The Ghosts of Stone Hollow (17 page)

Time passed. The moon rose higher and its golden light spread down the face of the Hills. As Amy watched, blurs of darkness turned into trees and smooth dark shadows into golden meadows. But that was all. Except for a white owl, drifting down from the Hills on silent wings, nothing moved, and not a single sound disturbed the utter quiet of the night.

Amy sighed. It was cold in the storeroom, and the lid of the steamer trunk was very hard. She shifted her position, resting her head against the window frame. Leaning back against the window, she forgot for a moment about concentrating. For only a minute she allowed herself to think about the warm bed and soft pillow waiting for her in her own room. She sighed again—and in that very instant, she was aware of movement in the room behind her.

She sat still, absolutely motionless, and listened, waiting for silence behind her to prove that she had only been imagining. But instead of silence she heard the sound again, and this time she knew it was the sound of footsteps. Very slowly she turned around and saw a man, standing in the doorway.

He was very tall. He was wearing a long dark coat, and the lower part of his face was completely covered by a long dark beard. Above the beard, his eyes gleamed, pale and cold.

Amy would have screamed in terror, but her throat seemed to be paralyzed. She shrank back against the window in helpless fear, as only gradually did she begin to realize the man in the doorway was unaware of her presence. He was looking across the room—at someone else.

The room was not the same. The trunks and boxes were gone, and there was a patterned rug on the floor. In fact Amy was not even sure it was the room she thought she was in, the storeroom at Hunter farm. But the little carved desk was there. It stood against the far wall beneath a glowing lamp, and in front of it a woman was sitting, writing something on a piece of paper. She was wearing a long white dress with a high collar, and her blond hair was piled high on her small head. Her face was very beautiful and sad.

The man moved then. He came out of the doorway and crossed the room in long firm strides. The woman shrank away from him, and there was fear in her face. He took the letter away from her and read it, and as he read, the frown on his face darkened. Then he tore it into little pieces and crushed them in his hand. The woman put her head down on the desk, hiding her face in her arms.

Two more people appeared suddenly in the doorway, two little girls dressed in ruffled dresses with wide sashes. Their hair was in long curls, and each had a huge bow ribbon in her hair.

The one with blond hair smiled when she saw the man and ran toward him, holding out her arms. He bent toward her and suddenly his face seemed quite different, as if he were not the same person at all. Smiling, he lifted the little girl into his arms and walked with her through the doorway and disappeared. Then Amy looked for the other girl, the dark one, and saw that she was standing near the desk where the woman still sat with her head in her arms. She was holding out her arms to the woman without touching her. When the girl turned and looked toward the doorway where the man had gone, her face was twisted as if with hate or anger.

Suddenly Amy found that she was catching her breath desperately, as if she had not breathed for a long time and was about to suffocate. Everything went blurry, and for a moment she put her hands up over her eyes. When she took them away, the lamp was gone and the storeroom was lit only by moonlight. Moonlight that gleamed on familiar objects—trunks and boxes, desk and chair and highboy. The room was deserted, once again only a storage place for old forgotten things.

A
MY SAT VERY STILL
, minute after minute, waiting and watching, but nothing moved or changed. In the hushed frozen quiet, even her mind seemed paralyzed, unable to explain or even question. When something finally came to life, it was only her lips, as if they had come unfrozen first, before thought or reason.

“What was it?” she whispered, and then shrank back against the window, frightened by the sound of her own voice. She had not been afraid until then, at least, not after the first moment. After that she had been too busy watching—as if no part of her existed except the watching part, with nothing remaining to be afraid for, or with. But now, as she came back to herself, she was first very much afraid, and then, as the minutes passed, more and more curious.

“What was it?” she said again. “What was happening?” The longer she thought about it, the more questions presented themselves, demanding more and more insistently to be answered. Why did he look so angry? What made her so sad? Why did the little girls act so strangely? And then, again,
What was happening?
At last, jutting her jaw, Amy came to a decision.

The Stone was lying on the trunk top where it had slid when it slipped out of her fear-stiffened fingers. Picking it up, Amy held it—gingerly at first, and then with more firmness and determination. “I have to find out—for sure,” she told herself. With the Stone clutched tightly in both hands, she concentrated on one thing—one particular question.

The air changed first. There was a feeling of movement, a rush of something like sound, except that the hearing of it came from deep inside and had nothing to do with ears.

The deep sound echoed and throbbed, the air moved, and then suddenly the man was back, standing in the doorway. The room glowed again with old lamplight, reflecting in the man’s deep-set eyes, as his head turned from side to side. He looked first toward the desk that sat, where it had before, against the far wall, beneath the lamp. But the small carved chair was empty now. The woman was not there.

The man frowned and turned away. His eyes moved, searching the other side of the room where the light was dimmer, and unfamiliar pieces of furniture, some chairs, a table and an old-fashioned divan, made vague and shadowy shapes in the pale lamplight. Amy looked, too, trying to see what he might be looking for.

But then his eyes moved again, turning now toward the opposite side of the room, toward the spot where Amy was sitting, and suddenly the silent sound was moving again, more strongly, and now it sounded like a warning.

The man’s eyes changed when he saw her and he smiled, but somehow the smile was much more frightening than the frown had been before. Terror-stricken, Amy watched him start toward her, crossing the room with long firm strides. Dropping the Stone, she leaped down from the steamer trunk, and ran. Almost immediately, before she had gone more than a few steps, her foot struck something hard, and she fell.

Amy fell into blackness and silence. Lying on the hard floor, she wrapped her arms around her head and waited for the unthinkable terror of the man’s hand on her shoulder or his voice in her ear. But moments passed, and nothing happened. When, at last, she raised her head, she found she was lying in the narrow aisle between boxes and trunks, and the moonlight was streaming in over the familiar orderly confusion of the storeroom. The man was gone. Stumbling to her feet, Amy ran out the door and down the hall to her room.

Back in her own bed, Amy lay flat on her back, with both hands clutching the tops of the blankets, and stared up at the ceiling. Her mind raced, thoughts and ideas coming up out of nowhere, bubbling, swelling, combining and breaking apart.

She knew, of course, who they were—the people in the storeroom. Somehow she felt certain that she would have known who they were even if she had not seen their pictures so many times in the old albums. The man was the Reverend Fairchild, her grandfather, the woman was her grandmother, and the two little girls were her mother and Aunt Abigail. That much was certain. But how had she seen them—and why? She had gone to the storeroom with the piece of the Stone, hoping to find out something more about Stone Hollow, and instead she had seen them—the Fairchilds.

It was then that she remembered something that Jason had said about the Stone—that what it brought back was affected by the things that were near—things like the Indian beads, the old doll that had belonged to Lucia, and the metal cashbox. And the storeroom, of course, was full of things that had belonged to the Fairchilds. But that didn’t explain their strange behavior—or what had happened, almost happened, when the Reverend Fairchild had looked right at Amy and had started toward her across the room.

Shrinking down farther in the bed, Amy pulled up the covers until only her eyes peered out above them. Although the moon had moved higher in the sky, and its beams no longer shone directly in through the windows, the room was still full of soft shadowed light. Only Amy’s eyes moved, searching every corner over and over, while in the back of her mind a word pulsed—“dangerous,” it said. “It might be dangerous.”

Jason had said that it might be dangerous to—to try to control the power of the Stone for your own purposes. Had she done that? Had she done that when she had grasped the Stone and—

The Stone! It wasn’t until that moment that Amy realized she had left it in the storeroom. She would have to go back, she told herself, and get the Stone. She would have to go back into the storeroom. She would have to go
now,
before morning.

Amy went on lying flat on her back with the covers pulled up to her eyes. She would get up soon and go back for the Stone—as soon as she had a little more time to think about it, and to get up her courage. She would go very quickly and quietly, and in just a minute she would be back safely in her own bed. She was still planning to go, waiting for just the right moment, when her eyes began to feel warm and heavy. She let them close, only for an instant, to rest them—and when she opened them again, the light streaming in through the windows came from a bright morning sun. The clock on the bedside table said eight-thirty. Amy leaped out of bed, staggering a little from sleepiness and started down the hall. She was almost to the door of the storeroom before she realized that it was open, and that there were voices coming from inside the room.

Fully awake in an instant, Amy tiptoed cautiously to the door and peeked around it into the room, expecting to see almost anything. But all she saw was her mother and Aunt Abigail taking old clothes and linens out of the steamer trunk and putting them in boxes.

“Amy,” her mother said, “what are you doing peeping around the corner like that?” She smiled as Amy came out from behind the door. “Are you awake or sleepwalking?” she asked. “Just look at yourself.” She pointed to the mirror over the rosewood dresser, and Amy looked, catching a glimpse of tousled hair, flushed cheeks and a rumpled nightgown.

“What are you doing?” Amy said. “What are you
doing
?”

Amy’s dismay must have sounded in her voice because both her mother and aunt stopped working and turned to look at her.

“We’re cleaning out this old trunk,” Aunt Abigail said, “so your mother can use it for your trip.”

“Isn’t it nice of Aunt Abigail to let us use her trunk?” Amy’s mother said. “See what a nice one it is with all these drawers and a place for hanging clothes, like a little closet. It’ll come in so handy until we get settled down in a permanent place.”

“Might as well serve a useful purpose,” Aunt Abigail said. “Never’s been used for anything except for storage space.” She turned to Amy. “I bought this trunk with the first money I ever earned. Right after I got out of school. Had some romantic notion about getting away on a long trip, but it just never happened. Then when Luther and I got married, I thought we might use it someday for our honeymoon, but we never were able to get away. Been sitting right here in this very room for over thirty years. Might as well be used for its intended purpose, for once.”

“Abigail,” Amy’s mother said, “I
do
wish you’d think about getting away, too. Perhaps if you only came to the city on a visit first, to see how you like it. Perhaps—”

“Amy Abigail,” Aunt Abigail interrupted, “what are you doing down there? Did you drop something?”

Amy had been down on her knees looking under the dresser and highboy. “No,” she said. “No, I didn’t drop anything. Not just now I didn’t. Did you see—” She stopped, realizing that there would be no way to explain the question she had been about to ask.

“What, dear? Did we see what?” her mother asked.

“Nothing. Nothing, Mama.” Amy backed toward the door. “I better hurry up and get dressed.”

“There’s oatmeal on the back of the stove,” Aunt Abigail called after her. “Your mother and I ate hours ago.”

Amy dressed quickly, ate her breakfast, and plunged into an enormously busy day. There was a washing to do, clothes to be folded away in the steamer trunk, and all the other possessions of the Polonskis to be wrapped and packed away in crates and boxes. But whether she was cranking the handle of the wringer, hanging out clothes on the backyard line, or wrapping dishes in old newspapers, Amy’s mind kept returning to the same question. Several times during the day, she managed a few private minutes, and each time she hurried to the storeroom, but although she looked under and behind every box and trunk and piece of furniture, she did not find the Stone.

The next morning Amy sat with her face pressed against the train window and watched the Hills fade farther and farther away into a gray-blue haze. At the far end of the car three men, members of the train’s crew, sat around a table playing cards and drinking coffee. Across from Amy, her parents were talking to a Mr. Randolph. Mr. Randolph was the only other passenger on the milk train that went through the town of Lambertville very early in the morning. Amy’s parents and Mr. Randolph were talking about the inconvenience of having to ride on a train that stopped at practically every farm all the way across the valley, and about how nice it had been when, for a short while just before the Depression, a real passenger train had gone through Lambertville and the other foothill towns. Now and then Amy listened for a moment, particularly when her father talked about the train trestles that he had helped build all across the state. But most of the time she had other things on her mind. Most of the time, with her face pressed hard against the window, Amy looked back and thought about the past—the past few days, and other pasts, more distant and mysterious. There was so much that was mysterious, and so much to wonder about.