The Vampire Moth

He didn’t notice it right away. He had the impression that the heat of the African night had dulled the nerve impulses in his flesh. But although he felt no discomfort, the sting was there. Above the knee, at the upper edges of the kneecap.
His bare thighs, free from the constriction of his pants, showed a tiny purple mark. Tiny, tiny. So small that he almost had to believe it was a treacherous trick of shadow and light.
He sat down on the bunk he had been assigned as his camp bed. Sharpening his vision, almost blurred by tears of sweat that dripped from his forehead onto his eyelids, he caught sight of a slight swelling disfiguring his skin.
Beyond the ajar entrance to the tent, the grotesque shapes of the village could be glimpsed, seeming to emerge from the brown earth like fragile mud heads. Straw hair and woven branches held the secret of a primordial song, and the guttural voice of drums rose from those remote huts, accompanying the supposed awakening of creatures of death.
There was in that beating wail, a prophecy of danger. With his senses sharpened by that ghostly rhythm, Andrew sensed a growing burning enveloping his leg.
And as the village prepared for the onslaught of the spirits in revolt, he watched in anguish as the insect sting from which a trickle of blood began to flow. Fever exploded in his head like a flashlight that ignited his thoughts.
Malaria, his skeptical traveling companion would have commented.
The moth that feeds on blood, he would have revealed to him, thinking of the studies that, his grandfather before him, had undertaken at the beginning of that century battered by two world wars.
The ancient obsession dwelt in his veins from his earliest childhood. Heir to an indefatigable frenzy for knowledge, he had been incapable of lending luster to his extravagant ancestor's studies.
He remembered his grandfather's fingers showing him an image yellowed by time.
An old snapshot that dated back to the days of his wanderings through the vast forests of the equatorial lands.
A hunter of arcane creatures, he would have liked to imprison his recurring nightmare in a glass case. That insect he dreamed of every night, in the wilderness of the unexplored regions of his mind in constant turmoil.
“It will be you one day who will hunt it down,” he had murmured to it on his deathbed.
Andrew had picked up that hunting will.
He had stuffed inside his backpack the sadistic belief that he would succeed in stealing the secret of those rare specimens of a mysterious supernatural species that lived particularly in the Congo regions.
The vampire moth.



At that very moment, he found himself delving into the darkness around him. It had been a mistake to indulge his unconscious desire.
Karl, the German friend with whom he had left for the Congo, seemed to be sleeping a sleep from unfathomable depths.
He caught sight of a light silhouetted on the horizon line. That was the spot where, in the womb of the savannah, he had heard the hiss of the evil creature.
The breath of a still invisible body that, during the expedition, had eclipsed into who knows what secret cave.
With his mouth kneaded by a whirlpool of saliva that he could not swallow, he watched a figure of a woman emerge at the threshold of the tent.
Her skin, taut and ebony, caught the play of light from the African moon. Her bare feet, adorned with bone bracelets, bore traces of the long journey she had traveled.
Mud. Mud and a thick reddish liquid.
Blood. Blood. Blood.
Andrew began to feel the aggressive tremors of fever. In that delirium of sensation, he could not take his eyes off the black villager who had come by to see him.
The young woman's pupils dilated into huge yellowish circles, and her lips showed a coiled proboscis with which she would suck up his succulent nectar. He let himself fall back on the bunk, writhing in destructive convulsions.
The monster in the guise of a moth-like woman again pounced on his exhausted body to perform the new raid on his veins.


Andrew, Andrew, the doctors and Karl called him.
But the black-winged moth had risen from the darkness of an unexplored past. Damned figure ready to demand its desire for human and animal blood.
Now, faces of men in white masks came up in an aseptic attempt to remedy its baleful fate.
But he knew.
When the vampire moth demanded satisfaction, no one could end its bloodlust. The village drums shouted its evil power, until now all was silent to his ears.
The deadly stillness of fatally tainted blood dragged him into a hopeless abyss.
The vampire moth.
This was the name whispered by the ancestors of that village lost in the flames of the sun. It burned within him, its bite cruel.
The fever that his friendly saviors were trying to annihilate with a mixture of drugs was a fire that incinerated all energy.
And modern remedies would never have victory over that death-bringing sting.
He should not have followed in his grandfather's footsteps. In the delirium of fever, which was now consuming him without hope of salvation, Andrew realized that he should never have violated the secrets of those uncharted lands. He should never have defied nature and its creatures. Man is so fragile compared to his surroundings, he thought in a glimmer of lucidity. Man does not have the luxury of violating nature's secrets without paying the consequences.
The vampire moth had won. Andrew slipped into darkness, and his colleagues had no choice but to declare him dead. When they buried him that same night, a moth landed on the mound of earth at his grave. It stayed there for a few minutes and then returned to the dark depths of the forest from which it had emerged.

***

Viviana De Cecco is an italian translator, blogger and writer. She also worked as a hotel receptionist and poetry translator in Montpellier. Since 2013 she has published short stories, poems, mystery and romance novels. She writes book reviews for Tint Journal, an online literary journal dedicated to English Second Language creative writing. She loves walking by the sea, watching movies, listening to rock music and visiting mysterious places. You can find her short stories and articles on her own blog. https://vivianadececco.altervista.org/