The Ghosts of Stone Hollow

Long before she had first seen Taylor Springs, Amy had heard so much about the little town that her mother's childhood there sometimes seemed more real than her own. So, when she and her parents had come to live in the Taylor Valley, and she had started at the school where her mother and her aunt had once been pupils, among families whose names and stories she knew by heart, Amy had confidently expected to feel right at home. But it hadn't been like that at all. It took Amy a long time to learn how to act and talk like the others. She managed it, though, because she was quick and adaptable, and eventually that unhappy hostile period was pushed to the very back of her mind. It was Jason who revived the memory of it: he was a new boy, odd and foolish and gentle, who wouldn't or couldn't stand up for himself. At first Amy thought he was scared, but when she found that he had been to Stone Hollow, she had to change her mind. The people of Taylor Valley wouldn't go near Stone Hollow. Some of them said it was haunted by an Italian family who had once lived there briefly and tragically; others that the ghosts were those of men who had brewed illicit whiskey there; others still, that it had once been an Indian shrine. Jason wasn't at all scared by this - on the contrary, he was calm and interested. "Time moves in big loops," he told Amy, "and sometimes the loops are very near each other. And there are places, only a very few places, where there is a power that makes them pull together and touch." Stone Hollow was a place like that, so Jason said. At first, Amy simply didn't believe him. This story, with its vivid portrayal of her day-to-day life, and its eerie glimpses of the past, shows how she began to wonder if he could possibly be right.


Genre: Children's Fiction