Iron Vampire Bates of Haiti (Or, the Ape men’s Bludgeons)

(A Science-fiction short story on—mutations)


The Haitian Citadel, in Haiti

Vampire Bates:

The so called Revered Master Gordon, who lived in the Citadel (1986) in the hill country of Haiti, some three-thousand feet on top of a mountain was gone, it was an the usual hour, and George Huntington was deep into the bowels of the fortress, the night tingling with eldritch shadows, movements in quest all around me, like bats, and stretched out arms, I hid around one of the many pillars surrounding me, stared at the beasts, thinking how I might handle these ape like men, with their iron bludgeons in hand, they saw me hiding, they must had seen my shadow from the brightness of the torches within their iron sheathes and metal clasps nailed into the walls. They looked wild as they swung those clubs recklessly about, coming towards me, I looked for an exit, then a gate, then I saw those bat shadows again, but this time they were not shadows, they were bats, and they came in swarms, and bit me here and there all over my body, as I tried to beckon them off (vampire bats, and my body started to pain me, a tingling sensation in the feet followed, and the beginning of paralysis, and I felt a few drips of water on me leaking from the roof, and it seemed to draw a fear into my cerebrum, and my body was starting to get rigid, I knew this was the preliminary diagnosis for rabies, but what could I do, they had iron like teeth and jaws, when they bit, like a piranha, pulling out flesh.

Anything would do I felt at this juncture, and so I rushed forward at them, those ape brutes, I knew there was an entrance behind them, if only I could get to it before these symptoms killed me, thus, I ran through the twenty apemen—and they snagged me like a bug in a web, that was the last avenue I had to my liberation.
I did tell myself silently, we simply don’t listen to our little voices inside our head, it’s there warns you, like a second part of your soul, or perhaps an element of residue inside the soul, it warns you, and my warning was do not go into the fortress at all, the monetary as it was being called while the Master Gordon of this scientist cult, ended his stay, he was working on a mutation experiment, and I was interested what it was, I worked for a small newspaper out of Minnesota, and I had been in Haiti before, to this very location, and in Port of Prince, and Cap Haitian, and Rankette, a village up and deeper into the mountains.
This fortress was built in the time of Napoleon, a time of stress for Haiti, built in fear his navy would try to enslave Haiti, and this fortress high on the mountain top was ideal, yet it took 20,000-slaves to build it, and something like four-years, and thousands of deaths. Some have called it the 8th Wonder of the World, but Master Gordon has called it his experiential lavatory, and has paid a good sum for privacy of the fortress, for several months. This is where I come into all this.

And as I was saying, instantly I was snagged like a fly caught in a web, I suppose I was surprised of the wild scene I never would have expected of myself, that before my own eyes as I sized up a moment ago, and in shock I did the insane act; next, the largest of the apemen, grabbed my shroud, the cloths that covered me now covered with blood and bite holes from the Vampire Bates, they were naked and as hairy as any ape in the Congo, might be, but here I was in the deep dungeons of the Haitian Fortress, next to the Caribbean Sea, it was blistering hot outside, but cool in these dungeons.
And the large apemen named Maraud, I had heard his followers call him that in their grunts and groans, I dimly stood my ground in front of him, as he looked at me restored to some kind of happy ignorance, and wound his hand up like a baseball pitcher, and whapped me in the face with that iron club, and bashed it again against my thigh, back and I caught it the fourth time with my first, then figured I had to reply disjunctively to him, that without a doubt, I was comparatively more knowing than he.

He itch his head as if trying to figure out my unusual smile, after he astoundingly pounded on me like a kid might with a toy he wanted to wreck out of anger it wouldn’t work properly, and I ran to the Monastery garden. I was dying I knew, from the bate bites, and the severe blows of the apemen; it was just a matter of time.
Then the so called Master came in, a high priest of some sort, and scientist of another nature, “Thank God you’re alive,” he commented, adding “these apemen are really unworthy to be among us, they are confused half the time trying to figure out if we are a man-seraph, or a man-god, or just a weak man in general, and perhaps a man-bat. I keep them fooled.” And he laughed.
The man called Master Gordon was carrying an embryo, an animal organism in the early stages of growth, looked related to the apemen.
“Come with me he said!” and I followed him to a cell in the dungeon, the apemen watching carefully, nearby.
“Trust me,” said the Master, “they will no longer harm you. This embryo is the fruit of my long enduring work, I am trying to create a dispensation, a miracle you might say, and plant it into those apemen, this conquest with enable or bestow upon man and ape alike, one of higher intelligence, the other with higher in strength. Thus making one new human being with two intertwined matures.
“It all comes under unthought-of new faculties for the new human race. This will neither be the first, or neither second, nor even the third hypothesis in this case, for man is really an experiment, individually, abstractedly and more potent than he knows.”
The Master now was unavailing to my mind, he was not convincing me of his good intentions for mankind, or the universe, then behind me an iron club hit my head, and I passed out.


(Three days later) When I woke the mysterious providence of who I was, was told to me, that being, the Masters quest, was part of it, I looked in the mirror, and I was inside of Maraud (the ape-man), we were a team now, connected for life, I remodeled, in my thoughts, and I was flooded with Maraud’s thoughts, I had to learn how to decipher between his and mine, and tell him to shut up, and let me try to form words, since his mind did not have the capability. I found out I could dominate him, at times, and when his brute team came into play, when they were guarding at their posts inside the fortress, he would approach them, hit them in the head, and start a fight, that is when I went silent, I did not know how to handle such tides of anger, he went like a rocket in high gear, and my strength was (or his strength, now part of mine) twenty-fold from what it used to be. He took a lot of blows and so I taught him (which was part of me now) to duck, and kick, and jump away, in this process of fighting, he became even more dangerous because of that.

I had walked back into the operating room, I paced the room, I noticed there was a fire in a heath, my body was in it, burning up, thus, there was no future escape, if I did, it would be in my new body and that was too monstrous to walk freely on any streets in the world without finding someone’s bullet to put me back into some zoo cage. The Master had his triumph.

Written: 8-8-2008, modified 8-9-2008