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

– depictions of depression

– discussion of traumatic injury

– discussions of death, including murder

medicalised descriptions of medical torture (descriptions of unethical medical experiments on unwilling participants from the perspective of a clinician)

– discussions of violence

Transcript

NEIGE
Alfie? Mon amie? Are you awake?

ALFIE
(quietly, like he’s dead inside)
Yes.

NEIGE
Okie. Good. I was wondering. I brought you your little, uh. Machine.

ALFIE
My laptop.

NEIGE
Oui. I thought maybe you would like to record something.

ALFIE
No.

NEIGE
It has been a week, mon amie.

ALFIE
So?

NEIGE
You can’t just lie here, Alfie. You need to get out of the house, you need to-

ALFIE
No.

NEIGE SIGHS

NEIGE
You did not mean to kill him.

ALFIE
So?

NEIGE
He was attacking you.

ALFIE
Doesn’t matter.

NEIGE
D’accord. You are a mindless predator. It cannot be helped. You are irredeemable and therefore deserve a slow and painful death such as you would not dream of inflicting upon anyone.

ALFIE
Has anyone ever told you you’re extremely annoying?

NEIGE
Would you believe me if I said no?

ALFIE
Go away, Neige.

NEIGE
I am not ready to give up on you.

ALFIE
Why not? I can’t control myself. You’re right. I’m an animal.

NEIGE
We’re all animals, Alfie. You, me, everything that is alive. Animals.

SHEETS RUSTLE

ALFIE
What’s the point.

NEIGE
Oh la la, the meaning of life, really? That is what you want to discuss? Sacre bleu, quoique if it means you will spend more than two minutes with your eyes open?

ALFIE
They’re open now, aren’t they?

NEIGE
My my, mon râleur, you have to be careful, you are almost giving the impression that you have a will to live.

SHEETS RUSTLE

ALFIE
Fuck off.

NEIGE
But you are being such delightful company.

ALFIE
Neige?

NEIGE
Quoi.

ALFIE
Foutre le camp.

NEIGE CHUCKLES

NEIGE
Tres bien. It seems you have been paying attention; perhaps I will have to stop swearing in front of the baby.

ALFIE
Would you just leave me alone, please.

NEIGE
Very well. But. I have found this letter.

(pause)

It was in the pocket of the man whose neck I broke. It is in English. I can read it fine, of course, I am fluent in many languages, but I worry there is nuance I am lacking because of the medical jargon.

ALFIE
I’m sure you got the gist.

NEIGE
Eh? What is that supposed to mean?

SHEETS MOVE

ALFIE
Ugh. Never mind.

PAPER IS SNATCHED.

ALFIE
Right. Let me– Neige. Do you know what this is?

NEIGE
Paperwork of some description, oui?

ALFIE
No, it–

PAPERS SHUFFLE

ALFIE
These–

PAPERS SHUFFLE MORE QUICKLY

ALFIE
Subject 71, male, aged approximately thirty seven. Blood type AB positive, blood alcohol at point four, ooh, he was swimming. Minor head injury, lacerations. Treated with 90cc VB intravenously in saline suspension over two hours… VB.

PAPERS SHUFFLE

ALFIE
73, she’s twenty six, type O neg, point one five, trauma consistent with moderate automobile accident, no consciousness, dilating pupils, treated with 120cc VB via injection to femoral artery, consciousness regained within twenty minutes. VB. It’s vampire blood! Neige, do you know what this means?

NEIGE
Do enlighten me.

ALFIE
I— fuck. You did this on purpose.

NEIGE
What?

ALFIE
Were these even on the fucking guy or did you write them yourself?

NEIGE
Why would I do that?

ALFIE
Because you knew it would— never mind. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Please go away.

NEIGE
Would you look at Subject 105, please?

ALFIE
No.

NEIGE
Alfie. It is important.

ALFIE
You told me not to think about the science behind it, so I’m not.

NEIGE
You are just burying your head in the sand. Like a flamingo.

ALFIE
Ostrich.

NEIGE
Vous bénisse.

ALFIE
Sure. Will you let me sleep?

NEIGE
You are not sleeping. You have not slept for days. I can tell by your breathing.

ALFIE
That’s… so fucking creepy. Do you know that?

NEIGE

I cannot help but notice what I notice.

ALFIE

Don’t have to say it out loud, though.

NEIGE

You don’t have to breathe!

ALFIE
Maybe I won’t.

NEIGE
Alfie.

ALFIE
Just. Go away, please?

NEIGE
Read the case notes for Subject 105 and I will go.

ALFIE
Ugh. Fine, fine.

PAPERS ARE SNATCHED UP AND LEAFED THROUGH AGGRESSIVELY.

ALFIE
Subject 105. Male, age unknown. Deceased, type 2. What?

NEIGE
Keep reading.

ALFIE
Right. Weight, 194 pounds, height, five eleven. Eyes responsive to dilation test. Biopsies taken at admission of skin, lung and– and brain tissue. All show cell death and preservation of typical S. Sibericus. I have never heard of that, but. Death and preservation. This is a vampire, isn’t it?

NEIGE
Keep. Reading.

ALFIE SIGHS

ALFIE
Okay, so. Day one. Subject 105 disarmed; removal of teeth and fingers, metal plates affixed on jaw to prevent regrowth. Jaw wired shut. Subject continued to resist and showed signs of distress typical to other s. sibericus victims displaying symptoms of deceased type 2. Put through typical s. sibericus victim stress test. Administered 15,000mg morphine – fuck me, that’d kill a horse. No effect.

Submersion in water for 120 minutes, no effect, perforation of– of brain chamber. Limited effect. Subject showed sign of brain injury. Removal of – fucking. Hell. Removal of frontal lobe, produced effect of severe brain injury as consistent with that in humans, yeah, fucking hell, no shit, I bet it did, you took half his fucking brain!

Remaining brain pan removed. Injection of 100cc human blood, type O negative, at the site triggered localised regrowth of brain tissue and some bone regrowth. Subject began showing signs of extreme distress, breaking bones in restraints, causing typical type 2 distress escalation. Frontal lobe re-excised, permanent restraints applied. Patient given 12cc VB through central venous catheter, causing minor distress deescalation. Day two, subject in late stage distress escalation. On assessment subject determined suitable for haemapheresis programme and moved to Ward 6 to commence.

Do you. Understand. Do you understand what they did to him? He was a person. He was… a person.

NEIGE
Keep going.

ALFIE
Neige. I—

NEIGE
You need to see. Keep reading.

ALFIE TAKES A STEADYING BREATH

ALFIE
Day Three. Subject shows promising response to haemapheresis stage one, becoming non-responsive to stimulae following exsanguination and salination, but persistent pupil dilation on examination. Day Four. haemapheresis Stage Two: Removal of cardiac muscle to be replaced with external pump for stage two successful.

Day Five. haemapheresis Stage Three failed. Subject displayed symptoms of seizure which persisted following excision of brain matter. Tissue unresponsive to localised VB and O neg stimulation. Following final excision, pupils no longer dilating, remaining brain tissue unresponsive to localised VB injection. Brain stem manually severed. Subject sent for full disassembly and organ study.

Jesus fucking christ. He was person. He could think and feel. Whether or not he’s human, it doesn’t matter, Neige, he was a person. Maybe he’s not alive in a way they understood it but was fucking living, you piece of shit. How. Could anyone. How could ANYONE. Do this?

NEIGE
You think that you are the monster? Look at this and tell me that is so.

ALFIE
Oh, Neige, don’t–

NEIGE
Don’t point out the obvious?

ALFIE
Just because he was involved in this fucking a– atrocity doesn’t mean it was okay that I killed him. This vampire might have killed a hundred people, it doesn’t matter! Nobody deserves that kind of– that fucking torture. And the way it’s written! The language of it! So clinical, so cold. As if they’re treating him. Coopting the language of care to describe an absolute fucking abomination.

NEIGE
You are not a monster, Alfie.

ALFIE
No, and nor are they! That makes it so much worse, do you get that? If they were fucking. Senseless, mindless, animal. If they were acting on instinct—

Firstly, there is no instinct that compels anyone into coolly and calmly cutting off the back of someone’s skull and slicing out part of their brain whilst they’re not only alive but fully conscious under your hands, alive, conscious, unwilling. No animal instinct drives anyone to that.

NEIGE
Then what are they?

ALFIE
Fucking evil, that’s what they are.

NEIGE
They are frightened of us. This is their response. They want to find a way to solve it. To rid the world of us. We resist their understanding, we complicate their views of life, of the limits of humanity. They are inflexible in their definitions so their only solution becomes one in which we are gone. We are a problem and an aberration to them.

ALFIE
Why did you make me read this? I don’t understand!

NEIGE
You are not one of them anymore! You cannot pretend to be! Sometimes you must perform as though you are the same as they are but you are not. You are different and you always will be. They will never forget it and it is dangerous for you to do so.

ALFIE
You wanted to make me scared?

NEIGE
Non. I wanted to make you understand.

ALFIE
Understand what?!

NEIGE
In the myths and the stories, we are creatures of the night that linger on the fringes of society and it is not because we are more vulnerable to UV rays or because we can hunt better in the dark, it is because of this. Because as long as there have been vampires there have been people so afraid of us that they want to take us to pieces. So afraid that their fear begins to look like envy. A fear that transforms us from what we are – thinking, feeling, living things just as they are – and into monsters who feel no pain.

They torture us because they long for this imagined victory over human faculties. They fear us because they believe we have what they crave to have and would use it against them, but the truth is that we are not mythical, godlike beasts, but creatures of the earth. Don’t believe them when they tell you that you are a monster or a god or both! You are none of these things. You are an animal. Just as they are an animal. It just so happens that you have become a different one than you were before.

ALFIE
Neige, I–

NEIGE
Stop. Stop it. I am trying to help.

ALFIE
How the fuck is this helping?! I’m fucking– I’m terrified. I don’t know who I– what I– I’m so lost and afraid, and I can’t figure out how to be— this. I could barely figure myself out before and now there’s – now I. There are new rules, I don’t know any of them. I’m frightened. I’m hungry. I feel so alone.

NEIGE
You’re not alone.

ALFIE
Aren’t I?

NEIGE
I’m here with you.

ALFIE
Physically, yeah, but. You– You’re like a million years old. You– you don’t see yourself. You don’t hear yourself.

NEIGE
I’m trying my best.

ALFIE
Well, I’m sorry, but it’s shit! Like. How the fuck is this supposed to help me? How the hell is reading this and you saying all that stuff about how afraid of us the humans are supposed to help?!

NEIGE
You’re speaking now, aren’t you? Sitting up in bed?

ALFIE
Fuck off.

NEIGE
You called them humans. You called you and I ‘us’.

ALFIE
Fuck you.

NEIGE
I want to beam the experiences I have into your head. I want to tell you how okay it is going to be. But you don’t believe me, you can’t believe me. I understand. I’ve forgotten what it is to be new but I have always felt out of my depth every moment, and this is a guess, for as you know, I have no memory of my human life, but… I am guessing that humans feel this way too. We are all just making it up as we go. It doesn’t get easier, you just get used to it, but you do get used to it. D’accord?

ALFIE
I’m so tired.

NEIGE
Oh, mon coeur.

ALFIE
I feel like I’ve forgotten how to sleep. I feel like my bones are made of lead. Every time I close my eyes… all I think about is blood. And there are these– these knots inside of me, Neige. And. Fuck. Fuck! Casper. If these people have him. What have they– they’re– Neige.

NEIGE
I know.

ALFIE
We have to do something. We have to go, to find him, to get him. We have to go right now.

NEIGE
No.

ALFIE
Why?

NEIGE
They will saw open our skulls and cut out our brains piece by piece until there is nothing of us left. I have lived ten thousand years. I do not want to die, and certainly not like that.

ALFIE
You don’t want to die?

A PAUSE

NEIGE
Do you ever listen back to your recordings?

ALFIE
Um. Not really. Why?

NEIGE LAUGHS TO HIMSELF

NEIGE
Zut alors. Okay. Well. I suppose that explains some things.

ALFIE
It explains what?

NEIGE
Nothing. Never mind.

ALFIE
Neige–

NEIGE
We will find Casper. But if we go now we will be fucking tortured, do you understand me?

ALFIE
Yes.

NEIGE
Bien. Very good.

ALFIE
Neige, I…

NEIGE
What?

ALFIE
I don’t know.

NEIGE
Okie.

ALFIE
We should talk about. You know.

NEIGE
Your reckless behaviour?

ALFIE
Yeah. That.

NEIGE
You should not have given me so much of your blood. We are both hurting for it. I was so hurt I had to drain that dead– If I were less experienced–

ALFIE
But you’re not. And I wasn’t talking about that.

NEIGE
Then what are you talking about?

ALFIE
Neige. Don’t be dense.

NEIGE
Denser than what?

ALFIE
Neige.

NEIGE
I cannot be denser than myself, mon râleur. That makes no sense.

ALFIE
You don’t want to talk about it do you.

NEIGE
There is nothing to say.

ALFIE
Sorry.

NEIGE
Non. Nothing. It is done.

ALFIE
Okay.

NEIGE
Will you sleep, if I leave you?

ALFIE
No.

NEIGE
Will you sleep if I stay?

ALFIE
Maybe.

NEIGE
I will stay.

ALFIE
Thank you.

NEIGE
It it nothing.

ALFIE
It isn’t. Thanks.

NEIGE
Oui, mon râleur. Whatever you say.

PAPERS SHUFFLE

ALFIE
Subject 105. How many people do you think they’ve taken?

NEIGE
I don’t know. Of the notes he had on his person, three were vampires, eight were not. Why these eleven files specifically, I do not know.

ALFIE
Maybe they were his rounds?

NEIGE
Rounds? Les manches? What is this?

ALFIE
You know, a bunch of patients any particular doctor is responsible for.

PAPERS MOVE

ALFIE
Yeah, see? Dr Vimes under Dr Bonham, Dr Vimes under Dr Bonham, Dr Vimes under Dr Bonham. Hmm. I wonder.

TYPING SOUNDS

ALFIE
Nothing on Dr Vimes is coming up. Lets see about Dr Bonham. Ha. Looks like he’s actually former Dr Bonham. He had his licensed revoked in 1997 for injecting patients with his own blood.

NEIGE
1997. This was not that long ago?

ALFIE
Depends on your perspective. To you, no. To me, I was seven. A little kid.

NEIGE
I see. Did it work?

ALFIE
What, the blood? No. Course it didn’t work.

NEIGE
You know this already?

ALFIE
I mean, logically, it’s not going to work, is it? You can’t just…

NEIGE
Quoi? Inject a patient with blood and think it will cure them?

ALFIE
Fuck.

MORE TYPING SOUNDS

ALFIE
Right, listen to this, ‘his patients remain grateful to him. ‘I don’t care what the court says, Dr Bonham saved my life,’ says Evangeline Pryce, 27. Evangeline was just eleven years old when Dr Bonham treated her with his so-called ‘haemoprosthesis’. She had recently been diagnosed with APL, a rare form of leukaemia which is resistant to many of the usual therapies offered to cancer patients. ‘It seemed pretty certain I was going to die. By the time I was nine, I’d been sick for eight years and I’d exhausted every treatment route.

‘Years of chemotherapy had irreversibly damaged my liver. My doctors warned that were my cancer to relapse, there would be no further treatment options for me. Even if it didn’t, it was likely my liver disease would progress to liver failure and I would not be considered an eligible candidate for transplant, even from a volunteer donor.’

‘Evangeline’s cancer would come back just two days before her eleventh birthday, making its presence known with a catastrophic nosebleed that almost caused her to haemorrhage to death. ‘My mum and dad found Dr Bonham through a friend of theirs whose sister had apparently received treatment from him which had cured her brain cancer. They wrote to him—’ they just explain how they got in touch with him which isn’t that interesting and then they talk about how sad it is she had cancer. She goes into treatment, and she’s cured.

Cured.

‘It wasn’t painful, though I do remember I became very unwell every few days during the treatment.’ And then, get this, the parents both disappear. Gone.

And when they struck Dr Bonham’s license? Guess when it was given to him.

NEIGE
I could not possibly.

ALFIE
1922.

NEIGE
And that is some seventy years before. He is an old man?

ALFIE
No. Look. That is not a man in his nineties, which he’d have to be at least if he was a doctor in 1922. He doesn’t even look like he’s in his fifties. He’s barely older than me.

NEIGE
He could just be a liar.

ALFIE
Or he’s a vampire.

NEIGE
Putian de merde. This is the one Casper was hunting.

ALFIE
What?

NEIGE
He must have told you. He was looking for someone, a vampire he believed was experimenting on humans with the blood.

ALFIE
No. He didn’t tell me that.

NEIGE
Oh.

ALFIE
He didn’t really tell me much of anything.

NEIGE
He was a complicated man, mon amie. Do not think much of it. He was probably trying to keep you safe.

ALFIE
Right. Sure.

NEIGE
What?

ALFIE
It’s just. What you said. About the others.

NEIGE
It was not like it was with you, with them. He was different.

ALFIE
How do you know that?

NEIGE
You are alive.

ALFIE
What if that’s an accident, Neige? What if he left me for dead?

NEIGE
He didn’t. Is that what you have been thinking about, lying here? About Casper leaving you for dead?

ALFIE
Not just that.

NEIGE
Look at me, mon râleur. Look at me.

ALFIE
What?

NEIGE
Casper loved you. He loved you.

ALFIE
You don’t–

NEIGE
Yes, I do. I’ve seen the bite marks all over you. You forget in those first days, I bathed you so you didn’t have to lie there in your own filth. I have seen the marks all over you. He bit you dozens, maybe hundreds of times. He had a thousand chances to drink you dry and he didn’t.

You know the agony it is to be close to human beings now. Casper was older than you but not so old as it wouldn’t have burned him to be in such proximity. He bled himself to the point of near-frenzy to leave you with the blood so you’d be kept alive whilst he was gone. He let himself succumb to the drive and take human lives for the first time in decades, just to make sure you would live. That means something.

ALFIE
He– he killed people? To save me? How do you know that?

NEIGE
I told you I followed his scent all over the city. It led me to the bodies.

ALFIE
How many?

NEIGE
Alfie–

ALFIE
How many did he kill?

NEIGE
Putain de bordel de merde, is there nothing that I say which will not cause you to prostrate yourself!

ALFIE
How many of their lives did he think mine was worth?

NEIGE
Tell me, honestly, that you would not have done the same. You cannot! You would have killed five, ten men if you thought it would save him!

ALFIE
Shut UP!

NEIGE
Je t’emmerde! Every life is meaningful but we value the ones we love over everyone else, even ourselves, you know this! Arrête!

ALFIE
Why do you just– you drop this shit on me. What I. Shit, SHIT. How am I supposed. UGH.

NEIGE
Do you want me to go?

ALFIE
No.

NEIGE
What do you want?

ALFIE
I want to die.

NEIGE
No you don’t.

ALFIE
I do.

NEIGE
Lay down, Alfie.

SHEETS MOVE

NEIGE
I will stay with you. Let you sleep.

ALFIE
Okay.

NEIGE
Oui, d’accord. I will stay.

ALFIE
Thank you.

NEIGE
Of course.

[END]