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.
In
August of 1989, just a month or so before I began the 4th grade (and
around 2 months before I made my debut as a thespian: again, a story for another day), my family and I moved
into a new house. This new house of ours was located on the east side of Bernon
Park, in the Bernon Heights neighborhood: in fact, we were literally only one
street away from the park’s eastern perimeter. I call it a new house, but it
had actually been built in 1952, which meant that by the time we had moved into
it it had already been around for 37 years. It was a small 2-story (plus a
basement) single family home done in the Cape Cod style, with an asphalt roof.
The lot the house could be found on was 5,039 square feet, with the house
taking up about 1,824 of those square feet; the remaining 3,215 consisted of a
large field located behind the house, where my siblings and I enjoyed playing
when we were kids (there was also a small lawn at the front of the house). On
the first floor one could find a sunporch (connected to which was the garage),
a kitchen/dining room, a living room, a den, a bathroom, and a spare room that
served as a playroom for my siblings and I. On the second floor there was
another bathroom, my parents’ bedroom, and a bedroom for me and my siblings (we
slept in bunkbeds back then). Though after a couple of years had gone by my
parents ended up converting the playroom into their bedroom, with the two
bedrooms upstairs now being split up between my siblings and I, two to a room: one of these rooms I still occupy, all these years later. Our new home
was only a few blocks away from Bernon Heights Elementary School: literally
less than a mile on foot, really.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.
(The Man With the Blue Face)
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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