Being Human- Outline for 'The Cure'
Hiroshima, Japan. August 6th 1945:
Sgt. Angela Rathbone of the U.S. Army is working in military supplies. She is also a vampire. She is delivering weapons to an army base when the Atom bomb drops. The road is scattered with dead and dying people. Angela, stunned, staggers across the carnage. She sees children burned by radiation, running naked. She makes it to the empty shell of a stone house. As she catches her breath and gazes in awe at the mushroom cloud still visible in the air, she hears crying. Under part of a door are limbs and blood. Angela is drawn to it, and hungrily flips the door. Underneath, are two dead adults, burned and flayed and a 12yr old girl, clinging to them. The girl, Sachiko, is also burned, her back without skin, and her legs are bleeding from wounds caused by the nails in the door. Angela is fixated on the blood, but Sachiko sees her and leaps into her arms. Conflicted, Angela resists but Sachiko buries herself in Angela's lap. She feels comfort at the hands of a child and finally gives in, biting Sachiko deep in the neck.
London, 1887:
Harry Yorke and 30yr old Eleanor Hayes have just wed. They move into the house that Widow Eleanor was left by her first husband, killed in the First Boer War. Harry is in torment and trying to beat the curse by the love of a good woman. Eleanor is reserved, religious, temperate, and Harry genuinely loves her. Eleanor has money and a large house that Harry can hide away in. He has told Eleanor he has a morphine addiction from the pain of a war wound. Eleanor wants to help him beat the addiction by prayer and keeps him chained in the attic, locked away. He is beginning to calm, and Eleanor feels she can leave the house to do charity work in the community of Whitechapel.
Dec. 1888: Harry has been dry for a year. Eleanor wants desperately to start a family, yet Harry is reluctant. He has built a good relationship with a local doctor, Charles McNaught. However, there have been a series of murders. Prostitutes are being ripped apart by a mysterious killer, referred to as 'Leather Apron'. McNaught takes Harry under his wing, encouraging him to atone for his sins. One night, as they are walking home from church, they come across one of the victims. Harry sees his bloodlust return to the surface and he flees home and locks himself away.
McNaught tries to visit him but is refused at the door by Eleanor. Harry keeps himself away from Eleanor too. He has chained himself in the attic and she fears for his life. His screams echo through the house for days. Eleanor becomes so frightened she finally seeks out Dr McNaught and begs him to examine Harry and try to cure him from his addiction. Dr McNaught agrees to take Harry into his house, where he has a basement, fashioned as a Sanitorium. They sedate Harry during sleep and McNaught takes him.
Harry awakes, restrained by leather straps, in a filthy basement. All around him are pools of blood, and what looks like a pile of bloody rags are dumped in the corner. McNaught is packing a doctors bag with a knife, a saw and a leather apron. He reveals himself to be the 'Leather Apron AKA Jack the Ripper', and invites Harry to accompany him. He reveals he knows what Harry is, and wants him to make him immortal too so he can continue his 'work'. He cuts his own wrist to tempt Harry.
When Harry refuses, he uncovers the rags in the corner of the room, knife in hand. Sat on the floor, gagged and bound, is Eleanor. Dr McNaught calmly bends to her. Harry summons all his strength to break the leather straps, but before he can snap them, Dr McNaught plunges the blade into Eleanor's ribs and rips up to her throat. Harry roars with pain as Eleanor slumps to the floor. As she chokes on her own blood, Harry bursts from his restraints and McNaught flees the room.
Harry is inconsolable. Eleanor is not quite dead and Harry panics. He bites his wrist and feeds the blood to her. Eleanor's wounds miraculously begin to heal immediately. She is roused, and feeds hungrily from him. Harry and Eleanor are left in the basement, Harry in grief, holding his immortal love's head at his wrist.
Barry 2012: Angela and Sachiko are on the run from the Old Ones. They have spent the last fifty seven years running across Asia and Europe, hiding from the ones who are sent to find Sachiko and kill her. Ten years after Sachiko was made by Angela, she hit puberty. Angela was baffled. Sachiko began to age, at a miraculously slower rate, a year for every human ten. Her DNA is unique, she is vampire, but she had radiation poisoning. She is turning back to a human. There are vampires who want her destroyed, as an aberration of their kind. But, there are immortals who see her as a return to humanity, a return to a real life. Eleanor is one of those immortals. Eleanor has heard of Sachiko's powers and wants to reconcile with Hal and find the cure.
Eleanor has been searching for Hal for over a hundred years. After he turned her, Hal's bloodlust returned, fuelled by Eleanor's hunger. They ravaged Whitechapel during 1888, finishing off the Ripper's victims and creating more. Then, they spread far and wide across London, taking care of the poor and homeless. Eleanor became distraught at her condition, however, and became delirious in the want for children. She massacred a whole orphanage, and set it on fire but not before she created her vampire family, turning three orphans and taking them with her. Harry couldn't bear to see her pain and delirium and grew angry. He staked the children and fled her.
Now, Angela and Sachiko need the trio's help. There are a splinter group of vampires which will keep Sachiko, and revere her as a healer. They want to protect her and it is Hal's job to deliver her safely. But Hettie and her followers are pursuing her also, with a want to kill her.
Eleanor returns to Hal and he remembers his past with her. Eleanor has never recovered from her condition and is tormented by the want for children. She wants Hal to take the cure and return to human form with her so they can live out a normal family life. Hal is torn by this. He has a dilemma driven by his fears for the next cycle, his love for Eleanor, a desire to end his immortal life and his loyalty for Tom and Alex.