Dark Divide: A Cormac and Amelia Story Read online

  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.

  If he missed the mark he at least did no harm, which was more than could be said for the charlatans who charged outrageous sums of money to conduct theatrical séances rigged by cables and hidden trapdoors and electrical effects. A reprehensible practice.

  Amelia wasn’t really here for the lecture. What she looked for were the other people standing in the back of the room, the ones in practical suits and walking dresses, with their amulets and charms discreetly hidden under ties and scarves, or inside the cuffs of sleeves. The ones who frowned and unconsciously shook their heads at what the lecturer said, rather than staring raptly with unquestioning acceptance. The ones like her, in other words.

  As the lecturer went on about wire gauge and strength of current as it related to strength of ectoplasmic presence, one of these others caught her studying the audience rather than the lecturer and held her gaze when it passed to him.

  He was a Caucasian gentleman in his thirties, clean shaven, with a beige suit and a high-collared shirt, a plain tie around his neck. His dark hair was ruffled, and the lines around his eyes indicated he smiled often. His walking stick had a smooth silver head engraved with a pattern she couldn’t quite make out. It was the walking stick that intrigued her—both elegant and unobtrusive, it jostled her instincts. There was more to this man. She wondered what detail about herself had attracted his attention. He nodded at her, and she returned the gesture. A secret recognition of their secret avocation.

  When the lecture ended and the audience began to disperse, she waited, and as she thought he would, the man approached, bowler hat tucked under his arm, walking stick loose in his hand.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. Did you enjoy the talk?” He had a delightful American accent, with just that little bit of a drawl that stage actors made so much of.

  “Yes, it amused me,” she said. “But I’m not sure I agree that science is yet able to measure all that is measurable.”

  He smiled politely. “I hear you share a country of origin with this evening’s scholar. May I welcome you to the fair shores of America?”

  “You may,” she said.

  “Welcome,” he said, bowing politely. “I’ll go one step further and say that there is an aspect of the universe that is unmeasurable.”

  “Such as. . . .”

  “The soul, ma’am.”

  “Ah. Yes, that. I would also say art, perhaps.”

  “Oh? How so? That painting over there seems to be about forty inches by thirty inches, I’d reckon.”

  He was joking, of course; she smiled in appreciation, and studied the painting he had indicated: a small copy of Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

  “I don’t mean the physical object, but rather the feeling it evokes,” she said. “This particular scene, for example, evokes little emotion in me. It is a fair representation of an incident that is part of another nation’s history, nothing more. However, for you and for most of the Americans in the room, for the people who chose to hang it here at all, I expect this piece evokes a great upwelling of patriotic feeling, pride in the scene and adm
iration for the man portrayed. That is the mystery, and those feelings cannot always be predicted or measured. That, sir, is the mystery that represents the gap between science and magic that our esteemed lecturer this evening has failed to address.”

  He regarded her with an interest that bordered on insulting, as if she were some foreign curiosity and not a respected colleague. She suppressed the incipient blush spreading across her cheeks and also the urge to apologize for her forwardness. This was what her older brother James meant when he said she would never attract a husband. She merely had to speak and instantly became an oddity to men.

  But then the charming American said, “Did you know it’s said that President Washington had wooden teeth? I admit, I can’t look at a picture of him without thinking about that.”

  She laughed as she was meant to, and thought no more about what James would say.

  The American gentleman, Mr. Roland Langley, invited her to tea at a nearby café. She accepted, and they discussed the quantifiable power of art and many other ideas besides. She no longer remembered which of them claimed the status of magician first. They seemed to slip into conversation about amulets, wardings, arcane circles, summoning, banishments, and all the rest of it without conscious acknowledgement. They simply recognized that part of themselves in the other. It had been like this at other times during her travels; she recognized a magic symbol carved above a door or the particular scent of incense drifting from an otherwise unremarkable bookshop, and known that something more lurked behind the façade. She always looked for such places, such moments. This was how she learned.

  Mr. Langley was also a pleasure to talk to, and this delighted her. He asked her where she had traveled from—he would have expected her to travel across the Atlantic to America, not the Pacific, and she explained that she had set off from Britain to the east rather than the west, across Europe, the Slavic countries, Turkey, and then the British colonies of the Middle East and South Asia before reaching Singapore, Hong Kong, and then the ship bound for Seattle. She had almost completed the circle back home, but she planned on spending a good deal of time in the Americas first.

  “And do you travel, Mr. Langley?”

  “I do, but maybe not as widely as you.”

  “Tell me where you were before you came to Seattle, then.”

  “Well, this may interest you, now that I think of it. I’ve just come from California, a spot in the Sierra Nevada mountains called Donner Pass. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the tragedy of the Donner Party?” he asked.

  “I certainly have. This is where I will be forced to reveal my secret vice of reading penny dreadfuls.”

  “Well, I’ll try not to judge you too harshly for that. Fifty years gone and fascination with the Donner Party seems to only grow in the public imagination.” He was no longer smiling, and his voice had taken on a serious cast. She had thought of him as affable, without care. Perhaps his public demeanor was a mask for more studious depths.

  “That seems to worry you.”

  “It’s like you said about art. Maybe we can’t measure it, but there’s power, when people react to something. Something beautiful, or something awful.”‘

  “More people, stronger reactions—” As in the horror evoked by a particularly lurid description of the events that transpired in those mountains: starvation, cannibalism, despair.

  “More power,” he finished. “I traveled with some of our colleagues to the pass to try to. . .how should I put it. . .disperse some of that power. Ground it out like a lightning rod.”

  “You believe such a concentration of. . .ill history. . .could be dangerous?” She thought of all the terrible happenings throughout history—wars, massacres, plagues—and all the power that might possibly surround such events. The world would be a blazing crater of hell by now.

  Had magicians always worked to temper such events, such locations?

  Langley offered an expansive shrug, in the demonstrative way of Americans. “Sure can’t hurt to settle things down a little. Folk like us have been going up there since the start, making sure it’s not haunted, or that nothing worse than ghosts show up.”

  “Fascinating,” she murmured. “Although I’m not certain I agree with you. It seems as though the whole world must be covered with ghosts and ill power, if such tragedies anchor harmful power to the material world.”

  “Who’s to say it isn’t?” he answered with his ready, charming grin. “At any rate, time will tell. If nothing bad ever comes of the events of Donner Pass, we may never know if it was our work that helped—or if there was never any danger to begin with.”

  “It’s likely neither of us will be alive to witness it, in either case,” she said, and poured herself more tea from the pot.

  And now here she was.

  It’s beautiful, Amelia murmured.

  The interstate climbed into the mountains, and Cormac had exited and pulled into an overlook. The view spreading before them was a postcard picture of tree-covered hills rising up to ragged granite peaks. The air smelled clean in the way only mountain air could. Ancient stone and young pines, the sharp edge of lingering snow.

  The valley was busy. The town of Truckee nestled at the base. The interstate arced around it on one side, the railroad on the other, and in between was a tourist mecca of shops, ski resorts, parks, and people.

  After the reading about the Donner Party Amelia’d made him do, he’d gotten a picture in his mind that this would be some desolate, remote place. Instead, it was where everybody crossed through the mountains on their way to and from northern California. And a big chunk of those folks stopped for vacation. Lake Tahoe was a dozen or so miles south. The traffic was bad, and the roar of semi trucks on the freeway was constant, inescapable.

  Perhaps it’s more peaceful in winter? Amelia suggested.

  “Not with all those ski areas,” he muttered. He was from Colorado. He knew how mountain tourist towns worked. If anything, the place might be worse in winter. Hard to imagine the twenty-foot blanket of snow that had socked in the Donner Party.

  If the members of the Donner Party could see this, the land that killed so many of them so brutally, what would they think?

  “That maybe they should have stayed in St. Louis?” Cormac said.

  Haven’t you ever wanted something so badly you’d have gone through any amount of hardship to achieve it? Believed in the chance of a new life so much the risk would have been worth it?

  He thought about it a minute, and decided that no, he never had. He’d had to take risks to get out of situations, not in them. But Amelia—Lady Amelia Parker—had taken that kind of chance when she left her family, along with its wealth and status, to become a magician. She had traveled the world, taking risks, until it killed her. Sort of.

  “I think they didn’t know what they were getting into. They didn’t believe in the risk,” he said. They’d been fed a line by guides and outfitters trying to get rich on the wave of settlers moving west in the 1840s. Apart from the gruesome details about that terrible long winter when they’d been trapped on the mountain, the whole story was ultimately sad. A tragedy.

  He took another deep breath of pine-filled mountain air, surveyed the valley one more time, and climbed back in the Jeep.

  “Let’s go track down Annie Domingo.”

  He called Domingo, who asked him to meet her at the visitor center at the state park, a few miles down the freeway.

  Literally right on the freeway. The site where forty people starved to death, where the survivors engaged in cannibalism and participated in one of the most famous tragedies in American frontier history, was no more than a hundred yards from a major interstate. A massive statue put up to commemorate the place by an overly enthusiastic heritage group back in the nineteen teens was visible from the interstate. The cognitive dissonance of it might actually give Cormac a headache.

  In the parking lot, a set of tired-looking parents leaned on the hood of their minivan and watched three squirrelly school-age
kids run around screaming, full of pent-up energy from riding in a car for hours. The dad had a camera in one hand but appeared to have given up trying to get everyone to stand still for a picture. Mom had a hand against her temple like she was nursing a headache. Years from now, this would be a treasured family memory. Or something.

  Cormac gave them a wide berth, walking through the lot to the new-looking visitor center. Like the visitor centers at a hundred other parks all over the west, the place was rustic—painted brown, suggesting a cabin with its sloped roof and backdrop of trees—and yet had plenty of wide concrete sidewalks that met Federal accessibility standards. Signs pointed to nearby nature trails and reminded visitors not to litter or feed animals. The parking lot was full, but most of the visitors seemed to wander out to the giant statue of an overwrought pioneer family, take pictures, and wander back to their cars. They were families with hyper kids, or older couples belonging to tricked-out RVs. Cormac—alone, frowning, studying the area through his sunglasses—felt out of place. Anywhere he went around here, he was going to stand out: that surly-looking guy all by himself, glaring at everything.

  He went inside to find Domingo.

  The old woman behind the desk just inside the main doors wore an olive-green uniform with a “volunteer” tag on it. She smiled broadly at him. She seemed tiny and earnest to Cormac, and did not look like she could be Annie Domingo.

  “Welcome to the park! Do you have any questions I can answer?”

  Such a broad offer, Amelia murmured. So many questions. . . .

  “Is Annie Domingo here?” Cormac said.

  The volunteer opened her mouth to tell him when a door behind the desk opened, and a woman in her thirties in a Forest Service uniform emerged, as if she’d heard her name spoken. She was average height, with an athletic build and skin like weathered sandstone. Her thick black hair was braided down her back. Her dark eyes were piercing.

  “Oh, here she is! Annie, someone’s here to see you.”