After dark, Cormac pulled into the parking lot, turned off the headlights, and shut off the engine. Once again, he had a feeling of disconnect. This landscape was so tame, so populous, how could he reconcile it with the stories of the Donner Party, the twenty feet of snow and pervasive death? Like the other locations significant to the story, nothing here gave any sign about what had happened. He didn’t feel a lurking menace, no sense of dread. No hint of the spirits of those who’d died. No, this was another beautiful mountain meadow with a trickling creek running through, ringed by towering pines, all of it silvered by the light of a half-moon. Only the ubiquitous bronze commemorative slabs told the story of what had gone wrong here.
Time erases, Amelia said.
It did and didn’t, Cormac thought. Of course a hundred and fifty years would change the landscape. But echoes remained. They changed the names of the pass and the lake to match the party. Everything around here was Donner. You could not know anything about the story and still have some inkling that something had happened here. Like an old battlefield with a single bronze plaque marking an event that no one but historians knew about.
Penlight in hand, he got out to walk around. This spot, some ways down an easy, well-groomed trail, had two markers: one where common belief said the Donner camp was located, and another some twenty feet away where archeological digs determined the camp probably was. Without a time machine, no one would ever know for sure. Unless Amelia decided to run some kind of séance and try to talk to one of the party.
Even then, any spirit raised might not know. The trees are different. The path of the creek will have changed. Memory is a tricky thing.
He kept the penlight pointed down, studied the grassy meadow as well as he could in the moonlight.
Walk that way a bit, I want to see something.
He got the feeling she wasn’t looking for anything in particular—she just wanted to look. He scuffed his boots through the grass, drying out in high summer, panned the light back and forth for anything that might jump out.
Meanwhile, he also listened. Kept his awareness turned out to the stands of pines surrounding the meadow, to the shadows around the parking lot a couple hundred yards away. They’d escaped the truck roar on the freeway, but the night wasn’t completely quiet, when he really listened. Trees creaked, a bit of underbrush rustled—one nocturnal creature hunting another.
There, Amelia murmured, and he sensed her frustration at not being able to simply reach out. If she wanted to badly enough, she could try to take control of his body—briefly, at least, before he fought back. At the beginning, he’d fought. The headaches had been mind ripping, and she hadn’t succeeded. They cooperated now.
He looked for where she indicated, and finally saw it: the glint of something unnatural mostly buried in the dirt, hidden by grass. Crouching, he picked at it, brought it into the light. It was a small brown button, made of bone or horn, polished.
“This what you wanted?”
Yes. I wonder. . . .
The button was old—but probably not that old. This ground had been scoured over so many times, nothing from that time would have been left. Unless some tiny artifact—like a button—happened to bubble up from the ground and appear just for them.
I want to try something, she said, and pressed forward. She wanted his hands, his muscles, his voice, to work a spell that was too complicated to explain. Frustrated, he nonetheless relented. One of these days, he was going to know her entire catalog of spells, every possible thing she could pull out in a situation like this. He hadn’t reached the end of her knowledge yet.
“And you never will,” she murmured with his own voice, as he slipped to the back of his own mind.
She struck a match from his pocket, started a tiny fire with a bit of grass—and was careful to clear a space around it and keep it barricaded, in response to his spike of anxiety about accidentally setting the entire forest on fire. Sprinkled some herbal mix into it, releasing a scent of earth and spice. Whispered words like she always did, that he couldn’t quite catch and could never quite remember. He was about to ask what this was supposed to do.
Something caught his—her—eye. She didn’t notice, she was so intent on reciting the spell and pressing the old lost button between her hands, calling forth whatever thread of power she was searching for. He tried to get her to turn her head, or at least shift her gaze to a sliver of movement, light where there shouldn’t be any. He didn’t have as much practice catching her attention as she had catching his.
At last she flinched, startled into paying attention to him.
The faintest blur of fog had risen. The night was dry, the sky clear. This might have been the start of morning dew—except it wasn’t morning and the gray mist only rose here, on this spot, some ten feet away. It had the shape of a woman. Details emerged: she wore a long skirt and a threadbare blanket over her shoulders, and stood with her hands folded before her. She gazed west as if waiting for someone to arrive from over the next hill.
“Tamsen Donner,” Amelia breathed.
And the fog slipped away, melting back into the air.
So did Amelia, in that moment. She was so astonished that she slipped out of Cormac’s body, back to her usual place lurking around his subconscious. He stretched his fingers and winced, adjusting to the feel of blood and breath again.
They stared at the space where the mist had formed—Cormac resisted calling it a ghost, that explanation seemed too easy—for a long time, waiting for something else to appear, for that unsettled prickling feeling to fade. Finally, Cormac stomped out the wisp of fire.
“Was that your spell?” he asked. “Did you do that?”
I fear it might have been coincidence. Suggestion. I’m not certain she was really a ghost. Merely an echo. Her pain, recorded on the ether. Just one bit of magic calling to another.
“What was your spell supposed to do?”
Recall history, she admitted. Show a glimpse of what had happened. But when I’ve used it in the past it’s mostly evoked noises and emotions, something linked to the artifact used to recall the image. I really doubt that button was a hundred fifty years old, however much I may wish it.
“If you want to try again we could always swipe something from the museum at the visitor center.”
That won’t be necessary. She sounded a little testy. Maybe because she knew he could really do it, and get the artifact back in place when they were done before Annie Domingo found out.