Chapter 6: Hammer Time
My mother's family lived on the second floor of a large duplex on Côte-Sainte-Catherine. The front doors to the second-floor apartments were located on the side of the buildings and faced each other from one duplex to the other. They rarely locked the front door and everyone knew their neighbours quite well. One morning, one of my uncles, who must have been about 13 at the time, says he woke up very early. This was summertime and although it was kind of light out, the sun hadn't risen yet so it was practically in the middle of the night still. He was half awake in his bed, a bit groggy and he realized that what had woken him was the sound of someone creeping along in the corridor. For some reason, it didn't feel right to him, it didn't sound like someone from the family was going to the bathroom during the night. It was slower, much weirder. He called out «Hey, who's there?». He then heard whoever was in the corridor walk back to the top of the stairs, down the stairs, out the front door. Creepy enough imho, but it gets much worse.
Within six months of this happening, a teenage girl was found dead in the duplex next door to my family's home. She had been killed during the night with a hammer by a 15-year-old boy that lived nearby. He was known by all the other kids of the neighbourhood and my mother remembers him as being very quiet and always kind of looking down or away whenever you would look at him. He was kind of an outcast, certainly because of his personality but also a bit perhaps because he went to a posh school thanks to his father being the janitor there and he got a bit snobbed out by the other kids.
In the duplex where my family lived, on the first floor there was a family with three teenage girls, in my family there were two teenage girls. I guess he knew where to look and I guess he must have been lurking around for a good while before deciding that it was time to take the hammer out. He killed himself in hospital or jail while he was still very young.
