Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

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 as 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