Free The Ghosts of Stone Hollow by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page A

hard to tell what had killed them, but everybody made guesses. Most people guessed that they had died of fright, except for a few like Aunt Abigail who thought they had killed each other, and the Reverend Dawson who thought they’d been “sacrificed on an altar.”
    Jason stopped and stood still. “An altar. What kind of altar?” he said.
    “The altar of Demon Rum,” Amy said.
    “Oh.” Jason started off, but then he stopped again and stayed stopped for a long time with a faraway look on his face, as Amy began to tell him about the Indians. She mentioned that some people said the Hollow had been haunted even before the Ranzonis died, and that way back in the olden days, the Indians had held ceremonies there to their heathen gods.
    “What did they do there, the Indians?” Jason asked.
    “I don’t know,” Amy said. “Dances, I guess, and sacrifices, and bowing down to graven images, all sorts of heathen things like that.”
    “Visions,” Jason said, and his eyes looked so strange and inward that for a moment Amy wondered if he meant he was seeing one himself, but then he went on. “Some Indian tribes had sacred places where they went to see visions.”
    Amy shrugged. “Did they? Well, they probably did that in Stone Hollow, too. All that kind of stuff.”
    Just past the place where Bradley Lane started uphill, they came to the beginning of the old road that had once led to Stone Hollow. It had never been much more than a trail, and now that it was weed-grown and rock-strewn, there were many places where it was barely visible. Before very long it was so steep that conversation was a little breathless, but there were some things that still needed to be discussed.
    “Look,” Amy said. “You won’t tell anybody about this, will you? Like at school or anyplace?”
    “You don’t want them to know?” Jason asked.
    Amy shook her head exasperatedly. “Of course not,” she said.
    “Wouldn’t they like it? Wouldn’t they like for you to go to the Hollow?”
    “They’d think it was funny because I went with you. They’d tease us.”
    “Why?”
    “Good heavens,” Amy said. “You’re really hopeless. You know why. Didn’t your friends in other places tease each other about boys and girls? You know, about a boy liking a girl, or something?”
    But Jason only looked at her with wide, questioning eyes, as if she hadn’t made it clear.
    “Or didn’t you have any friends?” Amy said.
    “I had some friends,” Jason said. “I had a very good friend in Greece.”
    “Well, didn’t he ever tease you about girls? Like if you talked to a girl a lot in school, or something?”
    “No,” Jason said. “My friend didn’t go to school. He was a hermit.”
    “A hermit. How old was he, for heaven’s sake?”
    “Old? I don’t know exactly, but he was a very old man.”
    “An old man!” Amy said. “That’s not—” But then she gave up. “Anyway,” she said, “just don’t tell anyone that we came up here together. Okay?”
    “All right,” Jason said. “Look, there’s the place where the bridge used to be. We have to climb down the cliff here and up the other side.”
    The climbing became too hard then to allow for much conversation. They climbed down and up and then followed the faint indentation where the old road had narrowed and dwindled to little more than a path. It had been dug into the canyon wall above the creek, and slides and rockfalls had made it almost impassable in several places. Trees grew thick and tall in the canyon, and in several places had fallen across the road so that it was necessary to climb over a trunk or scramble through branches. Finally they came to a place where the canyon became very steep and narrow, and the road turned very steeply up toward the crest of the range of hills.
    Amy remembered the spot. They were very close to the Hollow, now. From the crest just above them, you could look directly down into the narrow oval valley on the other side that was known as