Dark Divide (Cormac and Amelia 1)

ht have been the power of suggestion. Or it might have been some kind of dark magic evoking the power of suggestion. Fine lines, here. “Not sure, without knowing more,” Cormac said.

“Can you come look at the place? Would that tell you more?”

“I need to do some research. I can let you know tomorrow. You should probably hear my rates, see if you really want me there.” He told her a modest daily rate that was a fraction of what he charged in his hunting days, but still decent money. Plus the mileage to get himself out there, plus expenses.

“That’s fine,” she said, without hesitation. “Just please tell me you can come help.”

He thought she would have balked at the money. That she didn’t showed how serious she was. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Early.”

She thanked him and hung up.

Well, this sounded like a job. A strange, fascinating job, and maybe nothing would come of it—the death was natural, and Domingo was prone to paranoia. But Cormac felt like he used to feel before a hunt, when he had to size up his prey and consider his strategy, arrange his weapons and choose his ground. When he had a mission and purpose, a job no one else could do, that he was uniquely suited for by upbringing and disposition. He felt, in a word, happy.

Kind of weird.

So we’re taking the job? Amelia displayed an eagerness to match his own. They were both desperate to get back to work.

Cormac slept, and dreamed.

He was in a valley very much like one high in the Colorado Rockies where his father had taken him hunting when he was a teenager. A stone-laden creek ran through the middle, and grassy meadow climbed up the sides of the bowl, giving way to thick pine forests. A hazy summer heat lay over it all, and the sky above was searing blue. Cormac sat, or imagined himself sitting, on an outcrop of gray boulders near the trees, partway up the slope, looking down on the water as it frothed and foamed on its way.

A woman in a high-necked gray dress, the skirt of which brushed the grass at her feet, stood looking at the same view. She clasped her hands in front of her and seemed serene.

He wasn’t really sure if it was a dream anymore, if this was something that happened in his sleeping mind, his waking self, or someplace in between. This was a cloth woven from memory, imagination, and whatever threads tied him and Amelia together. This mindscape was where they’d first met when he was in prison, and a forceful, ghostly presence demanded that he listen to her.

When they first met her hands were gloved. They weren’t, anymore. Hadn’t been for some time, and he couldn’t remember exactly when the gloves had vanished. He wondered if he’d stopped imagining them, or if she had somehow removed them from their shared vision. Likewise, her hair had changed. She used to wear her dark hair tied in a prim bun under a simple hat, the picture of a proper late-Victorian woman. Now, she clipped it back from her face and left the rest to hang down her back in curls. She had grown comfortable with him. When she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, his breath caught.

Had he been born a hundred years too late, or just in time?

“You believe something unnatural killed that man,” she said. Here, she wasn’t just a voice. They could talk face to face. It almost felt normal.

“I’ve seen a lot of crazy in my time. This is new. But Domingo didn’t give us a lot to go on,” Cormac said.

Pacing a few feet, the fabric of her skirt shifting the grass as she moved, she said, “Even if there’s nothing to this, even if we get there, speak to this woman, and find nothing—if she’s willing to pay our fee, it’s only a few days of time, and we might have a story to tell at the end of it. We’ll definitely have the payment.”

Cormac agreed with this point. It would be good to be doing something. And paying the rent. “And if there is something to it?”

“Our last adventure was saving the world,” she said. “We can do anything.”

“Then let’s call Domingo and pack up.”

In her former life, her actual life, Amelia had always intended to come to this part of California. She’d been distracted, made a detour, arrived in Colorado, and then— Well, and then it had all come to an end.

But she’d made it here eventually, hadn’t she?

A hundred years before, she’d arrived in this country in the port of Seattle. As she almost always did when arriving in a new place, she started a search for magic. For magicians. For whatever she could learn. There was so much to learn.

As she often did, she started with local Theosophical Society, spiritualist lectures and gatherings. She rarely met with anything, or anyone, useful at these events—popular movements sanitized for general consumption, with much belief and hope but little practical application. Easy to judge and dismiss, but not so many years ago she’d been among the general public who attended these gatherings. The difference between them and her was all the work she had put into her passion over the years. She had never been satisfied with vague hopes.

In a newspaper she found a listing for a lecture by a member of the British Society for Psychical Research. She had encountered the man before; he made a living traveling around Europe and America lecturing on a variety of topics. He attempted to bring a rigorous scientific methodology to his work and had the endorsement of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

She arrived at the meeting hall just as the event was starting. She paid her coins and found a spot at the back of the room, standing against the wall because all the seats were taken. A gentleman tried to offer her his seat; she declined. The place was full, an excited audience attracted by the lecturer’s reputation and by Conan Doyle’s endorsement, blazoned on all the flyers and the program. The bulk of the audience were upper-class ladies who had the leisure for such esoteric pursuits and the money to spend on foreign lecturers and the pamphlets they invariably sold at a table in the foyer. The evening’s topic: The Possibility of Detecting and Measuring Electronic Fields Surrounding Ectoplasmic Emanations.

In all her travels and studies, Amelia had never encountered an ectoplasmic emanation. She had found auras, spheres, and lines of power, but they were insubstantial, and while she was interested in what steps could be taken to measure such fields, it became clear in moments that the lecturer was speaking of the solid masses that were meant to emerge from mediums in the course of séances. She knew of at least one so-called spiritualist who used cheesecloth to produce the effect. One didn’t need wires and magnets to detect cheesecloth.

To his credit, the lecturer acknowledged the existence of frauds, but he believed some real phenomenon existed behind the stories—and he would prove it as soon as he perfected a way to measure it.

Amelia felt as if he rather missed the point of the mystical—scientific method was all well and good, but science had not advanced far enough to be able to truly examine these phenomena. This lecturer approached his work from an assumption that science had advanced as far as it possibly could and therefore could entirely explain everything—with a little philosophical effort.