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asleep, or at least I didn’t think I was. I just closed my eyes and opened them again. And when I did, I could see myself. I watched myself get up, put on my robe, and go downstairs. I watched my hand reach out to unlock and then open the cellar door. The stairs creaked under my feet, so loud that I was sure everyone in the house—and everything hiding at the bottom of the stairs—could hear.
    But it wasn’t just the stairs that I heard. I also heard something else, something calling me. It was a whispering voice, a voice so soft that it might have just been my imagination, if I hadn’t felt it pulling me with a force I couldn’t resist, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
    Child of Canonchet , that spidery voice whispered, come to me. I am here. I am hungry. I am waiting for you….
    Stop, I told myself. But I kept going down into the darkness. For some reason the lights weren’t working. They’d burned out, or we’d had a power failure. I had a flashlight in my hand, though, and I kept playing its beam along the wall. I had to find the fuse box so that I could get the lights back on again.
    Then I heard something behind me. I knew that sound. It was the sound of a door, a heavy old door, being slowly opened. I had to turn around, but I couldn’t. I knew what I would see looming over me.
    I couldn’t move. But I could speak. And I said something. I didn’t even know that I knew the words in Narragansett until they came out of my mouth. “Awaun ewo?” “Who is that?”
    “AWAUN EWO?” I shouted the words again as loud as I could. Then hands grabbed me hard by the shoulders.

11
TENSION
    A UNT LYSSA HAD gone off to the library. Even though it was now the weekend, she liked to work on Saturdays, especially Saturday mornings when things were quiet. She left with her usual smile. Not a word about my three A.M . outburst that woke up her and Roger and brought them both down the hall to my room where they found me standing in front of the closet door with my eyes closed, yelling, “Who is that?” in Narragansett. My aunt had to take me by the shoulders and turn me around before I woke up.
    I say that I woke up, but in more ways than one I was still in the middle of that dream. The feeling of dread had been so strong that it hadn’t completely left me. I found myself looking over at the door down to the cellar and shuddering more thanonce while Roger and I ate breakfast. Or at least he ate. All I did was push my food around on my plate. Even though I usually devoured Aunt Lyssa’s French toast, my appetite was missing. Grama Delia and my dad had both told me more than once to pay attention to my dreams, because a dream can be a message. But what was the message of that dream, apart from the fact that I was now even more uncertain than I’d been before? Where did those Narragansett words come from? I knew they weren’t part of my limited Narragansett vocabulary. It was maddening. I felt as if I knew something, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. One thing I did know for sure, though. I had to get out of the house.
    I looked over at Roger and he read my mind.
    “Want to take a walk?” he said.
     
    I lifted my good hand to wipe the sweat from my brow. It was one of those close, humid days that we get in late summer on the east coast. The sky was hazed over with clouds. It hadn’t rained yet, but there was that feeling in the air, like the tension in the head of a drum. Something was going to breaksoon. A violent storm might come rolling in at any second, roaring up the river, bringing water from the ocean.
    “Which way do you want to go, Maddy?”
    Roger’s voice pulled me out of my reverie, and I looked around. We’d reached the bottom of Benefit Street again, its steep hill rising up toward Brown University. The one-way traffic heading north was thin. The sky and the heavy air around us were still threatening. Anamakeesuck sokenun . Soon it will rain. That is what Grama Delia would say in