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.