Whisper in the Dark

by Joseph Bruchac

  “Roger,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered.

  But before I could say anything, my cell phone rang. It was so unexpected, so much a part of the modern world and not where my gloomy thoughts of doom had been taking me, that it made me laugh.

  “It’s for you,” Roger said. It was a dumb thing to say, but the way he said it was so funny that it made me laugh even harder. Somehow I managed to get the phone out. But before answering it, I looked at the Caller ID and then sighed with relief. I knew that number.

  “Aunt Lyssa,” I said into the phone.

  “Honey.” Just that single word in my aunt’s gentle voice made me feel better. “Maddy, honey, I got your message about Bootsie. Is she all right?”

  “Bootsie’s going to be okay. Doc Fox is keeping her overnight,” I said. “Roger’s here with me.”

  “That’s good,” Aunt Lyssa said. “You want to bring him home? I’m picking up chicken for dinner.”

  I sighed with relief. This was all so normal. I looked over at Roger, who had been leaning close enough to hear my aunt’s side of our conversation. He nodded his head.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “We’ll talk when I get home,” Aunt Lyssa said in her positive way. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  I felt that way when I put my phone away. Everything was fine. There was nothing to worry about. But as Roger and I walked back up Benefit Street, that good feeling seeped away. And Aunt Lyssa’s reassuring voice was replaced by another one, a voice that whispered fear.

  10

  WHO IS THAT?

  I FLUFFED UP MY pillow for the twentieth time. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. We’d eaten dinner with Aunt Lyssa, and then Roger and I had played my new video game which is loosely based on a movie that is loosely based on a character out of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We’d gotten bored fast. It was all monsters and explosions and was way over the top. The really scary stuff isn’t like Star Wars with werewolves and vampires who look like the Incredible Hulk with fangs and claws. Real horror creeps up on you.

  We ended up turning off the PlayStation and just talking about normal stuff like other kids at school and our teachers and running. We’d talked a lot about Bootsie at dinner, how weird it was the way she was hurt. We were no longer worried about how she was recovering. Dr. Fox had left a message that she was doing great. He was just keeping her for a day or two to make sure she didn’t have an infection or something. Aunt Lyssa acted like everything was all cool, but she must have known I was still freaked out about Bootsie because she was the one who suggested calling Roger’s parents to see if he could sleep over in the spare bedroom. I wondered if he was sleeping now. I sure wasn’t. My mind kept going back, not just to Bootsie getting hurt but to those phone calls. None of it made sense.

  Think about something else, I told myself. So I tried focusing on how safe and secure I was here in my bed, here in my room in this house that had become my home.

  Then I began thinking about this house, about how old it is, from its gabled roof on down to its fieldstone foundation. That made me think about the cellar. It’s a real cellar, not one of those neatly sealed basements that can be turned into a rec room or a den with windows that open to the outside like you see in modern houses. Our cellar was dug into the ground, into the old stones of the hills of Providence. It’s always cool and even a little damp in the cellar, and although it lacks windows, it does have doors, three of them.

  Those doors are the first things you see when you come down the creaky wooden stairs. The door to the right of the stairs leads to a small, square root cellar, just about the size of one of the prison cells in The Count of Monte Cristo. The door in front opens to the furnace room and the storage bin where the coal used to be shoveled in from outside. The door to the left is the one that is never opened.

  That third cellar door is made of thick wood, heavy oak with huge metal hinges. I don’t know why it’s so thick and heavy, strong enough to hold against almost anything that might try to break it down. Maybe it’s just because that was the way some doors were built three centuries ago. A lot stronger than the new door at the top of the creaky cellar stairs.

  Had I locked that new door down into the cellar? For some reason the thought of it being unlocked made me feel panicked. No, I’d locked it. I’d done that first, even before latching the windows when we’d taken Bootsie to the vet.

  When I was little and just visiting Aunt Lyssa, not actually living in the house, I would scare myself by thinking about how that third door in the cellar used to lead into the tunnels. It was kept locked to keep people from going in and getting lost or maybe buried in a cave-in, because some of those tunnels have become unstable with all the houses and roads built over them now. Everyone in Providence has heard about the tunnels and the caves. Most people have never seen them. Some think that they are just a myth. But I grew up being told stories about them and I’ve done research in the library, and I know they’re real. Some of the tunnels and caves were used by abolitionists back in the nineteenth century to hide the runaway slaves who were following the Undergound Railroad north. But they weren’t dug then. They are much, much older than that. They’re as ancient as one of those nameless things that HPL imagined lurking in the dark, crawling through those tunnels, pushing its way through our creaky old door, coming up the steps one by one….

  I tried to keep from thinking about those caves, dark, secret places where almost anything could live. Of course, that is when I finally did fall asleep.

  Except I wasn’t asleep, or at least I didn’t think I was. I just closed my eyes and opened them again. And when I did, I could see myself. I watched myself get up, put on my robe, and go downstairs. I watched my hand reach out to unlock and then open the cellar door. The stairs creaked under my feet, so loud that I was sure everyone in the house—and everything hiding at the bottom of the stairs—could hear.

  But it wasn’t just the stairs that I heard. I also heard something else, something calling me. It was a whispering voice, a voice so soft that it might have just been my imagination, if I hadn’t felt it pulling me with a force I couldn’t resist, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

  Child of Canonchet, that spidery voice whispered, come to me. I am here. I am hungry. I am waiting for you….

  Stop, I told myself. But I kept going down into the darkness. For some reason the lights weren’t working. They’d burned out, or we’d had a power failure. I had a flashlight in my hand, though, and I kept playing its beam along the wall. I had to find the fuse box so that I could get the lights back on again.

  Then I heard something behind me. I knew that sound. It was the sound of a door, a heavy old door, being slowly opened. I had to turn around, but I couldn’t. I knew what I would see looming over me.

  I couldn’t move. But I could speak. And I said something. I didn’t even know that I knew the words in Narragansett until they came out of my mouth. “Awaun ewo?” “Who is that?”

  “AWAUN EWO?” I shouted the words again as loud as I could. Then hands grabbed me hard by the shoulders.

  11

  TENSION

  AUNT LYSSA HAD gone off to the library. Even though it was now the weekend, she liked to work on Saturdays, especially Saturday mornings when things were quiet. She left with her usual smile. Not a word about my three A.M. outburst that woke up her and Roger and brought them both down the hall to my room where they found me standing in front of the closet door with my eyes closed, yelling, “Who is that?” in Narragansett. My aunt had to take me by the shoulders and turn me around before I woke up.

  I say that I woke up, but in more ways than one I was still in the middle of that dream. The feeling of dread had been so strong that it hadn’t completely left me. I found myself looking over at the door down to the cellar and shuddering more than once while Roger and I ate breakfast. Or at least he ate. All I did was push my food around on my plate. Even though I usually devoured Aunt Lyssa’s French toast, m
y appetite was missing. Grama Delia and my dad had both told me more than once to pay attention to my dreams, because a dream can be a message. But what was the message of that dream, apart from the fact that I was now even more uncertain than I’d been before? Where did those Narragansett words come from? I knew they weren’t part of my limited Narragansett vocabulary. It was maddening. I felt as if I knew something, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. One thing I did know for sure, though. I had to get out of the house.

  I looked over at Roger and he read my mind.

  “Want to take a walk?” he said.

  I lifted my good hand to wipe the sweat from my brow. It was one of those close, humid days that we get in late summer on the east coast. The sky was hazed over with clouds. It hadn’t rained yet, but there was that feeling in the air, like the tension in the head of a drum. Something was going to break soon. A violent storm might come rolling in at any second, roaring up the river, bringing water from the ocean.

  “Which way do you want to go, Maddy?”

  Roger’s voice pulled me out of my reverie, and I looked around. We’d reached the bottom of Benefit Street again, its steep hill rising up toward Brown University. The one-way traffic heading north was thin. The sky and the heavy air around us were still threatening. Anamakeesuck sokenun. Soon it will rain. That is what Grama Delia would say in Narragansett.

  As soon as I thought that, it reminded me of where those words in my dream probably came from. I didn’t remember Grama Delia saying them to me, but I probably just picked them up without knowing it. After all, she’d been teaching me a bunch of words and phrases like that. Ever since I moved to Aunt Lyssa’s house after being released from the hospital, Grama Delia had made a point of giving me little language lessons every time she came up from Charlestown for a day or two to visit. She said knowing our language would make me stronger. I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that. I couldn’t see how Indian words could actually protect me. But I loved the feeling of Narragansett on my tongue. Grama Delia doesn’t come visit all that often, though. She thinks that Aunt Lyssa is uncomfortable when she sticks around too long.

  She’s right about that. Aunt Lyssa gets as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs whenever Grama Delia comes to visit. Maybe it is because even though Aunt Lyssa is my closest living relative and my court-appointed guardian, she’s still a little uncertain about her role in my life. After all, she never expected to have a stubborn teenager to take care of, especially one obsessed with the supernatural. Sometimes I think she’d be happier just to have her quiet librarian life back again. Other times, though, I think she’s really threatened by Indian stuff. Like she’s afraid that the more Narragansett things I do and learn, the farther away from her I’ll get. Like I’ll be stolen by the Indians. Like she felt that my mother—who was her little sister and best friend—was stolen away from her by my father. So I try not to say any Narragansett words around her.

  Narragansett words. I don’t always feel like I’m learning them, but then they just pop into my head at times like this. For some reason today is the first time that any of those words have come to me. You don’t really hear Narragansett spoken much anymore. I’m not sure if anyone, even Grama Delia, is fluent enough to carry on a long conversation in our old tongue. But unless you live around Charlestown, which has the biggest population of our people in Rogue Island, there’s not much likelihood you’ll hear any Narragansett spoken at all. That was another thing they made illegal in this state more than a century ago. It was actually against the law for Narragansetts to speak their own language. You had to speak it in secret and pass it on to your children the same way. Of course, nowadays it isn’t illegal anymore. My father had always said he was going to teach me our language.

  “When?” I’d ask him.

  “Soon,” he’d say. But he never got around to it.

  Kuttannummi nosh. Will you help me, my father?

  “What was that you said, Maddy?”

  I looked over at Roger. How long had I been speaking my thoughts, mumbling to myself like someone with bipolar disorder, as we walked up Benefit Street?

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just distracted.”

  “It’s okay,” Roger said. And he meant it, and I wished that he was right.

  12

  QUESTIONS

  AS ROGER AND I continued to trudge along, I started hoping it would rain. I wanted to hear the thunder roll. Neimpaug pesk homwak. Thunder’s lightning bolts will strike. That is what you can say about a thunderstorm. Neimpaug, that’s the thunder. And I love it. Whenever a storm comes rolling up from the coast, I want to sit out on the porch or by the window to watch it come, hoping for thunder and lightning. Aunt Lyssa is freaked out by storms.

  “Get back from the windows,” she’ll say. Or “Don’t use the phone during a storm; lightning can come down the wire and kill you.”

  She even says that about making calls on my cell phone during a storm. It makes me want to laugh the way she gets so scared. But I am careful not to make fun of her. It’s not her fault that she’s not Indian and doesn’t understand the way we think of thunder and lightning. Dad would always smile when he heard the rumble of thunder.

  “Old Neimpaug, he’s out hunting for monsters,” Dad would say. “He’s shooting his lightning arrows down at the earth to cleanse the land.”

  The thunder, though, didn’t come. It just stayed hot and humid as we walked, my T-shirt sticking to my back, my hair drooping in heavy, wet curls in front of my eyes. But you could feel that a storm was going to happen. There weren’t many people out walking. Still Roger and I kept plodding stubbornly on—or I did, and he stayed by my side. We reached the front of the Governor Hopkins house. Roger took my arm.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go sit down.” We headed for the terraced garden next to the building.

  Roger tried to open the gate, but the latch didn’t move.

  “Why would they lock up this place on a Saturday morning?” he asked.

  “Here,” I said, grabbing the latch and jiggling it so that it opened. Maddy, your accomplished tour guide. “This thing always sticks.”

  We made our way to the bench we had sat on the first time I brought Roger here. It has the best view of the gold dome of the old State bank. For some reason just being able to open that gate made me feel a little less confused and anxious about things. It is funny how familiar things can be so reassuring. The smell of the hedges and the late summer flowers surrounded me, and I took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” I said to Roger. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Roger put his hand up to his chin and leaned forward to rest his elbow in the palm of his other hand. There was a little smile on his face as he did that, and I knew he was trying to make me smile too, by imitating the pose of a statue. It worked. I actually giggled.

  “Okay,” he said. “Best way to deal with a monster hungry for your blood is to laugh at it.” His face became serious. “No kidding, though, Maddy. Whatever is happening, the worst thing to do is to panic. We gotta really think about what is going on here.”

  “What is going on here?”

  “First of all,” he said, “even though I just made you laugh, this is no joke.”

  ‘You’re right,” I agreed. “If it was just the phone calls or the message scratched on my door, it could just be a harmless prank.” I poked Roger in the arm. “Like the stuff you and I do to each other sometimes.”

  Roger grinned briefly. My letters written to him in red ink and signed “Vampira,” his phone calls back to me using that Bela Lugosi voice.

  “But it’s more than that,” he said.

  “Way beyond that. Because of what was done to Bootsie.” I stared at the old bricks of the walkway under my feet. “I think if she hadn’t gotten under the shed, she would have been killed.”

  Roger nodded. “Not just Bootsie. Remember what Mr. Patel said about other dogs being killed?” He stroked his chin again. “I wo
nder if the blood was drained from their bodies?”

  Desite the heat and humidity that was wrapped around us like a blanket, a shiver went down my spine, as if someone had just poured cold water on my back. I didn’t want to think any more about this. I wanted to get up and walk away, walk right back into my own everyday life.

  The sky was even darker now, and although it was still morning it was almost like twilight. Out in the street, a few of the automatic lights that come on after dark were flickering, as if trying to decide if it was really night already. Then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.

  “What’s that?” I said, quickly turning my head.

  Roger turned to look with me. “What, Maddy? I didn’t see nothin’.”

  I got up and walked toward the building, toward a window with one pane of glass that looked even older than the others. What I’d seen had not been in front of the building, but almost inside it. I say almost because it looked like a reflection, an image in the bull’s-eye pane of glass.

  Old windows are strange. They aren’t thin and smooth and even like the glass that’s been used for the last hundred years. They ripple and distort what they reflect, twisting your vision toward a dimension other than ordinary height and width.

  Roger was looking over my shoulder.

  “You see that?” I said, reaching my hand toward the pane of glass.

  “Jus’ a reflection,” he said, his voice puzzled.

  But it was more than just a reflection of us and the garden in which we stood. The garden in the window was different. The trees and hedges in it were not exactly the same as those behind us. Plus there were people in period clothing strolling in the garden among the late-summer roses. Men wearing beaverskin top hats and carrying canes. Women in long dresses holding parasols over their heads. Had we walked into a set where they were making a film about Providence three centuries ago? I quickly turned to look back into the garden, and Roger turned with me.