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 childhood illness, including hospital treatments and seizures

Mentions of child medical exploitation

Mentions of unethical medical experimentation, including on children

Implications of medical gaslighting

Mentions of blood

Descriptions of emotional distress

Discussions of death and grief

Transcript

ALFIE

We’ve been driving for days. Literal days. It’s interesting, how the nights are getting longer the further north we go. 

Neige and I have talked a lot, this time. It’s better than the silence last time we were on the road like this. Better than how fraught things felt after my head got ripped off. Still, it’s been a lot, and a lot of processing. 

I’ve been going through the patient files we took. Neige has been driving, which is always an experience, to say the least, but there are hardly ever any other cars on these roads, so it feels less dangerous. Most of the time. Sometimes there aren’t really any roads. 

I keep making jokes about invading Russia in winter, mostly because it annoys Neige. It’s not the snow you have to worry about, he says, it’s when it melts. Under preparing for the cold will kill you, sure, but nobody is prepared for what the meltwater does to the Russian countryside. Fields upon fields of slick mud which can take the occasional animal crossing them but you try to march an army over that? You make a swamp that sucks you in and swallows you whole. 

I kinda love the way he talks about this. Like he knows. Like he’s been sucked in by the mud, a member of some army marching somewhere, ill-advised. As far as I know he’s never been a soldier. I can’t imagine him taking orders well. He’s a real brat. Maybe he followed one, though. Maybe he picked off soldiers at the edge of the battlefield. 

The angel of death, the other side of the coin to Casper’s angel of mercy. 

I think that’s why I’ve not asked him about it directly, honestly. That comparison. We’ve talked a bit more about Casper since. Yeah. But it has all been about what he believed, what we think he was up to, speculating on what he might have known. 

That’s where we’re going. We can’t avoid it.

Neige followed him out here the first time more than a century ago. Across Russia, into the wilds, the snow. 

There’s one more city on the route, Norilsk. At the last place we got a hotel, I looked it up. The northern-most city in the world. You need a permit to visit it. We don’t have one, not a real one, anyway, but Neige says it will be fine. He owns a place up there, because of course he does. It’s also not the end of our journey, but it will be nice to stop, to be near civilisation, even if I don’t speak a word of Russian and it’s likely to be a very weird kind of place indeed, given its isolation, given the place we are. 

A part of me likes the quiet out here in the wilderness. I can see why this is somewhere you’d go, if you were like Casper.

When Neige followed him out here last time, he only went so far. He was afraid he was going to end his life, though he didn’t say that explicitly I could feel it in the intensity of his words. Casper would say he was visiting a friend, whenever he came out this way. Neige didn’t believe him anymore, but he got close enough to see that there were two trails in the snow, even though it made it hard to track a scent. Casper wasn’t alone. That was enough for Neige to believe that he was alright. 

Of course, our running theory is that the friend he was meeting out here was Bonham, so Casper very much wasn’t alright. 

I mean, was he ever, really? 

I’ve been thinking about him a lot. About the day we met and all the ones after. How he resolutely followed at a distance but never seemed to want to let me forget he was there, despite the separation. Driving me to work like it was his duty to keep me safe. Maybe he thought it was.

I suppose it explains somethings, what happened to me. Why I didn’t die when the half-mades came for Ben that night by the river. Why they kept seeming to show up around me so much more than other people.

I keep wondering what it feels like, to be them. If they have anything like an experience. Their brains are pretty much gone, only a few structures in tact, from what I saw in the notes we took from the lab in York. They seem to be able to smell, but. Is it smelling like humans and vampires smell, or is it more like how plants taste pheromones from other plants? Do they move the way ivy moves, feeling out the way? There doesn’t seem to be much sense to them. 

There is a kind of comfort in that, I don’t know. That they can’t feel the rot creeping through them. 

Neige said he knew a vampire, one of those other types he was talking about. He lived two hundred years, aging very slowly, but his body began to fail him. In the end, his flesh was putrid, falling off his bones. He couldn’t drink any blood; the parts of him for swallowing and processing it had rotted away. He couldn’t speak. Neige says the only thing that makes him certain he didn’t become a half made was how reluctant he was to move. It suggested he felt pain in a way that half-mades can’t.

There’s something desperate about them. Pathetic, almost sad. The way they only want to drink blood. This drive is the only thing alive in them, but their bodies can’t do anything to fix themselves no matter how much they drink. I’ve read Bonham’s experiments; the blood pools and pools inside of them, but never gets processed, goes nowhere. 

All those people they killed trying to save themselves, when they were beyond saving. 

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how much it seems to take to bring us back from the brink? It’s funny; getting my head ripped off was less of a problem for my body than the fact they drained so much of my blood. Neige was furious about that. They were letting it just drip out, onto a plastic sheet on the floor. It was hard to recover any of it. He drank and fed me, drank and fed me, did all he could for me to heal, but it was still hours, hours until I was conscious again. 

Poor Neige, after what happened with Claudio, it seemed to take him years to recover from that, though he admits he was in no place to properly register the passage of time. 

He’s hunting now. He wanted to go alone. I think he knows I needed a bit of space, and it’s right that we shouldn’t leave this stuff in the car unattended, even if it is unlikely anyone will find it. I could get by without it, but he’ll probably ask me to bite him later. I won’t say no, even though there’s a… I don’t know. There’s a heaviness to it that wasn’t there before. 

Maybe it should have been. I didn’t know who he was or what he’d been through. I didn’t know what it meant, before, that he let me drink from him. That he let me draw his blood and try to use it to revive Cas, too. The trust in that. The selflessness. 

It all makes me feel kind of hollow, with how— how much all of that is. 

To know what he was doing and that he just did it because he wanted to help. 

He didn’t know me either. 

God. It’s hard enough to reconcile the fact I’m alive because of Casper. Now I’m alive because of Bonham, too. Fuck. 

Ugh. 

Which brings me back to the patient notes. 

It seems like they wanted kids who were immunocompromised, or who they could make immunocompromised. They gave us the blood, probably some earlier version of whatever mixture we found in Tim Sherman, alongside bone-marrow transplants. Like they were trying to make our immune systems grow in tandem with something in that blood. 

They name it, in the patient notes. Factor V. I don’t know if it’s V like the roman numeral or V like the letter, like it stands for ‘vampire’, ha. There’s not much about what it is, here. These are patient records not a review of their experiments. There’s a couple of references to attempts at giving Factor V in isolation but they found it just completely obstructed the development of new bone marrow and killed the patients unless it was given as part of a suspension. A mix of other substances. Which is presumably whatever we found in Tim Sherman, but I don’t know. They mention only that the suspension is made of composite group vampire blood. Composite of what, they don’t say. 

It’s been useful, though, to look through this. I think what they were hoping was to find a way to make a sort of, I don’t know, middle ground. Between vampires and humans. 

It almost always failed. The kids died or became half-mades. A couple of them became vampires, but they’re recorded as deceased in their patient notes when that happens, and there aren’t any records of what happened to them after. I can only tell which ones they are because they get marked down as ‘condition: type 2’. From the dates of their cremations I’m guessing they killed them right away. 

It still makes me angry. So angry it doesn’t feel like anything except this sort of white heat in my whole body. Every single set of patient notes for every single child has a consent form signed by parents or guardians, extensive interviews with those people. Every one of them was desperate to do something, anything to save their kid. 

It disgusts me that Bonham exploited that. 

There’s a real sense that they really think they’re doing something, too. That they’re really saving these kids. I— I don’t know why but the tenderness in some of these notes makes me feel physically fucking ill. The people treating these children, they cared about them. They thought they were helping. 

None of the notes about the kids are written by Bonham himself but his ideas are fucking bleeding through them all. 

What those ideas are is still kind of hazy, though. They’re connected to what Casper thought; that vampires like me and Neige, we’re not really people. Not in the most important ways. We’re dead things with a secret in our blood that will unlock a brighter future for real people. 

We’re just things to them. Just things. 

The patient records that belong to vampires are really old. Most of them are from before, and maybe during when Cas and Bonham were in contact. The approach in those notes is totally different from what was happening with the kids. They’re really trying to cure them. The vampires all seem to come to them willingly, desperate to undo what had been done to them. 

I remember not long after I was turned, Neige said something to me about being lucky that I got to choose this life. That I wanted it. I. I knew he was right, then. I’d heard what had happened to Casper. But reading these things, it. It makes me ache, you know? 

Reading some of them I. I wonder if Casper was the one who interviewed them, the later ones. Just, the specific lines of questioning, the things that are emphasised, what gets played down. How again and again they return to this idea that these vampires need to be saved. That the last hope they have is what’s been done to them might be undone. 

But who knows. 

Who knows about any of it, really? 

What’s clear is these vampires, they consented to what happened to them, and brutal as some of it seems to be, it’s nothing on what we saw in that disused lab above the sanatorium, or what we saw in the lab in York, or what they did to Neige in Scotland. 

What I think that means. What I hope that means is that it when Casper was there, even if he didn’t think we are alive, he thought we were things worth caring about. Whose pain mattered in some way even if it might not matter as much as before. 

Vampirism in those notes, it’s talked about like a sickness. Something these people might get better from. It’s interesting that they seem to view the age of a vampire differently, here, but in a way that’s sympathetic to the ideas I’ve heard about ancient blood being more powerful. There’s a concept buried in these notes that the more recently a vampire was turned, the easier it might be to turn them back. 

There are a couple of mentions of ‘slow changes’ in those notes. I remember Casper said something about that, about the girl Antoinette turned, the one he loved like a sister, who was the reason that Casper ended up killing Antoinette. And maybe I had a slow change too, with how difficult things are. I’ve not really talked about that with Neige. 

There’s a few theories here but again, these are patient notes, not reviews of experiments, so it’s light on details. The amount of blood you need to turn someone is variable. There’s a minimum; about two pints. The person has to be close to death for it to really work, and ideally to be pretty low on their own blood, it seems like. There’s an implication that there’s a sweet spot, though. Beyond a certain point, if a person is really hurt or really unwell, everything gets harder. You’ll know about as quickly as with any change as to whether you’ve been successful; about three days in give, or take, but if the change is slow, the fledgling will need a lot more blood to finish turning, and otherwise will get stuck in a helpless kind of limbo until they starve to death. 

There are even a few reports that other vampires mentioned here, ones who’d been turned in particularly brutal circumstances where as well as turning their body was repairing huge numbers or bones or the symptoms of a long-term illness, where they couldn’t drink human blood for months, like even when they’d started to become more cognisant, their bodies still couldn’t process it. 

That’s interesting because of me, but also because of Neige. Because of what he said about after Claudio. Drinking human blood made him sick.

Also. Casper. When I was treating him, I— sometimes when I gave him blood, it would come back out a bit, a— a kind of regurgitation, and I… yeah. But that was mostly vampire blood. My blood. Until I started playing around with Tim. By then I’d stopped logging things properly. Not that it matters. I don’t have any of my notes anyway. 

Or enough of Bonham’s to make more sense of what I’m looking at—

Oh. Neige will be back soon. I can hear him on the snow. 

I can’t smell him yet, but he’ll be back. 

Ah, fuck. That means he probably heard a bunch of what I was saying. Sorry. I know you don’t like me speculating about the Claudio suff. 

He’s not responding. 

Ach. Well. I suppose it’s pretty cold out— 

Oh. 

He says he didn’t want to interrupt. Okay. Well, thank you. You can interrupt me, though. I don’t mind. 

I was in the middle of something, yeah, but. Maybe I should put all this away, now. I don’t know if this is helping. I’ve tried to record my thoughts about this like eight times already and I keep deleting them. It’s just hard to put it into words. Not just because things are so vague and hard to parse out here, but because of all of the—  the feelings? I’m so fucking angry, you know? So fucking angry. 

No. 

No I haven’t tried to talk about Casper’s notes.

Oh. You meant. My parents. Yeah. I don’t know what to say. I. Well… my parents. Thought. They were doing what was best for me. They felt lucky that they were so close to where Bonham was working, that it was only a day’s drive away. Trying to juggle having Grace, and my dad’s work… I was on my own there alone a lot. 

A lot of my notes are written by this nurse, Daksha. She. She played chess with me. She drew pictures with me. She– she fucking helped me learn to read. I can’t remember any of this, except sort of. Flashes? I think I know her face, vaguely. Soft brown skin, wide, pretty eyes. A smile with crooked teeth, I think. I think I remember her coming in the night when I was scared and laying on the bed with me but I don’t know. 

I do remember someone taking my hands and telling me I could do this. I don’t know what was about to happen but I know I was shit scared. And she sat on the floor in front of me, whoever she was, Daksha, maybe, but whoever, and she had on all this protective gear. It must’ve been because they wanted to avoid infecting me with anything, I guess. But nobody had touched me for days, I remember that, except to change my dressings or draw my blood but this nurse she sat down in front of me and she took my hands and told me I could do it. That I was strong even though I didn’t feel it. 

That— that memory it. It’s so much of who I am. It’s so much of why my life went the way it did, why I wanted to be a nurse, why I… 

They thought they were helping me. And they did save my life. But I am the only one. 

Sixty two patient records. Detailed notes about the children’s behaviour and the treatments they received. And I am the only one who lived. Of sixty two.

I’m not the last one they treated. There were another dozen or so, after me. They all died, too. And in their notes they get compared to me. They were trying to replicate the conditions that had led to my being alive and they couldn’t. The kids just kept dying. 

And then, twenty years ago. It all stopped. 

No more kids. No more patient records we have access to. All the places we’ve been to, the people Neige has found info on, they suggest that the line of enquiry that led Bonham to whatever he did that saved my life, he decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. 

I can only think that’s because he found something else that he thought was better. 

But I don’t know what. 

[ALFIE SIGHS]

I remember exactly when I got interested in vampires. I was, oh I dunno, I must have been about eleven, I think? And I was in a bookshop. YA was a pretty new thing then, and I remembered wandering over to the shelf, just outside the children’s section. The bookshop was vast, it was one of my favourite places in the world. We used to go there for a day out, just dad and me. He’d disappear off to look at the adult sci-fi and the stuff about war, and I’d be occupied in the children’s section for hours. We were pretty tight on cash at the time because dad wasn’t working, so we were only allowed to make a singular purchase each when we went to the bookshop. I liked that, and tried to pick only the book I would most want to read, which meant I’d often get through whole children’s novel’s without committing to purchase them just to make sure the book I was picking would be worth it. 

I remember that particular day was weird, though. I’d got into loads of trouble at school. There was this other kid and she liked to wind me up and I’d ended up throwing a chair, I got so angry about it, and then I had a complete breakdown about that. I had a panic attack so bad the teachers called for an ambulance. They thought I was going into anaphylactic shock. But when the ambulance got there they realised it wasn’t that but they took me to the hospital anyway incase it was asthma or something. I wonder what my actual patient records suggested about my illness when I was little, because it sure as shit doesn’t have any of the vampire stuff in there. 

At the hospital I had another massive panic attack when they hooked me up to IV fluids and freaked out so badly when they gave me an oxygen mask that I scratched one of the doctor’s face’s and had to be sedated. 

I woke up at home in my own bed. I’d broken my wrist in one of my freak outs. Mum and dad pulled me out of school for the rest of the term. They didn’t really. Talk about it. Or much to me at all. But then, on the weekend, dad said we should go for a bookshop day out. I was so excited I cried and we almost didn’t go because I was so worked up, but I managed to get calm enough that they let me in the end. 

The children’s section in this bookshop was pretty big. The ceiling was lower than the rest of the shop, in that little corner. It was a huge ware-house type of building, the kind that normally has a supermarket in it, but this was all books and records and CDs, and a little cafe at the front. The children’s section was right behind the cafe. The lowered ceiling was painted like a night sky, all stars and swirls of colour like the aurora, and a few spotlights. The carpet was like the night sky, too, and there was a little collection of comfy chairs nestled amidst the low, kid-sized shelves, where, if you were me, you’d plonk yourself down and try to whittle the selection of twenty odd books you’d accrued in the hours since you arrived down to just one. 

That day, none of the books were hitting quite right. My wrist was hurting in its cast. I was upset that I couldn’t find anything I really wanted. And then I spotted the YA shelf. 

It’s funny, really. It was definitely a book for girls. Pale white hands, loosely holding an apple. I picked it up, read the back. Bella Swan was certain that Edward was a vampire, that he wanted to eat her, and that she was in love with him. 

I felt my pulse pick up. I don’t know why. I read the opening pages. I wasn’t blown away by the writing, but there was something about it which compelled me. By that night, I’d read the whole thing, in secret under my duvet, reading by the light of a torch. When I got to the end I started sobbing uncontrollably. Spoilers for Twilight, Neige, not that I’d expect you to read it, but in the books final moments, Bella thinks Edward is going to turn her. I thought it too, believed it so deeply that when he kisses her throat instead of sinking in his teeth, I started sobbing.

[ALFIE SIGHS] 

My mum rushed in. She thought there was something seriously wrong with me, but when I finally managed to speak. He didn’t turn her, I said. He didn’t turn her. ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ My mum asked me. 

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s the worst thing in the world.’ 

Oh, there you are. 

NEIGE
(Distant, muffled)
Bonsoir. 

ALFIE
I went a bit off the rails after that. I read every vampire thing I could get my hands on, watched every vampire film I could. My parents were kind of weirded out by it but they mostly seemed annoyed. Whatever Bonham explained, he didn’t tell them what he was or what the basis of his treatments were, I don’t think, because I’m sure they’d have freaked out worse than they did otherwise. 

NEIGE
I am sure of this, too. 

[LOUD THUDDING]

NEIGE
As if you might outrun me. 

ALFIE
That’s not the— Fucking hell, have you read Twilight?

[A LARGE BANG]

ALFIE
Get off the car!

NEIGE
Non! Get out, you should come and see this too. Come up and sit with me.

ALFIE
Ugh. Fine. 

[ALFIE GETS OUT OF THE CAR]

NEIGE
Did you learn what you hoped to?

ALFIE
Not really, no. 

NEIGE
It is funny hearing you talk about how vampires came into your life before they. You know.

ALFIE
Came in me? 

NEIGE
Crass. 

ALFIE
Without fail. Seriously though I have no idea if I’m stringing any of this stuff together right. Without notes about their actual experiments, I’m stuck reading between the lines, trying to infer stuff from vague notes and implications. 

NEIGE
Fascinating. 

ALFIE
You don’t sound fascinated. 

NEIGE
You are right, I’m not. I don’t care about any of this right now. Please come up here with me and look at the sky. 

ALFIE
Ugh, okay. Fine. 

[ALFIE CLIMBS ONTO THE ROOF]

ALFIE
Mostly, I just wanted to talk about the science. 

NEIGE
And yet you say there is hardly anything of value in this way. 

ALFIE
Well, yeah, but. It’s enough, right? And I keep hoping if I talk it out, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll spot something I’d missed before. 

NEIGE
Ah, so what is your aim, then, oui? 

ALFIE

What else would it be?

NEIGE

The same reason you always record these things. 

ALFIE
Which has always been to figure out what’s going on.

NEIGE
Liar. You thought it was an obituary, or a memorial, or a scientific document of some kind. I think it is none of these things. I think this is an history. Of you. Of this moment. It’s why you capture the things you capture. It’s why you trim the quiet moments and the sex, but leave in the foreplay. Why you delete hours of rambling about blood types and dictated files, but you kept the first time I told you I loved you. 

ALFIE

Neige– 

NEIGE
Please. I haven’t it in me tonight to argue with you.

ALFIE

I don’t want to argue, either. 

[BEAT OF QUIET]

ALFIE

Do you want me to stop recording stuff? 

NEIGE

I love how you are choosing which pieces to preserve. I love that you keep those moments close this way. As though the past might, for a moment, become like the present. 

But right now, I would like you to sit here with me and look at the sky.

[MOVEMENT AS ALFIE SITS DOWN]

ALFIE
Oh— oh my god. 

[ALFIE GASPS]

NEIGE
Haéusōs. It is one of the few old words I still know, because it has not wandered so far as most of the others. Aurora, they call her now.

ALFIE

Tell me about her. 

NEIGE

Most of it is gone now. Some relearned from others’ histories. I remember the first time I saw them, the lights. A dawn in the dark of the night. How blessed I felt, to witness that dancing beauty. How alive and on the earth. It is strange. I was a young vampire, then, but I remember looking up, thinking. A hundred years from now I will return and Haéusōs will still bless the night if I know where to look. 

ALFIE

You are amazing. 

NEIGE

Hmm. Thank you. Here I believe that a more accurate descriptor might be old. I am simply very old indeed.

ALFIE
Pretty sexy, as fossils go. 

NEIGE

(fondly)

Tais-toi! 

Fossil is a good word for me, though. 

ALFIE

Hmm. I remember hearing this thing about octopuses, once, where– 

NEIGE

Is it not octopi? 

ALFIE

Shut up. Octopoids. Anyway, right, someone was talking about it being tragic that they’re relatively short lived but actually this is evolutionarily a fantastic adaptation, to have such a huge brain but to be able to live a complete, replicating life-cycle so quickly. It’s incredibly efficient, evolutionarily speaking, so yeah. Maybe you’re right. But probably I don’t think it’s helpful to think about things in terms like that, not when it comes to people. Especially not when the time frame we’re considering is what? Ten, twelve thousand years? 

NEIGE

Eh, oui. Cannot be certain. Something like this. Youngest it is possible that I might be is like 9000 years or so? But beyond this it seems there is too much record of towns and cities for it to be likely. I remember, though it is hard to think, I remember such densely populated areas being rare for. Oh. For so long. 

ALFIE

Jesus. 

NEIGE

What? 

ALFIE

Oh. I. There so few people, you were so new. I can’t imagine. You must have been so hungry, all the time. How did you even function? 

NEIGE

Poorly. Violently. 

ALFIE

Yeah. 

NEIGE

It is not worth thinking about it; it is not happening now and I barely remember. This is one of the few gifts of this time for me. What? 

ALFIE

Can I kiss you?

NEIGE

Oh. You may. 

[SMALL KISS]

ALFIE

Prettiest fossil around. 

NEIGE

I do not know, have you ever seen an ammonite? 

ALFIE

You’re so weird. 

NEIGE

Oui. A statistical anomaly in many ways. I’ll be very difficult to plot in your graphs. 

ALFIE

Ugh, talk dirty to me. 

NEIGE

You’ll have to reconfigure all of your data. 

ALFIE
(laughing)

Shut up! 

NEIGE

Make me.

[ALFIE’S LAUGH FADES]

ALFIE

Not now. 

NEIGE
Why not? 

ALFIE
I just. Want to be with you for a moment.

NEIGE

Ah, this I can do. 

ALFIE

I think I might expect too much from you sometimes. 

NEIGE

What do you mean? 

ALFIE

You’re so measured. So. Thoughtful. Sometimes you seem to have it all together but. Yeah. I don’t know. You’re a creature. You’re a thing that looks at the sky and sees these lights dancing and believes in something. I don’t know. You stood here then, like we’re lying here how. You have all that time inside of you, and you’re still alive. And a person. And a creature. 

You’re not wise, or like. No, you are wise, but it’s. Yeah. You’re you. Neige, the person. I, sorry. I don’t know. Probably sounds stupid. 

[A LONG MOMENT OF QUIET]

NEIGE

(barely more than a whisper)

Merci. 

ALFIE

Don’t cry. 

NEIGE

Ah, non. Let me. 

ALFIE

Okay. 

[MOVEMENT AS ALFIE COMES CLOSER TO NEIGE]

NEIGE

Ah. Ah. A long time. A long time. Hmm. Maybe in ten thousands of years you will come here and look and the lights will still be dancing. Maybe when you look at them you’ll think of me. 

ALFIE

You’ll be there too. 

NEIGE

Hmm. 

ALFIE

You will. You’ll look at the sky with me and we’ll think about this moment and it’s–

NEIGE

Do not speak of this as though it is the past. 

ALFIE

Make me a promise we’ll come back here. Once every thousand years we’ll come back to this spot on this hill and look at the Northern Lights? Even if we’re not speaking. Even if we. Come alone. We. We come here. Right? Promise if I… promise you’d still come?

NEIGE

I promise. 

[END]