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He would terrorize me every night. He would scare me during the daylight hours too, but it was ten times worst at night, because unlike his silence in the daytime, the sound of his footsteps could be heard clearly in the quietness of the night. Oh! the dread of looking down the hallway from my bed, clinging to my pillow, hearing him walk faster and faster, fearing seeing him turn the corner from our living room into the hallway which connected all three bedrooms in the house.

I am of course referring to PePe (pronounced Peu-Peu). In the daytime, PePe was hooked to the basement wall in our house; a wooden, carved native sculpture of a frowning face that looked terribly threatening to me. My father loved the carved abomination (he said it reminded him of Pierre Trudeau's face which he said always seemed terribly whinny), so when I expressed my fears of PePe to my parents, they simply downplayed my concerns, closing the conversation with the patronizing: "there...there..."

There was no escaping PePe. You see, my toy box was in the basement and you guessed it, right in front of PePe's evil glare. I remember running downstairs to get toys, picking up what I wanted and running up as fast as I possibly could. I also remember, on several occasions, being so overcome with fear on some of these "toy pick-ups" that half way up the stairs I would freeze, my body totally paralyzed with the fear that PePe was right behind me, ready to cause me unimaginable harm. My mother, hearing my screams of terror would usually come and rescue me, wondering what in the world had upset me so much.

The cat and mouse game between me and PePe continued until we moved out of our house on Dew crescent, a move that had broken my heart, but that had finally rid me of the abominable PePe. Little did I know though, that other terrors would await me in the near future, and that I would one day, have another encounter with PePe...