Ch-ch-ch-ha-ha-HA

When I was 10 years old, my family moved from Deep Cove to Chilliwack.

One of the things that made this move bearable for me was the fact that our new home had an in-ground pool. Sure, I was moving away from the forest and the ocean and the mountains -- not to mention my friends.

But hey! At least we were getting a nice pool.

A few weeks after we moved to our new home, my mom brought my brother and me to the local pool supply store to pick up some pool-cleaning chemicals. The man who worked there was obviously familiar with all the pool owners in the small town that was now our home, and since he'd never seen us before, he asked us where we lived.

My mom told him the name of our street. Grimacing, he responded, "Oh yeah -- the old Buchanan place. Where the kid drowned."

Turns out a group of neighbourhood kids had been playing hide-and-go-seek the year before, and one of them -- a three-year-old boy -- had crawled under the fence into what was soon to become our backyard, then had slipped and fallen into our pool, only to become trapped beneath its vinyl cover.

Just the kind of story you REALLY want to hear about your new home.

We were pretty freaked out... But not enough to stop swimming in our pool.

As I floated lazily in my innertube, or swam from one end to the other without taking a breath, the little dead boy would sometimes surface in my thoughts. I'd stare through the pool's clear depths and wonder how he must have felt in his last moments -- whether he'd known what was happening, if he'd screamed, and if so, if anyone had heard him.

Then I'd scramble out of the water and rub myself down so hard with a towel, I'd leave carpet burns on my skin.

Still, I'd thought the creepiness of it all was something I could deal with -- something that lent a certain gothic charm to an otherwise normal suburban home.

And then -- at the beginning of the summer I turned 12 -- I made the mistake of watching Friday the 13th.

You know... the pre-Jason original, the one with the psycho-killer mom who murders a bunch of innocent people in revenge for her son's death by DROWNING years before?

Yep. Didn't relate too much to THAT particular tale.

All of a sudden I began to take notice of the little dead boy's family (because yes, they did still live just a few houses down the street).

His older brother was just eight years old -- by the looks of it, still too small to go about stabbing people in their sleep. The mother was pleasant enough, and seemed far too busy chasing around her toddler daughter to entertain thoughts of bloody revenge.

But the father... He was big and seldom smiled. And he had a beard.

The facial hair clinched it. The man was a psycho killer, and he was out to murder my family.

That whole summer, I was afraid to stay in the house by myself. Every creak was a footstep, every breath of wind was the satisfied sigh of the hunter closing in for the kill.

(Of course, my pre-teen addiction to Stephen King novels didn't help.)

I tried to share my fears with my family, but they pooh-poohed my concerns and told me I was just imagining things. Which I was, of course. Logically, I understood that.

But logic didn't stop me from bolting out the front door whenever I heard the slightest unexplained noise coming from some other part of the house.

Even now, I can feel how my heart used to pound as I stood at the foot of our driveway and stared at our house, willing myself to believe there wasn't an angry bearded man with an axe hiding in the downstairs bathroom.

Eventually, I grew out of my fear. Grade seven finally began, I started spending more time with friends, and the inexplicable noises that had struck such terror into my heart fell mysteriously silent.

Then -- during the great ice storm of 1985 -- the pool's pipes cracked and broke. My parents never bothered to fix them. The pool fell into disrepair, eventually becoming home to countless frogs whose midnight croaking prevented my parents from sleeping.

Years later, while I was away at university, my parents decided to fill the pool with dirt and give it a proper burial. If you were to visit their house now, you'd never guess a killer pool lay concealed beneath the grass in their backyard.

Just like the pool, the terror it once spawned is still buried in my mind, lurking beneath the fertile soil of my imagination.

Except now that I'm a mother, it's not MY death that has the power to terrify me.

It's Milo's.

And suddenly, I feel a strange sense of sympathy for Mrs. Voorhees. Because the lengths I'd go to in order to protect my son from harm?

They don't bear thinking about.