The blue hatch is open and I push into the chamber.

It’s large and windowed, and in daylight must offer views of the compound and the surrounding forest stretching away to the horizon. Now it’s dark and gloomy.

I glance out the bank of windows nearest me, and glimpse the battle raging below.

I turn back to the shadowy chamber. In the center of the room, a figure stands motionless, towering from floor to ceiling. Is it a statue? A giant guarding his tenebrous lair? I step forward cautiously and realize that whatever it is, it’s not standing, but rather suspended from the ceiling.

Something moves above me, and the room starts to grow cold. I feel the whoosh of wind and the damp of rain. A segment of the roof is retracting! Starlight filters down, and I reexamine the large figure. It’s not a statue, nor a giant standing guard. It’s P.J., hanging from the ceiling!

She’s dangling upside down from chains, so that her long hair brushes the floor. She moans very faintly. She’s alive!

I run to her. And then I hear an ungodly sound.

It’s a rustle above the roar of the wind. A whisper that is at once delicate and deafening because it portends the approach of something dreadful.

Lightning flashes and I see them fly down at us through the opening in the ceiling. Red eyes, muscular and lithe ratlike bodies, gleaming teeth. Bats!

I remember reading that there are nearly a thousand different kinds of bats in the Amazon, including the only true vampire bats in the world. They sleep by day and hunt by night, and their preferred food is mammals.

I can’t fight them, can’t swat them away. There are too many of them—there must be twenty thousand! I wrap P.J. in my arms and hold her tight.

The stench of them is noxious! Their bodies are wet and cold! They cover my face, crawl through my hair, nip at me with razor-sharp teeth to draw blood, and then lap it up with tiny tongues.

There’s nothing I can do. I hear myself screaming, and P.J. is screaming, too.

I force my mind to work. Loathsome as these bloodsuckers are, they are also nature’s creatures. I remember the way it felt to hold Kidah’s torch, and how, for a few moments, I was one with all the animals of the rain forest, big and small, cuddly and repulsive.

I clutch P.J. tightly and try to shut out the pain and horror of the bat attack, and to recapture that feeling of being an integral part of the rain forest quilt of life.

When I held the torch I felt the jaguars prowling through darkness, the monkeys swinging in the trees, and the ants and beetles in the grass and ferns. We were all linked together, all joined with a common cause.