Roger cupped his chin with his hand and slowly shook his head back and forth. “I don’t know what I think. I mean, we’re always reading these stories and seeing the movies and talking about things like this. And we’re always saying things like we wouldn’t be that stupid to go into the woods like him or to go up into the attic like her, or to split up like those two did when they were searching the haunted house for whatever made that scary noise, you know? But I never really thought about any of it actually being real.”

“Me too,” I said.

“But it is. Maybe that monster, that Whisperer in the Dark, has come back and it has chosen you because, like you say, you are Narragansett and one of the last real descendants of Ca-ca-”

“Canonchet,” I said.

“Canonchet. Or maybe it is just some crazy man, one of those serial killers, who has put you in his sights. And there wouldn’t have to be any real reason for him to choose you or for that to happen apart from the fact that people like that don’t need to have any reasons to do that sort of thing.”

Roger’s voice grew slower as he reached the end of his sentence, almost the way a windup toy slows down and then stops because all of the energy in it has run out. He was quiet for a while. Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and sat up straighter.

“Should we go to the police?”

“What do we tell them?” I said. “I got two prank phone calls, my dog got scratched up, we got caught in a rainstorm, and now I am convinced that a serial killer or some razor-handed monster out of a Narragansett legend is coming to get me? They’ll either get ticked off at us for trying to put them on, or they’ll think we’re on drugs, or they’ll just patiently shake their heads and tell us it’s just our overactive imaginations. This city is such a weird place with a crazy history. They’re used to wacky stories like this. Witches, vampires, werewolves, blobs from outer space. Par for the course in Providencesylvania. Plus we’re teenagers, remember? In a policeman’s dictionary teenager is just another word for ‘pain-in-the-neck troublemaker.’”

“I guess you’re right,” Roger said, slumping back on the bench.