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The Reluctant Vampire
Eric Morecambe
A shocking announcement from the Vampire Prince - that he doesn't like blood but prefers chips and a glass of red wine - begins a tale of ghoulish intrigue and hilarious horror. With illustrations by Tony Ross, this re-issue is sure to delight.A tale about an extremely unconventional vampire. This tale of laughter and ghoulish horror for seven and eight year-olds is sure to delight. Here, Eric Morecambe’s customary humour is employed for a young audience.
It is a wild, stormy night in the small village of Katchem-by-the-Throat, in the tiny country of Gotcha, where the unhappy Gots are still ruled by Vampires after four hundred years. At Bloodstock Castle lives Victor, King of the Vampires, and his devoted wife, Queen Valeeta. They have two sons: Vernon, who has a nasty habit of turning people into stone, and Valentine, who reveals the horrible fact that he can’t stand the taste of blood! That’s only the beginning of an incredible story that will keep readers of all ages in stitches!
The Reluctant Vampire
by Eric Morecambe
This book is dedicated to
Steven James Bartholomew
Julian Gibbs
Ian Cockhill
Kingsley Roberts
Tom Barnes
and Darcey Cohill
Their knowledge of Vampires and their habits was invaluable.
Contents
Title Page (#ufbb20160-b934-5609-976b-c7ff7f64405a)
Dedication (#u2cb333ae-de29-56f3-94eb-e157051cba49)
Chapter 1 (#uf5b9ddd4-f958-52b9-910b-da6e91087260)
Chapter 2 (#u6d5cbf9f-e62d-5fcc-b333-e55582f9549b)
Chapter 3 (#ua7405313-4aaf-50ac-8c91-2cd66872d0e5)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
If you enjoyed this, you may also like (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Eric Morecambe (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1
Valentine arises,
As Dr Plump advises.
It was January in the year of seventeen ninety-nine. The sky was as wet and as black as a bottle of ink. A shaft of blue lightning suddenly lit up the seven-hundred-year-old castle on top of a hill. Small yellow lights flickered from behind a barred window in the highest room of the highest turret. For a few seconds before the lightning went out, the castle was silhouetted against thick, huge clouds, fat with rain. The wind bent double the tallest trees on the hill. They almost creaked with pain. The moon could occasionally be seen flying through the clouds at what seemed an incredible speed. Suddenly, it threw a few seconds of yellow light on to a thin ribbon of road leading up to the drawbridge of the silent castle.
On the road was a small coach being pulled by a very frightened horse. The driver was Doctor Plump. Although his name was Plump, he was the thinnest man you could ever imagine. He was six feet six inches tall but when he wore his top hat he was seven feet six inches tall, and when he was on horseback he was well over ten feet tall.
Doctor Plump was a humourless man with lips as thin as a grasshopper’s legs. A large Roman nose – almost large enough for a Roman to sit on – hung between his small, piggy eyes. His eyes were so deep set in his head they looked as if they had been put there with a Black and Decker.
He had been summoned to the castle urgently. His poor horse was wet through with rain and perspiration. The fear showed in its eyes as they rolled round faster than an old woman’s birthday. Doctor Plump urged the animal forward with the snap of a long whip that stung the horse like an injection from a blunt syringe, and they sped towards their goal, Bloodstock Castle, overlooking the small village of Katchem-by-the-Throat in the tiny mid-European country of Gotcha.
The ‘Gots’ were an unhappy people with no king of their own or even a president to rule them. They were ruled by the Vampires of Bloodstock Castle and had been for the past four hundred years.
The horse clattered over the wooden drawbridge as it took the carriage and Doctor Plump inside the courtyard. The Doctor pulled the horse to a halt, jumped off the coach and with his black doctor’s bag in his hand, ran towards the massive iron and wooden door, leaving the tired, bewildered horse covered in a cloud of hot steam.
He pulled hard on an iron bar with a handle attached. A bell sounded inside the castle loud enough to awaken the dead and their friends, the undead, who are like their dead friends but can come back to life again.
Dr Plump waited, wrapping his long, black scarf closer around his thin, scrawny neck. The echo of the bell died down and then the only sound was the rain hitting his top hat as loud as the chattering teeth of an Eskimo with flu.
From inside, the Doctor heard bars being drawn to allow the great door to be opened. It opened, but no more than a crack. He looked into the one black eye of Igon.
Igon was as ugly as it was possible to be. In fact, uglier. He had only one eye, hence the name Igon. A glass eye hung round his neck in a pouch but he only used it on certain occasions such as reading the paper. He would sometimes put it in his trouser pocket to see how much money he had left.
The Doctor spoke.
‘Doctor Plump,’ he wheezed.
‘No, I’m not. I’m Igon,’ said Igon and slammed the door.
The Doctor was left in the pouring rain, the driving wind and the dark night. He thumped as hard as he could on the great iron door.
‘Igon!’ he shouted against the door and the wind.
‘Who is it?’ said a voice from the other side of the door.
‘Doctor Plump,’ the wet doctor shouted.
‘He’s not here,’ Igon shouted back.
‘No. I’m Plump.’
‘You should go on a diet then,’ said Igon, who wasn’t the cleverest person in the world.
‘Please, I’m Doctor Plump.’ He put his mouth closer to the door. ‘I’ve been summoned.’
After a second or two the iron bars were once again removed from their sockets and the door creaked open a little. The same, single, black eye peered out.
The Doctor spoke very quickly. ‘I’m Doctor Plump and His Most Gracious Vampari, King Victor, sent for me to have a look at His Serene Vampary Prince Valentine.’
The door opened slowly. ‘Come in,’ Igon said gruffly.
The Doctor walked in with one long stride. Igon shut the door. Doctor Plump looked around the large hall. It was very dimly lit with no fire to help dry his wet clothes or furniture on which to lay his top hat and overcoat; it was just a very large, very high, freezing cold castle.
The Doctor looked down at Igon. He saw a small, twisted body with a hideous face. His back was bent double with the weight of a large hump that made him walk with his left shoulder nearer to the ground than his right one. His clothes (if you could call them that) were rags. Igon looked up as the Doctor looked down. Igon smiled, showing a most beautiful set of gums.
‘Follow me.’ He slid along the floor away from the door. ‘This way, please, Doctor Pump.’
‘Plump,’ the Doctor checked. ‘Doctor Plump.’
‘That’s what I said, Pump. I have great difficulty saying my ‘I’s as I have no teeth, so saying difficulty was even more difficult for me than saying Plump, Doctor Pump.’ Igon shuffled towards some distant steps.
The Doctor, a little nonplussed, followed behind him. He tried to make a little light conversation.
‘It’s a wild night.’
‘What do you expect for July?’
‘But it’s January,’ the Doctor said in a small, surprised voice.
‘I’ll bet it gets worse in August,’ Igon snarled. The Doctor looked mystified.
They had by now reached the steps, which spiralled round a huge wall like a vine round a tree. The steps were no more than eighteen inches wide, with no handrail. One side of the steps clung to the wall, on the other side was an empty space. One slip and you could fall to the stone flags below and be given a rather large collection of broken ribs. The safest way to climb them was slowly and carefully and to keep one open-palmed hand almost glued to the wall for support. The Doctor nervously followed Igon.
Igon’s bent body found great difficulty in climbing the steps, taking at least half a minute to move from one to the next. The Doctor, following Igon, looked up at all the steps they still had to climb and worked out quickly in his mind that at the rate Igon was climbing they would both be forty-five minutes older by the time they reached the top.
‘Do you think that maybe I should go first?’ the Doctor asked courteously, trying not to offend the bent, broken body in front of him.
‘No,’ came the painfully grunted reply. ‘We’ll rest for a while.’
‘Rest?’ the Doctor questioned. ‘Rest?’ Good Lord, we’ve only walked up five steps.’
‘You may have only walked up five steps but, my long thin friend, I’ve climbed them. We shall rest.’
Igon sat on the sixth step trying to get his breath. The Doctor stood towering over him and watched. After two minutes of gasping and heavy bronchial breathing, Igon slowly took his glass eye out, spat on it and quickly rubbed it with one of the rags he was wearing. He held it in front of him between his thumb and first finger and said, ‘It gets darker as we go higher.’
Eventually, they reached the top of the stairs and on the landing they saw the door leading into the unliving quarters of the Vampire King and Queen, Prince Valentine and Valentine’s brother, Prince Vernon.
Vernon was mean and hateful. He was the least liked in the family. He was also the elder of the two brothers.
The Doctor waited for Igon to knock on the door. As this didn’t happen, he said slowly and with a touch of annoyance:
‘Are you going to knock or have you got a key?’
‘It’s no good knocking. The rooms where they reside are at least another five minutes’ walk along the corridors.’
‘I see,’ the Doctor said with a forced calm. ‘So I presume that you have a key to get us past this massive door?’ He gave Igon a stiff grin.
‘Of course,’ said Igon nervously.
‘Well?’ the Doctor asked.
‘Yes I am, thank you. I’m very well, considering,’ Igon smiled once more to the Doctor.
‘Pardon?’ questioned the Doctor, trying to work out the conversation.
‘What?’ said Igon, not letting his eye look straight at the Doctor’s.
‘What do you mean, what?’ asked the Doctor, who in spite of the cold was beginning to lose his cool.
‘What do you mean, what do you mean? Eh? What?’ Igon was playing for time. The Doctor started to twitch, first his eye, then his bottom lip. He was getting almost to the exasperated stage. Self-control was more difficult to find. His temper was starting to show. You could always tell when his temper was ready to get the better of him. It was then that he started to crack his knuckles. Unfortunately, he was cracking them on Igon’s head.
‘The key. Where’s the key, you curled up lout?’ he whispered viciously.
‘On the table,’ Igon replied in a hurt voice.
‘Which table?’ the Doctor asked with controlled hysteria.
Igon pulled himself up to an almost upright position and with his gnarled hand pointed down the steps, and, with a dignity that any monarch would be proud of, said, ‘On the table, sir. The one in the kitchen.’
The matchstick-thin Doctor suddenly burst into tears; uncontrollable, fast-flowing tears that ran from his eyes like two small rivers in flood and about to burst their banks.
Igon was fascinated. He had never seen two eyes cry before. He had only ever seen one eye cry and that was his own when his mother used to hit him for being ugly, which was every day. Then he would look in the mirror at his one crying eye. He cried because he was so very ugly, not because of the pain inflicted by his mother’s heavy hand.
He would look in that mirror and wonder why he was so very ugly and ask his reflection ‘Why am I so ugly?’ … ‘No one is ever going to love me. No one is ever going to want me as their friend. I’m going to go through life always being lonely. I’m so ugly even I wouldn’t want to be friends with me.’ And he would watch a tear roll down from his eye.
Then, taking his glass eye out of his pocket, he would look at it and wonder why it didn’t cry. After all, it was an eye; his eye. But poor Igon was never told it wasn’t an eye at all. It was only a blue glass marble that had been in a Christmas cracker which he’d stolen and pulled. He pulled it alone as no-one wanted to share a cracker, let alone Christmas, with him and, of course, he was fascinated when the eye (as he thought) dropped out. As far as Igon was concerned, it was Heaven’s work.
By now the half-crazed Doctor had grabbed Igon and was shaking him with a fierceness and strength that reminded Igon of his dear old mum. Poor Igon, no matter what he did, it always seemed to be wrong.
‘No-one likes me,’ he thought, as the good Doctor bashed his head against the iron door and slightly dented it – not the door, his head. ‘The only person speaks kindly to me and likes me at all is Valentine.’
The knocking of Igon’s head on the door was heard in the Vampires’ rooms five minutes’ walk away. A Got servant was sent hurrying to answer the door before it was knocked down.
The servant opened the door to a strange scene. There stood two grown men and the taller one seemed to be using the smaller one as a door knocker. The servant had only started to work at the castle that week and had come to the conclusion that the things that went on around the castle were, to say the least, a little strange.
Only on his second day he saw something that would live with him for ever; maybe even longer. He had seen in the castle grounds a ‘Cowraffe’. He later found out that a Cowraffe was a cow that had been crossed with a giraffe so that you could milk it from a standing position.
