“RAWRRURHHHH!” The Whisperer in the Dark rocked backward, grabbing at its face with its hands, including the hand that held those blades, blades that cut into its own face as it tried to wipe away the wet, biting pain of the spray.

“ARRRGGHH!” it roared, so loudly that the walls of the cave shook around us. Half blind, it blundered into one of the support beams, splintering it into dust with a great blow from its arm. It swung its steel-clawed hand back and forth wildly, cutting the air, seeking flesh to rend and tear as it continued to scream. It was a scream that seemed filled with more anger and frustration than pain.

It was then, just as before, that Narragansett words came to me. They came to me as that tingling spread from my spine to my fingertips, an electric charge that I felt in both my good hand and my dead hand. I held both my hands up toward the sky that I knew was somewhere above our heads.

“Neimpaug!” I cried. “Thunder! Anunema! Help me!”

Then the whole world exploded.

27

EXPLANATIONS

ROGER REMEMBERS WHAT happened next better than I do because I was knocked unconscious. He remembers the roof of the cave falling in, tons of rock coming down right on top of the Whisperer in the Dark, but not a single stone striking him or me or Aunt Lyssa. He remembers looking up and seeing the light of the sky fifty feet above us. He remembers the three of them carrying me up out of that hole in the ground and emerging in the middle of the street that had been under construction two blocks away.

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.