By Rachel J. Swym
The Darkest House summons you from across the room, a matte-black book on a blacker bookshelf. The cover looks back at you. A blue-grey house melts before your eyes like a candle on its last burn. It forms the shape of a skull. Through the skull’s eyes—the house’s windows—you see a dusty, cobwebbed living room and a greying kitchen. The more that you look at them, the more the rooms seem familiar—like the rooms of your own home.
You pick the book up off of the shelf and flip through its pages. Each is printed on black paper, with white text between red borders. The book speaks to you, the reader, as a visitor to a horrible house. It tells you stories of a cursed home transcending time and space, absorbing other buildings into itself and poisoning them, sometimes with the inhabitants still inside. You become lost, wandering aimlessly along the impossibly-twisted map of the house printed on the book’s backing paper.
The Darkest House is also patrolled by five figures representing the worst archetypes of the nuclear family. Pater (Father) brandishes a belt and calls you a disappointment. Mater (Mother) smothers you while wailing about how underappreciated she is. Frater (Brother) looms in corners and hoards your secrets. Soror (Sister) lies, steals, and stabs you in the back. Ghostly Amator (Lover) whispers anxieties and corrupted seductions in your ears.
Skimming the book makes your chest tighten. You know reading The Darkest House will be unpleasant—maybe cathartically so.
You buy the book.
Throughout your life, you have experienced dark feelings in and around your homes sometimes: uneasiness, discomfort, derealization, not-quite-rightness. There were fleeting moments of these feelings—unnerving shadows in the corner of your childhood bedroom, or the sudden conviction that you’re not alone in your apartment. Then there were times when this feeling lingered longer, as you watched someone you knew and loved become strange and unsettling.
The stories below are real memories, absorbed and reconstructed into a choose-your-own adventure. Step inside their shoes and confront their rooms of the Darkest House. Sandrine’s sense of home disappeared as she moved across the world. Izzy lost her childhood home, over and over again. Spoorti lost people who once felt like home. They lost these homes both to changes outside of themselves—time, space, break-ups—and to changes within themselves. Even if the front door was in the same place, they eventually became such different people that they couldn’t remember where it had once been.
Today, they are finding and making new homes for themselves. But they remain touched by their darker homes.
“A Darker Home”: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story
Start Here: Antechamber
You are you, but a few universes to the left. The pieces of you are still here, but in a different order. Is that still you? Probably. But something is just slightly off.
Your Mom, if you have one, is this story’s Mom. Your Ex, if you have one, is this story’s Ex. If you do not have one, you’ve gained one. They’ve been absorbed into the House for you. They are someone else’s, but here in this story, they are yours too. Familiarly unfamiliar. Contentedly unnerving. Just a bit unsettling.
You’re driving down the road. It’s early evening, an innocuous time. It’s quiet. You are headed home from work, or school, or wherever you have been. You forget where you were, in fact. You don’t remember much of today, or yesterday, but it doesn’t matter. You’re headed home.
You turn because the GPS reminds you to, but you don’t need it really. These roads are familiar, even though you’ve never seen them. You don’t have to think about where they lead. You don’t know where you’re going, though you feel as though you do.
So. Where are you going?
(Somewhere far away—maybe as much an idea as it is a place. Go Back.)
(A traditional suburban home containing a traditional nuclear family. Go to Concrete.)
(The parent, sibling, or family member in the car with you. Go to Fifth.)
Back
You drive to the airport, board the plane, and step off into a place with bilingual signage. You can read both languages.
You meet your parents outside. They pack your suitcases into the trunk and drive you to your childhood house. They ask you all of the typical questions you’d expect after being away at college for months, and you answer them. But in-between the questions, there is silence. It’s not comfortable, familiar silence. It’s dry, heavy, and foreign.
The silence follows you through the front door. Everything is as you remember it—the walls the same color, the furniture in the same place—but they regard you as a guest, not a returning resident. Your siblings, too, move around you like they’re not used to your body being next to them anymore. The feeling makes your skin crawl. It’s still me. I’m back, you feel, but you’re not. Either this home isn’t the same anymore, or you aren’t.
When the table is set for dinner, your brother and his girlfriend set four places instead of five. They apologize and drag a chair over at the last minute, an afterthought. Here you are, a place you had so longed for while away at school, but suddenly, you find yourself yearning to be back across the ocean. Back where you really belong.
But where do you belong anymore?
(Maybe with your grandparents, a home of nostalgia and childhood enchantment. Go to Dust.)
(Maybe with your partner, somewhere new you’ve made familiar. Go to Endurance.)
Concrete
You turn your car onto your childhood street. It ambles along the sweet, narrow suburban road. Loose chips of asphalt grumble pleasantly under the tires, until they shoot like bullets into the weeds.
As the neighbors’ houses roll past, so do childhood memories. You and your sister racing around the big backyard in summer. Crawling behind the unruly bushes to play hide and seek. Pressing your hands into concrete stepping stones.
But when your address comes into view, the facade you see is not the bright yellow one you remember. Nor is it the faded yellow one you expect. It is a blinding, ghostly white.
What’s the opposite of deja vu? Whatever that is, you feel it. The shivers start from the space just below your throat and reach out into your fingers and toes. Maybe the car shakes with you. There’s a thick, clutching feeling in your diaphragm. You throw the car in park in the middle of the road.
The white mansion sitting where your childhood home once was is beautiful, in the way a rude supermodel is: stunning, but unreal. A sleek pavement pad with an in-ground pool covers what once was the backyard. Tiny, perfect flowers trim the house’s front. It’s revolting.
The yellow house hadn’t felt like home in a long time. Your mother took you from it years ago, and it decayed slowly but inevitably in your father’s hands.
But this? This Architectural Digest cutout, this monument to emptiness, erasing the last evidence of where you came from? This does not feel like it could ever be anyone’s home.
Where, now that this is gone, will you go?
(Your home after the yellow home. Go to Dust.)
(Where your mother is. Go to Fifth.)
Dust
Your teenage home is a large historic house—rooms upon rooms filled with clothes and books, your grandparents’ art, chatter and music and happy sounds. Giant windows let in so much light through the branches outside. Your grandparents welcome you home each time you return, their smiles meeting you at the entryway. Even after your parents move elsewhere, and you go off to college, your grandparents are there, in their bright shining house.
Then, your grandmother dies.
You don’t blame your grandfather for his grief, but your grandmother would not have loved this silent house where he now holds vigil. He’s built himself a graveyard, where you now live when you visit. Half of the rooms are perfectly preserved, the other half wiped clean. All of them whisper like mourners at a funeral when the lights are off.
You still stay there, when you come home from college; it’s still your “home.” When your grandfather leaves, you spend the night there alone. You grow afraid of the dark in the bright house. You run through the rooms when you hit the lightswitches, becoming a frightened child again. The wind howls outside and the branches tap the giant windows. They scratch at the glass and reach out to grab you. Your heart pounds underneath your comforter.
What is home, now that this place isn’t?
(Your partner. Go to Endurance.)
(A home you’ve made for yourself. Go to Here.)
(Have you been here before? Go to Loop.)
Endurance
Your partner’s dorm looks like any other dorm. What used to be a warm place has grown chilly. The couch cushions prick your thighs like thorns.
You’ve been dating your partner for three years. They’ve been decent years, for the most part. Consistent, comfortable, safe. You’ve felt their constant hope that your relationship will get better. You feel it in the walls of this dorm, like a box compressing you down to size. It’s suffocating.
You’ve tried to break up with them before, many times. Each time, they clung to you, draining your resolve—and you, loving them even if you didn’t love them enough, would agree. Today, once again, the feeling creeps up on you that this relationship is lifeless, a skin you are wearing for warmth. You feel the urge to shed. You steel yourself and tell your partner you’d like to see other people. Your partner—normally so desperate, so faithful—looks balefully at you, and accepts it. If you want to.
You sway on your feet in the absence of their resistance to hold you up. They agreed? The compressing box you were leaning against has given way. Why don’t they care enough to fight anymore? Your partner sees your sudden change, and tenses up. They ask if you’re alright, if you’re sure about this.
Are you?
(Break up, and flee to your family for comfort. Relationships make you feel like a teenager again. Go to Dust.)
(Sever the ties like an adult. Mourn, even if mourning feels guilty as the executioner. Go to Here.)
(Panic, apologize, and beg to get back together. They mercifully take you back, and life continues as it has. Go to Settling.)
Fifth
You are driving Mom’s car down an empty road. You are sixteen, with a learner’s permit, so Mom is in the passenger seat. Sometimes, like this time, you’re reminded you’re driving a three-ton killing machine, and you white-knuckle the steering wheel. You drive under a grey, still sky, even though it’s the middle of the day.
Mom is talking to you as though you were talking to her, and maybe you were, but it feels like you weren’t. You can’t remember the last time you spoke. Time is moving slowly, a second per minute. Your stomach drops as you beg Mom to stop talking. She will not. She insists that you asked her to tell you, that you wanted to know. You didn’t.
She tells you about a time before you—before your brother, before your dad. There was another man, she says. Another husband. Another home, another family. Maybe another daughter. There was a divorce and a name change and a restraining order. A scrubbing of the records. Secret.
He lives a few blocks away, near the town center. He remarried. Maybe you’ve met his kids. Maybe you’ve met him.
You drag yourself along the dark asphalt leading you home. You drive through tears, looking over your shoulder for monstrous men. You just went on your first-ever date. You thought Dad was Mom’s first-ever husband.
Images of other homes and other men and teenage girls who look kind of like you haunt you until you pull in the driveway. Mom insists nothing has changed. You realize your parents are adult strangers. You look toward the front door, and it feels like there’s a fifth body in your home.
(Enter the house and cry in your room. Dream of somewhere else. Go Back.)
(Reverse out of the driveway and drive to your old home, where things always made sense. Go to Concrete.)
(Have you been here before? Go to Loop.)
(Stagnate in your pain. You hate this home now, but you’ll never leave. Go to Settling.)
Here
You’re alone in your apartment. It’s nothing special. The walls are white, the floors are white, the bedding is white. It’s always slightly too hot, or slightly too cold.
But it’s yours, for now.
You’ll move out in a few months, when it’s time to move on to the next apartment. You’re always moving, lately, rarely sitting still long enough for anywhere to feel like home anymore. It’s a drifting way to live. But it’s not lonely. It’s just home.
This End
(There are others.)
Loop
It seems you’ve created a cycle. Back and forth, back and forth. We all get stuck in a rut sometimes, but you’ve allowed the House to trap you in one. New feelings are so scary that you’d rather accept the old ones, terrible as they are.
How’s the weather down there, Sisyphus? I hope you like rock climbing.
This End
(There are others.)
Settling
You stay with them, now and forever. No one will stop you, after all, from existing in discomfort. No one will save you from the unease of a home you choose. You are welcome to settle and stay, even if it doesn’t feel quite right. Even if it will never feel quite right.
And so you do.
This End
(There are others.)
Contributions sourced from Spoorti Gattu, Sandrine Faniry Rajaonarivony, and Izzy Weiss
Inspired by The Darkest House, A Role-Playing Game Product by Monte Cook Games
The Woodlands 