An Episode of Not Quite Dead.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this show is a work of horror fiction and frequently places characters in situations which jeopardise their psychological and physical health. This episode contains:

– profanity

– threats of violence, including implied threat of violence to a minor

– discussion of traumatic injury

– descriptions of blood

– descriptions of decaying bodies

– mention of deceased children (once, non-specific)

– sounds of a character in emotional distress

– scenes with sexual implications

– detailed descriptions of gruesome injuries

Transcript

As you drive out of York along the old Hull Road towards the A64, there’s this sci-fi themed petrol station. The roof is adorned with robots and aliens, and along the side, under the glowing sign declaring it open 24 hours, it says ‘Inner Space Service Station’. Until fairly recently, it had a banner hanging above the sign that said ‘the last stop in the universe’.

It’s themed that way because for miles and miles along the A64 you’ll encounter nothing but road, cars, and the vast, seemingly-endless reach of the Yorkshire Dales. It’s an almost beautiful landscape, rugged but for the hard dark tarmac line running through it. In places, the rolling hills are dotted with the white and black spectres of sheep. In others, small outcroppings of trees stand together, like they’re trying to shelter each other from the wind. For the most part, though, it’s thick, coarse grasses, tangled shrubs, and bright patches of heather.

I remember when I was younger, the dales terrified me. My mother’s aunt, her only living relative, lived over in Hull, and so we’d drive that way out of the city a lot once we’d moved here. I had terrible carsickness as a kid, which really added to the horror of the experience. I’d sit there a queasy delirium, staring at what seemed to me then a vast, endless, desolate landscape.

We drove out past the last stop in the universe at four in the morning on my birthday, out onto the motorway and into the rugged wilds beyond it. It’s been three weeks since then.

Eira This is Not Quite Dead, Episode Eighteen, Honeysuckle and Thorn

Neige is somewhere in the house, I think, but I’m not sure. He has this habit of lurking about very quietly so I don’t notice we’ve been in the room together until he speaks. He’s so properly a vampire.

ALFIE SIGHS

He’d be annoyed at me for saying that. He’d say, ‘Alfie, you’re a vampire too’. He’d point out there’s probably a way I should have know he was there before he spoke. He’d tell me it probably suggests some deficit or other in my capacity to be a vampire at all. As if I don’t know that already.

He is just such a vampire, though. And this place. It’s perfect for him.

You can’t see the house from the road. We came off the motorway like we were driving into one of the small towns you can access from it, but turned again. The road was only half there, made of dirt, mostly grown over. The car rocked violently over it, and it only got worse as we went. For a moment I was even grateful that I wasn’t human enough to feel carsick. It had started to rain, thick, heavy sheets sliding down the windshield, but Neige didn’t turn on the wipers.

Like I said we drove out of York this way at four in the morning on my birthday. He’d just– he made me bite him. I was still in that weird delirious stupor that sets in when I drink his blood, so I didn’t really register what was happening as he was shoving my limbs into clean clothes and shoving sunglasses on my face. He grabbed my drawers wholesale out of the chest and shoved them into the back of the car just like that.

He tapped my face like a cat, ‘come on, Alfie,’ he said. When I didn’t respond he slapped me harder, enough to make my ears ring. He pulled me up, took most of my weight across his shoulders, and took me outside to the car.

He strapped me into the passenger seat, made sure my sunglasses were still on, and slammed the door.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, my face pressed up against the glass. I saw the last stop in the universe, and then the rolling hills of the dales stretching on and away from us.

As we drove, I felt something tugging in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know how I knew, but a soon as I felt it, I understood that we were getting further away from Casper. I panicked, then, thrashing, straining against the seat belt. Neige spoke low and quickly, his gruff voice even and un-phased by my shouting and thrashing. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said, I was too stressed to really hear the words. But eventually it did make me calm enough to stop thrashing.

It was such an intense– it is so intense, still. It’s. I know we’re further from him now. I didn’t realise before, but I think. This knot in my stomach. I think it’s Casper, it’s tying me to him.

That has to be a good sign, right?

If I can feel this way, if it hurts so much to move further from him, that has to mean that he’s okay. It has to mean he’s alive. Casper said that he could feel what I felt, after he’d drunk enough of my blood. I think that’s what he…

Yeah that’s what he said.

After what felt like an age, Neige stopped the car. It was raining. Without the engine’s roar, the sound on the rain against the car’s metal body was huge and menacing.

The newly discovered knots inside of me ached. I felt as if I had been physically stretched. I was sweating through my clothes, but I didn’t feel cold. I haven’t since I turned. Casper said it’s only when it’s cold enough that you might freeze if you stay too still that you notice the cold, when you’re a vampire. Otherwise it’s nothing.

It will be strange, in the winter, to not see a cloud of mist in front of me when I breathe.

Strange, isn’t it, the things you take for granted?

I still breathe now, but it feel no relief from it. There are moments where that, in itself, is a kind of horror. Hyperventilating never really helps when you’re panicking, of course, but at least it felt like something was happening. Now the mechanism is even more useless than it was before. At least that horrible, plunging tightness in my chest doesn’t happen any more

After while of sitting in the dark and the rain, I realised Neige was watching me. He had been for some time. He reached out and took the sunglasses from my face. Away from the streetlamps, I no longer needed them.

‘Open the door,’ he said, and for some reason, I just did.

The rain blew into the car immediately. I could feel every drop of it on my skin, a bright point of cool contact. I could smell the cooling rubber of the car’s tyres, the still-hot metal parts of the its guts beneath the hood. I could smell the dirt where we had disturbed it, warmer, richer than were it was only stirred by the rain. I could hear the grasses of the dales swaying. I could hear small disturbances in the earth, worms writhing their way towards the surface.

Away from the city, the noise and the lights, the keenness I could feel everything with felt less frightening. The splotches of rain on my arm joined and ran across my skin, falling in fat droplets to the dirt. Though the knots inside of me ached and twisted, I felt a stillness in me I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. Not just since I turned but ever, in my whole life.

Neige spoke then, his voice a quiet purr I would not have been able to hear over the rain if I’d still been human. He said when he was young, the days were filled with pain and panic. He felt his senses pulling him in all directions. He woke up alone, naked and afraid. He doesn’t remember much of that time, but he has this quiet nausea whenever he tries to recall it, like a blanket over something else. He cannot pull the feeling back entirely anymore and he has no memory of whether he ever could, but he’s frightened that beneath it is a quiet certainty that he killed his entire family.

He doesn’t know if that’s true. He will never know, and he can no longer remember if this is a truth he once had an answer for, if he imagined this, or if it’s real. But sometimes when he sleeps, he sees faces which look almost like his own, streaked with blood, staring motionless from the ground.

He opened his door too and climbed out, leaving the door gaping. He took off his t-shirt and stood with hid face tilted up towards the sky. It pinned his hair back from his face, the water shifting the colour from honey gold to dirty brass. The water caught along the lines of his shoulder blades, and on thick twists of scars, like pale ropes pressed into his skin. There were dozens of them, criss crossed at uneven intersections.

‘I don’t remember how I got them,’ Neige said, quietly. ‘I don’t remember the pain.’

I said nothing. The rain continued to fall. Neige stood as still as if he’d been carved out of marble.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

We slammed the car doors shut and walked a little way further down the dirt road. I smelled the iron gate before we reached it, the rain stirring the rust and what few flecks of old paint remained. They were chained shut. I watched as Neige pressed his palm to the earth in several places near the pillars on either side of the gate. ‘Ah!’ he said, after a few moments. He drew his arm back and plunged it into the dirt fast and smooth. I could smell his wintery blood mixed with the wet, fresh soil when he pulled it free, a large key between his fingers.

He put the key in the lock, turned it, and nothing happened.

‘Excuse moi,’ he said, stooping slightly. The lines of his back and shoulders tensed as he took the chain in his hands and pulled the lock free, as though it were not made of thick metal. The chains clanked loudly to the ground.

Neige went back to the car and left me to wander through the gates by myself.

Inside the walls, which were seven foot tall, the ground was wilder than beyond them. There were clearly old flowerbeds, huge rose bushes almost twice my height spilled onto the barely visible gravel driveway. Nettles quivered in the rain, drops clinging like dew to their leaves’ fuzzy undersides.

The house, a small manor, was covered in ivy. I could smell that it was pulling away the limestone underneath.

Nobody had lived in the house for a long, long time.

Neige said he used to pay a family from the nearby village to come and look in on it, but he forgot to send payments for a few years, and by the time he remembered again, the family line had ended. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to spend much time in Britain anyway. He said, get this, he said it was never the same after the union. And he meant the fucking union of the United Kingdom. But yeah, anyway.

I don’t know much about architecture but I’d say the house is from the 17^th century or so, maybe? I’m not sure. From what I could gather, it was built for Neige as a gift, though why and from who, he didn’t say. There’s no running water or electricity, but it’s watertight, mostly.

Walking through it is like looking at the ruins of old splendour. You can see, in places, where it was once beautiful. There’s cornicing and detail work on some of the ceilings, intricate woodworkings on the walls. There are huge, old beds, mouldered. Strips of cloth turned the colour of dirt hang overhead.

It’s not ideal, Neige said, but it will do for a while.

I’ve been sleeping in one of the old bedrooms. It’s. Well, it’s gross, honestly.

I’ve been thinking about Casper a lot. Where he is. What he might be doing. The feeling of those knots inside of me hasn’t really faded, exactly. It’s like I’ve got used to it. I feel like, I don’t know. Like maybe if I followed them, they’d take me to him? But I don’t know how I’d go about sensing the direction other than just stumbling towards wherever made me hurt the least.

I wonder if Cas can still feel what I’m feeling. If he knows I’m hurting. If he knows I’m a vampire now. Maybe it– I don’t—

ALFIE SIGHS

Maybe he has the knots inside of him too. They’re tying us together across everything.

I don’t know.

When I was still human, Cas said he could feel what I was feeling, he couldn’t read my mind, but it was like… oh you know. I wonder if it’s to do with hormones? Like, somehow once he’d drunk enough of my blood, even when I was far away, he could somehow sense the fluctuations. The feelings. Hormone secretions. A rush of cortisol. He couldn’t tell apart real danger from a panic attack, oh man. I think that’s it!

I think that’s how it works.

You know, I think you could probably really easily test that mechanism without hurting the people too much. Just some adrenaline shots, cortisol shots and startle reflexes and–

What the hell is happening in my head right now?

That’s a– that’s not a nonsense connection, that tracks, I think that’s a good basis to design a study, I don’t feel like I’m thinking through mud!

ALFIE LAUGHS

What– what is–

Huh.

I think I– sometimes– I forgot what it felt like to be able to think straight. I’ve been.

Jesus fucking Christ I don’t think it’s properly hit me until right now, I have been so– I nearly died. I could have died. In some important ways, my fucking god, I did, I died, holy shit.

ALFIE LAUGHS HYSTERICALLY

Well. I guess I understand what Neige meant when he told me why he brought us here. I mean. Some of it was easy enough to grasp. I turned on my phone. I knew that was stupid. It meant we had to go. My mum would come looking for me, or Haley, or they’d send the police or something. And we can’t be there.

I didn’t realise until we were out of the flat how much the whole place reeked of sickness. When Neige took me to that club, everything was such an assault on me, I barely noticed. I just wanted to go home because it was quiet. But. The smell of someone slowly falling apart at the seams. The stench of my own death.

But he said until he knew I could bite, he couldn’t risk moving me. Maybe the change wasn’t completed, somehow. Anything too drastic, it might’ve killed me. Neige says he’s seen a slow change before. Someone who seems to have made it all the way through to the other side, and then, for whatever reason they just. Stop. Most of them just die, at that point. He’s seen a couple go mad with the drive though. An unresolvable blood lust. He said he wondered if they’d have become like the exécreble. That’s what he calls the half-made.

There are so many possible fail points with this change. Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe if we understood more about the exact mechanisms behind it, then–

KNOCK KNOCK

NEIGE
Mon petit?

ALFIE
Oh. Hi.

NEIGE
What are you doing in the cupboard? You are not hiding from me again?

ALFIE
No, I just–

DOOR CREAKS OPEN

ALFIE
I just wanted some time alone.

NEIGE
You could have just gone into one of the other rooms, you don’t need to hide in the furniture.

ALFIE
I know but!!

ALFIE SIGHS

ALFIE
At least I know you can’t be lurking in here. There’s no room.

NEIGE
If you would only listen to your instincts, mon petit, you would not have so much trouble knowing where I am!

ALFIE
I know, I just–

NEIGE
What is it? Come on. Say out loud.

ALFIE
I don’t know how.

NEIGE
You do not need to know it. You just have to feel it.

ALFIE
But I don’t know how!

NEIGE
Because you do not listen.

ALFIE
You haven’t explained!

NEIGE
Mon petit! To yourself, not to me! These are not skills you acquire, you understand? They are things your body will just do, same way that it used to regulate your breathing. You can fine tune this, if you wish, you can become very good at this thing, but your baseline abilities are there, innate, you do not need to learn them.

ALFIE
What if they’re not. What if I’m defunct, somehow? You said I’m defective!

NEIGE
When!?

ALFIE
You say it all the time! My ‘malfunctioning appetite’! All that shit. All the time, Neige.

NEIGE
Do not blame me for the failures of a language!

ALFIE
There are other ways you could have phrased it!

NEIGE
Like what?

ALFIE
Like– I don’t know! Literally anything that wasn’t just you telling me I’m broken.

NEIGE
Ah, always you have this habit of making what I say to be much worse than it is in your head!

ALFIE
It’s fine. I get it.

NEIGE
You do not! I have been telling you the exact opposite of what you have been hearing! You are not broken, mon petit!

ALFIE
Stop. Calling me. Fucking. ‘Mon petit’! I am not yours, I am not little. I am not a child.

NEIGE HALF-GROWLS, HALF SIGHS

NEIGE
You are extraordinarily frustrating. I only want to help.

ALFIE.
Sure.

NEIGE
What is that supposed to mean?

ALFIE
Nothing.

NEIGE
Non. Out with it. Explain yourself.

ALFIE
I just– it’s hard to believe.

NEIGE
What is?

ALFIE
That wanting to help me is the only reason you’re doing this.

NEIGE
Pardon moi, mon petit, but what is it exactly that you think this is?

ALFIE
I—I–

NEIGE
(mocking Alfie)
I—I– oh wah, wah. You sound more like Casper everyday. I have no patience for it. I will tolerate your incessant ramblings but I will not let you wallow in self-pity this way. It is unbecoming.

ALFIE
Self-pity!?

NEIGE
How else would you describe it?

ALFIE
Reasonable trouble adjusting!

NEIGE
You were not adjusting to anything when you started your little recordings, mon petit.

ALFIE
You didn’t have to listen to them. Nobody forced you. In fact I wish you hadn’t.

NEIGE
Why? So you could act like you did not know this was coming? That you were going into this blind, like most people? Have you spared a thought for a moment on how much of an advantage you have coming into this life knowing it exists? The first time most of us realise vampires are real are the night we wake up as one. You knew for months, almost years. There is much to be thankful for.

ALFIE
So, what?! I should shut up and stop complaining?

NEIGE
No, of course not! But you are at risk of falling into a bucket of your own bullshit because all you do is sit and stare at it.

ALFIE
I haven’t– I don’t!

NEIGE
Aren’t you speaking into your little machine right now?

ALFIE
Oh shut up!

NEIGE
Why? Don’t you like it when I point out obvious truths?

ALFIE
What obvious truths are you supposedly pointing out to me, huh?

NEIGE
You need to stop marinating in your own sorrows, mon râleur. You are a vampire now. Nothing you do is going to change that. You are stuck like this.

ALFIE
I KNOW!

ALFIE BREATHES HEAVILY

ALFIE
I know.

ALFIE CRIES

NEIGE
Oh, mon coeur. It is all so horrible as that?

ALFIE
I wish…

NEIGE
What is it you wish?

ALFIE
I don’t know.

NEIGE
You would be dead, if you had not turned. There was no saving you with this. And I know you would not give up all that happened between you and Casper, whatever pain it causes you now.

ALFIE
No. I wouldn’t.

NEIGE
We cannot change the past, mon petit. But we can change the future. And in your future, you are a vampire. I worry you have not realised this.

ALFIE
I– I have. I know.

NEIGE
Intellectually you know this but in your heart I worry you think of this as something that will go away. It won’t. Things will change, your relationship to yourself, to your vampirism, it will change, but it will be as long as you are. You and it are not separated.

ALFIE
Yeah.

NEIGE
You say this word but I hear a thousand others hiding behind it. It’s very frustrating. You’re acting as though you do not trust me at all.

ALFIE
Because I DON’T trust you!

NEIGE
Why not? Is it because I am French? That is very unfair, you know. They hadn’t even invented France when I was born, it’s not my fault if—

ALFIE
No! It’s because I don’t know you!

NEIGE
Have I not been helping you? Did I not save your life!?

ALFIE
Yes, but! You won’t tell me what you’re really doing here, how you know Casper, why we haven’t gone to find him yet. I want to help.

NEIGE
I need to be exactly sure what I am dealing with before I try to break into that place.

ALFIE

You– you know where Casper is. And you haven’t told me.

NEIGE

Of course I have not! You would go to him immediately, and I know you’re not ready do that for the simple reason that if you were ready, you would not need me to tell you where sweet Casper has been taken.

ALFIE

Why wouldn’t you need to tell me?

NEIGE

You’re still not listening to your body. It is meant to serve you, it’s an instrument, you only need to learn how to play and it will make beautiful music whenever you need it to.

ALFIE

Yeah, your metaphors are really nice but I still don’t understand.

NEIGE

There are some things only time and experience can teach you, mon petit. The problem is not really that you have no trust in me; it’s that you have no trust in yourself.

ALFIE
How the hell am I supposed to trust myself?! I’m useless at this. I’m awful at it. You tell me all the time. I’m defective.

NEIGE
Every defect stems from you denying what you are! You ignore your instincts in favour of what? Mumbling into a little machine? Why!?

ALFIE
Because it’s terrifying! It is terrifying. You say I’m not separate from the vampire part of me but– but I feel it. I feel separate. I feel like there’s some kind of animal inside of me I’m barely holding back. You say I need to embrace what I am, but I don’t want to be that animal I feel.

NEIGE
You are an animal. You have always been an animal, even before you were a vampire. You never ripped out anyone’s throat by accident before, did you?

ALFIE
No, but–

NEIGE
You are awake, aren’t you? Awake and alive, with all your senses. You’re hungry, ravenous, yes, because your body is young, still healing from the violence visited upon you in the change. Every cell in every muscle, remade. It is tiring, thirsty work, mon râleur. You could drink half the city and still have my sympathy, because I understand how it is to hurt so much, to thirst so deeply you think it will claim your whole soul. But I promise you, it will not swallow you. You’re not going to drown in this. I know this.

ALFIE
How?

NEIGE
I will not let you.

ALFIE
How can I trust you?

NEIGE
You do not have to, mon râleur. I will help anyway.

ALFIE
I just. I’m so bad at it. I am so bad at it!

NEIGE
Ah, non! You are not! You are not dead, do you know what an achievement that is, in itself?

ALFIE
Pretty low bar.

NEIGE
And yet so many people do not pass it. So many people are six feet under it. Listen to me. It is different for everyone. This is just how it looks for you. Do you hear? You are not doing this badly. Many people have become vampires before but this is the first time it has been you, mon petit. You understand?

ALFIE
But you yell at me all the time!

NEIGE
Yes! Because I have to! You would be dead if I had not yelled! But I let you feed from me, non?

ALFIE
I guess.

NEIGE
No need to guess, it is fact, no guess required. Anyway, I came to tell you that I am going to the city.

ALFIE
You’re leaving?

NEIGE
Oui. You have not fed for an whole day, mon râleur, you must want for it?

ALFIE
Well. Now you’ve brought it up…

NEIGE
Do not worry. I will be back soon. Unless you’d like to come with me, this time?

ALFIE
N—no. No thank you. I’m sorry.

NEIGE
You understand this loop between us cannot last forever, though, yes? This solution, it is temporary. Already I am weaker for it. I will not allow myself to wither for your sake, mon râleur, precious though your life may be.

ALFIE
No, I get it.

NEIGE
Bien.

DOOR SLAMS SHUT

ALFIE TAKES A DEEP BREATH

ALFIE

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

SOUNDS OF MOVEMENT

ALFIE

Neige, wait, I’ll come with you.

[END]