Kyle was stuffing finger foods into his mouth at a rate so accelerated it was clear he hadn’t had the foresight to stock in food for his self-imposed confinement. His eyes—well, eye—was red rimmed and looked like he’d been crying. Beth pulled me aside to tell me that he’d finally confessed to her he’d planned to steal some of the expensive jewelry Darby had given her. He’d gotten as far as taking it from her dressing room and squirreling it away, but when the time came to give it to the fence he couldn’t go through with it.
“We’ve got lots of things to work through, but we are talking now at least,” she said with a wan smile.
Darby came into the room to our hoots, hollers, and hugs. Then, as if the thought had come to all of us at the same moment, we fell silent, remembering that Noland Nicholson wasn’t going to be celebrating anything ever again.
“Awful quiet in there,” came a deep voice from the doorway and we turned as one to see John Daws standing on the porch. His work clothes had been replaced with pressed chinos and a crisp white shirt. Nadine looked undone, but motioned him in. “Darby,” she said, then cleared her throat. “John is, well, he’s—”
“I’m her boyfriend,” Daws cut in, and for the first time he smiled. “And how silly does that sound? We’re way too old to be sneaking around. She wouldn’t even let me pick her up for a date. Had to meet me at the movies or go to the next town over to have supper together. That’s not right. We like each other. I want to keep seeing her. You got any problems with it?” he asked Darby.
“No—well, no,” Darby said, looking as if he’d been hit by a stun gun. “That’s—that’s great.”
“Told ya,” Daws said, nudging Nadine, who was blushing like a schoolgirl.
“You haven’t spoken for forty miles, you okay?” Dave asked as we sped down I-40 back to Raleigh the next night. It was late and traffic was sparse.
“Yeah,” I sighed, “just trying to process it all. It’s so sad about Noland. And I can’t believe how Fowler snowed me. I thought I had better cretin radar than that.”
“That’s why you got me,” Dave said. “For backup. Besides, you weren’t so blinded by his charm you didn’t pick up the clue that broke the case.”
“I can thank Beth for that. She was telling me, rather emphatically, how she had the right to be in a funk if she felt like it and I suddenly remembered about the Grand Funk record. It was Beth who made sure he got tested for GHB too. I think I’ve underestimated her. I should’ve tried to get to know her better.”
“Plenty of time yet,” Dave said. “Darby invited us out again next week. Beth’s doing a cleansing ceremony for the atrium; Daws and Nadine are helping her plan it. Burn sage, chant, all that. Get rid of the bad vibes. Then we’ll listen to music as a memorial to Noland. Darby’s already busy putting the playlist together.”
We rode in silence for a while.
“Seems fitting,” I said.
I gazed into the sky. There was an autumn moon—not pink, but an awesome warm gold.
Copyright © 2012 by Brynn Bonner
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FICTION
DARKLING
by Val McDermid
Val McDermid has become a bestselling author through books like the recent The Retribution (2011), in which crime profiler Tony Hill and Chief Inspector Carol Jordan are pitted against a serial killer. PW said of the book: “Superb. . . . The emotional wedge that the sadistic Jacko is able to drive between Tony and Carol makes this one of McDermid’s strongest efforts.” But the author sometimes writes in a lighter vein too. This year, her first children’s book, My Granny Is a Pirate, came out from Orchard.
When the phone rings at seven minutes past two in the morning, I know I have to behave as if it’s just woken me. That’s what humans do. Because they sleep. “Whassup?” I grunt.
The voice on the other end is familiar. “It’s DCI Scott. Sorry to wake you, Doc. But I know how you like a fresh crime scene.”
He’s right, of course. The fresher the crime scene, the easier it is for me to backtrack to the moment of the crime. That’s how I come up with the information that will help DCI Scott and his team to nail the killer. I’m a criminal profiler, you see. Once I realised my physical body was stuck in this place and time, it seemed like an occupation that would be interesting as well as socially useful. It has the added advantage of having slightly vague qualifications and antecedents. And as long as I do the business, nobody enquires too closely about where I went to school.
I tell him I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I could make it a lot sooner, not least because I’m already dressed. But the last thing I want is to be too astonishing. I need to survive until I can resolve my situation. And that means not arousing suspicion.
When I arrive, the usual crime-scene slo-mo bustle is under way. Forensic rituals round the back of an out-of-town strip mall. Tonight, for one night only, it’s a theatre of the macabre.
The body’s a pitifully young male, barely out of his twenties, I’d guess. He’s dressed in black, Goth hair to match. Silver in his ears and on his fingers.
He’s pale as paper and it takes me a moment to realise that’s not
makeup. It’s because he’s bled out from the two puncture marks on his neck.
“Vampires don’t exist, right?” Scott says gruffly. “That’s what I keep telling my girls. All that Twilight garbage.”
“This isn’t the first?”
“The third this year. We’ve kept the lid on it so far, but that’s not going to last forever.”
That’s when I notice the writing on the wall. It’s scrawled almost at ground level, but I can tell instantly it’s written in blood. It’ll take the technicians longer to confirm it, but I know I’m right. I crouch down for a closer look, earning a grumpy mutter from the photographer I displace. “Darkling,” it says.
I step back, shocked. “Is this a first?” I point to the tiny scribble. “Was there something like that at the other scenes?”
“Nobody spotted it,” Scott says. “I’ll get someone to go over the crime-scene pics.”
I don’t need them to do that. I know already it’ll be there. I know because it’s a message for me. Darkling is where I am, where I’ve been since I found myself trapped in this place, this time, this body. Darkling. In the dark. A creature of the dark. But now I’ve had a message from my own side.
And now I understand how to fight my enemy. I need to erase this darkling existence. If I can wipe the word from human consciousness, I’ll be free again. Free to move through time and space in my full grace and glory, not the pale shadow existence I’ve had since I was jailed in this form. The murders will stop too. The three that have already happened will be undone, their victims back in their proper place in the world. That’s an unintended consequence, but a good one nevertheless.
I say something, I don’t know what, to get myself off the hook with Scott and melt into the night. I’m home in an instant, computer on, fingers flying over the keys. First recorded instance . . . Shakespeare. I can’t help but smile in spite of the seriousness of my plight. Shakespeare. How bloody predictable is that? I take a deep breath, spread my fingers against the side of my head, and will the transference.
The room is small, lit by a trio of tapers. In the flutter of light, I see a man in his late thirties hunched over a small wooden table. There’s a stack of thick paper to one side of him. His sharpened quill is poised above the ink pot, his dark eyes on the middle distance, a frown line between the fine arches of his brows. His lips are moving.
“The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That it’s had it head bit off by it young.
So out went the candle, and we were left darkling,” he mutters.
If I were in my pomp, it would be no problem. Being physically present would offer all sorts of options for change and deletion. In extremis, I could kill. But I can only manifest a
s a voice. He’ll think it’s his own interior voice, or he’ll think he’s going mad. Either way should serve.
“Not darkling,” I say. “Sans light. It’s the Fool speaking. Sans light, that’s what he’d say.”
He pauses, uncertain. “We were left sans light?” he says.
“Sans light,” I say. “Sans light.”
He twists his mouth to one side. “Not darkling. I cannot make a poet of the Fool. Sans light.”
He dips the quill and scratches out the word and I dissolve back into my body. I’m amazed. Who knew it would be so easy to edit the great bard of Avon?
Next up, John Milton and Paradise Lost. My consciousness emerges in a sunlit garden where the great man is declaiming. There’s no other word for it. But the poet is not alone. Of course he’s not alone. He’s blind. Somebody else has to write it down for him. There’s a younger man scrawling as he speaks. I need to move fast. We’re coming up to the line. Yes, here we go.
“As the wakeful bird sings darkling.” Milton gives himself a congratulatory smile.
“Birds don’t sing in the dark,” I say. The scribe looks around wildly, wondering if he’s just spoken out loud.
“Darkling,” Milton says, a stubborn set to his mouth.
“They sing at dusk or at dawn. Not darkling. Do you really want people thinking you’re an ignoramus? Think how it undermines the burden of your poem if the details are inaccurate. At dusk or at dawn, surely?”
“A correction,” he says. “As the wakeful bird sings at dusk.”
Two for two! I dissolve back into my body. These shifts out of body are exhausting. But now I’ve started I can’t stop. The promise of being myself again is too powerful. And so I continue. Keats and his nightingale—“Darkling I listen” becomes, “Obscured I listen.” Matthew Arnold’s darkling plain becomes “a twilight plain” and Hardy’s darkling thrush becomes “dark-bound thrush.” Star Trek: Voyager now has an episode called “Gloaming.”
It’s almost dawn and I’m almost drained. Darkling, I only have one more to go. Dr Samuel Johnson, the great wordsmith, the dictionary man. If I can remove the word from his dictionary, it will disappear for good.
I generate my final focus and emerge by the side of a fat man with a cat and a pile of manuscript paper by his side. I can read the words he has written. “Darkling [a participle, as it seems, from darkle which yet I have never found; or perhaps a kind of diminutive from dark, as young, youngling]. Being in the dark. Being without light. A word, merely poetical.”
Then his eyes fix on where I would be if I were corporeal. “I’ve been expecting you,” he says in his sonorous growly voice.
“You can see me?”
He laughs. “I was the doctor long before you aspired to the mantle, sirrah. And I will be the doctor again. You’re trapped in a human life and when that body dies, so will you. I have fashioned darkling to hold you.”
But as he speaks, the ink on the page starts to fade. The word and its definition are disappearing before our eyes. “Not for much longer. There are no citations. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
He glances at the page. I expect fear or rage, but I get a great guffaw of laughter. “But darkle does. The back-formation comes into being in the next century. Already, other poets have formed darkling and employed it in their verse. There is no escape from the power of the word. Did you really think it would be so easy? Darkling has taken you, boy. You are darkling forever.”
Copyright © 2012 by Val McDermid
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FICTION
THE MISPLACED PERSON
by Tom Tolnay
Art by Mark Evan Walker
Tom Tolnay describes himself as a short-fiction devotee and says he reads more than 200 short stories a year for pleasure. His own short stories have been published in widely different types of magazines, from mystery to literary to mainstream. Most recently, his stories have been featured in The Iconoclast, Hardboiled, and Carpe Articulum. The author also runs a small press that publishes many letterpress poetry books and anthologies of short fiction and essays.
In the old days Bartleby Jargon would’ve been known as an “eccentric” . . . an odd duck who, though out of step with the rest of the community, was appreciated by most because his weird originality made life a bit more colorful. Nowadays, in a world impatient with the uncommon, a world far less generous, Bartleby was called a “flake.” To the citizens of Gopher that meant he was adrift somewhere between the moon and stars, someone no good to anyone, least of all himself. But to me, Bartleby was just a misplaced person without a past or present.
Bartleby wasn’t born in Gopher, yet no one could say exactly where he came from or how he happened to show up at this speck of pepper on the map. He just was and had been for some time. What made him hard to figure out, I guess, was that he’d never learned how to give a direct answer, and always went round and round with a puzzled look in his eye. Under that gob of hair with the texture of clay was a plain, unmarked face that could’ve passed for thirty-five or sixty-five. Plus, he had oversized ears that tended to wiggle when he spoke, distracting us from thinking about anything beneath the man’s surface.
With his natural attraction to nuts and bolts, no one was surprised to hear he took a job at Cowley’s Hardware over on Main—even flakes, I mean eccentrics, have to pay rent and buy baloney. If eccentrics are different from regular folks it’s because they get things done by way of their own mysterious logic. Like the time his boss, Zack Cowley, was away at a hardware show in Chattanooga, and Bartleby, left behind to mind the store, handed over shovels, hoes, rakes, and God knows what else to a family of migrant farmers passing through. Either the family skipped town without paying, or Bartleby saw fit to give the stuff away. All Zack knew for sure was that a batch of tools was missing from his store, and there wasn’t enough cash in the register to account for the merchandise. But he didn’t sack his assistant, as everyone expected—in some cases hoped would happen, and I figure it was because no one else in town would’ve sorted screws and brads and washers with such enthusiasm and at such cheapskate wages. . . . They say it took Bartleby Jargon ten months to pay back Zack Cowley for those wayward tools.
Because Bartleby never expected anything from anyone, and yet was always willing to extend a helping hand to neighbors or strangers, I found myself doing little things for him. I’d bring him a coupla apples from the twisted tree out back our house, or I’d drop off the sports pages after I’d finished reading the local weekly: Like any red-blooded American, he had a soft spot for baseball. But he usually seemed embarrassed by my friendly gestures, so I had to hold back from time to time before I’d say to my wife, Maggie, “Think I’ll drop over to Jargon’s and see if he can use a little help with his mailbox—snowplow knocked it off the post two months back.” At which Maggie would look up from her knitting, over the wire rims of her glasses, and say: “I could use a little help stopping my kitchen faucet from dripping.” Reactions like that have taught me to do my thinking with my head and not with my mouth.
Bartleby’s behavior reminded me of an old song they used to play on the radio that goes something like this: “I start for the corner, but turn up in Spain.” One day Zack sent him to deliver an imported copper teapot to the Brandon place; it’s that sturdy white Victorian up on the hill, overlooking the village like God in His heaven looking down on us. Only Bartleby never reached Brandon’s mansion—ended up digging poppies out of fresh flower beds in the village square and transplanting them into his teapot. Then he goes and leaves this flower arrangement on the steps of the town jail. “What in God’s name was that flake thinking?” townspeople asked each other. To one of them, Myra Crane, I answered, “Nothing at all—he was just being Bartleby.” What I’d meant was, he was always doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and usually for some reason that made sense to no one but him. That’s why everyon
e in Gopher seemed to have a favorite Bartleby story. Whenever the men gathered for their Friday night card game at the Grange, or the women met in the basement of the Methodist church to organize a
fund-raiser on Saturday afternoon, they seemed to spend more time telling Bartleby yarns than dealing cards or planning a chicken-and-biscuit dinner.
If there’s one chapter in the story of Bartleby Jargon’s life in Gopher that stayed in people’s minds it would surely be the time he was drafted for public office. In my hometown the same half-dozen people keep their elected posts so long we didn’t really need to vote, though we sort of did anyway just to make sure folks in surrounding communities didn’t start calling us “commies.” Fact is, the few times someone else had the gall to put his or her name up against the standing Village Clerk, Village Truant Officer, Village Justice of the Peace, we, the citizens of Gopher, looked upon it as an act of aggression. Far as we’re concerned, Alice Archer is the Clerk and Artie Frome is the Justice of the Peace, and so on—that’s their job, their livelihood, and running against them was like trying to run them off their deeded lands. But several years ago Nickie Bumppo, the Village Collector for the previous twenty-nine campaigns, up and died on us.
You can’t run a town—even one small as Gopher—without a collector. Once a year for a whole month the Village Collector collects the dues to operate the Volunteer Fire Department (housed in a rickety barn on the abandoned MacKenzie place), to run an ambulance (an ancient hearse fitted up with a cot and first-aid kit), to plow the snow (a World War II Jeep with no doors) on roads the county ignores, and other such vital services. We call this money the Village Dues for the good reason that Gopherites find it easier to pay smaller dues for special services in summer than higher overall taxes at year’s end. A member of each household—we got maybe a hundred fifty households in Gopher—would drop off a check or an envelope with cash over to the Bumppo house, have a cup of coffee in Martha’s ballyard-sized kitchen, trade two cents’ worth of gossip, then go about their business. Lately, a few of the town’s better-heeled folks, like the Brandons and the Whitneys, came around waving credit cards like these things were the Lord’s Prayer sealed in plastic. But Nickie never got around to accepting “the devil’s tool” for payments since he believed we’d already let thingamajigs take over too much of our business. Except for figuring out who owed what and then collecting it, don’t ask me what Nickie did as collector the rest of the year. But he did it, I know, because it got done.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Page 16
