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
