"
A paragraph followed which was doubly underlined, and pursuing my
reading I made a discovery which literally caused me to hold my breath.
This is what I read:
"In a recent contribution to the _Occult Review_, Mr. Colin Camber, the
American authority, offered some very curious particulars in support of
a theory to show that whereas snakes and scorpions have always been
recognized as sacred by Voodoo worshippers, the real emblem of their
unclean religion is the bat, especially _the Vampire Bat of South
America._
"He pointed out that the symptoms of one dying beneath the spell of an
Obeah man are closely paralleled in the cases of men and animals who
have suffered from nocturnal attacks of blood-sucking bats."
I laid the open book down upon the bed. My brain was in a tumult. The
several theories, or outlines of theories which hitherto I had
entertained, were, by these simple paragraphs, cast into the utmost
disorder. I thought of the Colonel's covert references to a neighbour
whom he feared, of his guarded statement that the devotees of Voodoo
were not confined to the West Indies, of the attack upon him in
Washington, of the bat wing pinned to the door of Cray's Folly.
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