Yes, I said the three of them. Roger, Aunt Lyssa, and . . . Mr. Patel. The pit he had fallen into turned out to be only six feet deep, and the fall had done no more than stun him.

“It is thanks to my yoga training,” he said, “that I was able to fall just so.”

That yoga training had also enabled him to bend the upper part of his body back so quickly when the Whisperer swung its deadly iron claws at his neck. He had been wounded, but the wounds were no more than four deep slashes across his upper chest.

Why had the street exploded above us? There was sort of an explanation for that. Even though no rain fell, a sudden bolt of lightning shot down from the sky and hit the explosives truck. What couldn’t be fully explained was why it happened at just that moment. It was a freak accident of the sort that no one could have expected, any more than they could understand why the force of the blast had been directed straight down in such a way that it opened the roof of the hidden cavern.

There were a lot of things no one could fully explain that day.

The police, though, said they knew who the Whisperer in the Dark was. His name, they said, was Wilbur Whateley. He had been born an albino, his skin so devoid of pigment, his eyes so sensitive that bright light pained him, and he was raised in a home where there were suspicions of terrible abuse. That was probably why he had taken to killing and decapitating animals when he was a child. Wilbur also apparently loved knives. He’d been taken from his birth family and put into the foster care system. Thirty years ago, when he was only thirteen, but bigger and stronger than most grown men, he had murdered his foster parents in the middle of the night. Then he sought out his biological parents and grandparents. He found them, too. When the police caught Wilbur, he was walking down the road with a big bag over his back. I don’t have to tell you what he had inside that bag.

His childhood home had been just two houses away from Aunt Lyssa’s. That was probably why he had discovered the caves and knew them so well. And that was why he came back to this neighborhood after he escaped from a mental institution two weeks before he called me on the telephone. How did he know my name and that I was a descendant of Canonchet? He had probably gotten that from reading the article about my winning the interstate cross-country meet.

“Wilbur Whateley,” Roger said, shaking his head.

“I know.”

It was too weird. Wilbur Whateley was the name of a character in HPL’s “The Dunwich Horror,” a bent, goatish giant who was half human and half the spawn of a creature from the depths of horror.