Whisper in the Dark (6 page)

W
HAT DID I
see reflected in the window?

It was distorted and foggy, like something you see halfway between a dream and waking up. But it was clear enough. Too clear, in fact. Right behind us, a section of the brick walkway had lifted up. It was like there was a secret trapdoor in the middle of the garden. A red-eyed figure wrapped in darkness was rising out of the ground. I couldn’t see the figure’s face, but it was lifting one pale arm high as it began to come toward us. There was something held in its raised, threatening hand that glistened like steel. I had to turn around. I had to scream.

But I didn’t. Instead I heard words spoken in a voice that started out sounding like my father’s and then, I realized, was my own.

Neimpaug pesk homwak
.

The strongest gust of wind I have ever felt in my entire life came barreling into the garden at that exact second, along with so much rain that it seemed as if the whole sky was a storm gutter. And with that rain and wind came an arrow of lightning that exploded so close to us it rocked Roger and me back against the side of the building.

We were grabbing onto each other, trying not to fall down, trying to get our bearings. I smelled burning wood, but I could barely see far enough to pick out the ground underfoot. We were stunned and confused by the rain and the concussion of the lightning, and all we could think of was finding shelter. The rain was so heavy that it was barely possible to move as we stumbled forward blindly, and it was absolutely impossible to talk over the roaring, rushing sound of the curtain of rain wrapped tightly around us. It was as if the ocean had come all the way up from the coast and was sending its waves into the town.

Then, as suddenly as it came, it ended. The air cleared and the sky went from black to the milky color of a blown glass bottle. Thunder was still
rumbling, but from much farther away. Only that one lightning strike had been close. By the time we’d fumbled our way back to the gate of the garden, we didn’t need to find shelter after all.

I wiped rain and hair out of my eyes, gasping like a fish washed up on shore.

“Ohmigod,” I said to Roger as I tried to unstick my T-shirt from my body. “Did you see that?”

“Man,” he said. “I didn’t just see it, I felt it and I smelt it and I darn near drownt in it. I never went through anything like that before.” He pointed back at a tree with a black streak down its side and smoke still rising from its roots where the lightning strike grounded. “That bolt didn’t hit no more than forty feet away from us. First I thought we were dead, then I thought I was deaf.”

Roger lifted his head up toward the sky. “Yahooooo!” he yelled. “You missed us.”

I tugged at his sleeve. “No,” I said. “I’m not talking about the lightning. The window.”

I dragged him back through the garden, where runnels of rain were turning from rivers into small trickling rills, until we stood in front of the old window again.

“In there,” I said. “In the glass.”

Roger peered close. “Just an old room,” he said in a puzzled voice.

I looked at the window myself. This time it didn’t give back any reflection at all. I could see right through its warped glass into the small back room with pictures on the walls, a table, and a few chairs.

I turned to study the brick walkway, trying to pick out the exact spot that I thought I’d seen.

“Right here,” I said to Roger. “I saw this part of the garden reflected in that window like it was a mirror. And there was like a trapdoor here. The brick sidewalk lifted up and something or someone was coming out of it. Am I crazy?”

I started to turn away, but Roger caught hold of my sleeve.

“Maddy, look at that.”

He bent down to look close and gave a low whistle through his teeth. There, sticking out from between two water-washed bricks of the walkway, wedged in so deeply that we could not pull it free, was the broken, upside-down stem of a rose.

I
T ISN’T EASY
at times being Indian. I know I’m half white, but it doesn’t make the Indian part of me any less. Plus I look Indian. My skin is dark, my eyes are slanted, and my hair is thick and black. My dad used to say that all I had to do was put on a buckskin dress to look just like a Narragansett girl from the seventeenth century.

But I live in these times, times when people find Indians interesting but sort of quaint. Modern-day people claim to be rational—even though they believe in urban legends and their kids all read the Harry Potter books and dream about being wizards. So if you start talking Indian stuff as if you really believe it, they may just look at you as if they pity you for believing crap like that. And if you talk about the past, a lot of people say you should just
forget it. Live in the present day. Whatever happened, happened. This is the twenty-first century. Forget about it. But Indians don’t forget. I might listen to Eminem on my Walkman and play video games and send e-mail, but that doesn’t make me a different person. It doesn’t change the beat of my heart. We Indians know what century we are living in, but we also remember how we got here. And we remember the stories created along the way.

“Roger,” I said, “I have to tell you about the Whisperer in the Dark.”

“You mean that old story about the Indian boogeyman,” Roger said. “You told me that one already, Maddy.”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

“You mean there’s more to it than just some monster that takes away kids who’ve been bad?” Roger said, trying to make light of it. Then he saw the look on my face and stopped. “Sorry, Mad,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“I didn’t tell you the whole story,” I said. “The Whisperer story isn’t just one of those Narragansett tales that is as ancient as our hills. Part of it also comes from the time after the arrival of the Knife
Men.
Chauquacock.
That’s the name my Indian ancestors gave to the English. Some say it was because they admired the Europeans’ blades that were not made of wood or bone or flint like our knives, but fashioned out of some new, hard, and shiny substance with sharp edges. My dad, though, said we also gave the English that name because those newcomers could sometimes be just as hard and cold and dangerous as the weapons they carried.”

Roger settled back against the stone and crossed his arms. He could tell I was in my Maddy the Historian mode and that my story was going to take a while. I took a deep breath.

“Anyhow, the story of the Whisperer is like a lot of things that are Narragansett now but have a kind of English influence to them. Like the way the Narragansetts greeted Roger Williams when he first arrived here to found Providence, way back in 1636. ‘What cheer,
netop
,’ they said to him.
Netop
means ‘friend’ in the Narragansett language. But ‘what cheer’ was the way that English people greeted each other back then. Sort of like ‘Whassup?’ now. The Narragansetts had learned those words from the
early English traders.”

I explained to Roger how I had gotten so freaked out by Grama Delia’s story about the Whisperer in the Dark that it was a long time before I figured I was finally ready to hear more. But this time I went to my dad. Dad was so strong, so big and solid, that it was safer to hear such a scary story from him. Back then I thought he would always be around to protect me. Dad was always ready to talk about our ways. It was one of the things we always used to do together. So when I asked him about the Whisperer, he just put aside the wood carving he’d been working on, pulled his stool away from the bench, and sat me on his lap.

“The Whisperer,” he said. “You want to know about that scary monster, Maddy girl?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, clasping my hands together and leaning back against his broad chest.

Then Dad told me what he’d heard as a kid. No one really knew what that creature looked like. But they were afraid, terribly afraid of hearing its cold voice. Because when you heard the Whisperer speak, that meant that it had chosen you. It didn’t come right out and grab you like a corny movie
monster. You first heard its voice four different times. The fourth time was when it finally spoke your name. Then you had to go to it. You couldn’t stop yourself. After that you were never ever seen again.

Having my big, strong father tell me what he knew about the Whisperer actually made me feel a little better. Sure, it was spooky stuff, but with Dad right there to protect me, I knew I had nothing to worry about. I knew he was going to pick up where Grama Delia’s story about the Whisperer left off and tell me how that monster was defeated. And, sure enough, he did.

“Finally,” Dad continued, “the people decided they had to do something. The Whisperer had preyed on too many of their loved ones, and they had to put a stop to him. So one night they surrounded the part of the dark swamp near the coast where it was said the Whisperer lived. The people all had torches and made a great ring of fire. Fire and the bright light of the sun were the only things the monster feared. They kept moving in closer and closer. They saw a shadow slipping through the trees, running away from them, away from that fire.
They drove it back up the hill to a cave in a steep cliff where they knew it would take shelter from the light. Sure enough it did, and when they lifted their torches to see what was in the cave, what some of them saw was even more awful than they had expected. They blocked up the mouth of that cave with big stones and piled earth on top of that. They put down strong medicine to keep anyone or anything from opening it. That medicine was supposed to last for a thousand seasons. For a long time after that, no one heard the Whisperer in the Dark.”

“What did they see?” I asked.

Dad smiled. “I knew you were going to ask that, Maddy. Although they saw it only briefly, although it was covered with the blood of his victims, they thought they recognized the monster’s face. It was the face of one of their own people, the pawwaw who had been hungry for power before he had disappeared many seasons earlier. An evil spirit had come into him, and he had become a monster. When they closed that cave, they meant to seal in not just that man, but also the spirit that had turned him into something inhuman.”

But, I told Roger, that was not the end of what my dad shared with me.

“What your Grama Delia didn’t tell you,” my father said, “is that the Whisperer in the Dark returned many years later, after the coming of the English during the time of Canonchet. This time that dark spirit didn’t choose to inhabit one of our people. Instead it chose an Englishman. You could say that made sense. None of our monsters were as dangerous as the English. The long-ago monsters just killed a few people every now and then. But the English seemed to want to destroy all the Indians. We discovered that if we wanted to scare our kids into behaving right, it was a lot more effective to tell them the Chauquacock, those English Knife Men, were going to get them, than to say they’d be taken away by a giant bird or some other Indian monster.”

There was, my father explained, one Chauquaco, one Knife Man, in particular. He was the most bloodthirsty of all the English. Even the other Englishmen feared him. He was a soldier who had fought not just our people, but native people in other parts of the world. Asia, Africa, the islands
of the Pacific. Wherever he went, he took delight in killing—not just other warriors, but those who were weak, like children and elders. Then he drank their blood because he said it made him stay strong. His hair was white, but he didn’t look old. His eyes were red, and his skin was as pale as something you’d find under a rock. He was fearless in battle, and not just because he wore an armor-plated vest so that spears and arrows just bounced off him. He was huge and powerful. The only thing that he seemed wary of was bright light, and so he always attacked at twilight or in the dark. He had become like an animal, living in the woods apart from the rest of the English. Because he preyed only on the Indians, his own people left him alone.

We Narragansetts had a name for him. It was Chauquaco Wunnicheke, which means “Knife Hand,” because he carried a vicious weapon. It was a five-bladed knife with a handle. When he gripped it, those blades stuck out from his fist like razor-sharp claws.

One night our warriors took Knife Hand captive. They came upon him crouched like a wolf over the
body of a young man he had killed. He was drinking the blood. When he looked up, he saw a circle of men. Half of them held torches, while the others kept their arrows pointed at his heart. His red eyes gleamed as he tried to shrink away from the light, but they had encircled him and he couldn’t escape.

Some wanted to execute him right on the spot.

“
Nissnissoke
,” some of our men said. “Kill him like a dog.”

“A quick end is too good,” others said. “Let him know the long death of many wounds.”

But Canonchet did not agree.

“A warrior’s death is too good for this one,” he said.

They stripped Knife Hand of his armor and his weapons. Then they took him to a cave in the side of a nearby cliff. It was not a place where people ever went because it was said that a powerful bad
Chepi
, a spirit-being, dwelled there. The cave’s mouth had been sealed with great stones and medicine a thousand seasons before. It was the same cave where the Whisperer had been buried alive.

“Open the cave,” Canonchet said.

So the stones were pried out of the mouth of the
cave. Then they shoved the Knife-handed One into the darkness. Strangely he did not resist them, but went into that darkness as if he knew it, as if it was his own, as if he was eager to join it. Then the Narragansett men closed up the mouth of that cave again, tighter than before. But before they wedged the last stones in place, Canonchet threw that five-bladed knife in through the hole.

“Use this to cut your own throat,” Canonchet said.

Knife Hand, though, remained defiant. The last words that they heard him speak before they closed the hole were not shouted or screamed. They were whispered in a voice that chilled the spirits of all those who heard, not just for what was said, but because those words were spoken not in English but in their own tongue, in Narragansett.

“I will not die here,” he whispered. “The seasons will pass, and I will return again. I will come back for your children.”

I took a deep breath. For a moment it had been as if I was standing there with Canonchet, putting the last stone into the mouth of that cave, not in modern-day Providence with cars and busses going
by only fifty yards away.

“‘I will come back for your children,’” I said. “That’s what the Whisperer in the Dark said to Canonchet. Canonchet, my ancestor. And remember my bad dream from last night? I heard a voice in my dream, a voice that drew me to it. The voice called me Child of Canonchet, and it said it was waiting for me. And just now, in the reflection of the window, I saw him. The Whisperer in the Dark.”

I looked down at the stone pavement under our feet. Was Roger going to laugh at what I’d just told him? Was he going to say it was silly for me to worry about a made-up bloodthirsty monster from hundreds of years ago? Even though he was big into horror fiction and worshipped Anne Rice, it didn’t mean he really believed any of that. It was probably all just fantasy for him. “A safe escape from the pressures of the modern world,” as his mother might say in one of her lectures at Brown.

Sure, I’d told Roger some of our Narragansett stories before, but never like I believed them. Never like I was sure there really was something out there waiting to get me. I’d always kept this cool facade
going. I was in control. Maddy, the mistress of all she surveys. But for the last twenty-four hours, I’d been crumbling like an old wall whose mortar has worn out. If Roger laughed at me, or told me to grow up and get real, it would all come down, every last stone. I’d be totally exposed and all alone. And then what would I do? Maybe I would just run and keep running.

Roger reached out a long finger to tuck back a thick strand of damp hair that had come coiling down over my eye. It was the sort of thing my mother used to do. It was so kind and gentle that it made me raise my head to look at him. He didn’t say a word, but just nodded. Then he slid his arm down to put it around my shoulder. I let out a sob and just grabbed at him. I wrapped my own arms around his skinny waist, my good hand grabbing my other wrist. I held on to Roger like a shipwrecked sailor holds on to a floating timber.

I imagine that people who saw us standing there like that thought we were just a couple of exhibitionist kids who were making out in public. But we were two friends, real friends who could depend on each other. And as I hugged Roger, he seemed as
solid and reliable as a tree.

Our Narragansett creation story says that Cautantowwit made the first people from stone, but then broke them up and put them back into the earth because they were hard-hearted and uncaring. Then Cautantowwit shaped a man and a woman from the ash tree, and when those first people stepped forth they were as connected to the earth and as graceful and giving as the beautiful trees. That was how I felt as I stood there holding on to Roger—safe and rooted as we swayed a little bit like two trees in the wind.