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:

Mentions of unethical 19th century mental health treatments (incl. heavy restraints and lobotomy)

Critique of modern depictions of inpatient mental health care

Discussions of modern inpatient mental health care from a health-provider perspective AND a patient perspective

Mentions of panic attacks

Implications of torture

Descriptions of bones/remains

Depiction of emotional distress

Mentions of blood, blood drinking and biting

Mentions of the holocaust (in the context of vampires during WW2; the descriptions are not detailed or heavy but there is mention of the presence of concentration camps. There are also Nazi-eating vampires.)

Transcript

ALFIE

So. Neige is off somewhere, doing… something. But I’ve found this room that would be literally the first interesting thing we’ve found and we’ve been here for hours.

Well. That’s a lie. It’s not the first interesting thing, it’s the first potentially useful thing.

Neige said this place was a hospital but it’s not, not really? It’s an old sanatorium. I think it must’ve been built in the 1800s? I don’t know. Casper would’ve known.

It’s creepy as fuck. Everything is covered in dust and cobwebs and parts of the building have plants growing inside them. But all the old equipment. It’s just… there. Gurneys, wheelchairs, leather restraints.

We just came up from the basements. I wondered if maybe they stored paperwork down there. That happens at a lot of modern hospitals; there’s storage on the lower ground floor and a lot of admin stuff ends up there.

There were a couple of rooms which looked promising but there wasn’t anything useable as the whole lower ground floor is completely flooded. There’s about a foot of water that’s absolutely disgusting across the whole thing, awful green sludge on the surface, it’s climbing up the walls. I’m glad it’s autumn. It stinks down there now and it’s September. I’ve had to ditch the jeans I was wearing, it was just too fucking vile.

Neige, who is way smarter than I give him credit for, remembered to bring clothes. I need to shower really but at least I don’t stink of swamp water and I have dry socks. My shoes, there’s no hope for them, but it’s fine.

There was a storage room with cabinets and shelves where I think there might’ve been useful stuff before the damp and the mould got to it. It’s not worth searching through it all, the state it’s in. There were some lockable rooms down there, with bars in the doors instead of windows. Some of them had chains in the walls. Some of them had wooden chairs covered in green slime, with straps on the arms and where a person’s head might go. It’s all pretty horrifying, thinking they would just lock up people they thought might be mad down there. I wonder what would have happened to me, anxious little fuck who likes to take it up the arse?

Anyway. The ground floor seemed to be where most of the treatment stuff happened. There were rooms which seemed to be for out-patients, not a million miles away from what you’d see in a GP surgery today. There were more intense surgical suites, too, including a room where there was a box holding an ice pick and a hammer. For lobotomies.

Poor Neige had to deal with me ranting about that for the next half an hour as we walked around the other treatment rooms and waiting areas and a few rooms which looked like they may have been for admin staff, but whose cabinets were entirely empty of useful paperwork.

I was angry at the whole place. I told Neige about working on the mental health ward. I told him about how I’d had to spend a week in one when I was a teenager an even though it was pretty terrifying it was necessary and exactly what I’d needed. How it makes me angry now that whenever in-patient mental health stuff is depicted in media it’s as this spooky horrible thing or a sign someone has completely when actually these are places where people go to be fucking saved.

I was still a teenager. It wasn’t long after dad. I. Things had been really hard. I.

Anyway. It’s why it mattered so much to me to treat the patients like fucking people when i was working on a mental health ward because a good nurse in a place like that? The difference it made to me? Holy shit. It was also absolutely why I had to stop doing that though. It was good. I felt good about it. But sometimes there were people who— yeah. The stuff they did, it brought things up for me, and I’ve worked through it. Most of it. But its. If it’s happening in front of you all the time it starts to get hard to get it out of your head.

It’s not. It’s not important.

Um.

Yeah. Then we we went up to the first floor. Upstairs was a little more civilised than the basement. It’s wards and a few smaller rooms, nothing out of the ordinary. The remnants of a few common areas made the whole thing feel less bleak after seeing so many rows of too-small beds. The sight of soft furnishings, rotted and dust covered as they were, was a relief. I even saw an old chess board and some very mangled looking boxes of jigsaw puzzles.

Of course there were a few isolation rooms, beds with restraints on. Some people just need that. Nobody needs to be chained in the basement. Or. I mean. Like. Some people enjoy that. Nothing wrong with a bit of restraint. You know what I…

Sorry.

I do this when I’m nervous.

Honestly the isolation rooms fucked me up a bit. They don’t look like that now. They don’t like to restrain people that way, it’s… yeah.

Anyway.

After the isolation rooms was what looked like it was supposed to be a library. Shelves with a few scant books under layers of dust. All fiction, nothing useful to us. There were some armchairs next to this big arched windows. When the place wasn’t so disgusting I imagine it would have been a nice place to sit, there. Sit with a cup of tea, with your nurse. Time out of your isolation room. Siting looking out at the trees.

Beyond there was a set of double doors, and a staircase which we’d seen when we were scoping out the ground floor. This part of the hospital seemed like it might’ve been for children. We looked around a little bit but there was this little bear who had lost almost all his fur and one of his eyes and his thread nose had been chewed into a point and there was a tear on his paw where I could see the dense sawdust packed into his fur-less cotton skin. And for some reason I nearly had a panic attack.

So Neige made me sit in the hall on the floor, near the chess set and the nice chairs. He looked around the rest of the first floor himself and told me there was nothing interesting, and we headed up to the second floor.

The second floor is split into two halves. One half is normal offices and another couple of wards and patient rooms. The other half was behind a heavy metal door. I think it was made of iron, it weighed a ton, like maybe literally a fucking ton. We managed to get through but it was a bit of a struggle and we’ve broken the doorframe.

There were no windows in this part of the sanatorium. There are small rooms, entirely tiled. They have viewing windows you slide across to look into them, and the doors are all made of metal, and they all have multiple locks.

In one of those rooms, we found a skeleton. There were iron restraints around its bony ankles and wrists, and some kind of metal headpiece which seemed designed to hold a jaw completely shut, with adjustable dials on the sides. The skull inside it had vampire teeth.

I had been about to ask if I could snap one of the bones to see what the structure was like inside, but I realised that Neige had gone very quiet.

He got down onto the dusty tiled floor slowly, without a word. One by one, he took the bones from their restrains and lay them neatly in a pile. He was breathing weird and it thought he might have been crying but when he looked at me his eyes were fucking scarlet and I could taste the fury coming off him in the air. He broke the dials and pried the headpiece apart. It was so difficult his arms were shaking and Neige is fucking strong. Strong enough to damage a wall made of brick several layers thick so we can get through a door.

When the skull was free, he set it with the other bones. He knelt in front of them.

‘Do we always leave bones?’ I said. Which maybe was stupid but. He looked up at me. His eyes weren’t red anymore.

‘It depends on where we are left to decay,’ he said.

‘Like with humans.’

‘Yes,’ he said, very softly. ‘I would like to be burned,’ he said, a little louder.

‘What?’

‘When I die. I should like to be set alight. Do not wait for my flesh to crumble. Do not leave me like this.’

‘Okay.’

‘What about you?’ he asked, looking up at me, totally earnest.

‘Take me to the sea,’ I said.

A flicker of a smile on his face. He touched my cheek. ‘I do not think there will be much of use up here either. Shall we go as we did downstairs; I will continue from the door, you go down to the end of the corridor and we meet in the middle? Oui?’

And then I went off on my merry way, right down to the end of the corridor, which is when I walked into this room.

First one I opened. Two desks. About four hundred ancient filing cabinets. The motherlode.

Except, well. The first cabinet was just a load of stuff about horticulture, and then there was an entire cabinet about slime moulds. But then things got a bit more interesting, but like, not that much more. The labels on the shelves indicated they held patient records… once. But they don’t anymore. Everything is gone. Except the stuff about horticulture and slime moulds.

THUD.

ALFIE

Neige?

MOVEMENT, FOOTSTEPS. NEIGE IS NEARBY, BREATHING HEAVILY, STRUGGLING WITH SOMETHING.

ALFIE CROUCHES BESIDE HIM; HE CONTINUES TO STRUGGLE WITH SOMETHING.

ALFIE
Oh, my love, my love.

NEIGE
I cannot get them out.

ALFIE
You’re exhausted, your hands are shaking, look at you.

NEIGE
I— I need to get them out.

ALFIE
I think they’re okay, kitten. I don’t think it’s hurting them anymore .

NEIGE
I don’t want to leave them like this.

ALFIE
You’re so kind. Lovely thing, I do not think you can help them now.

NEIGE
I have to try.

ALFIE
Look at me, kitten, you’re okay. They’re not hurting anymore.

NEIGE
Gah.

ALFIE
Let me put their head with the rest of them, okay?

NEIGE
But—

ALFIE
Non, mon chaton, you helped. Already, you’ve helped. Okay?

ALFIE TAKES THE HEAD FROM NEIGE, TAKES TWO STEPS ACROSS THE ROOM.

NEIGE
Your pronunciation is horrible.

ALFIE
You’re welcome.

ALFIE SETS THE HEAD DOWN.

NEIGE
You are sweet.

ALFIE
I know.

ALFIE COMES BACK TO NEIGE AND SITS BESIDE HIM.

NEIGE
Fuck. I am shaking.

ALFIE
Yeah. You really fucking are.

We should go.

NEIGE
Can you drive?

ALFIE
I’d prefer it honestly. You’re a terrible driver and you moan about it the whole time you’re behind the wheel.

NEIGE
Ha.

ALFIE
I found an admin room and it was totally cleared out. There’s literally nothing here.

NEIGE
Except for nine dead vampires.

ALFIE
Yeah. Except for—

NEIGE
PUTAIN DE MERDE.

ALFIE
I’m sorry.

NEIGE GROWLS

NEIGE
I hope they were not conscious.

ALFIE
Me too. Do you want to bite me?

NEIGE
I can get by.

ALFIE
You’re shaking real bad.

NEIGE
It will pass.

ALFIE
Hmm.

NEIGE
It is not… I am exhausted but my hunger is not out of control. I’ve not overexerted myself. This has been happening.

ALFIE
What do you mean? The shaking?

NEIGE
Oui.

ALFIE
When?

NEIGE
Now and then.

ALFIE
How often?

NEIGE
Ach, I do not know, I do not count, why would I dwell on it?!

ALFIE
How long as this been going on?

NEIGE
Ngh. Since.

ALFIE
Since the lab?

NEIGE
Oui.

ALFIE
What does it feel like?

NEIGE
Quoi?

ALFIE
When it starts. The shaking. What does it feel like?

NEIGE
M– n– Dying.

ALFIE
Hmm. I. Neige. You’ve seen me have a panic attack, haven’t you?

NEIGE
Oui.

ALFIE
Do you think that maybe—

NEIGE
I don’t want to talk about it.

ALFIE
Alright. Can I touch you?

NEIGE
Ah, oui.

ALFIE
Pretty kitty.

NEIGE
Purr. Purr.

ALFIE CHUCKLES

NEIGE
Oui, my accent c’est terrible.

ALFIE
I won’t let them take you again.

NEIGE
You couldn’t possibly—

ALFIE
I got you out before, didn’t I?

NEIGE
You were shot in the head!

ALFIE
I got better.

NEIGE
We both nearly died, multiple times.

ALFIE
I know, I know! But I got you out, didn’t I?!

NEIGE
Yes.

ALFIE
I wish I was stronger. I wish I was better. I wish I could make you less scared.

NEIGE
It is not your fault. It is them. It’s all of this shit. It’s the fucking wire and staples in my fucking chest, I swear— I swear to fuck.

ALFIE
It’s okay. We’re okay. Nobody is coming for us now, it’s okay.

NEIGE
We shouldn’t stay here.

ALFIE
No, it’s gross. Also you need to hunt, ‘cause even though you’re not feeling it I can smell that you need to.

NEIGE
Your nose is very keen.

ALFIE
Is it?

NEIGE
Mmm, it is.

ALFIE
Is that annoying?

NEIGE
Non.

ALFIE
We should go.

NEIGE
Oui, nous devirons.

ALFIE
You’re not moving.

NEIGE
I need a little longer. Is that alright?

ALFIE
Yeah, of course. We can wait a bit.

NEIGE
Merci.

ALFIE
Did you not know they’d be here?

NEIGE
Who?

ALFIE
The vampires.

NEIGE
I… I suspected it. But. The reality is quite different.

ALFIE
Yeah. I get that.

NEIGE
I imagine you do.

ALFIE
How did you find out about this place? It can’t be a coincidence that we scope out a sanatorium which just happens to also have a secret vampire torture lab on the second floor.

NEIGE
It is not a coincidence. From what I have been able to discern this was one of the first places he came, Bonham, after Casper kicked him out. The standard of care for the mentally ill was poor at the time, I think it seemed to him a good option, non? To have fluid access to as many people as he could get his hands on. So he set up camp here.

ALFIE
What was it you were hoping to find?

NEIGE
Something which explained… I do not know what. Something which might help me understand the mentality he is approaching his work from. Which might indicate how what seem to be disparate pieces are part of a cohesive whole.

ALFIE
Yeah. That’s been driving me up the wall too. Constantly feeling like we’re missing something. And we’re missing the bits that join them up. It’s maddening.

NEIGE
It is crucial that we know what it is he is attempting, comprend?

ALFIE
Of course.

NEIGE
I’m also afraid.

ALFIE
That he’s going to find you again?

NEIGE
Of this, yes. But that is not what I meant. I am afraid of Casper.

ALFIE
What? Neige, I. He. I can’t feel him. He’s. Gone. I— I—  He can’t, and he wouldn’t—

NEIGE
Non, non, non, that is not— 

Sorry. I didn’t mean—

ALFIE
It’s fine.

BRIEF PAUSE.

NEIGE
I told you about his habits during the war. I had heard some rumours which I was terrified could connect with this. I investigated them at the time but it was— it was clear quite quickly that it could not have been Casper. I was finding his soldiers who had been visited by angels in the wrong places for it to be him. This work was happening in the East, in Hungary, mostly. Casper rarely went to that part of the world.

ALFIE
What were the rumours?

NEIGE
That there was a vampire luring vulnerable people fleeing the occupation and exploiting them to his own will. The Second World War was an odd time for vampires. Some decided to dispense their own kinds of justice. Some friends of mine, Bashan, Eidyn, and their friends, they are Jews who remembered the ghetto uprising in Budapest. They did what they could to save anyone they could, and fed lavishly on the blood of their new oppressors.

At the end of the war they visited the sites of the horrors and offered the chance to turn to those who were dying. Out of the horrors of the war, a community of vampires grew in Budapest, larger and more integrated with society than elsewhere in Europe. This was another reason Casper avoids this part of the world. They did not like Casper.

ALFIE
Why not?

NEIGE
It disgusted them that he thought them dead. I know Ediyn found it tres amusing at first but Bashan was less sympathetic. From his perspective, they lived and they lived defiantly.

Ediyn is a few hundred years his junior, and related to him, a human relative.

ALFIE
That’s crazy.

NEIGE
Yes, she is his great, great, great niece, or some extraction of that. From his brother’s line. She was quite young when he turned her. She had developed a sickness and was about to die. Bashan had kept watch over his family, would swoop in now and then, Uncle Bashan, he would introduce himself, vague on the precise nature of his relation. But when he heard she was sick and came and turned her. He took her in, raised her as his own.

ALFIE
How old was she?

NEIGE
I think seventeen.

ALFIE
Fucking hell. I would not want to be seventeen forever.

NEIGE
Who would? 

Ediyn has found it has presented her some challenges, but also some opportunities. It was a great ploy when she was hunting Nazis, for example. She was beautiful but obviously young, easily led, they thought. She was both bait and hook.

Bashan did not approve. He worried about her drinking the blood of such evil men, that it might pollute her. But he has some odd ideas about that sort of thing so it is not worth troubling too much about it.

ALFIE
How old is he, exactly?

NEIGE
A little more than two thousand years, I think. He was older than Claudio, but not by enough for him to worry about him being Ancient Blood.

ALFIE
I don’t understand why he worried so much about that, what did it matter?

NEIGE
Eh, I do not know Alfie, it is all mostly nonsense to my mind. It is probably to do with the other kinds of vampire.

ALFIE
The— the what.

NEIGE
Other kinds? Well, not entirely. Some vampires, they were less susceptible to sunlight. Others continued to age, some at slower rates than humans, but others not.

ALFIE
What. What! Why didn’t you mention this before?! This is— this is huge!

NEIGE
Well, I did not think there was much point as they are all dead.

ALFIE
What do you mean, they’re all dead?

NEIGE
Claudio killed them. Systematically. They’re all gone.

ALFIE
But— but that’s. Neige. WHAT.

NEIGE
It hardly mattered. It was unlucky, those of us who were turned who had to live like this but were not even blessed to live longer. Those vampires, they did not heal as we do, either. There were fewer of them because of this, but there did seem to be an increased amount of verve for legacy amongst them. An ephemeral lifespan will do this to someone. Just look at human kind.

ALFIE
Holy shit, Neige. Holy fucking shit. This could mean fucking— fuck! It’s. Different strains, the— the notes, Bonham’s notes, it’s—

NEIGE
Slow down, you are not making sense.

ALFIE
Sorry, sorry, this is just absolutely huge? I— I don’t know how you can’t understand that.

NEIGE
They are gone and have been for hundreds of years.

ALFIE
Well. Firstly, they’re still a part of vampire history and they matter even though they’re gone and it is like. Absolutely insane to me that you were just carefully extricating decades old bones from their restraints, then you’re talking about your Jewish friends eating Nazis and saving would-be holocaust victims and then pretty much in the same breath you’re like ‘what does it matter who they were, they’re all dead’.

NEIGE
It is not that I think they do not matter, it is that I don’t see how it can possibly be relevant to discuss with you because there are none of them left.

ALFIE
Well it— there are a ton of vampires around who remember they exist, right?

NEIGE
Perhaps a ton, maybe a couple of tons, given the average weight of a human or vampire.

ALFIE
I—

Oh my god. You are. Oh my god.

NEIGE
What did I do?

ALFIE
I’m going to lose my train of thought, you’re so fucking— fuck, I love you, alright?

NEIGE
More than alright with this.

ALFIE
Oui, encroyable. Uh. Fuck. So, a couple of tons, so like, twenty vampires?

NEIGE
Around about that, I think so.

ALFIE
Enough that Bonham would know about them, even if he might not be old enough to have met any of them himself.

NEIGE
Potentially, oui, this is the case.

ALFIE
Okay so, great. Um, there is some stuff in Bonham’s notes about different types and things, and it might be about this, but I— I can’t remember half of the shit anymore, I wish I had my stupid notebook but it’s all back at the house, if the house is still even there and UGH. Anyway it doesn’t matter the point is! Do you remember what you said to me after Tim Sherman?

NEIGE
Non.

ALFIE
Right, well, you said that he and Bonham and everyone else were trying to find a way to be vampires but without consequences, right? They want to be able to— to cure stuff, to be alive for as long as they want, but to not have to— yeah. To be able to go out in the sun and presumably to not have to drink blood. But, who knows what this man thinks is a good or bad thing about vampires honestly, we just know he thinks that there’s bad stuff and good stuff and he’s trying to control what bits he keeps, to make some kind of panacea or something, so he can just. Yeah.

NEIGE
I do not know what you mean by ‘just yeah’, but besides this I follow what you are saying.

ALFIE
Well. The other thing we know he’s definitely been doing is making vampires starve to the point where their brain degenerates and they become like half-mades, and making actual half-mades and releasing them, and doing vivisections on half-mades and vampires. Right?

NEIGE
Oui. But you are forgetting something.

ALFIE
What?

NEIGE
The melange.

ALFIE
Fuck. The blood. The vampire blood in Tim. It was a concoction, you’re right, made up of many sources, too many to really pin down the flavour. That’s important, you’re right. Because with everything else, he’s— what if rather than trying to find a cure, he’s trying to make a new kind of vampire? One which doesn’t have all the drawbacks of the others?

NEIGE
Perhaps.

ALFIE
Ahh, and haemapheresis, it’s. It’s not about curing— it’s about treating. That’s what Tim was saying, I think? God I can hardly remember. But I think that’s what he was saying? Maybe they’re trying to isolate one specific part of the system of things that makes vampirism work. Maybe they think if they can get rid of that one part, it fixes everything else.

NEIGE
Maybe.

ALFIE
You don’t sound convinced.

NEIGE
That is not it.

ALFIE
What? What is it?

NEIGE
Ah. It is something. I need to think.

ALFIE
Neige—

NEIGE
Oui, oui. It is just. Claudio, once he’d made his little ascent to power, he would only drink the blood of other vampires.

ALFIE
I. Fuck.

NEIGE
I mentioned it only because I wonder if it may be relevant to Bonham’s experiments.

ALFIE
Yeah. Yeah, I know. And maybe it is. I just—

NEIGE
I share traits with horrible people too. 

I love it when you bite me, mon râleur.

ALFIE
You’re sure?

NEIGE
I am. Je promets.

PAUSE.

ALFIE
I’m sorry there was nothing here for us.

NEIGE
It is okie. I know where we are trying next, but I’d been hoping to avoid it.

ALFIE
Why?

NEIGE
It was open more recently.

ALFIE
I mean, surely that means we’re more likely to find something there.

NEIGE
Oui.

ALFIE
I— I know it’s hard when it’s. When Casper— But he’s—

Even if he was working with Bonham. He wasn’t—

The stuff we saw, none of that was him. He made Bonham leave when he started suggesting it. The stuff with Linda, with those soldiers in the war, all of that. He was trying to help people. Save them.

NEIGE
Without asking.

ALIFE
Yeah it was— it was ill-advised but it did save them! He saved Linda’s life. She’d fully be dead if he hadn’t dripped that blood into her eye…

NEIGE
Quoi?

ALFIE
Huh?

NEIGE
You got this, uh, glazed look upon your face, what are you thinking of?

ALFIE
Just. That he put it in her eye, that’s all. The ocular nerve goes right to the brain… I wonder if he was doing that on purpose.

NEIGE
Maybe.

ALFIE
Yeah. Yeah, maybe.

NEIGE
I am alright now. We should hunt. And then we should go somewhere more comfortable. Though honestly I will accept any location that feels less haunted.

ALFIE
We’ve got time to hunt?

NEIGE
You will still bite me though, oui? When we find somewhere safe to sleep?

ALFIE
If you want me to.

NEIGE
I do.

ALFIE SIGHS

ALFIE
Okay.

NEIGE
I love that you are a freak in this way. It delights me.

ALFIE
Thank you?

NEIGE
I love the taste of my blood on your tongue.

ALFIE

Fuck.

NEIGE
Not here.

ALFIE
No. No. I literally would. But. No, creepy as fuck. No thank you.

NEIGE
Oui, come on. I think I recall there is a service stop some miles away we will reach before dawn. We can eat someone, find a bed to fuck in, and then sleep in whatever mess we make like the creatures we are, oui?

ALFIE
Okay. Except for. The sleeping in mess; we will be showering. Before and after.

NEIGE
I will concede on this and only this.

ALFIE
I don’t like waking up crusty!

NEIGE
Non. This is fair. The concept is always more romantic than the execution.

ALFIE
The concept being…?

NEIGE
Falling asleep debauched, limbs shaken out and covered in a slick of sweat and blood and—

ALFIE
Oh fuck. Fuck.

NEIGE
Well, get up off the floor then. Let’s go.

ALFIE
Right, yeah, sorry.

[END]