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:

– sounds of a character in distress from the outset

– depictions of complex and potentially unhealthy grieving

– raised voices with high emotionality

– mentions of traumatic bodily injury, up to murder and dismemberment

– mishandling of bodies

– references to sex and sexual encounters

– references to unhealthy and potentially abusive relationships

– brief depiction of intense anxiety

Transcript

SMALL SOUNDS OF CRYING. A CLUNK AS A PHONE, ON WHICH THIS CONVERSATION, IS SET DOWN

ALFIE
What is this?

NEIGE
The point.

ALFIE
What?

NEIGE
‘I am Alfie Dellon and I am not quite dead’.

ALFIE SNIFFS

ALFIE
What are you talking about?

NEIGE
You started making recordings for a reason. It was because something was happening, something awful, and you wanted to leave a piece of yourself behind, non?

ALFIE
I guess.

NEIGE
You say it is a eulogy, an obituary. You claim it is for the purpose of there being one source of truth that will outlast you. You preserve moments of fear and love, you keep them here. That is what you do.

ALFIE
Why?

NEIGE
From what I have heard, that answer changes every time you sit down. How many hours of straight silence have you recorded of the inside of the lab, just in case there was some sound of disturbance? The reason for that is different than why you sat down that first time. Different again when you chose to record what we did to Tim.

ALFIE
I don’t know what you’re saying.

NEIGE
You didn’t know if he was dead or not when you started and there was still a point. To go on, to try, to leave a record.

ALFIE
I– I tried to be a vampire because it was the only way to save him.

NEIGE
Non. You bit him.

ALFIE
So?

NEIGE
Mon coeur.

ALFIE
I know what you want.

NEIGE
I imagine that you do.

ALFIE
I can’t.

NEIGE
My love. We cannot leave the house as his mausoleum. If that’s your end goal, okay, but all of your medical records are there, your stash of phones, your laptop.

I don’t want to leave him there. I would like to set Casper into the ground.

Please

ALFIE
I don’t want to see him.

NEIGE
I can go in first. I can move him. You won’t have to see.

ALFIE
I don’t want you to move him.

NEIGE
I know. I know. But it is wrong to leave him. It’s time. Please. I— I need this, I think.

ALFIE
I’m not ready.

NEIGE
It has been three days!

ALFIE
I’m sorry.

NEIGE
(frustrated sigh)
A few nights away, nobody will notice, but if there is even a chance that Bonham and his cronies knew where we were, it’s… they will come if we don’t go to him soon.

ALFIE
So? He’s dead. What does it matter if they come?

NEIGE
Alfie. You have not finished sorting through those notes. There are hundreds of hours of recordings in that house. We can’t abandon them.

ALFIE
None of that matters anymore.

NEIGE
This is not just about you! I need you to understand this! It is not about you! And it hasn’t been for a long time. It’s about all of us, now. Vampires. You’re right. Something has to change and it had already started to change, in part as a consequence of your actions.

ALFIE
I didn’t mean to do that.

NEIGE
Lies!

ALFIE
Leave me alone.

NEIGE
Get up off the floor.

ALFIE
No.

NEIGE
I’ll carry you.

ALFIE
I’ll tear out your fucking throat.

NEIGE
Oui? Is that so? I’d love to see you try.

ALFIE
Just leave me alone.

NEIGE
I can’t.

ALFIE
Why not?

NEIGE
Please, Alfie. Just get up off the floor. You can’t stay there, we have things to do, and we need to hunt. Please!

ALFIE
You go.

NEIGE
Alfie!

ALFIE
Just go! Go. You’re good at that.

NEIGE
What?

ALFIE
You’re good at walking away when things get difficult.

NEIGE
Excuse moi, I must have misheard. Did you accuse me of leaving when things become difficult? From your place wedged between the wall and my bed frame, which you have not left for days?

ALFIE
I’m not leaving. I’m staying. That’s what I’m telling you.

NEIGE
Physically, yes but– why am I arguing with you? What is the point? How dare you accuse me of abandoning you!

ALFIE
You left me. And you left Casper.

NEIGE
You know nothing about what happened between Casper and I.

ALFIE
And whose fault is that?

NEIGE
HIS! Casper’s!

PAUSE

NEIGE
Is now the time for this? Is it really?

ALFIE
I’m not going anywhere.

NEIGE
Ugh, I. Alfie. Alfie.

ALFIE
What?!

NEIGE
You don’t want to know about this!

ALFIE
I promise you that I really fucking do.

NEIGE
No, it. You don’t.

ALFIE
Fucking. TELL ME.

NEIGE
Fine. Fine. If that is what it takes. If this is what will make you understand.

ALFIE
I’m all ears.

NEIGE
I left because he asked me to leave.

ALFIE
What?

NEIGE
He asked me to leave, and so I went.

ALFIE
I don’t understand.

NEIGE
What is there to misunderstand? It is a simple concept. You have asked me to leave before, witnessed me go. The concept of this cannot escape you, surely?

ALFIE
Yeah but, you didn’t fucking go actually, did you, you hung around all weird and–

NEIGE
And yet you accuse me of abandoning you.

ALFIE
I felt fucking abandoned.

NEIGE
You asked me to go; I could not risk leaving entirely. I stayed out of your way. What do you want from me? To read your mind and know that when you say to leave you mean for me to stay?!

ALFIE
I didn’t mean for you to stay.

NEIGE
So what did you mean?!

ALFIE
I don’t know, alright! I want you to stop bullshitting me. I want you to treat me like I’m your equal.

NEIGE
You don’t care for yourself and yet you resent me for stepping in to help.

ALFIE
The internet! You just. Decide when I find out about stuff. You are in charge of what I know and when I know it and that’s gross.

NEIGE
Alas, there is no collected histories of Neige le vampire. I’m sorry.

ALFIE
I know that it’s not your fault you’ve lived so long and have so much shit to disclose but you fucking editorialise.

NEIGE
Doesn’t everyone?

ALFIE
I mean. Yeah. I guess. But you leave out stuff that’s important. You leave out things you shouldn’t. There are gaps in what I understand that don’t need to be there, and they’re there because of you. You could answer so many questions, but you don’t. You don’t.

NEIGE
You don’t understand that there is no proper time for this information to come to you, and it won’t help you. All it will do is make you feel worse. You don’t need to know this. Why won’t you trust me about this?

ALFIE
I can’t. You won’t answer my questions! You ask me to take you at your word whilst you’re doing the shadiest shit possible. Whatever you think, it will help me to know this, okay? Casper is– he’s a fucking. Corpse. I’ve been. Lying with him. Holding him and I. I need to understand why you walked away from.

NEIGE
I told you. He asked me to.

ALFIE
You’re driving me fucking insane, is this what happened with him, too? You annoyed him so much that eventually he told you to fuck off but you couldn’t commit so you just kind of lurked around like an annoying ghost?!

Neige.

Hey.

Neige.

MOVEMENT

ALFIE
Neige? I– I’m sorry.

NEIGE
Please do not touch me.

ALFIE
I– shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean to cross a line, I didn’t even know there was a fucking line there! I—I– ugh. I’m sorry.

NEIGE
It was not like that.

ALFIE
I– no. Just ignore me. Yeah I’m angry at you but also. It’s not your fault.

NEIGE
Some of it is. But no. I am answering your question. I didn’t push him to the point he sent me away from him like that. It wasn’t the same.

ALFIE
Oh.

NEIGE
His whole life was marked by a kind of disquiet, even before his turning. When I met him he fell into my arms with a kind of enthusiasm that is rare. There was a look in his eye, something pushing me, testing me. I think he hated vampires because that’s what he was. There is no cure which is not certain death, for us, but even if there were, if the changes could be unwritten, then it would not have fixed Casper. He didn’t want to fix the fact he was a vampire, he wanted to fix the fact he was himself.

ALFIE
He didn’t need fixing.

NEIGE
I know that! I know. But the point is not what you and know to be true, but what he believed. You lived with him for months, you knew him well enough to know I’m right.

ALFIE
So why would you leave him when he was in that state? He was vulnerable, he was–

NEIGE
He was fucked up, that’s what he was. He needed to work on his shit but he wasn’t there. He couldn’t be there. And I can’t, I– I can’t sit in that space with him. I would dive to the darkest depths of the ocean with him, sit through tears and shouting, anything, but that’s not how it manifested. That’s not how it was. He hated vampires because he hated himself and he was fucking me, the oldest vampire, the vampire so many vampires fear. A vampire killer.

He loved that contradiction, the allure of the myth about my blood. All the reasons it upsets me were the reasons he was fascinated. It hurt so much to be so close to that kind of energy, like you would not believe. He loved me with what felt at times like a singular focus, but it was not…

It was not a love that gives. It was a love that wanted, that could only ever hunger, never be satisfied. I’d think we’d reached a point where things were changes but… There was always more space to pour myself into. The gaps inside of Casper were vast and expanding.

ALFIE SIGHS

ALFIE
Sometimes it felt like loving me was hurting him.

NEIGE
Yes.

ALFIE
So. Why did he ask you to go? And how did you, I–? I know how that can be, sometimes, how things like that they. They have a way of getting anchors in you.

NEIGE
He went too far. If he had not asked, I would still have stayed despite that, but he told me to go. So I did.

ALFIE
What did he do that went too far?

NEIGE
He told you about Romania. About the coal shed. He did not tell you why he was there.

ALFIE
What?

NEIGE
After we started spending time together I took him travelling. We came back when some friends noticed some suspicious things happening at the edges of cities all over Europe. There were times when we were away together I felt that maybe he could be coaxed out of that gloom, but. We came back. We found so many half-mades left in such strange places, some of them mangled in ways which were clearly deliberate.

ALFIE
Someone put then there on purpose? Henri?

NEIGE
Oui. Though, at the time. Casper wondered he’d made a mistake, years before. There was a vampire in Siberia he’d killed. She had been doing similar experiments on half-mades, you see. He drained her dry, burned her remains, but he was so worried he’d somehow left her alive. He told me he thought he understood what these vampires were doing.

This upset.

ALFIE
Because of fucking Claudio.

NEIGE
Oui.

ALFIE
Fuck Claudio.

NEIGE
Alfie, I– you are angry at him?

ALFIE
After what he did? How he hurt you? Of course I’m fucking angry.

NEIGE
Thank you.

ALFIE
Uh. You’re welcome?

A PAUSE

NEIGE
Casper. He was repulsed by what he was, by what he hungered for, but at once seduced by it, and by me, by my lack of shame or fear of myself. We were drunk with each other’s company, a passing back and forth of poison-filled kisses. He spat his name for me like a curse, screamed it like a prayer, I whispered his like it was a fucking obituary.

It ate me. It ate at him. I wanted to consume and be consumed. He wanted to live and to die, all at once. I wanted to show him everything I had seen. I wanted him to see beauty in the world, and I would sit and watch him sketch it out, but never felt it touch his heart.

I would fuck him and he’d cry, he’d cry and cry, and I’d hold him and keep him safe from both of us, and the world beyond. I showed him all my secret places; sunken ships in the tropics; the ruins of towns in the jungles of the Amazon; old trails across sandy dessert, known only by snakes and wildebeest and me. We would go and he would smile but he was a ghost, and though I could touch his hand, his face, his lips, there was no substance to him beyond that.

How could we be dead, my love, I asked him. I feel so alive, I said. I don’t feel alive, he answered. I believed him. He didn’t seem it, not really. He was a ghost.

As things got more bizarre in my attempts to figure out why vampires were disappearing, why we kept finding half-mades in abandoned mine shafts missing limbs, or with their organs removed, Casper withdrew. He would take weeks long trips, told me he was looking for a friend. I followed him sometimes, checked he was safe, but he made himself difficult to find, even for me.

One day he arrives at my house in Normandy, announcing he found his friend.

That friend was Bonham. I know now that Bonham– Bonham was fucked in the fucking head. But I did not know it then! Then all I knew was Casper was asking for subjects to study. He said to me,‘I want to understand what we are’, so I say fine! Incredible! Understand, study! I will bring you half-mades, I will help find somewhere for you to work, I will make sure you are undisturbed. Perhaps that would kill the madness in his heart, I thought, because I know what I am, and I am not dead. Non. So surely if he studied, if he looked then he would see?!

But non! Non. He did not see this! his letters to me were increasingly obscure, and when I would suggest that I come to visit he would tell me he would come to me instead.

Let’s meet in Paris, he would say, and I would not refuse him because Paris is a fine city, and I have friends there, in Paris, friends whose company Casper enjoys. See others, I say. And I say to him, Casper, darling, please bring your friend with you, this Bonham, bring him to Paris, let him speak with Henri, I’m sure there is much for you to share? Non, Casper says, he cannot, he is too busy, he does not wish to speak with Henri.

How strange, I would think. At the time, all I knew was Henri was studying half-mades just the same as Bonham and Casper were. The purpose was different and so were their hypotheses but they would have knowledge to share, I was sure! I was so sure!

But no, not once was my invitation to Bonham accepted, in a decade. Bonham never came to Paris, not that I know.

But Casper did.

Every time I saw him, things grew more and more strained, every time.

And then that fucking book. What Mr Stoker knew of vampires I do not know but it compelled Casper so, and he was so fucking convinced it held some kernel of truth that off he went, to the Romanian hills, off he went to find them, to find fucking– who knows what he expected, truly? And this Bonham, he– his influence on Casper, the things he told him!

I have never been worried Casper would turn into his maker, that the rot that addled Antoinette’s brain, inherited from Claudio, would ever spread to him. He killed her of his own volition! Despite being raised in a way that told him he was superior, despite being her favourite, despite all of that, still he killed her in the service of what he thought was right!

My folly, of course, was thinking this would make him immune to all other nonsense. The idea we are corpses, the idea we were dead, despite being thinking, feeling things, despite the fact I loved him, that he loved me, that–

I was sure it was that passion of youth, vision clouded by inexperience and a life filled with yet more hardship than even most vampires have to suffer through. He was so good and he was so smart, and I did not think he– he wanted to die, so I just– I let him do what he needed to do, thinking he would eventually, eventually, finally come to realise he was not awful. He was okay. Just okay. Normal. He could say he was a vampire, and understand this was a morally neutral statement of fact.

How could he not reach this point, I thought? He knew me, he had spent time in my company, he was not afraid of what I was. Though he did think perhaps my blood had some property that the blood of younger vampires didn’t, this seemed to be born out of some misguided notion of aging, as though my blood were a fine wine, fortified and becoming more potent with age, rather than because I was some kind of ‘messiah.

So I would shadow him, you know. If he made a trip and didn’t mention it to me, I would follow him. He must have known this. He must have been aware. I rescued him from that fucking coal shed, and the wretched idiot who’d got himself thrown in there before Casper, pathetic little man he was, too, snivelling at my feet in his gratitude.

Went through all that trouble to save him, only to realise he was carrying some legacy of Claudio in him, to have him look at me with wide eyes and call me ‘Snow Blood’ and say he was doing my work when he killed those fucking children! In my name! Dead. The fucking audacity.

I drank him dry, smashed his skull until its contents were a smear on the ground.

How fucking…

Casper watched me with dead eyes. A ghost.

‘They worship you and you deny them,’ he said.

I said I never asked for fucking exaltation, because I haven’t. I haven’t!

He asked if I would deny him. If he were to say he’d found a truth, an answer for what we are, and a solution for how it could be undone, would I smite him like I smote that vampire from the coal shed?

I told him the truth. I told him that if he was gripped by that sickness. That maligned sense of resolution. If he would dare to fucking invoke my name as a dedication for murder and torture and suffering then yes, he would have to fucking answer to me. And if when I came to see what he had done, and hear him out, if then his best answer was to scream and call me two hairs shy of god?!

Oui. I would fucking kill him and be glad to.

You want to make me god? I will be your fucking god.

NEIGE BREATHES HEAVILY

ALFIE
Neige–

NEIGE
DO NOT. Do not.
(pause)
Casper told me he did not think I was a god. He said he thought I was a monster, and that it wasn’t my fault. But that maybe there was some way to cure the both of us so we could live again.

NEIGE LAUGHS BITTERLY

NEIGE
My darling, I said. What do you think I have been doing for all these many years if not living? He could not answer. It felt like being torn to shreds inside. Like he had reached into my chest and pulled apart my lungs and I was spitting blood instead of speaking when I told him that I loved him. He said he– he said he loved me too. And then he asked me to go, so I went.

ALFIE
Fuck.

NEIGE
We spoke now and then, after this. He came to me in Paris, right before I killed Henri. He asked me, then, to take his life. Said if I would not do it, he would go to Henri.

‘Henri?’ I thought. Why would Henri agree to this? He and Casper had spoken in letters but they were not close. Why not ask his friend in England? They had stopped their work, Casper told me. Ideological differences.

Casper told me that Henri had said he could help Casper. That he could cure him. That is madness, I told him so, but…

ALFIE
But?

NEIGE
It was more than it first appeared to be. Casper had written to Henri. Bonham was certain Casper’s hypothesis was madness, that it could not be done, the technology did not exist. But Henri had developed this, manual pump from blood infusion, Casper thought maybe they could make it work–

ALFIE
These developments are happening DECADES before they were ever used in human medicine, do you know that? Are you aware of this?

NEIGE
You’re not listening to me!

ALFIE
What aren’t I listening to?!

NEIGE
It was Casper’s hypothesis that if you could swap out all of the blood fast enough you could effectively cure vampirism by displacement.

ALFIE
Because he thought that it was only in the blood.

ALFIE
Henri was very vocal about how it was the centre of the brain he believed integral to the process of change. On the hypothesis, he and Casper were opposed, but they had agreed to collaborate on this experiment, at risk to Casper’s life!

ALFIE
And then you killed Henri.

NEIGE
(very quietly)
I only went to speak with him. There had been signs for months that something was wrong, half-mades dropped into wells with tubes shoved into their arteries, vampire blood nobody recognised being spilled on city streets. Henri was so unassuming. So mild mannered. I only went to him to talk. I don’t know what it was…

That day. Perhaps it was that I had come unannounced and so he had no time to hide his tracks. But I could smell something wrong. Fear, soaked into the carpets. And death seeping through the cracks in the doors.

After I subdued Henri, found what he had done, I went and got Casper. I brought him with me, like one rubs a dog’s nose in the mess it has made. Look what you volunteered yourself for, I said, when I showed him the young vampires in Henri’s cage. ‘Look what he thinks of you!’

And I threw Henri to them.

Casper was silent as they tore him.

When it was done, I let go of him, and he stood up. He would not look me in the eye. And then he said to me, ‘that is what I am’. And then he was gone.

ALFIE
Oh.

NEIGE
It was a long time before I saw him again. Decades. I first noticed it during the war. A man I met down an alley, during the occupation, there was a smell clinging to him. Casper, in his blood. I confronted him, asked him if he’d met another being like me.

You know what he told me? That he was saved by an angel. He’d set a bomb on a railway line but it had gone off before he had chance to flee. He was badly burned and could not move, he was certain death would come for him. But it didn’t. Someone else did.

ALFIE
Casper?!

NEIGE
He gave him the most beautiful wine he’d ever tasted, and he healed without even a scar. His saviour was an angel, the wine was the real blood of christ, he said.

I found no trace of him in Europe through the war, except in stories. Fallen soldiers saved by an angel. What is the harm in this, I thought? A few dozen more men to make it home, after those horrors. But then the war ended, and it carried on. In clubs I would encounter people with a lingering smell of him in their blood. The faintest whisper of the flavour of him, mixed into their own.

I sought him out, I told him it had to stop. He acted coy, offended, but I had smelled it, his blood in them, it could not be denied. He promised me he would stop it. But it did not stop. I tried to ignore it. I pretended I did not notice it, until I could not.

And then, after so long, he called me.

ALFIE
About me.

NEIGE
Oui.

ALFIE
And you still came to help.

NEIGE
No.

ALFIE
But—

NEIGE
Mon râleur. I heard that call, and within it, the echo of that conversation we’d had so long before. All those soldiers, those people he’d given his blood to, ah I do not know, but to me it seemed like they were in aid of one thing: experiments. And now he was calling me back to him.

Calling me back to play saviour.

I came to York to ask him what he thought of me. I thought I knew the answer.

And I will not be a benevolent god.

ALFIE
You came here to kill him didn’t you.

(pause)

No you— you didn’t— you. You saved me because you– you loved him.

NEIGE
I loved him yes, but that is not why I saved you.

ALFIE
Then why?!

NEIGE
I told you already. I saved you because I listened to the tapes. You chose this life, it is a powerful thing. But they also told me I was right. Casper was still experimenting on people.

ALFIE
What?! No, he– he wasn’t!

NEIGE
The moment you met him! With Linda, and then with—

ALFIE
He didn’t.

NEIGE
What else would you call what he did?

ALFIE SOBS

ALFIE
Neige, no, I– I see why you think it but— you’re wrong! You’re wrong!

NEIGE
I am sorry! Please, please—

ALFIE
It’s not true.

NEIGE
Please, please–

ALFIE
Shut up, shut up! Neige, why would you say that? Why?! How could you?!

NEIGE
Of course not! Of course, whatever you say, please just– I am wrong! I am wrong. Okay? Just– look at me, oui?

ALFIE
I am a vampire. I am a fucking vampire. Why do I feel like I’m having a heart attack, my heart doesn’t even fucking DO ANYTHING!

NEIGE TRIES NOT TO LAUGH, AND FAILS

ALFIE
Stop laughing. Stop fucking laughing!

NEIGE HALF-LAUGH, HALF-SIGHS

NEIGE
Alfie! Alfie. I think I am in love with you.

ALFIE
You really pick your FUCKING MOMENTS.

NEIGE STARTS LAUGHING AGAIN

NEIGE
(still very much laughing)
I’m sorry.

ALFIE
Fuck you.

ALFIE
(almost laughing, too)
Don’t leave. But fuck you.

NEIGE
I will stay.

[END]