It was in 1989, when I was in the 4th grade and a student at Bernon Heights Elementary School, that my family and I moved to a new house, also in the Bernon Heights area. Bernon Heights Elementary School was located in a neighborhood named Bernon Heights, and this was one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city of Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Ah, Woonsocket . . . the city I was born in, the city I grew up in. Woonsocket is a very old city (it was incorporated back in 1888), and it is located in northern Rhode Island, right near the borderline that divides the state from Massachusetts. It has a population of over 41,000 people, most of them being (like myself) of French-Canadian ancestry, for towards the end of the 19th century Woonsocket had been a bastion for French-Canadian immigrants looking for a new home: towards the start of the 20th century so many French-Canadians had lived in the city that it had been nicknamed “Little Quebec” (at that point in time, more people living there had spoken French than English). Although the city has modernized in recent years (a renovation that actually began in the 1970’s), I still see it as an old city made up of abandoned textile mills, crumbling cemeteries, and Gothic churches. It also served as the real-life inspiration for the fictional city of Thundermist that sometimes appears in my books (most prominently in my second collection Autopsy of an Eldritch City).
To get to the school itself, first you passed through a small parking lot located atop a hill (this parking lot was almost directly across the street from the more upscale and prestigious Mount Saint Charles Academy). The parents would drop their children off at the top of this hill, and we’d then walk all the way down to the bottom. At the bottom of the hill was a large parking lot (which also doubled as a playground: here one could find a basketball court, for example), bordered by the school to the right and a large field to one's left. This field had a baseball diamond and a very large rock (my friends and I would often play on this rock, using our imaginations to transform it into a time machine or spaceship), and it was surrounded by a small forest known as the Booth Pond Conservation Area. On the southeastern perimeter of this field (not far from the big rock) was a small (and supposedly haunted) hill that rose up into the forest, and the top of that hill was forbidden territory, though of course, one always saw the older kids sneaking up there (I myself finally ventured to the top of the hill in 2020 . . . but that's a story for another day).
As for Bernon Heights Elementary School, there isn’t much to say about the building itself, other than that it consisted of two stories and was made up of light brown bricks. When you stepped through the front doors, you found yourself in a sizeable foyer. To one’s right was the small school library, and a hallway that led to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. Directly facing the front doors was the cafeteria and the kitchen, this cafeteria serving double duty as the school auditorium (on one wall of this cafeteria there was a poster concerning first aid for people that were choking, and this poster always creeped me out, thanks to its illustration of a choking mustachioed man with a face that was a pale blue hue). To one’s right was the principal’s office, the kindergarten classroom, and a long hallway that led north, flanking the cafeteria (lining this hallway were the preschool classrooms). If you went up this vertical hallway you would eventually reach another long hallway, though this one was horizontal. Taking a left here would take one to the 5th and 6th grade classrooms, while taking a right led to the 4th and 5th grade classrooms, the Special Education classroom, and the boiler room. In this northern hallway one could also find the school gym. When I was in the 4th grade, my classroom was Room 2, which was located at the very end of the northeastern perimeter of this long hallway, in the fourth and fifth grade quadrant. I’m not going to tell you what the interior of this classroom was like because I no longer remember. I suppose that Bernon Heights was an okay school, but it couldn’t hold a candle to my own home.
Our old home, where I had spent the first 9 or so years of my life, had been located on the west side of Bernon Park, and not far from Park Avenue. That had been a much older house, as it was built in 1922. It had also been a much smaller house, with a tiny backyard and only a partial basement. I remember that the first floor consisted of a living room, a small eat-in kitchen, a bathroom and a spare room, while two bedrooms were located on the second floor. I remember that in one corner of the living room there was one of those giant old television sets, the kind where they were built in enormous wooden cabinets, and how a small bookcase was located to the side of this television, this bookcase belonging to my mother: some of the novels that could be found on it back in the day were Lee Raintree’s Dallas, Stephen King’s Carrie, William Blatty’s The Exorcist, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
My memories of our old house are somewhat hazy. In some ways there was something about the place I found very frightening. The basement especially terrified me. It was small, dark and gloomy, and there were these spooky paintings of creepy-looking faceless people in exquisite garments that the previous owner had painted on the walls. I remember there was also a very large hole in the center of one of the walls, and how as a child I had fantasized that this hole was a gateway to Hell itself: it probably didn’t help matters that my parents warned me to never stick my hand into that hole. This basement also figured into many of my nightmares: as I’ve grown older its very rare that I have bad dreams anymore but during my childhood in the 1980’s I was especially prone to nightmares. I remember my dad had a paperback copy of Robert Silverberg’s 1980 fantasy novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. On the book’s spine there was this sinister-looking man with blue skin who I would always refer to as “The Man With the Blue Face” (my dad would tell me the character’s real name, but I could never remember it). Anyway, this “Man With the Blue Face,” well, he terrified me, to the extent that my dad had to hide this book on his bookshelf behind another book. I can probably safely say that this Man With the Blue Face probably appeared in around 50% of my childhood nightmares. This was one that occurred often: in the nightmare, I’d be lying in bed in my bedroom when I’d hear a voice call my name. Thinking it was my parents, I would go to the top of the stairs and look down. And almost every time, it would be the Man With the Blue Face standing at the bottom, waiting for me. I would find myself unable to run as he charged up the stairs. He’d grab my ankles and then yank me down the stairs. Then he would drag me along the hallways of the house until we came to the door that led to the basement. The Man With the Blue Face would swing open the basement door and start pulling me down the stairs. Then the basement door would slam shut and I would wake up, usually screaming for my mother.
A variation on this dream had me getting dragged down to the basement by members of the Swiss mask theater troupe known as Mummenschanz. Now, you might be curious as to how it was that a young boy living in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in the early 1980’s was familiar with the work of Mummenschanz. Well, they appeared in the last episode of the first season of The Muppet Show, and my siblings and I were great fans of that program when we were kids. Though I hated that Mummenschanz sketch: I believe you can still see it for yourself on YouTube at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe95sn0cN3k).
A year after we moved away from that old house, a murder took place at a home on the street right next to our former street. In September of 1990, Catherine Miguel was murdered in broad daylight by her estranged husband John, stabbed to death 30 times on the front lawn of her home, before the eyes of their 6 and 11 year-old children, a 15 year-old babysitter, and numerous local kids who had gotten out from school minutes before and were walking back home (one of my friends saw the whole thing). Events like that can stain the psychic atmosphere of a place for generations. If that neighborhood has a tutelary guardian, it is no doubt a vulturine and invidious spirit.
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