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

– descriptions of medical injuries

– mishandling bodies of deceased/potentially deceased persons

– descriptions of violence and torture

– descriptions of nonconsensual blood-drinking

– discussion of violent medical abuse and torture, including medical abuse which harmed children

– mentions of IV access points

– sounds of a character in emotional distress

– implied threat to life and references to intent to end life

Transcript

Look, I need help.

Not Neige help, not help any kind of vampire I know of can give me.

Actually, I don’t know enough vampires to know if that’s true, honestly. But I know need help.

A CAR GOES PAST

I probably should have planned this better. I’m not thinking straight, I probably need to hunt. When was the last time I…?

Neige. The last time was when Neige stayed over. I think that was the last time I recorded myself, too. I’ve just been reading, or trying to read. It’s just like I have a bunch of disparate pieces and I can’t get them to snap together, you know? It’s difficult. It’s very difficult.

I was working on the assumption that we had all the paper files up to a certain point but. Now I wonder if that’s not true.

How much am I actually missing?

ANOTHER CAR PASSES

Should probably go out to hunt. I should have gone to Leeds, not York to do that. Leeds is bigger, and it’s safer because people don’t know me there. Neige’s house, the place I’ve been staying, it’s about the same length of a drive to both. But. I have to come to York. So maybe I should hunt here?

I’ve just not tried to hunt here alone.

Honestly, I’ve barely tried to hunt alone at all.

I’ve actually mostly been hunting at motorway stops? It’s just that there’s one twenty minutes from the house and I don’t like to leave Casper, you know?

ALFIE SIGHS

Why am I doing this again? Sitting in my car by the river. Watching.

A CAR PASSES

I feel quite close to Casper, doing this. Not just because he’s sat in the passenger seat, but… I don’t know, this kind of thing? This is the kind of thing he must have been doing, before he… before Bonham got him.

Feels different, being out here by myself – or with Cas – than it did when I came here with Neige before we caught Sherman. We sat out here for weeks, watching, waiting. There was a lot of stiff silence. It was quite awkward, really. Not sure why he agreed to help, honestly.

A CAR PASSES

We fought. Not physically but it felt like it could have gone like that. And I don’t know! It was kind of. Scary.

Neige would have set fire to the universe, I think, those first few days, after…

I don’t actually know this, but I think that he wanted that sort of energy from me, too. But I didn’t have it. I didn’t have energy at all. I just wanted to be with him, with Casper, and Neige, he—

RAIN HAMMERS ON THE ROOF OF THE CAR

It’s not like he didn’t understand. He seemed to understand it extremely keenly. But it upset him, it made him angrier. The longer it went on, the more furious he became, and I could tell he was trying to give me space but it was driving me mad, all that weight of him not saying anything. I wanted to scream, and then one morning, he came in and looked at us, at Cas and I, and his expression…

Neige is a beautiful thing, it can’t be minced about, he’s pretty. He’s small and blonde, and when he’s not hunting and his eyes are blue rather than red, when he’s fully clothed and you can’t see those scars on his back or the rough bite marks on his chest and arms, he does not look dangerous.

At least, I’d never seen him look dangerous until that moment as he was looking down at me and Cas.

He had watched me with Casper before, but his expression had been fiercely neutral, eyes empty, nonjudgemental. He can be so quiet sometimes he almost dissolves into a room, and I’ve got so used to him now that I can feel almost alone when he’s there, sometimes, until he would make some sound and I’d remember.

The first day, I just– I just wanted him to be clean. Casper, that is. Washing off the crust of dried blood around the staples in the back of his head. Combing the ragged remnants of his hair, all different lengths, like they just grabbed in handfuls and chopped. One side of his head was most shaved, where they’d cut into his skull? The skin was roughly glued shut. There was enough hair for me to comb to hide that spot when I’d cleaned it with rubbing alcohol.

I dressed him in my clothes, because I didn’t want to leave him there naked. I didn’t want to keep looking at the stapled shut line under his collar bones, the messy y-shaped junction where it met with the one that sliced sternum to pelvis, like– autopsy marks.

Neige was worried, I think, that I would want to–

ALFIE SIGHS

I think he thought maybe I’d like to investigate him. To reopen those marks. Maybe I… maybe if it wasn’t Casper. But it is.

ALFIE BREATHES SHAKILY

Neige–

ALFIE’s BREATH CATCHES IN HIS THROAT

Neige helped me dress him. It was like he did everything he could to avoid their skin touching, the whole time, he barely even brushed him with his fingers.

But when we were done he– just lightly he touched his hair. What’s left of it. Why of everything this seemed to be the thing that upset him the most, I– I don’t know.

It was beautiful hair, when he was– before. It. Casper’s hair. He. It was like a living thing, almost. He didn’t have a lot of time for it, usually kept it pulled back, but sometimes, if we had nowhere to be, he’d let it hang dry against his back after he showered. The curls would come together in this thick, waterlogged swirls that stuck to his skin. It had about four different textures, some ringlets, some waves, some parts in tighter coils, and each of these would dry at different speeds.

And there was Neige, and maybe I’m imagining it or making it up in my memory, but I think his hand was shaking as he touched Casper’s head. He was— he was so careful.

After that he wouldn’t touch him again. He’d sit with me whilst I sat with Casper, with him in my bed. Watching, like he was waiting for something to happen. When it became clear I was going to need to hunt, he made me leave, promised to sit with Cas the whole time.

When I got back, though, he’d moved him, moved him from my bed, taken him downstairs to the backroom, laid him on an old catering table.

ALFIE BREATHES RAGGEDLY, ON THE VERGE OF SOBBING

He’d put a sheet down on top of it, covered Casper up with another. Not like he was sleeping, like he was— Pulled over his face, like he’s—! Like he’s dead.

I was furious, I was in pieces. Neige held me too tight to really just be a hug. When I stopped fighting him, he– he took my hands – again, his grip was tight enough it would have been a struggle to break free.

And he led me outside into the moors. He stooped down, not letting go of my hand, and picked some gorse and heather, handing it to me.

A CAR PASSES

And he just kept picking it. When we both hand an armful, we went back inside. Without a word, Neige lay the flower’s on the sheet he’d put over Casper. And it looked–

It looked like a funeral.

I sat down on the floor beside the table Cas was resting on, reached up, took his hand where it lay under the sheet. I sat there, still and quiet. Neige sat across the room, still and quiet, too.

And then a piece of heather fell.

I got up immediately, pulled the sheet aside. Casper’s other hand was hanging over the side of the table, the opposite side to where I was sitting. I looked at Neige and I could tell he was thinking the same as me; Casper had moved. He wasn’t gone. There was something, some trace of him left inside of there. I took a knife from the kitchen, cut my arm, let the blood fall into Casper’s mouth, and I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The cut in my arm healed, but when I went to open it again, Neige stopped me. ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

‘He moved,’ I told him.

Neige shook his head. ‘His arm must have fallen.’

‘How?’ I said.

Neige had no answer for that.

So I waited.

Neige left, he hunted, he came back. He saw I was still with Casper. He tried to tell me to let him go, to sleep in my bed instead of on the floor beside him. As days wore on he tried to make me go to hunt. I was hungry, I had been secretly dropping blood into Casper’s mouth whenever I had the chance, but I knew it wasn’t secret, really, that Neige would have smelled the blood right away, would have known what I was doing. We didn’t talk about it. It went on like this for weeks, until that morning he came in to the backroom and just stood there, just inside the door, staring.

It raised something in me, some kind of white hot fear that grew outwards from my spine. For a few seconds, no more than that, he looked like everything he is, a monster, thousands of years old, who has seen the rise and falls of empires. And he looked at me with such a deep, loathing disgust or resentment, I don’t know what it was, but I felt like slime. Worse than slime.

‘What do you want?’ I asked him. He told me it was time to let Casper go. That it should have happened weeks ago. That he shouldn’t have let things go on this long.

Let them, he said, like he could choose. Like it was for him to decide. Like I needed his fucking permission. Like he has any say in this at all!

ALFIE INHALES SHARPLY

In some distant part of me, I think I could tell he was trying not to get angry with me, that it was taking a lot of effort from him not to scream and yell and rage. As soon as I started shouting, he just totally shut down. When I screamed at him to leave, he just nodded. He didn’t even say a word. He just. Went.

Gone.

Just like that.

It was a couple of weeks before I got so hungry I could stand to leave Cas alone. I was scared Neige would come back, would take him away, would burn him, like he kept telling me to do.

I didn’t dare go into the city. I drove the twenty minutes to the motorway service stop, almost accidentally killed a lorry driver who was smoking down the side of his cab. He was very easy to lure into the bushes. I wasn’t sure how to approach it; you cannot seduce an exhausted, entirely sober lorry driver into the sadly manicured bushes down the side of a motorway services the way that you can seduce someone in a nightclub. So I thought, different plan. And it was kind of a bad plan, actually? I just went, and I yelled: ‘Oh my god, what a weird fucking rat? You have to see this,’ and he just. Came to me.

I didn’t realise how close I was to completely losing my mind to the drive to kill until I felt that man’s heart give this awful, awful flutter.

I thought, immediately, of the time Casper had almost killed me.

I licked the bite in the man’s neck shut and dragged him to the side of his lorry, climbed into the cab and hit the horn. I sat in the bushes until someone came to check he was okay, and when I knew they’d called an ambulance, I went back to Casper.

The next night I was more careful. I walked instead of driving. I stopped when the driver was on the verge of losing consciousness and dragged him back, babbling, delirious, to his lorry. I tucked him into his resting place and left him there to sleep it off. I was out of blood debt enough by then that I could manage only taking a couple of pints.

It is a convenient spot to hunt, so long as you’re careful.

After that second lorry driver, I had enough wherewithal in my head to start reading the notes.

It was very obvious from the beginning that I was missing stuff. They didn’t mention what they’d done to Casper and honestly I’ve been too afraid to look too closely at what they might have done to the inside of him. I will not reopen that fucking autopsy scar. I don’t–

ALFIE’S TONE IS LESS UPSET, NOW MORE ANGRY, VERGING ON CLINICALLY COLD

Tim Sherman wasn’t honest about what they did to Cas’ brain, either. The other vampires I saw in that cold storage room, they were missing the whole back of their head. In every description of excision of brain tissue, they take off the whole back of the skull off. Cas has an incision just above his ear and another at the top of his spine. The one round his ear, it’s about nine inches long, it– it’s massive. I can feel ridges under the skin, like they’ve stapled the bone back together underneath? There’s also a hard disc of scar tissue right behind his jaw, like there might have been some kind of drainage tube there. The other incision on his head, at the top of his spine, is about two inches across, neat line, stapled shut.

He has marks on his inner arms, on his throat, underarms, the insides of his thighs, all which look like IV access points, but for a very thick gauge line, like you’d use for dialysis, which is why I’m thinking, you know, maybe these are haemapheresis marks. There’s no mention of the size of the lines they use in anything I’ve read, though. And what’s happened to Cas doesn’t seem to line up with what they’re talking about for haemaphersis, not exactly, because.

Well.

The others, they stop like Casper has stopped, but then they start to lose limbs. Their bodies deform, lose structural integrity. The stages of decomposition are different for vampires, but Cas isn’t at any fucking stage he’s just. There.

Static.

RAIN HAMMERS ON THE ROOF OF THE CAR

ALFIE’S VOICE IS EMOTIONAL, DESPERATE

And at first, I thought– well. I can’t smell him. Not really. Not properly. It’s like almost all of his blood is gone. But the thing is, it’s in there. Like. It’s in him. I know it is, because I can draw it out of his veins. But he doesn’t smell like Neige or I. He doesn’t smell like a human, he smells. Diluted? It– it’s hard to describe. Maybe I’m insane.

ALFIE IS BREATHING SHAKILY AND AUDIBLY FIDGETING

I think Neige thinks I’m insane.

It’s like some vital part of the process of us, as vampires, has been disrupted in Casper. With the haemapheresis victims, they’re basically half-mades. One thing that’s interesting is they were looking at the types of brain activity between the half-mades, their Type 1s, and then their Type-1Bs, which is their classification for people who were normal vampires who they thought they killed but then turned out they’d done something else to. Whatever protein they’re stripping out of the blood has to do with whatever it is about vampirification that allows us to not just. Decay, I guess? It also has something to do with higher brain function.

They’re not true half-mades, the Type 1Bs; they don’t rot right. They decay, but they decay like vampires, not like human corpses. Whatever they’ve done with haemapheresis, it seems to counter the preservative, restorative effect of vampire blood, but not necessarily anything else?

Which if—

ALFIE SIGHS

Which if anything is the opposite of what’s happened with Casper. He is only preserved.

Funny thing about those PET scans, though. When they first tried to PET scan a vampire’s brain, it didn’t look like anything at all because the brain is no longer using glucose as it’s primary source of fuel. It’s using red blood cells, and the amounts it needs is really small. It seems this thing, this ‘virus’ or whatever it is, completely hijacks the body, and it’s much more efficient at getting it to do what it wants than a human body seem to be at working in the first place.

It– it also looks like, on some of the images, that the virus causes this new system of… veins? Kind of? But they’re messy and different in between each scan, and they seem to like. Think? Kind of? It’s a whole new vasculature and it connects the brain, the throat and the heart, so like, we swallow, and some of the blood we eat goes directly to our brain, and the rest goes to the heart, which then immediately starts to beat, which I think— I think that’s it, I think that’s the mechanism.

There’s nothing in the literature to confirm this either, but I think they dilate, these veins? When we hunt. I think that’s why our eyes turn red. That vasculature, it– it’s capable of constricting and opening, almost like an extension of the heart, but it lights up on a PET scan like it’s a thinking thing, too.

And I can’t see how that can happen just as the result of some proteins which you could filter out like modified dialysis, it’s too— It’s not a virus like any virus I understand, or a bacteria, or. It’s too complicated. It doesn’t make sense. And there’s nothing, like I’ve said, nothing about the mechanisms by which the change in a vampire occurs, and that, if I were in this position, if I were trying to work out how vampires worked, I would be studying the change.

Casper said it himself: even if they hate vampires and want them dead like Sherman implied, you still need to understand them, and that means trying to make new vampires so you can observe the change occurring. It just does not make any sense that they have no documentation of it.

And I know they fucking were studying it, too, because they were making half-mades, not just their Type-1Bs, but real, Type-1 half-made vampires.

But I’ve found no records of any full vampire that Holden Labs created. None.

They have records for Type-1 patients they’ve made, Type-1B patients they created by catching Type-2 and doing whatever the fuck haemapheresis actually is to them, and then Type-2s they’ve caught and killed, and humans who they seemed to have grabbed and intervened with who have been in medical crisis, who they’ve used Bonham’s other pet project on, haemaprosthesis, which is what he was using when he was experimenting on those kids.

But yeah. Not a single Type-2 that Holden Laboratories seems to have made successfully.

Which doesn’t make any sense!

The haemaprosthesis stuff is troubling too, cause Bonham’s continued experimenting with it after what he did to those kids in the 90s.

ALFIE SIGHS

It’s also troubling because it’s literally what Casper was doing the moment I met him.

And because of what I saw Casper do for Linda, I’ve watched haemaprosthesis play out in real time; the temporary reprieve of symptoms, the fever that follows, accompanied by those symptoms’ return. And I’ve lived it too, with what Casper did for me, giving me his blood. It didn’t heal me, not exactly; you can see on my x-rays, my bones were still broken, but there’s like. A substance holding them together. As the effect of the blood wore off I could feel my ribs, especially, starting to move again.

It’s like there’s a crucial piece of that process missing, when you give vampire blood to a human.

ALFIE SIGHS AGAIN

Like. I don’t know. I think there are multiple factors which all have to work together at once for vampires to actually function, you know? Because a human that’s drunk a bit of vampire blood can maybe be a bit better for a little while but eventually they’re going to get a horrible fever, and if they haven’t consumed enough of the blood then–

Enough. Of the blood.

Shit, I should have brought the files with me, that fucking cascade thing they were talking about. I think it— it’s easier if the person is dying, Casper said, to try to turn them. I think it’s because you need to have a massive immune response! Your body needs to actively be fighting infection to turn. And half-mades, their blood, their spit, it’s infectious; you can’t make a normal vampire from a half-made because something is missing from it! You’ll get a horrible infection and either die or turn into a half-made, Casper implied, and most likely die. So there’s something that causes massive infection and inflammation, and that’s necessary for what happens during the vampirification process, but it’s not all of what needs to happen!

Oh my god.

Which means the process of vampirification can be interrupted. And from Bonham’s experiments we know it can also be… partially regressed?

And Casper? Casper’s what? He’s… he’s experienced another kind of engineered interruption, at a different point in the process? But which, and how is it… how does it?

THE BUILDING ENTHUSIASM IN ALFIE’S VOICE BREAKS AND HE SOUNDS HOPELESS AGAIN

How do I fix you, Casper?

I’m sorry for dragging you around. I– this is. It’s not very dignified.

You know when we met, you and I, Casper? You were like a thing out of a dream. Unreal and beautiful, so strange, so different, so– yes. Frightening. But I liked it. Fuck Neige for that but he’s right, I did like it. You scared me, and I liked it.

It was like jumping into the sea, loving you, the grasp of the waves, the water pulling at me, tugging me down to the depths. There was a comfort in it, the way it pressed in at all sides. And when you would be gone, I’d breach the surface and gasp the fresh air, knowing the whole time I would need to hold my breath again I could to stay in the deep dark with you as long as I could.

I think about it a lot, but. I don’t know, there’s something about memories from before. They feel different, somehow. Everything before the change, it feels. Not fuzzy, exactly? But faded a little, distant. As though they don’t belong to me.

I think about the night in the forest and the memory unfolds in my head like a dream, moving in that same liquid way. I remember the hot bite of your teeth on my mouth, but I don’t remember the pain. The taste of my own blood in my mouth tastes like human blood tastes to me now, when I remember it, though all of that nuance, those layered intricacies of flavour? I didn’t have them then. When I remember how you fucked me it’s– is it the feel of you, that I remember? Do I remember how that felt at all?

And now every kiss, I–

When I remember kissing you, I think of how it feels to kiss you now. Lips that do not meet mine back, that I only ever just kiss lightly in case– in case.

I close my eyes and remember running my hands through your hair, warm and damp from the shower, but now I. In those memories I feel the slice on your head, the buzzed short hair, picking the blood from round the glue and stitches, fucking– Casper.

And what you were then wasn’t what you told me, the you I saw and the you that you were…?!

How much you didn’t show me of yourself, it fucking– it hurts, it hurts.

And it feels like–

Fuck.

ALFIE IS CRYING NOW, GASPING BETWEEN WORDS

I just wonder if maybe Neige is right, and I’ve done something terrible by– by holding on to you. I’m sorry. Fucking hell, it’s just that. All I can think about is those days after I was attacked, about you coming into the hospital, knowing human medicine couldn’t save me, and. Thinking that. Thinking that maybe there was some kind of crazy, batshit chance that Neige might be able to, or Bonham somehow?

You could have gone to Bonham months before you did. I’m sure you knew how to find him, so once you’d suspected he was involved, you could have…

But you didn’t, and there must have been a reason. Whatever Neige thinks about what you’d want, he’s wrong about why you went to Bonham, because you could have gone so fucking long before you did. My god, I wish you’d explained. I wish you’d told me. But so much was happening, I was so sick, and knowing how I feel now, even when I’m sure, I’m so sure there will be some kind of way to– to help you.

You must have been so scared to do what you did. I am not worth any of it.

I’m sorry.

But you did it anyway. You pulled me out of the hospital, you let me drink so much— so much of your blood, you must have been in agony, I can’t imagine. I don’t know how you could even think, how you managed not to drain me dry. You compromised everything to try to save me.

Who the fuck would I be not to do the same for you now? What would say about me? And Neige, he seems so ready just to– he’s just so ready to just—

I can’t. I can’t. Not until. Until I know for sure, I can’t help you. I won’t let you go. I have to keep trying, or. Or what am I?

Which brings me here.

Because in the absence of information from Bonham’s team about what they did to you, Casper, I need to find out for myself. And I can’t do it alone, or at a random house in the middle of nowhere.

I need help. Human help.

Haley’s help.

Right.

CAR KEYS

Let’s do this.

[END]