Wandering along the beach I mused to myself,
‘What a funny place is this island in The
Canaries called Feurteventura, with its volcanic
rock and crashing surf, not to mention my eccentric host,
Señorita Marmaduke, who puts garlic outside her door.’

‘Maybe she thinks we’re in that country where a
bloodsucking count preyed on young maidens.’
Of course, I was thinking of Transylvania,
where that dead aristocrat’s nocturnal
wanderings nearly sparked a peasants’ revolt,
after he was unable to sleep due to woodworm in his coffin.

I soon discovered that King Vladimannanex had acted swiftly
and expelled the count to this remote Spanish possession.

However, word spread of the ‘undead’ being’s imminent arrival,
thanks to author Bram Stoker, who warned the residents to evacuate.

You see, he’d learned of the existence of this fang-laden prowler
from a Transylvanian lady of the night – her cry of,
‘I didn’t bargain for those size 10 molars, mate!’,
alerting the constabulary, and she escaped with her neck intact.

Thus young Bram was inspired to create the legend of Count Dracula.
I laughed after reading about this, before noticing a document
describing a sudden exodus from the island in 1882,
and a geological survey which showed an absence of volcanic activity.
‘So,’ I mused, ‘what prompted their sudden departure?’

Then, arriving in the village of El Cotillo, I asked if there
had been a tradition of undead visitors in the 19th century,
but a bemused mayor denied this.

This was despite graffiti found in a cave on the beach, saying, ‘Dracs woz here.’

‘No,’ the dignitary said, worried my talk could scare off tourism,
‘that’s a rumour stemming from a marine biologist,
who was obsessed with Gothic horror films,
especially one featuring Boris Karloff living in a volcano. 

‘The prof came here on holiday, but left because our beaches tend
to be ‘el nudo’, and his wife, a lay preacher, was hit by a bout of prudism.

‘He even claimd in our newspaper, The Canary Islands Clarion,
that our Monk Seals, a close relative to the Californian short-toothed walrus,
had been found with neck bites. 

‘He then went on to expound the theory they’d been the victim of a vampire,
claiming that a visiting blood-sucking count had, due to a shortage of humans,
contented himself with what he called ‘seal snacks’.

Then on the headland I noticed the skeleton of a whale,
with the inscription, ‘It is believed this magnificent
creature died from a wound to the neck – experts are still puzzled
as to the bloodless condition of the corpse.’

That evening I hailed the proprietor, Señorita Marmaduke,
who, her breast adorned with a crucifix, was cooking a blood-filled stake,
and, with a knowing look, quickly acceded to my request for a clove of garlic.