Dark and Deep

Bearing a child. Love, they say, begets it, besets you. Life, they insist, begins with you; over a grave you cannot not wonder they’re wrong: “I wasn’t healed from bearing her before we buried her. That was when the seed of true sin, the one that haunts me, was planted. My hatred of my husband watered that seed. I couldn’t forgive him.” Fell pregnant, they nod, fallen for many things, only some of the times pushed; over the precipice they ask you, again through the grimace, to fall in love: “I stand and run and run, the hatred in my heart and the seed in my belly growing even now until he catches me, holds me down, carries me back, and I lie alone grieving my baby in the earth, and for the one growing in me now, growing in poisoned earth.” Emptiness in each fulfilment they bury you in, in the hollows you ask the mores, is this it, am I all they say? “Long you stand looking down this road as far as you can to where it bends into the undergrowth. You sigh-- what can you find at the end of it but your own doubt, the cavernous hole where God once lived in you? You find that hole at the end of every road now, and it’s deeper every time.”

One winter, you might realize when, you’ll hear the whispers without your name. When in the aloneness the aches overtake, they won’t send the doctor but the priest. The doctor, they explain, is attending a birth, and you’ll nod, a life so overfilled needs no more loss, love regrets it, resets you: “When things die, people or love or hope or hearts, they leave their broken bones in the objects around them. So many ghosts are here, their bones rattling." Rattled out of the decrescendo one last time to answer, to relate, to defer no longer your refusal to either, this at last is power, the refusal to. “That’s when the witch grew in me, started wearing my skin.” After life, beyond the cages clattering with prayer, soul only soul, the answers, this relation skein, to whom could the priest guide? Long since buried in its fulfilment: “The hole of doubt in you feels bigger yet shallower, as if something is there to believe in, but it’s monstrous” and over a grave you cannot not wonder they’re wrong. At peace, they stop trying to rebut you: “Warm winter woolens instead of traditional formal reverend’s clothing. They make you feel like just a man.” The claim to be something more than worldly, of course, you’ve heard it a thousand times, but “No one will miss such a man, who might leave a job at the slightest whim and go singing down the open road, who is always after an open door, an easy way out.” When you take them seriously, the pain and punishment at the moment nigh, stop their raging to debut you, let loose the hellfire: “You fling the door wide, the bones there in front of me. A moment they stand balancing with emotion, and all but lose themselves, nearly tumbling down again. A tongue of fire flashes out and licks along the upper teeth. Smoke rolls inside the sockets of his eyes.” Demons of a desire so coldering it collapses, cellar secrets pretensions that bearing all this life makes more than “Bones. So many of them, where they should be, where they were, where they are not. A life made of bones rattling and seeking, their fingers still clutching at me.”

The harrowing heaves with the repetitions, so the prose complies. Any image rendered redoubles, retriples migrainely: “Scrubby patches of ice-frosted weeds poke through the hard-packed dirt. Small patches of ice, little frozen puddles, gleam here and there where the dirt dimples.” Okay fine, I’ll put on a jacket. The imagery has a power that grips you, and certainly the mood deserves it relentless, simply that sometimes repetition merely repeats. In the best cases, the doubling downhills the momentum to the sudden jerk up, like this sentence tensionreleasing through its final phrase: “Snow falls in downy flakes from the darkening sky, frosting the frozen ground, landing on leaves no step has trodden black.” But any beauty so earned wilts with the once again without passion: “Fat, lazy snowflakes drift from the darkening sky as twilight deepens.” While often the additions don’t add anything other than the originating impulse, the repetition is by its relentlessness redeemed, as sometimes the repetition, like some Stewart Lee routine, breaksthrough to new, some secret centrality you’ve been circling the entire time: “The white web, the white spider, the white moth, all glowing softly in the dim of the barn, here when all these things should be dead or sleeping through the winter cold. They are as out of place as you are, the design of your life having brought you here despite your lack of fitness for the job, for any job, really. It seems in its unnatural presence a design of darkness clothed in white, appalling, inevitable.” Logic of the gravity of the given gives you the drawing perspective. In there, the core compels.

Briskness keeps the impasto from muddying, so perhaps blurry better describes the pained picture redoubling the forest in so many trees through which you terrorglimpse “a white figure flickering in the woods, keeping pace with you”. That this haunting bespeaks a strange hope testifies to the electricity that keeps sparking from the unsaid, a stronger current to wish be carried to the surface the salience of all these shocks.

Dark and Deep is a parser adaptation of a collection of poems, in which you incarnate a priest, called to an old woman’s bedside as she is about to die, to provide comfort in her final moment. Throughout the conversations, you learn more about the woman, and how certain rumours about her peculiar abilities fare true - which she temporarily shares with you. At its core, the story is one of loss and grief, regrets and deeply buried secrets.

I can’t say much about the adaptation of the poems, as I never encountered that poet prior to playing this game, though I do not believe being knowledgeable in English poetry is required to enjoy the story. I was hooked from the start. It is beautifully crafted, depicting life in all its glory and failures, all the good it can bring, all the ugly sides it can reveal, and all the bad you unearth.

The central mechanic offers a unique perspective, by flipping between the conversation between the priest and Mrs. Lajway in the present, and snapshots of her life in the past. The way the conversation deepens as you explore her life through her answers and those past snippets is really engaging. The further it goes, the more I wanted to know about this interesting woman and the life she left. It gave layers and complexity to an old woman, discarded by society.

In a way, that structure reminded me a bit of After the Accident, with the shift between past and present when “touchstones” are interacted with, yet still feels completely different and fresh. It enhances the codes of horror, by playing with your senses, as you see different things in the priest and Mrs. Lajway’s eyes, making you question reality (is all maybe just a trick of the mind? influenced by the bewitching words of an old woman’s tale?).

A very engaging and, at times, disturbing game. Would recommend in a heartbeat to horror fans.