Nightmare in the Blood
Brooke Wonders
*
My husband and I played Bloodborne together. For nongamers: Bloodborne is a critically acclaimed gothic-horror videogame put out by FromSoftware and developed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, arguably the greatest living game auteur. I say my husband and I played Bloodborne together, but that’s not true: my husband manned the controller while I watched from the couch, laptop perched on my knees as I researched every available quest chain in the game.
At the moment, our Hunter was in a pit, wandering through darkness. Avatars in Bloodborne are called Hunters, and they resemble disheveled Victorian goths. Our Hunter wore a black tricorn hat, a jaunty black capelet, and a black bandana over her nose and mouth. Few of these features were currently visible.
“I don’t think there’s anything in here,” my husband complained.
“Keep walking. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”
A gray-pink mass emerged from the darkness: a brain, tall as our Hunter and covered in too many eyes, with a bouquet of tentacles blooming from its side. It stared at us. We’d found the dying body of the Brain of Mensis.
“This is the thing that wrecked us?”
The Brain of Mensis sits atop a tower in the Nightmare of Mensis region. When its gaze falls on you, you take damage—quickly and brutally. We’d spent most of the level hiding behind pillars to keep out of the Brain’s sightline, until finally we found a lever that dropped the Brain of Mensis down into the pit. Now, we hunted it.
Mensis sounds like menses. Hunters chug blood vials instead of health potions—where’d that blood come from? Toward the end of the Nightmare of Mensis, the thin wail of a baby leads players to a woman dressed in white, her front stained with blood. Beyond her is Mergo’s Wet Nurse, a four-limbed, black-shrouded angel of death who fights beside a rusted pram. Once Mergo’s Wet Nurse has been defeated, the baby’s cries stop. The Lovecraftian Great Ones who rule the benighted world of Yharnam have stillbirths, attempt surrogacy, and even babysit—despite continuous failure to achieve parenthood, they keep trying. Bloodborne’s imagery evokes the discomfort and silence surrounding reproduction and the female body.
“This walkthrough says to use the Make Contact gesture,” I told my husband.
“How did anyone ever figure this out?” he grumbled, but complied. Our Hunter bent her arms into a 90-degree angle. “Now what?”
“Don’t touch the controller.”
A minute is forever in videogame time, especially when shadows usually hide beasts who try to murder you. We waited in the dark for Make Contact to make contact. At last, the brain rewarded us with loot: a rune that increased the blood echoes we won by killing things. Even Bloodborne’s currency has a gothic name.
“Now what?” my husband asked again.
“The internet says to kill it, but you don’t have to.”
We sat in silence for a moment. The brain’s sad eyes watched us. Then my husband hacked it to death, a mercy.
I hate being the girl who watches boys play videogames, but I wrecked my wrists playing World of Warcraft in the aughts, and my hands go numb and stop working whenever I game. This chronic pain had recently been overshadowed by a more acute agony, however. Elizabeth McCracken, in her memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, refers to her stillbirth as “the calamity,” and there is no better word. At the time of my miscarriage, everything I knew about pregnancy loss came from McCracken’s book, and though stillbirth is not miscarriage, I’m grateful she shared the gory details, as they were all I had to go on. My husband and I played Bloodborne because I lost a pregnancy, and immersing ourselves in body-horror fantasy felt easier than talking about it.
My husband held my hand as the ultrasound tech told us she couldn’t find a heartbeat. I laughed in shock, and my husband gave me a worried smile. I was in the eleventh week of my pregnancy and about to exit the first trimester, or so I thought. The OB/GYN told us I had a blighted ovum, and that based on its size, the being inside me had ceased to be at nine weeks. Instead of suggesting a D&C, the usual procedure for a miscarriage occurring after week ten, the OB/GYN said, “I’m so sorry,” and sent me home to pass it naturally. A D&C, or dilation and curettage, is the same surgical procedure used for medical abortion, and women receiving one after a miscarriage usually recover in two to three days. I did not receive this care.
I ended up in the OB/GYN office because I’d started to bleed. I was about to get on a plane to fly from my home in Iowa to Washington, D.C. for a writing conference, and I knew so little about miscarriage and had received so little information, I thought I could still take part in panels while passing a nine-week-old fetus. I was a 35-year-old woman raised by a feminist mom who’d pressed Our Bodies, Ourselves into my hands the day I got my first period. I should have known, but I didn’t.
I wish miscarriage, stillbirth, and pregnancy loss were discussed more openly, especially the gore. I passed massive clots, bleeding through maxi pads faster than any period I’ve ever had. In two days, the shock wore off, and I fell into depression. My body expelled tissue while my mind mourned the baby I hadn’t been sure I wanted, until I learned she wasn’t to be. I went to the clinic for blood draws each week like a good girl. I never received results from these blood draws, nor was I given any information about why I had to endure them; I’d had only two appointments before losing the pregnancy. These doctors didn’t know me. After eight weeks of blood draws by inept phlebotomists, my inner elbows bloomed purple; I looked like an addict. During the busy month of April, I stopped going. No one followed up.
A baby can survive outside the womb at twenty-five weeks. I carried my miscarriage for twenty-three. This harrowing process is referred to as an incomplete miscarriage, but it usually ends after around four weeks. Mine lasted for four months of erratic, heavy periods and random contractions that felled me. I didn’t know they were contractions; I thought I’d developed a strange muscle spasm in my midsection—perhaps an exercise-related injury, or maybe indigestion? Finally, I grew concerned enough to return to the OB/GYN. She scheduled me for a D&C the next day.
That night, the contractions quickened, leaving me strung out on my bathroom floor. My fever spiked and I couldn’t keep water down. My husband debated taking me to the emergency room, until a 4am ice bath cooled me down enough to get through the night. On May 13th, 2017, the day before Mother’s Day, I received a D&C. “You fell through the cracks,” the OB/GYN said before the anesthetist put me under. The surgery lasted seven minutes. My cousin, a nurse-anesthetist, called the next day. “You were at how many weeks? That’s unbelievable. You’re lucky you didn’t die of sepsis.”
I received the D&C in May. My husband and I played Bloodborne in June, July, and August, then started over again with a new character build and weapon. We bought the expansion and played that. As the grief ebbed, we cut back to fewer hours of gaming. We took up weightlifting. We went to therapy. I wanted to write about the miscarriage, but the usual nerve pain limited my ability to type, so my husband offered to be my hands. In the same way he moved our Hunter through abandoned universities and haunted cathedrals, now he typed while I dictated.
I lose my mind, so my husband goes hunting for it. We wander around in the dark.
“I don’t think there’s anything in here,” my husband says.
“Keep walking. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”
A gray-pink mass emerges from the darkness: a brain, or maybe a fetus, a gothic horror either way. This is the thing that wrecked us. The reason we’re down here in the pit.
When the phlebotomists checked my blood each week, they were searching for the echo of my lost pregnancy: the hormone hCG. When that hormone left my bloodstream, it would be evidence my body no longer believed itself pregnant. The number didn’t go to zero until a doctor dilated my cervix to scrape and suction the stubborn tissue away.
Bloodborne’s three endings become available after you’ve defeated Mergo’s Wet Nurse. A gate opens in the Hunter’s Dream, allowing you entrance to a graveyard where Gherman, the first Hunter, awaits in his wheelchair, an 18th-century contraption of wicker and metal. Gherman offers you a choice: awaken from the Hunter’s Dream and end your hunt. Or, stay asleep to dream of blood. If you choose to awaken, you come to in a cathedral. A bell rings in the distance, heralding the sunrise—the first ending. If you choose to remain asleep, Gherman rises from his chair and a boss battle begins. If you defeat him, however, a new horror appears: the Moon Presence. The scythe-wielding Moon Presence resembles a thorn bush crossed with an anorexic Giger alien, and she can’t be fought. In this second ending, she cradles you like a mother, then confines you to Gherman’s chair, where, it is implied, you will continue his work of mentoring new Hunters in the ways of the hunt.
The third ending triggers only if you’ve collected three “One Third of Umbilical Cord” items. One drops off Mergo. Another can be found in an abandoned workshop. The third can be won in several ways, but here is the path we used. We rescued a pregnant NPC named Arianna and sent her to a chapel safe haven, where she remained. She helped us by donating vials of her powerful blood, a consumable item that increased stamina. Until the time we went back for more Arianna blood and found her weeping and no longer pregnant. “This is a nightmare,” she told us. At her feet, a pink abomination cheeped pitifully. It had a fetal look to it, labial, but with hooked claws for hands. Arianna’s sobs transformed into maniacal laughter, but for a few seconds, the two sounds were indistinguishable.
We acquired the third umbilical cord segment by murdering Arianna’s newborn monstrosity. Killing the Brain of Mensis takes multiple strikes, but the Celestial Child dies from one hit.
If you manage to collect all three cords, when the Moon Presence appears, you can kill her, and in place of the usual Prey Slaughtered message, the words Nightmare Slain fill the screen. In a final cutscene, the Doll—the game’s combo girlfriend/mother figure—discovers a newborn monster on the path leading away from Gherman’s graveyard. It looks like an eggplant with tentacles. The Doll scoops it into her arms and coos, “Are you cold? Oh, good Hunter,” suggesting this helpless creature will grow into you, or someone like you. The Great Ones have successfully reproduced, and you end the game proud parent to a baby eldritch horror.
I grieved the fantasy of parenthood in the early weeks of my miscarriage, but as it stretched on, grief persisted in my body outside my conscious awareness, thanks to the hormones in my blood. In the most material way I can conceive, I couldn’t let go of my pregnancy. It took years for my husband and I to work through the terror and horror of those four months enough to try again. Bloodborne’s land of Yharnam reconnected us—a nightmare, slain. And eventually, we completed every available ending, including the one where we became parents.
*
Dr. Brooke Wonders is an Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa, where she teaches courses in speculative and experimental nonfiction, as well as fantasy and horror. Her writing has appeared in The Dark, Brevity, and Clarkesworld, among others. Heloise & Wulf, a gothic-horror videogame she cocreated with Annah Browning and Paracat Games, is free to play at Black Warrior Review.
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