Grimsby, in the great (New) England tradition of Woburn (WOO-burn), Billerica (bill-RICK-uh), and Leicester (LESS-ter), is pronounced GRIME-bee. It's located halfway between Worcester (WOO-stah) and the Five Colleges area. It's a bigger city than Lowestoft, closer to a Springfield or a Worcester. Unlike Lowestoft, whose second-largest minority is Portuguese (I believe; I need to check my notes and they are out in my car), the second-largest minority in Grimsby is Vietnamese.


For the first 100-200 years of its existence (again, the exact date of its settlement/incorporation are in my notebook in my car), Grimsby was your typical Massachusetts growing city. Then, in 1925, the Charlevoix-Kamouraska earthquake shook things up (HAHAHAHAHAHA). A chasm opened up through the center of town. You can still see the remains of Main St. and the houses along it in the shallow end. Shadows have a tendency to slither as you get toward the deeper end, but that's just the rats.

...right?

The area around the chasm was leveled and turned into a small park. Parents tell their children not to go in the park at night because they might fall into the chasm -- even though it does have a small fence around it -- and while they mostly listen, it's not because of the risk of falling to their deaths. It's because the trees, at night they look like have teeth.

On the very edge of the southern side of Grimsby is a state mental institution. When Carrie was growing up, it was abandoned, but lately they've been making repairs and moving new patients into portions of the renovated buildings. This is largely funded by Veracine, a large drug manufacturer/research company on the North end of the city.

No one likes to go near the city's cemetery, as there were incidences of double-graves a while back that couldn't be traced back to shady funeral homes. The stories range from serial killers to Indian Burial Grounds, and it's become sort of a rite of passage among foolhardy teenagers to stay locked in for a night.

The natural disaster people do like to talk about is the Blizzard of '78, and how when the power went out, the snow seemed to come alive. How a snowdrift inched its way down the new Main Street, even though there was nothing to pile up against. How the bodies they found when the snow began to melt were withered and leathery -- regardless of how old they were. How two and a half feet of snow had really seemed like a whole hell of a lot more that night.

All in all, though, it's a nice city. A good city. Full of good people. And if one time the mayor went a little crazy and killed ten people with a hatchet, well.

No one can really blame him, can they?