Magic Island Storytelling Theatre: Strange Tales From The Isle Of Arran: Ghost & fairy tales & more.

And so we come to the final episode of this dramatic tale inspired by the urban landscape and macabre folklore of my native southside of Glasgow, a story I've wanted to perform and record like this ever since I first performed it live in the theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival way back in 2015, a story I was intent on performing, then as now, in an unequivocal, unapologetic Glaswegian voice and language. I hope with this, and the preceding episodes, I have done my native city full dramatic justice, in my own macabre sort of a way.

Our young narrator has looked set to suffer the most terrible yet of all the many cruelties the Vampire has inflicted on him, having to stand by and watch as the Vampire sinks his iron teeth into the throat of his ailing mother on her sick bed. But maybe our protagonist has more fight in him than even he had thought, fight enough to challenge the Vampire at last - to take him on in a fight to the death. The Gorbals Vampire Must Be Destroyed!

Now that the Gorbals Vampire has told his story to our narrating protagonist, this strange pair perhaps better understand one another now. Yet the fact remains - our young hero is getting older and no longer able to serve so successfully as 'bait', drawing victims to the vampire's iron fangs, and the Vampire is getting helluva thirsty. But now the Vampire comes up with a whole new idea for getting hold of fresh blood. But this will lead our hero to another startling reunion....

So the time has come for The Gorbals Vampire himself to tell the story of how he came to be a vampire in the first place, a story which links his biography intimately with that of the city he haunts....

This being a horror story, the episode contains scenes and images some listeners might find disturbing....

So an innocent young Glasgow boy has been conscripted into serving as "bait" to lure victims to the clutches of The Gorbals Vampire. But as we learned in the last episode, time is catching up with the boy himself, making him much less useful in that regard. But as the relationship between the Vampire and our protagonist becomes ever more tense, a figure from an earlier chapter of our story is about to make a surprise reappearance, in an episode which makes no apology about some frank Glaswegian language and an eye for the harsher side of life in the big city....

So in the last episode, we saw how our very Glaswegian Nosferatu was able to use our innocent protagonist as "bait" in his quest for human blood. Now we see The Gorbals Vampire adopt this as regular practice. What can our narrator do but go along? But if he fell into the Vampire's clutches as an innocent boy, time itself has clutches of its own....