Death's Excellent Vacation (31 page)

“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. Don’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.

The demon in the dunes was Brenda Narramore’s recently deceased grandfather!

When I wouldn’t stop pawing her, groping at her on the beach and in the Boardwalk spook house, when I wouldn’t listen to his ghostly demands to leave his granddaughter alone, he had found a way to stop
her
!

That’s when I would’ve totally freaked out if I hadn’t started seriously smoking, full-time.

Dorals at first, to honor Brenda’s memory, I guess. But Dorals were low in tar and nicotine. Not enough juice to wash away the guilt that came with the weight of knowing that my actions had caused a beautiful girl to be “disappeared” by a demented dead relative.

I moved on to Marlboros.

Unfiltered Camels.

Cigarettes can numb you out. Erase a lot of mental anguish. Help you stuff down all sorts of feelings of guilt and shame and remorse. I think this is why, when I was a kid, all the priests and nuns smoked. We Catholics needed all the help we could get.

By Halloween 1975, I had forgotten all about Brenda Narramore. Callous of me, maybe, but I just assumed that the police officer was right. She was a runaway. Yes, that first month back home I would sneak down to the corner drugstore on my bicycle to check out the newspapers from Philadelphia and down the shore. I kept searching for a gruesome story like “Missing Girl’s Body Found, Flesh Ripped off Her Beautiful Body by Deranged Beast” or “Monster Stalks Jersey Girl.” But I never found anything about Brenda Narramore at all. Not even in the tabloids with the stories about Elvis and aliens.

The demon in the dunes was, most likely, what I first supposed it to be: a figment of my overactive imagination. Face it, seeing evil creatures lurking in blank white spaces is what a comic book artist does.

I just started seeing my mythical tormentors earlier than most.

However, after that ride down the tunnel of love with Brenda Narramore, I never saw that particular apparition again. I blocked him out of my waking thoughts. Only let his image seep into my subconscious when it needed an especially hideous creature to haunt the shadows of my graphic novels, like my first
New York Times
bestseller, an early Belinda Nightingale tale called
The Withered Wraith of Westmorland
.

The only thing I can’t comprehend: Why am I thinking about all of this again? Why now?

Why today?

Why am I drifting back to Seaside Heights, August 1975? Surely there are more important places and dates in my life for me to review. Especially now.

I hear a knock on a door.

Remember where I am.

My wife crawls out of the hospital bed.

I creak open an eye. Expect to see a doctor. Maybe a nurse.

It’s a middle-aged woman with short-cropped, wiry gray hair.

“May I help you?” my wife asks weakly.

“I’m sorry,” says the visitor. “I’m an old friend of David’s. When I read in that papers that he . . .”

The visitor holds up a faded paperback book. Burgundy cover.

The Catcher in the Rye
.

She opens the front flap. Shows my wife the doodle of the baseball catcher with the bottle of rye in his mitt. My wife nods. Recognizes my signature.

The demon in the dunes didn’t kill Brenda Narramore. She grew old and frumpy.

I try to speak. Groan out her name. Can’t. Too weak.

Dammit! Why am I thinking about that night we first met?

Saturday. August sixteenth. 1975.

I close my eyes. Race back. Replay it.

The young, topless Brenda Narramore hovers over my trousers.

“Shhh. You’re just nervous.”

I nod. I am.

“Here.” She digs into her beach bag. Finds the crumpled Doral pack. “Have another smoke. It’ll calm you down.”

“I thought we were supposed to, you know, smoke afterward.”

She lights two fresh cigarettes.

It appears. Ten feet behind her, lurching out of the shadows. The gaunt walking skeleton of an old man, all jagged bone edges and drum-tight skin.

A man, maybe not all that old, maybe barely fifty, who only looks like a walking, hairless cadaver because he has been undergoing radiation treatments and chemotherapy for his lung cancer.

The demon wobbles forward; close enough, this time, for me to see his eyes when that cloud drifts away from the moon.