The Darlings
By Alysia Huang
Knowing then what would happen now, the Darlings might have thought twice before settling into the house that would in the end, take everything that they held dear - including things that they didn’t even know were possible to lose.
But by virtue of happenstance, or an ugly twist of fate, they did. And this, is how.
It was like any other mid-Autumn morning - mundane and unassuming - when the Darlings moved into their new home. The wife, Wendy, like the charming Darling; and the husband, Peter, like the lost orphan. Though their personalities and upbringings contradicted those namesakes. Peter was from a “good family”, an only child who spent summers in Normandy and winters in Aspen. Born to upper-middle class loving parents, Peter grew up in a brickstone residence with a wrap-around porch on the fashionable side of town. He knew how to ski and what the word “sommelier” meant. Wendy, on the other hand, did not. She grew up in a ramshackle flat on the unfashionable side of the unfashionable side of town, with parents who used choice expletives and the crack of a leather belt in place of words of affection, which were not in their vocabulary. From a young age Wendy knew the meanings of words Peter would not even hear until his first year of Oxford. So when they married in a June wedding after a supposedly whirlwind romance - most of which was passionately spent on Peter’s office desk at the company they both worked for - it was no surprise that their parents did not show up to support their union; Peter’s because they did not like to associate with those from the unfashionable side of town, and Wendy’s because they were dead (a horrific murder/suicide that shocked absolutely nobody).
But if there was passion in their marriage then, then there was certainly none now. As the years passed by, the office desk was traded in for a lovely townhouse (on the fashionable side of course) complete with a nursery and a separate corridor for the maids, though it was only because of one of those things that the Darlings had to move out of that townhouse. After the tragic death of their 8 year-old son Henry, Wendy could no longer bear to pass by that nursery without remembering the boy who grew up there and crying unstoppably. After numerous consultations with the physicians and multiple herbal tonics for hysteria (all of which did not seem to take effect), Peter took some advice from a university pal of his - Xavier - whose wife had suffered from a similar affliction after a miscarraige, and decided to move to the countryside for a change of scenery.
Which takes us back to the aforementioned house. Wendy had screamed and cried for days before being convinced to leave for their new home. She did not speak on the entire journey there apart from the occasional hoarse whisper for the bathroom or a cigarette.
The house itself was quite grand, 5 sleeping chambers, a sunroom, and a greenhouse as well. Peter had bought the house optimistically, thinking to himself of all the miraculous recovery that would take place in that sunroom. Xavier insisted that a sunroom was necessary for any insane woman of good breeding to overcome a bout of hysteria in, his own wife had taken to knitting in one and soon recovered in no time to pop out three more chubby, squealing babies. Peter liked the sound of that. And to make things even better, the house had cost him half of its market value. Something about bad tenants or an undesirable neighbourhood, which Peter dismissed since the tenants were - obviously - now dead, and as for the neighbours, there were none living near them for miles. It seemed perfect to Peter. Ideal. But that was before they had discovered it.
There were many strange things about that house. Annoying things like water stains on the ceiling but no source to explain them. Inconvenient things like windows that would rattle in the wind no matter how many times you would replace the panes. And strange things, like the Room. As unique as the individual and just as dubious, therefore deserving of the capital letter that declared it as only one of its kind in the whole world, a fact that would later be considered a blessing.
A seemingly simple space, Room was tucked away at the end of a long corridor, smaller than the others, with 4 walls and a ceiling like the others. But unlike the others it had a strange quality. See, Room wasn’t just any room, Room could grant any wish as long as you made it within its confines. It was a drunken night many months after they had moved in, and Wendy had been drinking excessively as usual. She liked the solitude of the small hidden space that Room provided for her, to hide from Peter’s suffocating hopefulness for her recovery. It was that night that Peter confronted Wendy in her hideaway and they exchanged many choice expletives over her lack of improvement. It was then that Wendy made a very rude remark beginning with the words “I wish” and suddenly, Peter was unable to speak. No matter how he moved his mouth or exhausted his windpipe the words simply would not come out. Peter had been shut up. By a force that neither of the Darlings could quite comprehend. But how the Darlings stumbled across Room’s ability is not nearly as important as what happened after this discovery was made. At first came shock, naturally. Then confusion, then eventually, realisation. Soon after testing out a few more requests starting with those two magic words, and of course undoing Peter’s speech impediment, came an uncertain sort of excitement. A terrifyingly giddy feeling in their stomachs and a tightness in their lungs as the Darlings became aware of every breath they drew as their wishes came to life before their very eyes. Then came the surge of wishes. And with every wish made the Darlings learnt more about Room and its capabilities.
They started with the simplest requests. Money. Gold. Jewels. Caviar.
Then came some more complex things. Famous artworks. The wedding cake they had had at their nuptials. Wendy’s favourite necklace she had lost. Peter’s prized toy model Ford he adored as a child. It was then, after a week or two when they called Peter’s cousin Thomas in Paris to confirm that the Mona Lisa had indeed not vanished overnight that they realised that Room could recreate things. Things that already existed. This was the beginning of the end for the Darlings.
Then came the fun, weeks of tumultuous and carefree fun. Dining on truffles and marzipan and pheasant baked with rosemary. Getting drunk on thousand-dollar Moët that cost them nothing but a few words while admiring paintings whose twins remained safely locked up in the Louvre. Swimming in riches and dressing themselves in fine furs and jewels. Reinvigorating their lives and bringing their fantasies to life with everything and anything they could want. Wendy wished for an exact copy of Peter’s old office desk, and Peter quit his job soon after. They began to forget about why they were there, what they were trying to forget, the pain and the sadness and discomforts of life. It was sublime, while it lasted.
Then came the next, most detrimental, most inevitable wish. When Peter woke up one morning and came downstairs to find his wife sharing a cup of tea over eggs with an 8 year-old boy sitting across from her at the breakfast table. Henry. His son. Though he had died chasing after a ball across a road and gotten hit by a car almost a year ago, there he was. Bright-eyed and very much alive. With blood colouring his round cheeks and coursing through his veins - his and Wendy’s blood. Their son.
It was a rush of confusion and joy and tears and sobbing. Peter, though he could tell deep in his gut that this was horribly unnatural and wrong, could not bear to condemn his wife for something that had kept him up at night since the moment he saw that toy Ford of his recreated before his eyes. And Henry was here. He was in his arms and breathing and talking in that high voice of his, “Father? What are you doing? Why are you crying?”
It was a miracle, it seemed. Wendy joined in with the tears and the hugging. If only they had known what would happen next.
A wholly inevitable event, was the reliability of time. Age. The one thing that it seemed Room could not achieve was manipulate or stop time. And so Henry, like any other boy, continued to grow. But the strangest thing was, though his body was growing and his voice was maturing, his mind seemed to remain the same. As the years continued to pass, and Henry grew into a man, almost towering over his father and with a firm jawline and the shadow of a beard, he would still throw tantrums, and cry when his tower of bricks fell over. It disgusted Peter to see a man larger than himself still sleeping cuddled in his mother’s arms and suckling his thumb like some sort of perverted anomaly. Peter started sleeping in a separate room from Henry and his mother, who indulged him so. Perhaps the reason Henry remained a child was because he was treated like one, but Peter did not believe so. He believed that there was no explanation other than something going wrong when Room recreated Henry to explain the man - no, the boy - before him. Peter’s happiness at being reunited with his son quickly turned into a deep shame. For himself and for his son, who he grew to resent, and he felt guilty for it.
Hearing an adult Henry scream and shriek for his mother. To sit silently biting his tongue at the dinner table when Henry refused to eat his vegetables. To have to choke back the taste of bile in his throat when his own son, nearing 20 years of age, would wet the bed and wake up crying in his deepened voice, carrying the stench of urine with him. Peter came to hate Henry. To hate Wendy for what she had done. To not be able to escape Henry within his own home and to hear his daily tantrums whenever he was refused anything by his gentle, pleading mother. She still loved Henry like the day he was born, he was still perfect to her. Wendy never made another wish unless it was for Henry’s sake. A mechanical train set, a pirate costume for Halloween, a pair of what Wendy nicknamed “big boy trousers”. All of it disgusted Peter to the point where even the sight of Henry would make his stomach turn. To see his only child and heir be reduced to an uncoordinated and infantile wreck.
No amount of distractions the Room could provide could deter him. He knew what the only thing that could satiate his hate was. So one night, after Wendy had taken a few drops of Laudanum to fall asleep, as it was getting difficult in her old age, Peter woke the sleeping Henry who lay in the arms of his mother and told him to follow him downstairs. Henry, of course did so, he was always so obedient towards his father. What happened from there was inevitable, from the beginning. Afterwards, Peter continued with his plan.
That night the house, along with the three remaining trapped inside, Wendy Darling, Peter Darling, and Room, burned to the ground. An inevitable event, it seemed. The most likely fate for the Darlings from the beginning. Though they may rest with the knowledge that they were the last to fall victim to Room and his many, many talents.
Rationale
The theme of “The Darlings” is very clear; “Be careful what you wish for” being the simplest and shortest way to sum it up. Its purpose, much like similar tales of ambitious heroines aiming too high only to fall hard, or men of science refusing to accept the realities of life and death, is to warn readers of the consequences of actions made out of desperation or passion without due consideration for the outcomes.
I took inspiration from popular culture in films, books, and TV that either reminded me of the gothic genre or contained (or subverted) gothic features. I drew on inspiration from modern horror and thriller themes in film and entertainment especially, identifying intriguing plot devices, concepts, and ideas that I wanted to reinterpret and incorporate into my own writing. Classic gothic horror films and the alternative and subversive adaptations of gothic tropes in independent distributors like Neon, Versus, and Blumhouse provided ample reference and inspiration for this narrative from multiple perspectives and lenses. I strived to make my mental list of film references and inspirations made up of dozens of tiny details or lines of conversation combined to create a story that aimed to recreate the gothic genre in my mind to portray what my own interpretation of the genre is today. A few examples that stand out to me are the inspiration behind Henry’s character arc and immaturity which was inspired by a character named Ari from the sci-fi teen series “Maximum Ride”, who had the mentality of a 9 year old though he had the appearance of an adult man. Another is how I got the idea to write “Room” as a character or entity rather than an inanimate object or place, from “Monster House”, a cult kids halloween movie from the 2000s.
There are many classic horror and gothic tropes contained all across different genres and subgenres of media and film, that it was easier to see how others had retranslated and redone the genre’s classic tropes in a refreshing and modern take to suit different audiences and keep up with the demand for newer media. In the narrative, more obvious use of tropes are the “grieving couple who has just lost a child”, “getting more than you bargained for (from a wish or request)”, and the tricky concept of reanimation or recreation of something that should have remained dead - an obvious Frankenstein reference. Mary Shelley’s misunderstood and at times, infantile, complex monster also served as inspiration for Henry’s mentality, mirroring a mad scientist in how his mother created him without considering the uncertainties and dangers of bringing him back, and twisting this once-innocent child into something detestable and pitiful.
I wrote the narrative to have an an “upper-class”, sort of late 17th to early 18th century feel to it, much alike the Yellow Wallpaper, whose themes of taboo mental illness and conservative views on depression and social withdrawal I adopted for the character of Wendy, who much like Perkins’ protagonist, started off on a journey of “recovery” enforced by her husband. The themes of isolation and lonely sense of abandonment in Perkins’ work were an inspiring point to draw from, and contributed greatly to my choice of a similar setting and background from which to begin the narrative. Like the Yellow Wallpaper, I wanted my narrative to give the reader a similar feeling that they were in a different time period with its own set of rules, but not make it a “period piece” and to make its commentary more subtle, but subversive with a dry humour and monotone wit that reminds the reader that they are judging from a different time and with it, a different mindset; “a sunroom was necessary for any insane woman of good breeding to overcome a bout of hysteria” is a good example. Words from that time period’s vocabulary like “hysteria” (or “melancholia”) are used to highlight the time’s dismissive stigmas surrounding mental illness, and the mention of a “trend” such as a sunroom being attributed as necessary for a “woman of good breeding” draws attention to the class divides of the time and the focus on social and public appearances, poking fun at the vain values of self-image of the time - what was or wasn’t deemed “fashionable” (reminiscent of Gatsby perhaps?).
Cherry-picking the most iconic and “hallmark” tropes of gothic literature and melding them with modern tropes and characterizations from newer entertainment spanning multiple genres such as horror and sci-fi provided my narrative with some opportunity for a newer take on old tropes by learning from and combining different elements from a vast library of gothic and its many subgenres, by-products, and literary brethren.