Death's Excellent Vacation

by Charlaine Harris

  She looked where I was staring, where I pointed.

  “What?” She saw nothing.

  If only I had been so lucky.

  A malevolent cloud moved away from the moon so it could illuminate the demon’s monstrously withered face. Under the folds of the hooded cloak, I saw sunken, hollow cheeks. A gaping hole for a mouth. No hair. Not even above his hollow eyes. No eyelashes, either. Just the puffed-open, bulging eyeballs of a startled embryo.

  I know I whimpered.

  “David?”

  My whimpering freaked Brenda out.

  I didn’t really care.

  Panicked, I tried to scrabble backward, to scale the dune wall, to escape over the top of that horrible sand trap and run away from the demon only I could see.

  Then I heard the creature’s leathery lungs rasping for breath. Snoring backward, its chest expanded like a balloon—causing its shriveled face to be seized with unbearable pain.

  That’s when Brenda abandoned me.

  “You guys?” she screamed as she ran away, covering her breasts as best she could. “You guys?”

  I wanted to run away, too, but my legs were paralyzed.

  The demon of the dunes staggered forward. It wheezed, and I was hit with the rank odor of death. It raised its right arm and pointed one gruesomely long, bony finger at me.

  “Who are you?” I stammered, even though I knew the answer: The demon was my drunken hallucination. My emaciated pink elephant. Apparently beer and wine weren’t always fine. Wine and beer could be something to fear. Especially if you polish off a whole six-pack and chase it with a half a bottle of strawberry-flavored rubbing alcohol.

  Especially after listening to ghost stories.

  This creature had to be a nightmarish manifestation of my latent Catholic guilt. An illusion. A hideous incarnation of my unbridled shame about what Brenda Narramore and I had almost done. This was the thing the nuns had warned us about. Mortal sin manifested in the guise of the Grim Reaper. I wasn’t married to Miss Narramore, but I had seen her naked breasts. I had almost done more.

  I deserved to be tortured by the devils and demons of my own imagining.

  As the beast lurched closer, I could smell the rancid-meat breath seeping out its mouth hole.

  “Stop! Now!”

  It croaked the words.

  “Stop! Now!”

  I move uncomfortably in the bed.

  Try not to wake my wife.

  Why am I remembering Saturday, August sixteenth, 1975?

  Am I, for whatever reason, meant to finally unravel the mystery of the demon in the dunes?

  Honestly, it’s something I haven’t thought about in more than three decades.

  Long ago, I feared that my actions that hot summer night had riled up a slumbering spirit bent on punishing those who did not adhere to its stern moral code.

  I imagined the wizened old man under the wrinkled robe to be the ghost of one of Brenda Narramore’s distant relatives who, like the grandfather in Kevin’s tale, had come back from the dead to protect her chastity and, when he couldn’t persuade me to stop, turned his wrath on her!

  For a time, I was certain that the demon lurking in the dunes was Brenda Narramore’s guardian devil.

  THE next morning, I remember, Kevin and I went out for breakfast at this deli where they made extremely greasy fried-egg and bacon with cheese sandwiches. Hangover food.

  “So, dude—you totally freaked that Brenda chick out last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d you do? Pull out your wanker?”

  I shook my head. “I saw . . . something.”

  “What? Her humongous titties?”

  I looked up from my sandwich.

  “Hey,” Kevin said defensively, holding up his hands, “everybody saw her running up the beach, man. She let it all hang out.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell Kevin about the demon I thought I had seen in the dunes. We weren’t little kids anymore. We weren’t allowed to see prowling phantoms in the shadows or bogeymen hiding underneath our beds.

  “I guess I acted like a dork,” I finally said.

  “Don’t worry, bro. Plenty of fish on the beach. We’ll meet some fresh chicks. Probably today.” He held out his Kent pack. Two bent cigarettes were all that were left inside the wrinkled pouch. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I thought you smoked now.”

  “I’m quitting. My lungs still hurt from last night. Feel like charcoal briquettes.”

  “You’ll get used to it, bro. You just cough up the phlegm and junk in the shower every morning. That clears ’em right out.”

  I waved him off.

  Kevin sighed. Put his Kents back in his pocket. “Bummer.”

  “Yeah.”

  ONE week later, however, Brenda Narramore forgave me.

  On the second Saturday of my family’s two-week vacation, she strolled boldly up the beach, wearing nothing but a bikini and big sunglasses, her hair as wild as a brown sea of coiled serpents. She headed straight for the rolled-out towels where Kevin, Jerry, and I had set up shop for the day.

  She had her beach bag slung over her shoulder and carried a portable radio like a lunch bucket, swinging it alongside her hip, letting it brush against the stretched fabric of her bikini bottom. I think “My Eyes Adored You” was droning out of the solid-state Sanyo’s tinny speaker.

  “I remember my first drunk,” she said softly as my eyes did as the song suggested.

  “What was it like?” I asked, my mouth drier than burnt toast.

  “I saw giant lizards.” She shot out her tongue. Flicked at imaginary flies. Rolled it back to moisten her lips. “Where are your two little buddies?”

  I gestured to the left, where Jerry and Kevin were flirting with two bubbly blondes on a nearby beach blanket. High school girls. They had decided to “aim a little lower” after six straight days of crashing and burning with college chicks.

  “You want to blow this pop stand?” Brenda asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You ever do the Haunted House on the Boardwalk?”

  “Once. When I was little.”

  “You ever do it with a girl?”

  I could only shake my head.

  “It’s dark in there, David. Real dark. Nobody can see you doing whatever it is you want to do.”

  WE headed down to the Seaside Heights boardwalk.

  “My snobbier friends at school call this Sleaze Side Heights,” Brenda remarked as we strolled past buzzing pinball emporiums and the blinking lights of popcorn wagons.

  “I take it they’ve been here before?”

  She laughed. Tucked her arm under mine.

  “You got any smokes, Dave?”

  “Nah.”

  “You quit already?”

  “Sort of. Maybe.”

  “Too bad.”

  I pulled a soggy dollar bill out of my swimming trunks. “They sell ’em over there,” I said, gesturing to a smoke shop wedged between a French fry stand and a skeeball arcade. “You still doing Dorals?”

  She nodded.

  “Menthol, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t disappear.”

  “I won’t.”

  And she didn’t. Not then, anyway.

  IT was easy to buy cigarettes when you were sixteen back in 1975. Everybody smoked. Brenda said at her college, you could even smoke in the classrooms. There were disposable ashtrays on every desk.

  I handed her two packs of Doral Menthols.

  “They were only forty cents each.”

  “Thanks, Dave.” She uncurled the plastic wrapper off a pack, lit up a cigarette fast. I remember her hands were trembling slightly until she huffed down that long first drag. After she finished her smoke, Brenda grabbed my arms and pulled me close. Let me feel her bikinied breasts press against my chest. “Did buying me my ciggy-boos wipe you out?” She exhaled the remnants of stale smoke that had been swirling
around inside her gorgeous chest up into my eyes.

  “Yeah. I only grabbed like a buck this morning . . .”

  She tugged playfully at my swimsuit’s elastic waistband. Glanced down at my unambiguous bulge. “Funny, your pockets don’t look empty.”

  My ears went sunburn red. I so wished I had worn blue jeans to the beach. Maybe an athletic cup.

  “Don’t worry, Dave. I’ve got cash.” She broke our clinch and headed toward a clapboard kiosk. “I’ll spring for the tickets.”

  We had been cuddling up in front of Dr. Shallowgrave’s Haunted Manor, the rickety, ride-through spook house on the Funtime Pier. It was the closest thing Seaside Heights had to a genuine Tunnel of Love. Brenda bought five tickets for each of us, and we stepped into the waiting twoseater roller-coaster car. It was shaped like a skull.

  “Welcome to the frights of Seaside Heights,” said the guy who lowered our safety bar. He was about my age. Had more pimples. He also spent a little too much time eyeballing Brenda, checking out her tight top. When he finally stepped away from our car, he whistled in admiration and gave me a knowing nod: “Looo-king goooood, bro. Looo-king good.”

  The car jostled forward. I heard the pull chain clanking underneath our feet. Barn doors swung open, and our slow moving love seat was tugged into a dark tunnel filled with hazy smoke, ultraviolet lights, tolling bells, and hokey pipe organ music.

  Brenda snuggled closer. I draped my arm over her shoulder.

  She moved my hand to her breast.

  “Welcome to my Haunted Home!” boomed a sinister recorded voice. “Ride in peace! Mwa-ha-ha!”

  I heard a whoosh-click of compressed air. Hidden doors sprang open. Two skeletons with tattered clothing flailing off their jangling bones flew out of dark cupboards.

  Brenda shrieked. I laughed.

  And kept my hand locked on second base.

  Next came the mannequin strung up in a noose. Then another dummy puking up bright red blood into a witch’s cauldron.

  “Gross,” mumbled Brenda.

  “Yeah. I told him to stay away from the chili.”

  We rounded a bend and entered the Haunted Library. An automaton—a shriveled old woman who resembled Norman Bates’s dearly departed mother after a witch doctor had shrunken her head—was rocking back and forth in a creaky chair in front of a wall of bookcases. A rubber rat popped in and out of a hole in her rib cage. Some of the books shook in the shelves while a gargoyle serving as a bookend flashed its bright red eyes.

  That’s when the lights went out.

  Our car froze.

  All the moaning and groaning and spooky music slid to a stop.

  The ride had died.

  The tunnel was pitch-black.

  “Guess they forgot to pay the electric bill this month,” I quipped.

  “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Brenda, fumbling through her canvas bag, crinkling open that pack of Dorals I had bought her.

  She flicked and flicked her Bic but the gas didn’t catch. The flint just sparked and strobed.

  “Damn,” she muttered, the white tube stuck to her upper lip.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me.”

  I took two cigarettes out of the pack. Stuck them in my lips.

  “Use these,” said Brenda, handing me a book of matches.

  I gazed into her eyes. Flicked a paper match across the strip of sandpaper at the base of the book. Tried to light the cigarettes as suavely as I’d seen tuxedoed rogues light double smokes in the movies.

  I inhaled on mine while I handed Brenda hers.

  “I thought you quit,” she said, taking a puff and snuggling closer.

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Cool,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s the menthol.”

  We laughed and smoked, the glowing hot tips of our cigarettes casting the only light in the darkened tunnel. When the cigarettes were nearly finished, Brenda held hers elegantly off to the side. “Come here, big boy.”

  I did as instructed.

  We French kissed like crazy. It tasted a little like two ashtrays licking each other, but I didn’t care. I was alone in the dark with an incredibly sexy woman dressed in a bikini too tiny to fit my two fists. I flicked my cigarette down to the ground, leaned out of the car so I could stomp it out without looking down, then sank my hands into her wild hair to pull her face closer to mine.

  Soon, my hands were sliding down across her bare shoulders, down to those barely contained breasts straining to burst free.

  “I hope it takes all night for them to fix it,” she moaned.

  I was heading for third when he showed up again.

  The demon from the dunes.

  The emaciated man in the rumpled white cloak, his hooded face more horrifyingly gaunt than I remembered, the jawbone clearly visible beneath the skin, the nose a sharp protrusion of jagged cartilage. He was struggling to breathe through his gaping mouth hole. As he hovered in the darkness behind our car, I realized he was luminous, as if he had been irradiated in a nuclear bomb blast. His body was a floating, yellow-green X-ray; his head a skull wrapped in translucent skin.

  “Stop!” he hissed at me, turning the air in the tunnel rank. “Now!”

  I tried to ignore the glowing demon because it was obvious from the darting tongue dancing around inside my mouth and the hand guiding mine southward that Brenda Narramore sure as hell didn’t hear her ghostly guardian of sexual abstinence wheezing his words of warning at me!

  “Stop!”

  I closed my eyes, tried to make the thing disappear.

  “Stop!”

  I sneaked open an eye and saw the demon once again attempting to raise its rigor- mortised right arm like the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come from the Dickens tale so it could point a bony finger of condemnation at me.

  That’s when the lights thumped on. The audiocassette of scary music slurred back to life.

  Brenda giggled. Pushed my wandering hand, inches from heaven, aside.

  “Just our luck.”

  “Yeah.”

  The car lurched forward.

  The demon had disappeared.

  A day later, Brenda did, too.

  “VACATION’S almost over,” she said when we kissed good-bye in the parking lot of her motel that Saturday night.

  “I’m here for another week.”

  “Me, too. But then, I’ll be going back to school.”

  “I could come visit you. I could take the bus to Philly.”

  “No. You can’t.”

  “Why not?” Listening to my own whining, I should have known the answer.

  “You’re too young, David.”

  “But . . .”

  “This is what it is. Fun. A summertime fling. Don’t get all serious on me.”

  The transistor radio in my head rolled through every sad song about summer romances ever recorded. “See You in September.” “Sealed with a Kiss.” Chad and Jeremy’s “A Summer Romance.” The Beach Boys wailing about “having fun all summer long.”

  “But . . .” I stammered again.

  “Don’t worry, Dave, before letting you go, I want to feel some kind of good-bye.” She was paraphrasing Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. “Sad or bad, I need a good-bye.” Her tongue tunneled into my ear again. “We’ll head back to the dunes. Tomorrow night. Say our good-byes there. Finish what we started.”

  “Uh-huh.” She was cupping my crotch.

  “And David?”

  “Huh?”

  “It won’t be sad or bad. It’ll be the best good-bye you’ve ever had.”

  I nodded. I had already forgotten about my imagined visitor back in the funhouse. Hell, I had forgotten my own name.

  THE next night, however, Brenda was gone.

  “We thought she was with you,” said her roommates when I showed up at their motel for our hot Sunday night date down in the dunes.

  “Did she go back to Philly?” I asked.

  “No. Her stuff is still here. Do
n’t worry, Davey. She’ll show up.”

  BUT she never did.

  I kept going back to the Bay Breeze Motel.

  Her two girlfriends kept telling me they hadn’t seen or heard from her since that day she went to the Boardwalk with me. Her beach bag was draped over the headboard of the bed she had been sleeping in. The sheets were rumpled and cold.

  On Tuesday, Kimberly and Donna called the Seaside Heights Police.

  The cops asked me all sorts of questions.

  On Wednesday, my dad came to the police station with me and brought Kevin’s father, who was a lawyer.

  I answered every question as honestly as I could without embarrassing myself in front of my family. The police didn’t need to know about the beer and Boone’s Farm. About Brenda and me making out in the haunted house. I stuck to the facts. Wheres and whens.

  “I only hung out with her twice,” I said, sounding much younger than sixteen after two hours of interrogation. “I hardly even know her . . .”

  “Are you officers finished?” asked Kevin’s dad, sounding exactly like Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law from TV.

  “Yeah,” the cop said. “Miss Narramore’s family is worried, is all. Nobody’s heard from her since Saturday. Not like her not to check in, they say.”

  “I’m sorry,” said my father, “but David here is in no way responsible for any of this. For goodness’ sake, officers, Miss Narramore is a college student. Nineteen. She should be able to take care of herself. She sure as hell shouldn’t be running up and down the beach playing Mrs. Robinson, seducing high school boys!”

  I remember the cop nodding. “They’re going through a rough stretch.”

  “Who?” my dad asked.

  “Her family. The girl’s grandfather died a couple weeks ago. Now she disappears. They’re not thinking straight, you know? Keep pushing us to dig something up. I figure she’s just another runaway, like in that new Springsteen song. Guess she was ‘Born to Run.’ ”

  The grown-ups all nodded.

  I didn’t. In fact, I froze.

  Because, in my mind, at that moment, I knew exactly what had happened to Brenda Narramore.

  It was just like that old man who had come back from the dead to help the rescue squads find his granddaughter.