‘I just wish someone would invent cardboard,’ said the vampire. ‘At least that would be a start.’42
‘I think my mother did invent cardboard,’ said Sir Lancelot, who had not read footnote 34, ‘but she called it an omelette.’
‘They could call it a muchcloserscope,’ said Morgan le Fey.
‘I think omelette sounds better,’ said Lancelot.
‘I hope he’s all right,’ said the vampire when her nephew still had not reappeared ten minutes later.
I hope he’s not, thought the second rat.
After they had smashed the toilet, helped Scraper out of the drain and pulled the bucket off his head, they reviewed their situation.
‘Right,’ said Princess Floridian. ‘This is the situation.’
‘No, I think it’s the bathroom,’ said Scraper.
Brat and Bloat agreed with him.
I wish I’d listened to my teacher more, the Princess thought, when she said never work with children, animals and walking potatoes.
‘Before we go any further,’ the Princess continued, ‘I think there will be a new rule and anyone who breaks it will get a punch in the ear.’
‘A punch?’ said Scraper. ‘Isn’t that a fing for making holes in bukkits?’
‘No,’ said Princess Floridian, holding up a rusty gadget for making holes in leather belts. ‘It’s one of these and every time you break the rule you will get yet another place in your ear where you can put a big fat earring.’
‘But…’ Scraper began, followed by a loud scream of pain.
‘You haven’t said what the rule is,’ said Brat, backing away behind Bloat.
‘So I haven’t,’ said the Princess. ‘Sorry, potato boy, you have a one-hole credit. The rule is that none of you can speak a single word unless I say you can.’
‘But…’ Scraper began and then stopped very suddenly.
‘That’s your credit used up,’ said the Princess. ‘So if I ask any of you a question, then of course, you can speak, and if something is creeping up behind me and looks dangerous you may speak. Every other time, you must put your hand in the air and wait.’
Bloat put his wing in the air.
‘Yes?’
‘I haven’t got any hands,’ said the young dragon.
He put his wing in the air again.
‘Yes?’
‘It probably isn’t dangerous, but there’s a small black bird sitting on the windowsill looking at us,’ said Bloat.
Princess Floridian spun round and tried to grab the bird, but the little vampire, who looked like a bird, was too quick for her.
‘Have you been sent here to spy on us?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Fissure. ‘Why, what are you doing?’
‘None of your … ow, ow, ow,’ cried Brat as the Princess punched a hole in his ear.
‘Well, what are you doing here?’ she said.
‘Just flying about,’ said Fissure. ‘Us birds do that a lot, flying about. It’s probably what we do best of all.’
‘Bird?’ said the Princess. ‘I thought you were a vampire bat.’
‘Funny you should say that,’ said the young bat. ‘I get that all the time.’
‘Would you like to spy for us?’ said the Princess.
‘Might do,’ said Fissure, thinking if he played his cards right, he could become a double-agent and get double rats. ‘What’s in it for me?’
‘What would you like?’ said Princess Floridian.
‘Ah, well,’ said Fissure.
Because he was supposed to be a bird he was supposed to like all the gross stuff that birds ate like seeds and flowers and other planty things. He knew that birds did not suck the blood out of things.
If I ask for a rat, he thought, they might get suspicious.
He knew some birds did eat rats, but they were usually quite dead rats that had bits fallen off from rotting and no blood left inside at all.
‘What have you got?’ he said.
‘OK, guys, you may speak,’ said the Princess. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘You could sit on my bukkit for a bit,’ said Scraper.
‘Some cheese?’ said Brat.
‘Have you got any cheese?’
‘No,’ said Brat, ‘but I have got a sausage.’
‘Sausage?’ said Fissure, who wasn’t sure what a sausage was on account of them not being part of the standard vampire diet, which was mainly made up of blood with the addition of more blood. ‘What’s that then?’
‘It’s a brilliant new invention,’ said Brat. ‘I stole it from the castle kitchen before I escaped. You take a tube out of a dead animal’s stomach then you cut up bits of another dead animal or even several dead animals and mash them up with things like fat and blood and onions and bread and plants and then you stuff them inside the tube you got out of the dead stomach and then boil them.’
‘That is gross,’ said Princess Floridian. ‘No one would eat that.’
‘They do,’ said Brat. ‘They’re really fashionable and they have a special thing to cook them on called a BarbYeCue.’
‘Did you say it had blood in it?’ said Fissure.
‘Yes, loads of it,’ said Brat. ‘It’s a blood sausage.’
‘All right,’ said Fissure. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Good boy,’ said the Princess.
‘What is it I’m going to do?’ said the young bat, who couldn’t think of anything except the blood sausage.
‘Be our spy,’ said the Princess.
‘Right,’ said Fissure. ‘What am I going to spy on then?’
‘Everything.’
‘Right. So when do I get the sausage?’
‘Every time you tell us something useful, I will give you a slice.’
‘Right, I’ll get started right away,’ said Fissure.
‘Oh, and one thing before you go,’ said Princess Floridian as casually as she could. ‘It’s not important, but um, er, I don’t suppose you’ve seen a sort of sword thing sticking out of a bit of a rock out in the lake somewhere, have you?’
‘Do you want me to spy on it?’
‘Well, only if you happen to see it,’ said the Princess. ‘It’s not for me, you understand, but I’ve got a friend who absolutely loves swords and he’d be quite sort of excited, well, no, excited is too strong a word. I mean he…’
‘Your friend?’
‘Yes, my friend. He’d be quite interested to know where it is,’ said the Princess.
‘Oh.’
‘So if you happen to see this sort of sword thing, you know, when you’re flying around over the lake around all those lovely little islands, my friend would be rather sort of happy to know where it is. I think it belonged to a friend of his who might have dropped it or something like that.’
‘So it belongs to your friend’s friend then?’ said Fissure.
‘That’s it,’ said the Princess. ‘And he’s a good friend of mine. I don’t mean my friend’s friend – I’ve never met him – I mean my friend. So it would be really nice if we could find the sword for him.’
‘OK.’
‘I would think he – my friend, that is – would be so pleased if you did find it that he would want me to give you an extra slice of blood sausage, if you found his friend’s sword, that is.’
‘OK,’ said Fissure. ‘Say no more. I’m on the case.’
And with that he flew off over the lake and all the islands.
A lot of people think that vampire bats were once human beings that were turned into vampires one night while they were asleep and a vampire flew into their room and bit them in the neck. This is both true and completely wrong because there are vampires and vampire bats.43
Here are the dictionary definitions:
vampire n. 1. a corpse supposed, in European folklore, to leave its grave at night to drink the blood of the living by biting their necks with long pointed canine teeth. This then turns their victims into vampires or, worse still, geography teachers or, even worser, geography teachers in cordu
roy jackets who teach their students about Belgium and nowhere else. 2. See vampire bat.
vampire bat n. a small bat that feeds on the blood of mammals, birds and humans,44 using its two sharp incisor teeth and anticoagulant saliva, found mainly in tropical America, Manhattan and Avalon. Contrary to a widely held misunderstanding among book editors and other people, vampire bats do not change into people. They are bats all the time.
Avalon had both types of vampire, but the ones we are concerned with now are the vampire bats. There are no vampire graves inside Camelot itself. They are all in a small town by the seaside called Byton Bay where people go on holiday to lose weight by having a couple of pints of blood sucked out of them and get a nice tan.
Vampire bats, on the other hand, do not live in graves because they are not human corpses. They are small furry mammals that hang upside down from beams in the towers of big castles like Camelot. They are actually quite soft and cuddly. It’s just that they drink blood – and who hasn’t done that now and then? Actually, even if they don’t suck your blood, their bite alone can give you some very unpleasant diseases. There is one called Lyssavirus which kills you and another called Rabies45 which makes you froth at the mouth and kills you, but you don’t really mind because you’ve already gone completely insane.
The Vampires of Camelot46 have lived in the castle since it was first built and are the oldest vampire family on earth. Many people believe that all the world’s vampires are descended from the Vampires of Camelot. Where they came from, no one knows. Many people believe they were created by Merlin’s great-great-grandfather Merlin.
‘It’s the sort of thing he might have done,’ they say. ‘Aft er all, anyone who created something as evil as cats would be capable of anything.’
‘I didn’t know Merlin created cats,’ other people say.
‘Oh yes, he made the first one out of some rusty barbed-wire, a piece of broken glass, a cup of spit and something an owl coughed up.’
‘Wow. You learn something new every day.’
‘No you don’t.’
The oldest vampire in Camelot was three hundred and fifty-seven. She was called Lucestays and she never left her beam in the bat tower of Camelot. Her legs and wings were so stiff with arthritis she could barely move them, and it had been over fifty years since she had swooped down on a sleeping creature to suck its blood. Nowadays her children would go out, grab a mouse, carry it back to the tower and hold it for her while she had a bit of a drink. Her fangs were so worn down that her children even had to make the puncture holes for her.
‘I should have died years ago,’ she kept saying.
No one argued with her, even though they were the ones keeping her alive without realising they were actually doing it. It was the mice they brought her every few days. The Muris immortalis cametloticus or Camelot Everlasting Mouse, a creature that had definitely been created by one of the early Merlins, actually contained the secret of immortality in its blood. A few drops could stop you ageing for up to a month47 and as Lucestays drank the blood once a week, she simply stopped getting any older. The only person who knew this was Merlin himself as he also sucked on an Everlasting Mouse once a week. There were also a few very, very old cats around the castle.
Lucestays was actually getting a tiny bit older because sometimes her children brought back a baby rat by mistake and that blood did not have any magical qualities apart from giving you really bad wind.
By and large the vampires kept themselves to themselves. They usually only left their tower at night and most people didn’t believe they actually existed. It suited the vampires that way because by and large people tend to look upon bloodsucking in a disapproving sort of way. If they had known there was a big family of vampires in the neighbourhood, they would have all gone to bed with their socks on because, as everyone knows, ankles are a vampire’s favourite feeding place.
‘Humans are ridiculous,’ said Fenestra. ‘I mean, how many of them have actually tasted fresh warm blood? As we all know, if they did they would realise just how incredibly delicious it is.’
Morgan le Fey was the great exception to the rule. On the day she had been born, Fenestra had come to her as she lay in her crib beside the bed of her sleeping mother. What exactly had brought the bat to the child’s side is a mystery. As the child had come into the world, Fenestra, who had been hanging from her Friday Beam48 dreaming of a red Christmas, which is like a white Christmas only with a lot more blood, had felt something calling her. It was not a voice, but something in her soul, a feeling more than a noise, and the calling came from Morgan le Fey. For her part the newborn princess was unaware of it, yet when Fenestra flew down and sat on her chest looking deep into her eyes, the child knew there was a bond that would tie the two of them together forever. From that day on there was barely a day when the two of them didn’t speak to each other. Fenestra became the secret eyes and ears, bringing secrets from all around Camelot to the young princess, secrets that she stored away in her memory, secrets that were there to use whenever she needed them.
Fenestra’s friends and relations were Morgan le Fey’s friends too and watched over her wellbeing day and night. Now that Sir Lancelot had come into her life, they watched over her day and night and knight.
There were two hundred and fifty-eight vampires living at Camelot and every night they spread out across the countryside looking for warm ankles. Only Lucestays and the baby vampires stayed behind. The baby vampires were still being fed by their mothers so they didn’t need fresh blood. However, to make sure they knew what to do when they were old enough to go out and feed, each baby was left with a big red tomato to practise biting on.
Fissure flew out over the lake until he was out of sight of the runaways. He looked down over the islands, without really paying much attention.
Excalibur, he thought, boring.
Then he swung round, making sure he couldn’t be seen, and flew back to Morgan le Fey and Lancelot.
‘They’re looking for Excalibur,’ he said.
‘Who isn’t?’ said Sir Lancelot.
‘Indeed, my lord,’ said Morgan le Fey. ‘People have searched for the Sword of the True King for hundreds of years.’
‘Are you sure?’ said the vampire.
‘Absolutely,’ said Morgan le Fey. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, all you had to do was ask us vampires. We all know where it is. Always have. For all the good it will do you,’ said the vampire.
‘Why do you say that?’ said Sir Lancelot.
‘Well, I know of at least eighty-three people who have tried to pull it out of the rock and I’ve no doubt there are dozens more, but no one has moved it as much as a hair’s width.’
‘That is because it is the Sword of the True King,’ said Morgan le Fey. ‘Only he can pull it from the stone.’
‘Your father couldn’t,’ said the vampire, ‘and he was a true King. I mean, they didn’t come much truer than Uther Pendragon, good friend to us vampires he was. That’s why we showed him where the sword was, but even he failed to move it.’
‘My father tried to remove Excalibur?’
‘He did indeed. He burst several blood vessels trying and put his back out so badly he had to lie down on a plank of wood for a whole month with unguents down his trousers, and even after that, he forever walked with a slight limp and a strange tilt to the south.’
‘So that’s how he got that,’ said the Princess. ‘He always told me it was an old war wound from a battle with a giant phoenix.’
‘There’s no such thing as a giant phoenix,’ said the vampire.
‘I know that,’ said Morgan le Fey, ‘but I thought that was because my father had killed it.’
‘They asked me to spy for them,’ said Fissure.
‘What, the boy Brat?’ said Morgan le Fey.
‘No, the one who’s in charge,’ said Fissure. ‘The girl.’
‘Girl? There isn’t a girl…’ the Princess began. ‘No! The girl? It has to be that poor King K
asterwheel’s daughter that he thought they had kidnapped. Well, well.’
‘Should we send for him?’ said Sir Lancelot.
‘Tricky,’ said the Princess. ‘He thinks his daughter is an angel. I think the shock would give him a heart attack. On the other hand it would be better he find out from us rather than tittle-tattle gossip from the servants.’
When King Kasterwheel arrived, Morgan le Fey sat him down in a comfy chair, gave him a nice big cup of super-relaxing chamomile tea and broke the news to him that his sweet, innocent daughter was actually a nasty, greedy, selfish little minx.
‘Oh yes,’ said the King. ‘I could have told you that.’
‘Oh,’ said Morgan le Fey. ‘I thought you would be devastated.’
‘Devastated? Oh no, my dear. I passed devastated years ago. I’m on depressed resignation now,’ he said. ‘From the day she was born she has been possessed by wickedness. She hid it behind her great beauty and immense charm and fooled almost everyone.’
‘So what has she done?’ said Morgan le Fey.
‘Our daughter was five years old and for her birthday party we employed a travelling circus, and that day my wife ran away with a clown,’ said the King, ‘All she left me was a short note burnt into the fur of our daughter’s teddy bear. It said, “Boodgye”. I knew my wife had no great talent at spelling and so I believed she had deserted me forever. It was not until our daughter’s nursemaid came to me and explained that Boodguy was one of the circus clowns that I understood. I was devastated. My wife had deserted us for a short dumpy bald clown with enormous shoes and a huge red nose.’
‘You poor man,’ said Morgan le Fey. ‘That is terrible.’
‘Would that that was the whole story,’ said the King. ‘There’s more?’
‘Indeed. A few years later I discovered that my wife had not run away at all,’ the King explained. ‘Our daughter, the angelic Floridian, had killed her.’
‘A five-year-old child?’ said Morgan le Fey.
‘Indeed. Somehow she got her mother to stand behind one of the circus elephants and then fed it a currant bun, knowing full well that elephants always sit down to eat buns. My wife was squashed flat. Floridian then bribed Boodguy the Clown with an enormous bag of jelly babies to push the body into the moat.’
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