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

– discussions of parental loss through possible suicide

– discussions of childhood parentification

– discussions of complex grieving

– discussion of traumatic injury

– mentions near-death experiences

– sounds of a character in emotional distress

– descriptions of erotic encounters and sexual acts

– mentions of drug and alcohol use, to excess

– heavy, detailed descriptions of blood and blood drinking

– detailed descriptions of injuries

Transcript

I’ve never kept a diary before. I never liked the idea. I’d try sometimes. I’ve got half a dozen notebooks where the first page says ‘dear diary’, but I’d make the one entry and never add anything else afterwards. I couldn’t stop myself from reading the words back, and there was something about seeing those moments laid out like that which… yeah. Well. Let’s just say I never wanted to write more, afterwards.

It was always wrote in a fit of emotions. Mum told me I wasn’t allowed something. Dad broke another promise. The vulnerability of it, I– I don’t know.

In the beginning this was a goodbye to whoever would find it. You, whoever you are.

Me? Neige, maybe? I don’t know.

I wanted===

ALFIE SIGHS

Part of the motivation for starting to make these was that I didn’t want my mum wondering like she had to after dad died. I didn’t want her to have to go through that again.

I’ve thought a lot about my dad, you know. About what he did. I’ve worked through the full spectrum of possible feelings about it, I think.

I just, I can’t see a reason he’d have been out on that road where he died if it wasn’t to step out into it. But he left no note! And we were all left to put the pieces together.

I’ve been thinking about my mum a lot. About what that did to her, when he died. And that time at least there was a body. At least there was a what, and a when, if not a why.

And what have I done, now? I’ve just… gone. Just like that!

EIRA: This is Not Quite Dead, Episode 19, Wannabe.

Neige and I have been trying to fix things around the house, a little. I say fix. Neither of us is particularly practical, but we’ve been cleaning things up. We’ve ordered beds, rugs. Neige has bought us a generator, for electricity. I asked him where he’d got the money and he just sort of scoffed. He said ‘I am older than money’, like that was an answer to the question. Which it isn’t, to be frank.

It’s nice to have a bed, but, I don’t know. It’s also weird?

The first few days here, Neige and I slept curled up on the floor of what I think used to be the dining room. I moved up here to this room, one of the old bedrooms, at the end of the first week. Partly because I just needed some space, and also because… yeah. Neige, he’s. Yeah. He’s Neige.

I’m not sure where Neige sleeps. Somewhere on the other side of the house, I think. He knows I want space, and I do. But it’s strange to be this far from him. I don’t get that same feeling I have about Casper. I don’t feel pulled taught when he’s not nearby. It’s more like a low level amount of awareness, like if you’re wearing shoes that are too tight? It doesn’t hurt, exactly, not at first, but you notice.

Every time you take a step you notice.

It’s worse when he’s out of the house, of course.

There are so many things to learn in this new life. So many things I didn’t even know to anticipate, but then, how could I have known, really? Casper left. He left. I know he didn’t mean to stay away, I know it’s not his fault, but– he left.

I feel the ropes that bind me to him so tightly, like ropes around my diaphragm.

He left.

If Neige hadn’t found me I’d be dead. Neige said I’m the first vampire Cas has ever tried to make without Antoinette forcing his hand, but he also said that I’m not the first human Cas has slept with, and that. Hmm. I don’t know. I just.

It’s not–

It’s not that I want to be special?

Actually, it is a bit. I do want to be special to him. That’s okay, right? It’s okay to want to be special to people we love like that.

ALFIE SIGHS

I am aware I’m being pathetic about it. I– I sort of want to pick Neige’s brain about it but it’s the kind of thing that makes him stiffen up. He’s real loquacious until I actually want him to talk. Sure, he’ll say stuff, but I get the impression he’s keeping things from me.

And like, honestly, it’s fair, isn’t it? He’s known me two months. Why would he spill his guts to me, you know?

Does feel a bit unbalanced because he’s listened to these stupid tapes. If you’re listening again, Neige, I swear to god. I bet you’re laughing in that way you do. That little laugh. Yeah. Anyway. Turn off the tape, these aren’t for you.

They’re for me, or, I don’t know.

Hopefully I’ll beat the odds and live longer than a year, and if I do I’m going to want this. I’m going to want to be able to look back on this and know why I made the choices that I did. Neige is right about one thing; if I didn’t become a vampire, I would have died. And I wouldn’t give up what happened between Casper and I for anything. Which is two things, isn’t it. Ugh. Who cares.

When dad died my mum was… for a while she was sad in a normal way you’d expect someone to be sad. I’d come home and she’d be lying in bed, sometimes with her shoes on, just lying there. I don’t think she ate or drank anything unless Grace or I brought it to her directly. Sometimes she’d cry but mostly she was just still and quiet.

I tried to give her as much space as I could. Grace was only eight, when dad died, Tammy was just less than a year old. I was in my late teens, so. Yeah. Without much family nearby it was my job to step up. Mum’s aunt, Helen, would come over from Hull, but she had her own kids in high school, you know. Dad’s parents lived in Kent, but they were so, so old that when they visited for the funeral it wasn’t really a help for us, it was. Yeah.

They died too, a couple years after dad, three months apart from each other. Everyone on that side of the family said it was from a broken heart. I didn’t like the way they said that. Sort of accusatory. Sometimes they’d look at mum like it was somehow her fault he’d walked out into oncoming traffic. Like?!

That was only because they didn’t see what she was like when they weren’t around. She’d started to thaw, then, by the end of the first year. It was mid-July, when he died. God, fucking. Thirteen and a bit years ago now. Jesus.

I’d been supposed to go to nursing school in Glasgow, but I deferred a year, after dad was hit.

Sometimes Tammy asks about him. When she was littler she used to play this game, where she’d get Grace and I to answer questions about him. God, I remember this one time, she was asking if he was any good at cooking.

ALFIE LAUGHS

I said ‘no way, he didn’t care about cooking at all’, and Grace was like ‘I dunno, he was pretty good at a roast!’

And I just felt this sinking feeling inside of me, right, just this awful feeling of guilt. But I also just couldn’t stop myself from laughing because he wasn’t any good at a roast, he just bought everything from the frozen section. It was all Betty Crocker stuff out the freezer.

Grace’s eyes went so wide. ‘You’re kidding?’ she said.

‘Nope.’

Then she said, ‘I’ve been missing dad’s roasts for years and you’re telling I could have had one if I’d just gone to Iceland, that’s what you’re saying?’

‘Pretty much.’ I said.

Grace sighed. ‘The audacity,’ she said.

I laughed so much I thought I was gonna pop a lung.

ALFIE SIGHS

Tammy asked what ‘audacity’ meant. I think I told her it was like being cheeky. She wanted to know if dad was cheeky, and like. No. He wasn’t, but he could be funny, if you understood his sense of humour. Not in a dark way or anything, it’s just pretty like. It’s divisive. I’ll tell you his favourite joke, right?

‘Red sky at night: shepherd’s delight. Blue sky at night: day.’

ALFIE LAUGHS

Oh man. Yeah, and ‘there are two types of people in the world; those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.’

I remember we told that one to Tammy and she said ‘what’s the other type?’, bless her. She was only six or seven, I think.

I have not been there for her the past few years. I… It’s complicated. She was a baby, when dad died, so he just straight up wasn’t there to parent her, and mum? She loved us but there was a good three, four years where she just did not like. Engage. I get it, I do. But that first year, after dad? It was like she was at the bottom of a lake, a lake that had frozen completely over.

She started to thaw out a bit, after the anniversary of his death. It didn’t get easier, him being gone, but. I don’t know. It was the second school year with out him, the second Christmas, you know? It wasn’t any better but it wasn’t brand new anymore. His absence started to feel normal, though it didn’t necessarily hurt any less.

I decided not to go to Glasgow, to stay local, in York. Trying to balance that degree against essentially raising my sisters was… it was tough. Mum, though she was thawing out, she. Yeah. She could only really cope with being a person. She couldn’t quite do the parenting thing, yet.

I’m not mad at her for that, you know? It’s not her fault. It was shit.

I just hope she doesn’t do that again now. I just.

ALFIE SIGHS

I hope Haley gave them the note. I don’t know if having a note off dad would’ve helped much but I don’t know. I feel like the not knowing was a part of it. It was for me. I wasn’t mad at him for killing himself, not really, but for not telling us? Not even saying goodbye?

Ugh. I mean. Maybe it really was an accident?

Fucking– no. It wasn’t we know it wasn’t, there was no reason for him to even be on that road. It’s. It’s fine. But this is what I mean, that ambiguity, that possibility, it kills you. It’s like this cut on the roof of your mouth you can’t stop prodding. It’s.

I’ve been so busy with work. I think, after what happened with Ben, I think that I just sort of. I worked more so that I didn’t have to think, I guess? It started before we broke up. I met him at uni, and things started going south pretty soon after we moved in together, and I just. I wanted to hide from it. So I worked.

I’d actually wanted to do paediatric nursing. Sure the kids scream but none of them ever called me a cunt, you know? But after a year or two I switched to emergency. Because… because I did. Because I didn’t want to think.

I saw less of Tammy and Grace because I started avoiding my mum. I was avoiding my mum because… fucking. She didn’t like Ben, it was so obvious she didn’t like him. He didn’t like her, either. He’d make a big noise about how she exploited me and stole my childhood by failing to cope with her own grief, all whilst expecting me to do all his laundry and cook all his meals after working a fourteen hour shift, because apparently he never learned the meaning of the word ‘irony’.

And now he’s dead. I washed his blood off my legs in the shower, I watched it swirl down the drain. He’s dead.

I liked his mum. She was nice. She didn’t deserve a son like that. She didn’t deserve to lose him that way. Fuck.

This is going to ruin my mum. It. Fuck. Grace is halfway through her degree, she’s gonna have to– she’s gonna get dragged back to York, to look after mum and Tammy because there just isn’t anyone else, and what am I doing? I’m sitting on the floor in this mouldy house, talking to myself. I’ve left them, I’ve abandoned them, this is so much worse than what happened with dad because I had so much more of a choice.

They don’t know that but like. I know. I fucking know, alright? It’s my decision. I’ve walked away from them and there’s an extent to which it’s about making them safer but also, also, it’s incredibly, incredibly unresolvable-y selfish of me. They are suffering and it’s my fault. My fault for not leaving it alone like Casper told me to, for carrying on with him, for kissing him, for fucking him, for everything that’s happened.

It is not all my fault but a lot of it is my fucking fault. I should have managed this better, if I had managed things better, I–

I don’t know. I wouldn’t have fallen in with fucking literal vampires and I could actually show up and be there for the other people I love.

And they are never going to know what really happened. They’ll never know I did this because I was trying to keep them safe from my stupid decisions. I think they’d be angry at me if they did know. Mum would be all like ‘that’s very self-righteous of you, Alfie’, and maybe she’s right, but at least she’d get it. She’d know this wasn’t something I did lightly, you know?

She’d know I was trying to save Casper.

Ugh.

Not that I’ve been able to do much of that, even. Neige is right, I know he’s right. I would be worse than useless if I tried to help Cas now, but it doesn’t make it feel any better to be sitting here doing nothing when go knows what is happening to him.

I keep thinking of the day we found Moira in the river. All her teeth knocked out. No fingers. Like the vampire Casper found in the coal shed in Romania. Disarmed.

Has someone done that to him, to my Casper? Pulled out his lovely, too-sharp teeth? Turned him into something writhing and hissing and too hungry to think?

There was so much he didn’t say. So much he never told me. He never even mentioned Neige existed, Neige, who knows him well enough and cares about him deeply enough that when he go word that Cas was in danger he came looking for him. Neige, who trusts Cas’ judgement so implicitly that his apparent decision to keep me alive is enough to make Neige want to help me, no questions asked?

You’d mention Neige, surely. Neige, and the fact you’d slept with other humans. He told me– he told me this was the first time he’d drunk enough of someone’s blood to make that bond between us. Did that mean he didn’t bite the others, or that he fucked them and then just. Ate them. Something Neige said, what was it? That Casper had ‘left me alive’?

He’s taken a bunch of humans to bed with him but I’m the only one he’s left alive.

He nearly didn’t.

He– he nearly killed me, in the car, and.

Those days afterwards, he was so strange and withdrawn whilst he cared for me. I was so weak, so exhausted, it never even… I was so frustrated that he was angry at himself for slipping up but. If that had happened before. If it was a pattern. If he was expecting me to die…

Fuck.

Neige is. He’s wrong.

Casper didn’t pick me. He never told me all about what it was like to be a vampire because he didn’t think I was going to make it. It wasn’t because he was ashamed he just– he just. He wasn’t expecting me to live. Like a fucking iPhone, he was going to move on and get another one, fuck. Fuck!

‘It’s been ages since I’ve killed anyone’, bullshit. BULLSHIT.

He didn’t tell me about Neige because Neige is fucking important.

And I’m not.

I—

But.

Maybe I’m getting carried away. Just because he kept stuff from me, it doesn’t mean he didn’t care about me. He had two hundred years of stuff, that’s a lot, and he did share some of it. He told me about Anoinette and Paolina, you don’t trust just anyone with that stuff, do you?

I just. I have such little gauge for what he was like outside of, you know. Us. Our relationship kind of ate me alive.

ALFIE CHUCKLES

Kinda literally, I guess. Ha.

He could be so gentle. He could be so small. He could be so– so Casper.

Maybe the reason he slept with humans is because he hated vampires so much. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell me about Neige. Maybe Neige is the one who’s lying to me by omission.

But like. Again. If we’re making concessions for having just lived so long it’d be unreasonable to expect anything close to a thorough rundown of what happened in your life, then. Neige definitely qualifies for some leeway.

I still don’t know how old he is. But he’s extremely fucking old, that much I can gather. Now I’m just like. Are we talking ‘remembers the Roman Empire’ old, you know?

ALFIE SIGHS

What must I seem like to him? This tiny, nothing person he’s been saddled with, and for what?

I’ve been going into the city with him, sometimes. Leeds, not York. Neige rightly thinks it would be stupid for me to go back to York so soon after leaving. It’s a city, but a small one. Too many people know me. I’d be recognised. And I’m missing. I wonder what he knows about that, if anything. I wonder if he cares. I guess human lives must seem small and unimportant when you’ve been alive as long as he has. But I don’t know.

The way he hunts is… yeah.

We go to clubs, anywhere dark, crowded, where people are off their faces. You can smell it, the level of intoxicated they are. Under the rich smell of blood, you can smell the booze, the coke, the molly. Find a mark, dance with them. I remember Casper kissing me in the car, making me forget. That powerful haziness that slipped over my brain. I have to think that Neige is doing something similar half the time. I can see something in the people’s eyes, a glaze that’s different to the drugs, like a moth drawn to an electric lightbulb.

It helps that he’s so beautiful, I think, like terrible cherub amidst the gyrating dancers. His eyes are steely blue grey, most of the time, but as he goes in to bite they swirl a deep, lustrous red, like half-dried blood. The colour moves, like sped up clouds across his irises, entrancing, hallucinatory. He takes people’s faces in his hands, sinks his teeth into their necks. I smell the sweet rush of endorphins as he drinks slow and deep.

Then he takes my hand, puts it on their hip, turns them to me. They look at me, their eyes half lidded, lips bitten, hearts racing, blood running in thick lines from the bites Neige has left on them, and I lean close. I can taste the cold whisper of Neige’s spit around the edge of the wound, like a cool breeze through a sauna, and then, then I can taste the blood. Rich, thick, sweet. I feel the sickening jolt of my heart bursting to life, matching the human’s at first, but then racing away, too fast, so fast it hurts, an exquisite sort of pain that opens up a whole area of pleasure inside of me I never knew I had the capacity for.

And then I feel Neige’s fingernails on my hips and with a gasp I let go.

He’s taught me how to lick and press the bites closed with soft presses of my lips, almost like kisses, painting me red. The humans waver a little, sometimes stumbling into someone close them. But they were already wasted. I could taste the alcohol and other drugs in their blood, a heady mix, like seasonings in a well-crafted dish.

It’s so hard to let them go.

The worst is when they leave, afterwards. When I take it a little too far and they’re too giddy to stand upright, and their kind friends apologise to us and help them out of the club to go home. My mind races away from me, as I walked them stumble through the doors. If I followed, I could take them easily. They’re already weakened. It would take so little effort to overpower them. I could drink and drink and drink.

This one guy, Neige handed him to me, and when I bit him, I felt him get hard in his jeans. He moaned in the most delightful way, and his blood was this delicious, nuanced blend of alcohol and nicotine and a rich, varied diet. He swayed his hips against mine, and as I fell deeper and deeper into that wide, dark pit of pleasure inside of myself, he gasped, and the flavour of him shifted. A rush of oxytocin and dopamine, like new flavours twisting into the dish. It made me shiver, it made me ache. No wonder Casper always bit me when I came, it was the most exquisite thing I’ve ever tasted, so divine it flicked some switch in me and I leaned in closer, my arms creeping up from his hips to his shoulder blades, locking fast in place.

I felt his knees give out. I didn’t care. Neige was digging his nails into my hips but I didn’t care. That sharp bite of pain only heightened what I was feeling.

Neige slid his hands up my sides and I swear to fuck no touch has ever felt like that to me before. I was fully clothed but I felt completely wrecked. I was still biting hard into this guy’s neck, holding him up between the swaying dancers. And then Neige bit me right where my neck meets my shoulder, hard, fast, brutal.

The bright white hot point of pain shuddered through my whole body like an electric shock. I gasped and the man tumbled to the ground.

The dancers around us didn’t really notice, except to glance down at him when his prone form interrupted their dancing. I could hear his heart thudding, smell his breath. I turned around and Neige was standing a few feet back from me. His mouth was red with my blood. He was breathing hard and heavy. He stared at me, the strobe catching in his dark red eyes as they swirled and shifted.

My heart was slowing in my chest again, the giddy intoxication of the man’s blood already beginning to recede in my mind. ‘Neige,’ I said, and I reached for him, but he stepped back. He shook his head once, firmly, and wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand. He reached down to the guy on the floor, the guy I’d almost killed, and pulled him upright.

You could tell I’d taken too much from him just from the colour of his lips. He was going to need medical attention. The bite on his neck was bleeding sluggishly. Neige licked it and pressed his palm over the injury. When he dropped his hand, the spot was smeared with blood again, but the injury had almost totally vanished. He’d used my blood to seal the wound.

My ears were ringing.

Neige told me to take the guy to the bouncer, so I did. The bouncer looked pretty furious, and then Neige stepped in, speaking fast, feigning drunkenness and also an inability to speak fluent English.

I stepped away. I couldn’t feel my legs. I sat down heavily on the kerbside. I kept thinking about my dad. I kept thinking about how easy it would have been to kill that man. I kept thinking about how easy it would be to just step out into the road.

Neige’s pale, blood-smeared hand reached into my line of vision, holding a lit cigarette.

‘I didn’t think they did anything for us,’ I said.

‘They don’t,’ said Neige, blowing a cloud into the sky. ‘But it might make you feel better.’

I took a look, slow drag. I could feel the smoke inside my lungs. That immediate relief of tension, a placebo ahead of the real chemical relief, washed over me. I’ll never feel the nicotine again but it was familiar. Comforting, almost.

‘Can’t get cancer anymore, either,’ said Neige.

‘Is that a fact?’ I asked him.

Neige sat down on the kerb with me. ‘You ask all the wrong questions,’ he said.

I told him to tell me what the right ones were. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Why do you think it is that vampires shy away from looking closer at the science of it all?’ he asked me. He looked up at the sky, blew a cloud of smoke up towards the stars.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him, and I don’t.

Neige patted me on the back. ‘You will understand,’ he told me quietly.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me off?’

‘For what?’ said Neige.

‘I nearly killed that man.’

‘I know,’ said Neige. ‘Why would that mean you would need telling off?’

I stared at Neige, my mouth falling open slightly. ‘We– we don’t want to just kill random guys in random clubs in Leeds, do we?!’

‘No, of course we don’t,’ he said. ‘Which is why we didn’t.’

I tried to point out how close I’d got, how very near to falling into that pit within myself I’d come, but Neige wouldn’t let me finish. ‘I told you I wouldn’t let you drown in it, and I didn’t.’

I opened my mouth, closed it again. Neige flicked the part of my muscle he’d bitten. It had already mostly healed, but it was still tender and bruised-feeling, and the flick sent a quiet quiver of pain through all of my bones.

‘I told you,’ said Neige. ‘Trust me or don’t. I’ll help regardless.’

The bite’s left a scar. Next to the ones Cas made in me. Neige says that as far as he knows, it’s only vampire teeth that can scar vampire skin like this, and I can’t tell you how, exactly but this scar feels different to the ones I got when I was human. Neige’s bite is more ragged, two crescent moons of almost iridescent skin, the place where his slightly-too-long canines went deeper than the others showing up as slightly raised circles like slices of pearl. His bottom teeth are crooked, one in the middle standing in front of all the others, making the half-moon of his lower jaw thicker in the middle than the top.

If he’d licked the wound it wouldn’t have scarred. I wonder if he left it on purpose. And if he did, what the purpose was.

Is it to remind me not to kill? Or that he’ll stop me before I fall into the pit?

ALFIE SIGHS

Anyway. I still don’t trust him.

[END]