going to eat him,” moaned Wendell.

  “It’s not going to eat him,” said Steve.

  “It’ll eat him,” Wendell insisted. “It’ll eat him, and poop him out, and then guano beetles the size of cars will eat him.”

  Steve paused, struck by the vividness of this imagery. “It’s really not likely. I mean, I don’t think . . .”

  “I will never have a friend like him again. No one will sit with me at lunch. Big Eddy will squash me—I’ll die alone in the boys’ bathroom and no one will notice.”

  “You know, I don’t think it will.”

  Steve hitched a coil of rope over his shoulder. “Bats don’t usually carry food around. They eat it on the spot, because it’s hard to fly otherwise. And it didn’t eat Danny right there. In fact, from the noises it was making . . . No, that’s crazy.”

  “And it—she—thinks Danny’s her baby?”

  “Well, maybe. But that’s a good thing!”

  You could have cut Wendell’s skepticism with a knife.

  “If she thinks he’s her baby, she won’t eat him. And she probably won’t drop him, or squish him, or leave him to get eaten by jaguars.”

  Wendell hadn’t even considered jaguars.

  “Come on,” said Steve. “We’re going after him. Camazotz has to have a roost somewhere. We just have to follow her trail back to it and wait until daylight, when she’ll come back to sleep. Then we can grab him.”

  “Oh good,” said Wendell. “We’re doomed too.”

  So far, Danny did not feel particularly doomed.

  What he mostly felt was seasick.

  Clutched in a hind paw as Danny was, every step Camazotz took was a vast swinging lurch. It wasn’t straight, either—he slipped side to side, depending on which arm Camazotz was leading with. Occasionally the giant bat got tired of carrying him and switched hind paws, which involved being airborne and then briefly squished.

  This did nothing for the seasickness.

  This is a great adventure, he told himself. He’d been captured by ninja frogs and giant squid, but never by a Zapotec bat monster before.

  He would have enjoyed it a lot more if he hadn’t been in danger of throwing up. Or if he had any idea where Camazotz was taking him.

  He’d tried to see where they were going, but it was a blur of shadows and greenery, and it was going in all directions, which was really hard to watch. So he kept his eyes shut tight, feeling the fur of the giant bat’s belly against the back of his head, and concentrated on keeping his lunch down.

  He’d also tried to breathe fire at first. But his stomach had just made a perilous glurrrrrch noise and threatened to bring up something a lot more solid than flame.

  He was so busy not throwing up that it was a shock when they stopped moving.

  Camazotz stood on the edge of a river. It looked like the same one that Steve had boated up, but Danny couldn’t be sure. The moon had come out, and reflected a white wash across the water.

  Very carefully, the bat set him down on the bank, and then hunkered down itself beside him.

  Danny brushed himself off and looked up at the face of the bat. “Um. Thank you for letting me go?”

  Camazotz made a cheerful squeaking noise, leaned down, and licked him again. Danny winced.

  Then the giant bat leaned out over the water and stared deeply into it.

  Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Um,” he said.

  The bat ignored him.

  Had it lost interest? Should he make a run for it? Could he get away?

  Probably not.

  Maybe he could sort of sneak away, very quietly—Camazotz hadn’t noticed him until he’d laughed. He could hide under a bush or something until it went away . . .

  He slid a glance at the bat and took a casual step away.

  The bat continued to ignore him.

  He tried another step.

  With terrifying speed for something so huge, the bat slammed its entire face into the water. Danny let out a noise that was absolutely, positively not a shriek and jumped at least another foot in the air.

  Camazotz lifted its face out of the river. A gigantic fish, longer than Danny was tall, flopped from its jaws.

  It wolfed the fish down as casually as Danny might eat a chicken nugget, and went back to staring into the water.

  “Oh . . . kay . . .” said Danny, taking another step back. Apparently he wasn’t on the menu, which was comforting, but not by very much.

  He was about ten steps from the tree line. He gulped.

  Camazotz looked over at him and made another cheery squeak, like a subway train trying to make friends.

  Danny froze.

  He wished Wendell were here. Wendell would have puked all over the jungle and he couldn’t run as fast as Danny and he would definitely have blamed Danny for everything, but at least the dragon wouldn’t have been alone.

  And Wendell knew something about bats. That might have been helpful. Steve would have been even more helpful, but then Wendell would be stuck in the jungle all by himself, and it wasn’t any good to get rescued from a giant bat only to discover that Wendell had been sat on by an endangered tapir.

  Another sudden splash and another fish. This time, though, Camazotz picked it up with one foot, turned, and held it out to Danny.

  “Um,” said Danny.

  He’d eaten a piece of sushi once, at a restaurant with his parents. It had been interesting, in a notsure-if-he-liked-it kind of way. There was a big difference between a little tube of rice with a bit of pink meat in the middle and a whole dead fish being dangled over his head.

  “Err. Thank you. No.”

  The bat waved the fish at him again.

  He held up both hands and pushed it back, turning his fa
ce away.

  Camazotz shrugged its wings and tossed the fish into its mouth, then went back into the water.

  I’ve got to get out of here before it decides to try to feed me something else, Danny thought, and backed another step toward the jungle.

  Halfway there now. He glanced into the trees. It was incredibly dark and tangled, but surely it would be easier for him to move through it than Camazotz.

  Just a few more steps.

  Just a few more . . .

  THE ROOST

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Wendell.

  “As sure as I was five minutes ago,” said Steve.

  Camazotz had cut a swath of destruction in bent and broken trees, forming a path that was relatively easy to follow, but it wasn’t a straight path. It wandered around, as the giant bat had found something interesting or tasty, and sometimes there were large gaps in it, where the bat leaped or scrambled over something it couldn’t knock down. Steve and Wendell had spent twenty minutes wandering around in a gap, and Wendell still wasn’t entirely convinced they hadn’t come out on their own back trail going the wrong way.

  The problem was that the jungle all looked alike. It was dark and dripping and full of groaning and flapping and buzzing, some of which might be bugs or birds and some of which might be jaguars or . . . or . . . iguana-eating tapirs or something. After all, if a two-story bat god could live out here for years, without being noticed by a bat researcher practically in its backyard, there could be anything. Ancient primitive dinosaurs. Lost tribes of cannibals. Things that nobody knew the name of because nobody who saw it had ever lived to say anything but “Oh god, not my spleen—!”