Roger came up next to me. “I don’t think I want to go through there either,” he said. “Not under the ground, even though it’s a new tunnel and probably safe. The hidden tunnels, like the ones Lovecraft wrote about, they’re all old ones.”

I nodded my head. I knew Roger was remembering the same stories I was. Like “The Rats in the Walls,” with giant cannibal caverns under an ancestral castle. But then there was also that picture Lovecraft describes in another story that showed horrible fanged creatures attacking people at a subway station.

“No, I don’t want to go into that tunnel,” I said.

“No way,” Roger said, drawing his finger across his throat.

“This is crazy.”

“I know,” Roger agreed. “But we both saw the rose, stuck there in between those bricks as if there was a trapdoor there.”

We began to walk, my good hand holding the numb fingers of my other hand cupped against my diaphragm. I had a sick feeling in my stomach again. Next to us the river flowed on as always, as if nothing was wrong with the world. I found myself wishing a birch-bark canoe would come floating up to us. A Narragansett man dressed in the traditional way would be in it, holding a carved paddle and smiling up at us.

Comishoohom? he would say. “Do you want to go by water?”

I would want to say Nux, which means “yes,” and get into that canoe and let him paddle me far away from all my fear and uncertainty. But I would shake my head.

Machaug, I said. “No, not now.” I can’t just save myself and leave everyone else behind.

He smiled again, the same broad smile I remember on my father’s face.

Maumaneeteantass, netop.

Then he turned back to his paddling, the heavy muscles of his shoulders and his broad back rippling as he worked the paddle, pushing his way swiftly up that river against the current until he was out of sight.

I felt a smile coming on to my face as I stood there looking at the empty river.

“Maddy,” Roger said, “what were you saying just then? You talking Indian?”

“Maumaneeteantass, netop,” I said slowly. “Be of good courage, my friend.”

Roger nodded his head. “I like that. When did you learn that?”

“I don’t know that I ever heard it,” I said, “until just now.”

I sat down on a bench and patted the seat beside me. Roger folded himself down, put one arm over the back of the bench, crossed his leg, right ankle over left knee, and turned to give me his full attention.

“Tell me what you think,” I said.