Whisper in the Dark by Joseph Bruchac Page B

inhabit one of our people. Instead it chose an Englishman. You could say that made sense. None of our monsters were as dangerous as the English. The long-ago monsters just killed a few people every now and then. But the English seemed to want to destroy all the Indians. We discovered that if we wanted to scare our kids into behaving right, it was a lot more effective to tell them the Chauquacock, those English Knife Men, were going to get them, than to say they’d be taken away by a giant bird or some other Indian monster.”
    There was, my father explained, one Chauquaco, one Knife Man, in particular. He was the most bloodthirsty of all the English. Even the other Englishmen feared him. He was a soldier who had fought not just our people, but native people in other parts of the world. Asia, Africa, the islandsof the Pacific. Wherever he went, he took delight in killing—not just other warriors, but those who were weak, like children and elders. Then he drank their blood because he said it made him stay strong. His hair was white, but he didn’t look old. His eyes were red, and his skin was as pale as something you’d find under a rock. He was fearless in battle, and not just because he wore an armor-plated vest so that spears and arrows just bounced off him. He was huge and powerful. The only thing that he seemed wary of was bright light, and so he always attacked at twilight or in the dark. He had become like an animal, living in the woods apart from the rest of the English. Because he preyed only on the Indians, his own people left him alone.
    We Narragansetts had a name for him. It was Chauquaco Wunnicheke, which means “Knife Hand,” because he carried a vicious weapon. It was a five-bladed knife with a handle. When he gripped it, those blades stuck out from his fist like razor-sharp claws.
    One night our warriors took Knife Hand captive. They came upon him crouched like a wolf over thebody of a young man he had killed. He was drinking the blood. When he looked up, he saw a circle of men. Half of them held torches, while the others kept their arrows pointed at his heart. His red eyes gleamed as he tried to shrink away from the light, but they had encircled him and he couldn’t escape.
    Some wanted to execute him right on the spot.
    “ Nissnissoke ,” some of our men said. “Kill him like a dog.”
    “A quick end is too good,” others said. “Let him know the long death of many wounds.”
    But Canonchet did not agree.
    “A warrior’s death is too good for this one,” he said.
    They stripped Knife Hand of his armor and his weapons. Then they took him to a cave in the side of a nearby cliff. It was not a place where people ever went because it was said that a powerful bad Chepi , a spirit-being, dwelled there. The cave’s mouth had been sealed with great stones and medicine a thousand seasons before. It was the same cave where the Whisperer had been buried alive.
    “Open the cave,” Canonchet said.
    So the stones were pried out of the mouth of thecave. 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