Excalibur by Colin Thompson Page A

froth at the mouth and kills you, but you don’t really mind because you’ve already gone completely insane.
    The Vampires of Camelot 46 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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I didn’t know Merlin created cats,’ other people say.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Wow. You learn something new every day.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 month 47 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.
    â€˜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 Beam 48 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’tspeak to each other. Fenestra