The Freedom Maze Read Online Free PDF Page B

furnishings, round about the time of the First World War. Just as well. They wouldn’t have fit into Oak Cottage anyway.”
    “So is there anything left of the Big House?”
    “Some. Used to be, you could see it from your room, right past the maze, until the oak grove grew up around it.” Aunt Enid gave Sophie a hard look. “Now look here, Sophie. I don’t want you going anywhere near the Big House. You’d likely go inside, just to take a look, and have a wall fall on you or some such. We’ve got plenty of ghosts in the family as it is — we don’t need another.”
    She was, to Sophie’s astonishment, perfectly serious. “Mama says there aren’t any such things as ghosts,” Sophie said.
    “I’m pleased to say that your Mama isn’t the sole judge of what is and isn’t so. World would be a pretty dull place if she was. I don’t suppose she’s seen fit to tell you about Old One-Eye or the Girl in Yellow or the Swamp-Weeper?”
    Sophie closed
Gone With the Wind.
“No, ma’am.”
    “They’re part of your heritage, child. Way back before he built the Big House, your five-times-great grandpa Fairchild owned a slave called Old One-Eye. He was a conjure man — that’s a kind of heathen witch doctor — and he could conjure up spirits and haints and rain during the sugar harvest. He was nothing but trouble, and when he ran away, Grandpa Fairchild wasn’t as upset about it as he might have been. Still, property was property, and it didn’t do to have it running away. So Grandpa Fairchild sent out the slave hunters to find Old One-Eye and bring him home.”
    “Did they find him?” Sophie asked.
    Aunt Enid looked grim. “They did that, child. It took them nigh on a year, but they found him, back in the swamp among the cypress and the swamp maple. The slave hunters trussed him up and carried him back to Oak River hanging from a branch like a wild hog. By this time, Grandpa Fairchild was mighty irked, and as I said, Old One-Eye was a heap of trouble. So he had him whipped until the skin fell off his back, and then burned him to a crisp and threw his bones into the bayou. Daddy used to swear he’d heard him when he was a boy, hollering and crackling in the old stable-yard.”
    Sophie shuddered. “That’s horrible!”
    “Most ghost stories are horrible,” said Aunt Enid. “They wouldn’t be scary otherwise.”
    “Are there ghosts in the maze?” asked Sophie, remembering the whispers.
    “Well, there is the Girl in Yellow. I disremember the details, but it’s said she walks there just before dawn.”
    “Does she whisper?”
    “I never heard anything about whispering. Why?”
    Sophie shrugged.
    Aunt Enid studied her for a moment. “You just remember, child: ghosts are only shadows. You say your prayers, they can’t hurt you.”
    “Aunt Enid, have you ever seen a ghost?”
    “If I haven’t, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” Aunt Enid said. “After all, I’ve never seen Jesus. There’s no question that there’s strange things around Oak River, and if they’re not ghosts, then they’re something mighty like.”

Later that day, Sophie went back to the maze and stood at the
entrance, listening for the voices she’d heard the day before. The cicadas sounded like cicadas. The leaves and grass rustled only when there was a breeze. No strange animals appeared or childish voices teased her.
    Maybe Sophie read too much, like Mama said, but she did know what was real and what wasn’t. She knew the animal she’d chased into the maze wasn’t just a cat or a rabbit or a muskrat. The more she thought about it, the less she believed that the voice she’d heard belonged to a real child. Which meant she must have been talking to a ghost.
    Sophie had been wishing for a magic adventure ever since Papa had read her
Peter Pan
when she was little. What she’d had in mind was a trip to the past or a world like Narnia, filled with magic and talking animals, not being led in circles by a ghost with a