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Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Footnote
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About the Author
Also by Eric Morecambe
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
Round the throat a little tightening.
Vernon’s back, caused by lightning.
The statue smashed open as the lightning hit it. The life-sized stone statue crashed to the ground and split open from head to toe. If you had been there you would have seen the statue leave the plinth it had been resting on for the past three years. You would also have seen a man crawl out of the broken statue and slowly, very slowly, make his way in a crab-like crawl to one of the park benches. He tried to sit on the bench. It took him seven minutes to bend his stiff body into a sitting position.
If you could have got close enough, even with all the pain he was suffering, you would have seen on his very pale face a tiny flicker of a smile playing about his evil, tight blue lips: he was already looking to the future. He creaked his sore and unused neck muscles and, in obvious agony, they lifted his heavy head to look at the moon through two black and vicious eyes. He worked out the time. It was 2.30 a.m. He thought how lucky he had been.
‘I would be dead now if that storm and the lightning had struck in the daytime. We Vampires can’t live in the daylight, not for very long.’
Vernon the Vampire was free again. He filled his underworked lungs with the cold night air in the village of Katchem-by-the-Throat in his beloved land of Gotcha, and looked at the smashed stones that had been his home for the past three miserable years.
He allowed his mind to go back to just before he was statued, thinking, ‘What a fool I was to allow myself to be turned into stone. After all, it was my invention, it was I who was going to turn the others into stone. But soon I will take my rightful place as the Vampire ruler of this country and rule over these stupid peasants as we Vampires have done for almost a thousand years.’
He allowed a small painful smile to invade the corners of his thin lifeless lips. He thought of all his old enemies and the smile widened, causing him more but worthwhile pain.
He thought of his parents, King Victor and Queen Valeeta, whom he now hated, laying some of the blame for his condition well and truly at their door. He thought of his brother Valentine, who was not really his brother, only a step-brother, having been found on the castle steps, and who was not a real Vampire either. He thought of Igon. Oh, how he hated Igon. ‘Igon and that stupid so-called brother of mine, they were the ones who put me into that statue for these last three years.’ His eyes narrowed as he thought. ‘All of them will get the dues they deserve. Each one shall suffer the pain I’ve suffered and then they shall suffer death.’
Vernon didn’t know of the changes in the land of Gotcha, he only remembered the past when the country was ruled by his mother and father. Vernon was still, in his own mind at least, Prince Vernon Vampire, and next in line to be King and ruler of Gotcha.
What Vernon didn’t know was that his brother was now the President of Gotcha. His mother and father, the ex-King and Queen, had retired to the country and, although they were still Vampires, lived a normal life. Admittedly they slept in the daytime and stayed awake all night, but they harmed no-one and were popular.
Igon, that was the one Vernon wanted to hurt the most. But Vernon only remembered Igon as he was before he was statued. In those days Igon was the most ugly, the most horrible tiny dwarf with a hump for a back and, as the name suggests, only one eye. He was horrible. But not now, not any more. After Vernon had accidentally turned himself into a statue, Victor and Valeeta abdicated. Victor gave the people of Gotcha a parting gift. Using up all of his Vampire magic, he turned Igon into the most handsome of men. No more the small, wizened, ugly dwarf, but the six foot, very handsome giant.
He also made him into a Prince, Special Prince Igon of Gotcha. But Vernon knew nothing of this. The only thing he knew was hate and how to enjoy it. He sat there on the park bench trying to think of anyone he liked; much to his pleasure, he couldn’t.
He rose very slowly from the bench and stayed halfway between sitting down and standing up because he thought he heard a loud creaking noise. He moved again and this time he was sure he heard it. It took several minutes before he realised that it was he who was creaking, having been in that statue for three years in the same position. It was to be expected. He creaked away from the smashed statue, rather like a centipede with rheumatism, and made his way to the caves he remembered before he was statued.
As he walked to the hills where the cave was he could feel his strength coming back. After a couple of long slow miles he was beginning to feel better, a lot fitter. He knew his strength was returning to his body, he could feel it. He looked down at himself. His evening dress wasn’t in too bad a condition, except that it was covered with three years of dust, but that only needed a brush.
Alas, his top hat was really badly bent; he couldn’t wear it even though there was no-one around to see him. To put a squashed top hat on his Vampirian head just wasn’t done. The best way to straighten it out would be to fill it with stones and broken bricks. The weight would take the creases out and after a good polish it would look as good as new. This he did.
Of course, he could have magicked it back into shape, but that would be a waste of good magic. At the moment he didn’t have the strength to magic anything. Anyway he wasn’t going to waste his Drac-given power on a top hat. He was going to save that power and use it on one or two of his old (who wouldn’t get much older) friends, the ones who deserved his special way of saying thanks.
After reaching the caves he found the deepest one he could. He knew that after a good day’s sleep he would be as fit as he had ever been. The thought kept running through his mind, ‘You can’t keep a bad Vampire down.’ After his sleep he would think about his plans. ‘Before the week is over,’ he thought, ‘Gotcha will be in a state of fear and panic.’
* * *
President Valentine rose early that morning, looked out of the window of the Presidential Palace and saw a most beautiful day. Summer was wonderful in Gotcha. He wondered if the freak storm in the night had done much damage. It had awakened him at about two thirty in the morning and he had had difficulty getting back to sleep. When he did, he had dreamed a terrible dream, a dream that took him back three years into the past. He had seen Igon as he used to be and the old King and Queen, but worst of all he had seen Vernon, who seemed to be smiling. He had smiled all through the dream – a smile frightening enough to frighten the strongest of men. When Valentine awoke he was covered in perspiration.
The sound of the daily paper being squeezed under the bedroom door brought him back to reality. Quickly he picked up the paper and scanned first the headlines and secondly the gossip column. The headlines screeched the words:
PREZ SEZ BIZZ BOOM AT CHRIS
which roughly translated means: ‘The President of Gotcha has given much thought to the unemployment situation and feels that, within the next few months, things are bound to improve and, in spite of what people are saying, business will boom before Christmas.’
President Valentine read the page quickly and was quite happy that neither he nor his wife had been misquoted. As he threw the paper on to the bed he made his way to the window, when suddenly he stopped. His eye had caught the words STOP PRESS tucked away in the corner.
He read: ‘Last night in a freak storm, lightning hit Vernon statue in park. No sign of Vernon … 2.30 a.m.’ Valentine read the words, ‘No sign of Vernon’ again and again. A sharp knock on the door broke his concentration.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘Your Secretary of War, General Motors.’
‘Come in, Motors,’ the President called out. The General entered the room. He was a man of average height and above average width. He tried to salute his President but he was so wide his hand couldn’t reach his forehead. It always stopped about nine inches away. He did once go on a diet and his hand actually got to within four inches of his forehead.
‘What can I do for you, General? I’m a very busy man at the moment.’
‘Sah, hi was wondering, Sah, hif you ’ad read the mornin’ pypers, Sah?’ he asked. Well, actually he shouted. He shouted everything as if he were still on the parade ground. His wife and children were not only nervous wrecks, but slightly deaf as well.
To give the General his due, he had worked his way up from the ranks of the Gotcharion Army to become their General. The Gotcharion Army consisted of six men, six including the General. At the moment there were two deserters, two on leave and one on manoeuvres.
‘Please, General, can you keep your voice down?’ the President asked.
‘Hov course, Sah,’ the General shouted back, the echo making the chandeliers tremble. Valentine shook his head.
‘What is it you wish to see me about, General?’
‘Well Sah, the late edition hov the mornin’ pypers said that the, er, statue hov Vernon had been blown darn, Sah,’ the wide General bellowed.
‘Yes, I had read that, General, thank you,’ the President waved his hand towards the door, hoping that the General just might take the hint.
But the General continued, ‘Blown darn, Sah, hand there ain’t no sign hov Vernon, Sah. Nah we bofe know that Vernon was put inside the statue, Sah.’ The last sentence was spoken in a whisper from the General that could be heard in the next village.
‘Please try to keep your voice down, General, I beg you.’
‘Hi ham keepin’ my voice darn, Sah,’ the big General’s soft voice once more shook the chandeliers.
‘Yes, well I think the best thing you can do, General, is send me a memo.’
He took the General’s fat arm and purposefully walked towards the door with him, while at the same time, to show there were no hard feelings, he put an arm around the General’s generous shoulder. It reached about halfway between the start of his shoulder and his spine.
‘I do appreciate the fact that you thought it necessary to come and see me but please do write to me, eh?’
‘Sah,’ screamed the General as he saluted his President. His President smiled. The smile faded as he saw a very expensive Ming vase break into little unrepairable pieces.
Once the General was outside the room, Valentine sat down on the edge of the bed. A hundred things went through his mind. He thought about Vernon; about how he had invented a fluid that, with the slightest touch, could turn people into stone; and how he had accidently let some of that terrible fluid drop on himself and he had been placed in the park as a statue. He realised that Vernon would be out to get his own back, not only on him, but on his mother and father and, in particular, Igon whom he hated. He knew that right now Vernon would be in hiding somewhere, planning how to kill them all, and anyone who stood in his way.
* * *
It was dark, very dark in the cave. Vernon opened one eye as he lay on a slab of stone. He knew he was as safe as the Bank of England, which, from the position he was lying in, was West by Nat. West. He allowed himself a grin. Why not? He had slept the reviving sleep of the undead and felt quite strong again.
He had also dreamed a pleasant dream, a dream filled with bare throats, exposed necks and bulging veins just waiting to be bitten. He was hungry now he had rested. The only thing he wanted to do was to satisfy the desire to plunge his teeth into someone.
His black eyes were getting more accustomed to the dark, dank cave. As he swung his feet to the ground he saw a small shape. Heady with the rest and the joy of being alive again, he kicked the small shape. It was his hat, filled with stones and bricks and rocks. When the hat was kicked it didn’t travel very far. Had the hat been empty it would still be travelling, he had kicked it so hard.
He looked down at his shoe. The pain was awful. For a moment he didn’t know whether he still had a toe on the end of his shoe, or even worse, if he still had a toe on the end of his foot. He jumped around the dark cave holding his foot in his hand, screaming vile oaths and swearing old Vampire swearwords like ‘Yacoub’ and ‘Slumpy’ and, the most evil swearword of all, (three words really) ‘Srettah uoyno emoc’. Those particular words were such naughty swearwords that even Vernon didn’t shout them out loud; he only said them through clenched teeth.
He whimpered and limped towards the entrance of the cave. The pain gradually faded away and after a few minutes he was starting to feel his normal unpopular self again as he stood at the entrance of the cave and cursed the world. He stood there and looked at one of Gotcha’s special and most beautiful sunsets. He shaded his eyes as the sun dropped silently behind the distant hills; within seconds it was cool and dark, black dark, Vampire dark. Like all Vampires, he hated sunsets. Sunsets with that great, big, cruel ball of fire hanging in the sky, making the clouds a bright blue and red and pink and green and white and purple … ‘Horrible,’ he thought.
He had once heard about a thing called a rainbow, but, thank Dracula, he had never seen one. Who in their right minds would want to look at lots of colours in the shape of a large bow, hanging in the sky – not doing anything, just hanging there. Now to see a falling star, that was something a bit special, because that meant in Vampire folklore that another Vampire had been born.
He left the cave and made his way to the dusty ribbon of road, carrying his bent top hat, while, with his hands, he brushed away three years of dust from his suit.
He shouted across the fields and trees, ‘Watcha Gotcha, I’m here to getcha!’ He smiled at the only joke he had ever made in his entire life – if it was a joke.
CHAPTER 2
Igon, Victor, Valeeta the Queen;
All very worried, Vernon’s been seen.
Vernon’s mother and father, Victor and Valeeta, the ex-King and Queen of Gotcha, opened the curtains the second the sun dropped behind the distant hills and looked out on to a beautiful moonlit night. Victor was always agitated at this time of evening, when he had only just got up. He hadn’t even made his coffin yet and making the coffin wasn’t a thing he looked forward to. As he refused to make his wife’s coffin, she refused to make his, and so they both had to make their own. But, to be fair, the old King did polish both their coffins twice a year. He quite enjoyed doing that; therapy, he called it.
He went to the front door and picked up the paper, The Nightly Express. It was lying face down on the mat so he read the back page first. Wilf the Werewolf, a big friend of Victor’s and now the manager of Gotcha’s football team, had picked the Gotcha team to play Gertcha. Gotcha v Gertcha was the match of the season. Victor walked slowly, reading the sports page as he went.
In all probability he would be able to see that game as it was being played at night. Wilf had thought of the idea of playing at night under what he called floodlights; it was a very clever idea and it was typical of Wilf to think of it. Victor thought, ‘I’ve got a lot of time for Wilf.’ It was really very simple: at the ground they had installed four huge candles (one at each corner), ten foot thick and sixty feet high, so that on still, clear nights you could see the game.
Of course one or two of the hooligan element tried to stop the game, if their team was losing, by climbing to the top of the candles and blowing them out. But, as they got closer to the flame, the hotter and greasier the candles became, so they soon slid down and were then carted off to the sin bin at the back of the ground. The punishment meted out was short and sharp: the afternoon before the next game they had to reclimb the candles, right to the top, and clean the wick. On the evening of the match they had to climb the candles once again to light them. So hooliganism was down to a minimum.
The only problem with night football was that the game had to be postponed if it was windy, because the wind blew the candles out. A windy summer could cause havoc with the league fixtures.
Victor was reading the sports page as he sat down at the table waiting for his evening breakfast, blood red jelly, a double strength tomato juice and three red black puddings. Valeeta looked at him and the headlines of the paper were facing her:
VERNON’S STATUE SMASHED,
VERNON THE VAMPIRE WAS
NOT ENCLOSED AS THOUGHT
She snatched the paper out of Victor’s hands, leaving him reading empty space. It was quite some seconds before he realised the paper was gone.
With a surprised look still on his face, he said, ‘Vot are you doink?’
Valeeta showed him the headlines. ‘Look,’ she said.
He read them quickly, then again slowly. He looked at his wife and asked, ‘Vot does it mean?’
She put the paper down on the table and said, ‘If it means what I think it means, then we are in for trouble, all of us.’ She picked up the paper and read the article out loud:
‘Last night your Nightly Express reporter was first on the scene. In our lovely well-kept park, last night’s storm in its fury lashed out and hurled down the statue of Vernon the Vampire. As it crashed to the ground it smashed open. Vernon the Vampire was not inside it …’
Victor and Valeeta looked at each other.
‘Of course he vos,’ said Victor.
Valeeta carried on reading:
‘If Vernon the Vampire was still alive when the statue was broken into fragments like a cheap mirror on the concrete surround then, in the opinion of the park’s spokesman, “He will be on the prowl and he will be out to get those who planned his downfall.” When asked if he thought that Vernon would be out to kill the President, the park’s spokesman, Mr Spadenfork, nodded his head in agreement saying, “Vernon is still alive ’cos when I’ve cleaned that statue I’m sure I’ve seen it breathe, seen it move as you might say.”’
Valeeta looked once more at her husband.
‘Ivor Spadenfork. He’s no spokesman, he’s a park attendant,’ Victor continued. ‘I’ve known him for years.’
Valeeta smiled, saying, ‘It must be over four years, dear.’
‘No, I’ve known him for years, not four years.’
‘Darling, how can you have known him four years and then over four years, you silly billy?’
They looked at each other, both thinking, ‘You’re mad.’
Victor forced a small smile and said, ‘Vot else does the paper say, mine orchid petal?’
Valeeta looked down at the paper and found where she had stopped, ahemmed, and carried on:
‘It is not the policy of this newspaper to spread fear or panic, but until the Vampire is caught, please keep your children indoors and no-one should venture out between sunset and sunrise. Please do not talk to strangers. The advice of this newspaper is:
If you think you’ve seen the Vampire Vernon, keep calm and, if he grabs you and starts to squeeze the life out of you, do not fight back, as this could annoy him. If you think he is going to plunge his teeth into your throat then, and only then, scream. If you have a sore throat and can’t scream, you must wave your arms about frantically until help arrives.
According to an inside source, the President, when asked if special precautions were being made available to protect the public, said, “That’s very possible.” Once again, I tell the readers of The Nightly Express: “Do not panic.”’
Valeeta put the paper down. Victor stared across at his wife. They saw fear in each other’s eyes. Valeeta thought that Victor would find it very difficult to compete magically with Vernon as he was so out of practice and also completely out of condition – so much so that he became out of breath falling asleep. They slowly and quietly finished their evening breakfast, each with his own thoughts. Victor had silently made up his mind to see his son Valentine, the President. After all, what were friends and relatives in high places for?
* * *
Vernon strolled about Katchem in secret. No-one saw him, he made sure of that. The village was almost deserted, hardly a soul was to be seen, except for the police, and even they were not walking alone as usual, but in sets of eight. Vernon was thrilled that he had caused so much confusion and fear. Considering the fact that Katchem only had eight policemen, Vernon found it relatively easy to avoid the whole of Katchem’s police force at once. He walked in and out of the shadows of the streets he knew so well, past Motherscares and Boots the Cobblers.
Fear was beginning to show itself, from the highest person in the land to the lowest.
* * *
In the oblong room at the presidential house Valentine sat with his wife Areta. His young son, Virgil, had been packed off to bed, with a nanny they could trust and a servant to sleep outside the young boy’s room. It was the first time Valentine and Areta had seen each other all day as he had been so busy trying to get things planned and organised with regard to Vernon while still running the whole country.
‘How did things go, my dear?’ she asked with concern in her voice.
‘Terrible,’ was the quick reply. ‘We hardly did anything and ended nowhere. Sometimes I think that the Council and the Senators are all so interested in themselves that they forget about the people who put them there.’ He paused and asked the time.
‘It’s almost nine o’clock.’ She held his hand.
‘Oh well, I expect Victor and Valeeta will be here soon,’ he sighed. ‘They will have read the news, and now night has come they will be able to travel, so I think they will be here fairly soon.’
‘Why don’t you lie down and get some rest before they get here?’ She smiled gently at her husband.
* * *
Victor and Valeeta were almost at the presidential palace and had turned in order to make a good landing as near to the front door as possible. Valeeta made a superb landing, right on the path itself, slowly letting herself to the ground and at the same time powdering her nose. She landed very gently, so gently that she continued walking along the path without one little trip or scuff of her shoes. It was the type of landing that other Vampires would have applauded, a professional’s touch.