Death's Excellent Vacation

The Demon in the Dunes CHRIS GRABENSTEIN

Chris Grabenstein did improvisational comedy in New York City with Bruce Willis before James Patterson hired him to write advertising copy. He is the Anthony and Agatha award-winning author of the John Ceepak/ Jersey Shore mysteries, Tilt-A-Whirl, Mad Mouse, Whack-A-Mole, Hell Hole, Mind Scrambler, and Rolling Thunder; the thrillers Slay Ride and Hell for the Holidays; and the middle-grades chillers The Crossroads and The Hanging Hill. His dog Fred has even better credits: Fred starred on Broadway in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With five brothers, most of his summer vacations growing up were pretty scary, but the only paranormal creatures Chris encountered were the mermaids at Webb’s City Drug Store in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the whole family went every August to visit his grandparents. The humidity was pretty monstrous, too. You can visit Chris (and Fred) on the Web at www.chrisgrabenstein.com.

I don’t know why I’m lying here dreaming about 1975 and the demon in the dunes.

It’s summer. Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Saturday. August sixteenth. 1975. The night I first saw the demon lurking in the shadows at the dark edge of the sand.

Kevin Corman and I are running down a moonlit street away from the Royal Flamingo Motel and our families.

“You score?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah.” I held up two warm beer cans. “Schlitz.”

“Your old man won’t notice?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered—nervously as I recall. I wasn’t a big rule breaker when I was a teenager. I usually stayed quiet. Stayed out of trouble.

“Far out,” said Kevin, taking my two Schlitz cans and stuffing them up underneath the flapping coat of his leisure suit. He was dressed to score that night. Dressed like John Travolta would dress a few years later when he had the same sort of Saturday night fever.

Kevin and I were on our annual two-week family vacations down the shore. We were neighbors back home in Verona, New Jersey, went to the same high school.

“Uhm, were you able to get any, you know, booze?” I stammered as we tried not to look too conspicuous: two teens—one nervous, the other cocky—skulking down Ocean Avenue at 9:30 at night. When we were younger and on vacation, this is the time of night when we would’ve badgered our parents into taking us up to the boulevard for swirled soft-serve ice cream cones. Now, our mothers and fathers stayed by the motel pool to play cards, smoke cigarettes, and drink highballs out of indestructible plastic cocktail glasses while we lied about heading over to Funtown Pier so we could go out drinking ourselves.

“My parents drink whiskey, Dave,” said Kevin. “Extremely hard to rip off, man. Doesn’t come in a can.”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes, my dad snags miniature bottles off airplanes. Doesn’t bring ’em on vacation, though.”

“Cool.”

“Hey, you ever even drink whiskey?”

“No. Not really.”

“Word to the wise: Beer and wine, mighty fine. Beer and whiskey? Mighty risky.”

I nodded as if I knew.

“So, where’s Jerry?” I asked.

“Said to meet him over on K Street.”

“Cool.” We had two more blocks to go. “What about, you know—the girls?”

“Relax, dude. They’re college girls. Means they’ll have their own wheels.”

“Yeah.”

“And Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“Chicks this hot? They definitely know how to find the dunes, bro. Probably been going down there to make out since we were like in junior high.”

I shuddered to think about all the things the curvy college freshmen we had met eight hours earlier might know. They were both nineteen. Kevin and I were infants: sixteen-year-olds with pimples when we ate too much pizza. Our buddy Jerry McMillan was a little older. Seventeen. He’d been “held back” a year. Always said he liked second grade so much, he took it twice.

We reached K Street.

“I did score these.” Kevin flashed me a half-empty pack of Kent cigarettes he had undoubtedly stolen out of his old man’s Windbreaker. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“You ever try one?”

“Nope.”

He shook the pack. “More taste, fine tobacco.”

I waved him off.

Kevin shrugged and lit up. He smacked down a long drag and let it out in a series of billowing smoke rings. I remember I was impressed.

“We are looo-king goooood,” Kevin said between deep tokes, doing a pretty good Chico from Chico and the Man. A lot of guys did the same imitation back in the seventies, but Kevin had the shaggy Freddy Prinze hairdo to go with it.

We waited. Kevin smoked. He looked pretty damn cool doing it, and that made me wonder if I could ever look cool enough for the night’s coming attraction: my first blind date.

The two girls we had met on the beach had a friend.

That’s why I had splashed on some of my father’s Hai Karate cologne. Found it in his Dopp kit along with some foil-wrapped condoms. My parents having sex. That was something I definitely didn’t want to think about when I was sixteen and being fixed up with a college coed who probably had sex several times a day between classes.

“Where the hell is Jerry?” Kevin said as he ground out his cigarette butt in the sand at the crackled edge of the asphalt. “College chicks this hot won’t wait forever. They’re from Philly, man!”

My heart beat faster.

We’d first met the two Philly girls when they were half naked on the beach and Jerry McMillan had had the balls to stroll over to their blanket and talk like a letter straight out of Penthouse magazine: “Is it hot out here or is it just you two?”

They should’ve laughed or groaned or even puked at Jerry’s lame pickup line. But, no. They both thought our somewhat older friend was cute. Most girls did. Jerry McMillan was lean and lanky with droopy eyes that made it look like he was half asleep at all times. He kept his shiny helmet of hair sleekly combed over his ears, its slanting divide always parked directly over an ironically arched eyebrow.

As it turned out, the girls Jerry had randomly decided to hit on were looking to get down and boogie. They eagerly volunteered their names (Donna and Kimberly) and local phone numbers. They were staying at the Bay Breeze Motel with another friend, Brenda. Three college girls in a single room. No parents. They were all probably on the pill. A lot of girls were popping birth control pills in 1975 because “makin’ love with you is all I wanna do,” at least according to Minnie Riperton’s big hit single on the radio. Everybody who was sixteen or over that summer had already lost their virginity.

Everybody except me.

“We’ve already done the Boardwalk,” sighed the girl named Donna, arching her back, stretching her double-D cups to the max. If Jerry McMillan was a Penthouse Forum letter, this Donna was the Pet of the Month without the staples.

“So,” said Jerry, “I take it you two are bored with the Boardwalk?”

Incredibly, the girls laughed at that lousy line, too!

“Yeah,” said Donna, who had Farrah Fawcett’s winged hairstyle from the pinup poster. “We want to have some real fun, you know? We are ready to feel the funk and party hearty!”

“Then, ladies, you came to the right beach,” said Kevin, who had been pumping iron on a bench in his garage all winter and spring so his chest and stomach would be ready for just this moment. I hung in the background. When you’re a timid teen, it pays to have brazen friends like Kevin and Jerry.

“So, Sunshine,” said Jerry, crouching down so the girls could gaze dreamily at his droopy eyes. “You ever heard about the dunes down south? In the state park?”

“Sure,” said the other girl, Kimberly, as she rolled over to tan her back. She was wearing a very small bikini spotted with Wonder-Bread-wrapper-colored polka dots. The bottom was actually two tiny triangles held together by white plastic rings at her hips. She reached around to unsnap the hook holding her skimpy top in place so she wouldn’t have an unsightly tan line racing across her back to add to the white doughnuts the sun-blocking circles would definitely be leaving on her flanks.

“Meet us down there,” said Kevin. “Ten P.M. We’ll bring the liquid refreshments.”

“We’ll find some driftwood, too,” added Jerry. “Rub a couple stiff sticks together and see if we can start a fire.” Every cheesy thing the guy said made these girls giggle.

I said nothing.

When I was sixteen, girls terrified me.

“Can we bring Brenda?” asked Donna, whose bikini was full of burnt-orange and harvest-gold flowers. Reminded me of the coffee percolator back in our motel kitchenette. “Brenda’s different. Likes to read books and junk.”

“No problemo. She can hang with Dave. He reads books, too. Finished the summer reading list like back in June.”

It was true. In books, I could be cool like Jerry and Kevin.

“You sure?” giggled Kimberly. “What if Brenda is like a total dog?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Kevin. “Dave will bring his leash and walk her while the rest of us get down and get funky!”

SO at nine thirty that night, Kevin Corman and I stood underneath a hazy street lamp waiting for Jerry McMillan, more booze, the two horny college chicks, and my blind date with the bookish Brenda.

Like I said, Jerry was seventeen but looked even older, so he was always the one in charge of procuring the adult beverages for any party, be it a kegger or a spontaneous bonfire on the beach in Island State Park. He had headed over to Barnegat Bay Bottles, the scuzziest package store in all of Seaside Heights, maybe New Jersey, to procure a couple cases of beer and several bottles of Boone’s Farm wine: Apple and Strawberry. Both flavors tasted like Kool-Aid laced with malt liquor. Maybe gasoline.

It’s amazing how much I’m remembering now about that summer night in 1975. How vivid it all seems—especially when I realize I haven’t thought about any of this for decades. I grew up. Went to college. Became rich and famous. Locked my summers down the Jersey Shore inside a mental shoebox with the rest of my long-forgotten memories.

But tonight, as I lie in bed, fitfully drifting in and out of sleep, crisp details fill my head.

The swimming pool at the Royal Flamingo Motel with a curving slide lubricated with a trickle of water so you slid down even faster.

The Funtown Pier, home to all sorts of rickety thrill rides—including Dr. Shallowgrave’s Haunted Manor.

The swarm of suntanned bodies bopping up the beach with their radios on. All of them, in my memory, swaying to the blare of a Tijuana Brass soundtrack, the theme from The Dating Game.

But, most of all, I remember Brenda Narramore.

Please don’t tell my wife, who is snuggled up beside me now, cradled against my back, but I am dreaming about a girl I met one summer nearly three and a half decades ago.

Brenda Narramore.

My first summer love.

My muse and inspiration.

How many times have I redrawn her body, first as a leather-clad warrior in my comic books, then as an indestructible street fighter in a ripped and slashed flight suit as the heroine in my graphic novels? How many hours have I spent retracing her curves and lines? In fact, I made my fortune transforming my memories of Brenda Narramore into pen-and-ink drawings of Belinda Nightingale, superheroine of the postapocalyptic world.

The critics always label my impossibly busty Amazon in her tight, revealing costume as “nothing more than an adolescent sexual fantasy.”

They’re right.

She is.

She is Brenda Narramore.

The girl I once feared I’d let the cloaked demon snatch away.

JERRY’S car finally crunched across the seashells on the shoulder of the road.

I could hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” leaking out of his car stereo. Captain and Tennille. It had to be on the radio. No way would Jerry buy a cassette that bogus.

Jerry—who actually possessed a legal New Jersey driver’s license in addition to his fake one from New York State that made him officially eighteen and therefore old enough to buy booze—had his own car. A Starsky and Hutch Gran Torino with a modified V-8 and a Cruise-O-Matic transmission. I can still see the scooped manifold jutting up over the hood. His “ex-dad” had given the car to Jerry just after the divorce.

“What it is, what it is,” he said as he scrolled down his window. “You bring your bread?”

I dug into my shorts. “Five bucks, right?”

Jerry snatched the wrinkled bill out of my fist. “Funkadelic. You steal it from your old man?”

“Nah. I mowed lawns last month.”

“Dyno-mite.” He turned to Kevin. “Don’t leave me hangin’, bro!”

Kevin passed off his cash with a slap to Jerry’s palm.

“What it is, what it is,” said Jerry. I forget why. We all said that in 1975, I guess. “Hop in, brothas!”

Kevin called shotgun. I climbed into the backseat with the two cardboard flats filled with beer cans—one slightly refrigerated case of Schlitz, another of Falstaff. A wrinkled grocery sack stuffed with twist-cap bottles of what Boone’s Farm called wine clattered every time Jerry hit a pothole.

“Didn’t even need to hire Squeegie tonight,” Jerry bragged. “The blind doofus with the Coke-bottle glasses was working behind the counter.”

If Jerry couldn’t score our adult beverages with his fake ID, Squeegie was always his fallback plan: a burned-out World War II vet who slept in the Dumpster out back behind the liquor store. Squeegie would do just about anything for two bucks. Of course, back in 1975 gas cost forty-four cents a gallon, a stamp ten, and a whole pack of cigarettes only thirty-five.

The last time someone sneaked me a pack here in New York City, it cost him nine dollars, and I only got to smoke one before my wife caught me, started crying, and flushed about eight dollars and fifty-five cents’ worth of tobacco down the toilet.

I had told her I’d quit.

I had lied.

WE met the Philly girls at the state park.

Brenda Narramore was beautiful.

A dark pyramid of wavy hair tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of kinky corkscrews. Her body was perfectly proportioned, up top and down below. She even wore sexy librarian glasses before they became fashionable. That’s why Belinda Nightingale always accents her skintight leather breastplate with horn-rimmed reading glasses.

That first night, however, the real Brenda was not costumed as an Amazon princess. I remember she wore an embroidered peasant blouse tied off with a sash, the shirttails barely covering her bikini bottom. It looked like she was wearing the tiniest miniskirt ever sewn. She also carried a canvas flower-power beach bag.

“Hi, guys,” said Donna. “This is Brenda.”

Donna more or less said that to me, officially pairing us up for the evening.

“Hey,” I said.

Brenda Narramore smirked. Her raven-black eyes sized me up. I don’t think they liked what they saw.

“Shall we?” said Jerry, who was lugging the clinking bag of Boone’s Farm bottles under his arm. He held out his free hand and Kimberly, the lanky girl who tottered like she was already wasted on cheap wine, took it.

“Need a hand?” Donna said to Kevin, who carried the case of Schlitz.

“I’m good.”

She squeezed his bulging upper arm. “Strong, too.”

He shrugged. “I work out a little.”

“A little?” She was kneading his arm like some Italian women work over cantaloupes in the produce aisle.

“C’mon,” said Kevin with a well-practiced shake of his shaggy hair. “Let’s boogie.”

They headed down to the beach.

Brenda Narramore looked at me. I never felt so scrawny or childish, standing there soaked in Hai Karate, wearing my best Orange Sunkist “Good Vibrations” T-shirt and denim cut-offs, straining to hold on to that case of Schlitz without all the cans tumbling out because, somehow, maybe from the condensation dripping down the sides of the aluminum tallboys, the cardboard bottom had become sopping wet.

Brenda pulled a pack of Doral Menthol cigarettes out of her beach bag. Stuck one between her plump lips. Flicked her Bic and lit up.

I guess I was gawking at her.

“Dream on,” she sneered on the exhale.

She ambled down to the beach.

I followed. A safe distance behind her.

WE scraped up some driftwood and used the brown paper wine bag to start a small beach fire.

Not a raging bonfire, just enough extra warmth to help the beer and wine make everybody feel good ’n’ toasty. Intoxicated after chugging three tepid cans of Falstaff (the beer that promised “man size pleasure”), I became hypnotized by the fire. I saw chattering mouths and contorted faces dancing in the flickering flames, not to mention a flock of shadowy witch doctors leaping across the sand, furiously stretching out their twitching limbs to reach the not-too-distant dunes where, it seemed to me, more nefarious shadow friends might lie in wait.

Remembering Kevin’s sage words about beer and wine being considered mighty fine, I unscrewed the cap off a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and started guzzling.

It’s no wonder, not much later, I started seeing real phantoms. The demon in the dunes.

I gulped the wine, because I was nervous, sitting scant inches from Brenda Narramore, who kept lighting up Doral Menthol cigarettes while exhaling her own hazy cloud of specters, adding them to the mustering swarm of ghosts sent swirling skyward by our smoky campfire. One time, when I shifted in the sand, our thighs actually brushed. I don’t think Brenda Narramore felt it, but I was extremely glad I had worn the tight cotton cutoffs instead of my J.C. Penney polyester shorts, which would not have done a very good job concealing that night’s rising adolescent fantasies.

Then, believe it or not, Brenda actually turned, pushed a few bouncy hair coils out of her eyes, and smiled at me like she knew every secret I had ever had.

“Ciggy-boo?” she said, holding out her crinkled Doral pack.

“He’s a wimp,” sniggered Kevin, who was bogarting one of his dad’s Kents on the other side of the fire circle, letting the cigarette dangle limply off his lips. “Dave doesn’t smoke.”

I reached out for Brenda’s proffered pack. “Hey, there’s a first time for everything, bro.”

“What it is, what it is,” said Jerry, admiring my sense of adventure.

I pulled a white, filtered tube of tobacco out of its wrinkled cellophane container. “Dorals, huh?”

Brenda nodded. “They’re menthol,” she whispered, her voice husky and helpful.

“Cool.”

For some reason, that made Brenda laugh.

Maybe she thought I’d said, “Kool.”

“Need a light?” she asked.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She found her Bic in the breast pocket of that gossamer peasant blouse, which, when backlit by the fire, was basically see-through. I could see she was round and firm and perfect.

“Thanks.” I took the lighter. Rolled the little ribbed wheel with my thumb a few times. It sparked against the flint.

“Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” said Kevin, my buddy the expert smoker. “Hold down the button, spaz.”

I did as suggested. Heard butane gas hiss up from the tiny plastic tank.

“Now flick it.”

I flicked.

The flame torched up six inches and scorched my nasal hairs.

“Here,” said Brenda. She braced a warm hand on my thigh and plucked the unlit cigarette out of my mouth. “I’ll light it for you.”

She smacked hard on the Doral she had already had going in her mouth until its tip glowed as bright as the dashboard cigarette lighter when it popped out of its hole in my dad’s Buick. Red hot, she plucked her cigarette from her lips, put mine in its place, and lit it off the end of the glowing one.

This wasn’t just my first cigarette—it was also my first lesson in chain smoking.

“Since it’s your first, just puff it,” Brenda said as she handed the smoldering ciggy-boo back to me. “Don’t inhale right away.”

“Cool.”

But I did.

Hacking and coughing and choking, I ignored Kevin’s laughs and took another sip of that horrible strawberry wine, grimaced, and tried again.

This time, the smoke filled my lungs a little easier. Slid down my wind-pipe a little smoother. Maybe it was the menthol. It felt like I was sucking on a hot candy cane. And man, did I feel good. Something powerful shot through my veins, made me feel as funny and clever as Jerry and Kevin combined.

“Taste me, taste me.” I raised my cigarette and recited Doral’s famous TV jingle as if it were Shakespearean verse. “Come on and taste me!”

Everybody laughed. The three girls. My two buddies. Jerry McMillan even winked at me just to let me know I was finally catching on to how to play the game, finally growing up.

Finally joining the fraternity of the tight and the cool.

So I smacked down some more smoke. Stifled some more coughs. Felt a rush of nicotine that made me feel like a jolly genius with superhuman powers. I jumped up and did my best to impersonate the jazz chanteuse voice of the singing cigarette pack in Doral’s cheesiest TV commercial: “Taste me, taste me. C’mon and taste me! Take a puff and let me do my stuff!”

Everybody was doubled up, laughing, holding their sides.

Brenda Narramore included.

Blurry from beer and wine, dizzy from tar and nicotine, I stumbled sideways and accidentally dropped my “ciggy-boo” in the sand.

“Here,” said Brenda. She was already firing up its replacement for me.

I plopped down next to her. Took my second smoldering stick. I coughed like I had bronchitis. Felt dizzy. My brain was all kind of fuzzy, but I think Brenda Narramore had moved closer to me. Our thighs kissed.

I couldn’t follow up on whatever that might mean because Kevin wanted to tell ghost stories.

Understandable.

We were sitting around a hypnotic driftwood fire under a full moon. The three girls were giddy and loose thanks to the beer and wine. In fact, Kimberly had already crawled into Jerry’s lap wearing nothing but her bikini.

A good ghost story would force the other ladies to leap into the first available pair of strong, manly arms they could find (such as the ones Kevin had spent the winter and spring sculpting in his garage).

And so Kevin started spinning his tale.

“My uncle Rocco works for the Verona Volunteer Rescue Squad. One night, they get this call from over in Montclair. Now, Montclair is a bigger town, has a professional ambulance crew, firefighters, the whole nine yards. But, last March, there was this huge accident. A horrible wreck. Seven girls in a station wagon, cheerleaders on their way home from a basketball game, wrap themselves around a telephone pole.”

Donna gasped. It was all the encouragement Kevin needed.

“Anyway, my uncle Rocco and his partner hit the siren and lights because it’s all-hands-on-deck time, you know? There’s only one problem: They’re from Verona and don’t know the roads over in Montclair too good. So they pull over to the side of the road. Whip out a map. Can’t figure out where the hell they are. All of a sudden, Uncle Rocco senses somebody staring at him through his window. It’s freaking him out, but he turns around and sees this old black dude standing right outside his door.”

“What’d he do?”

“He rolled down his window.”

Donna gasped again.

“Remember, it’s early March. Technically still winter. So when Uncle Rocco rolls down that window, he’s hit with a blast of cold air. He can see his breath steaming out of his mouth, it’s so frigging chilly out. Anyways, he sizes up the old black dude. The guy doesn’t look like trouble. Kind of dapper, a college professor type, you know? Wire-rimmed glasses, tweedy sport coat with the patches on the sleeves, neatly trimmed goatee. The works. Anyways, the professor standing outside their vehicle asks Uncle Rocco if he’s looking for the car wreck. ‘Yeah,’ he says. The old black guy nods. ‘It’s about a mile east of here.’ ”

When he was doing the black man’s voice, Kevin made him sound all warbly and spooky. The girls moved closer to their guys. Well, Donna and Kimberly. Brenda just sat there smoking Dorals, staring into the fire.

“ ‘You sure?’ my uncle Rocco asks. ‘Yes,’ says the black man. ‘Take the next right, then turn left at the second traffic light. The second, mind you. Not the first. The second!’ ”

“So what happened?” Even Jerry McMillan was mesmerized.

“They take off. Siren wailing. Lights spinning. They do the right, hit a major highway, count the traffic lights. Long story short, they find the wreck right where the old man said it would be. They set to work. The station wagon is totaled. Buckled up on itself like an accordion. So they get out their power saws and pry bars. Work off the doors. Cut open the roof.”

“Are the girls all dead?” asked Kimberly.

“No, they’re rushed to the hospital. All seven of them.”

“They didn’t die and turn into ghosts?” Kimberly whined. “I thought this was supposed to be a ghost story.”

“It is. Hang on.”

Donna scooched closer to Kevin. Kimberly wrapped her arms around Jerry’s neck. Brenda fired up two fresh Dorals at the same time. A double-barreled shotgun. Offered one to me.

“Thanks.” I took it. They were getting easier and easier, milder and milder. I took a puff and let the Doral do its stuff.

“Anyways,” Kevin continues, “after they run the girls to the hospital, all the ambulance crews are hanging out in the ER parking lot, shooting the breeze. Uncle Rocco asks some guys from the other volunteer squads how they found the wreck. Most bust his chops; say they used a frigging map. One or two, though, one or two say this old black dude walked out of the shadows and told them where to go. Black guy in glasses with a goatee. ‘We couldn’t see his breath,’ says this one paramedic from another town near Montclair. ‘What?’ my uncle asks. ‘It’s freaking cold out,’ says the other rescue worker. ‘My breath was steaming out of my mouth, but this black guy? You couldn’t see no breath.’ My uncle suddenly remembers: He couldn’t see the black dude’s breath, either!”

Donna is too scared to gasp again. So she shivers. Her teeth chatter.

“A week later,” Kevin continues, “Uncle Rocco goes to visit the girls in the hospital, wants to see how they’re doing. They’re all fine. One of the girls, though, is black, and she’s got stuffed animals and flowers and a couple of framed pictures propped up on her bedside table there. ‘Who’s that?’ my uncle asks, pointing at one of the pictures. ‘My grandpa,’ says the girl. ‘He died last November.’ And the guy in the picture? Dig this: He’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a goatee, and a tweed sport coat. Just like the black dude with the invisible breath. To this day, Uncle Rocco swears it was the girl’s grandfather who told them how to find that wreck! The old man came back from the dead so his granddaughter wouldn’t have to die, too! He was like her guardian angel!”

Nobody said anything for about ten seconds.

The fire popped and crackled.

“That’s freaky,” whispered Donna. She hugged herself. I could see whole patches of goose bumps sprouting on her arms.

“You cold?” Kevin, ever the gentleman, offered her his leisure suit jacket.

“I know a better way to warm up.” She took Kevin’s hand. “You ever done it in the dunes?”

“Not with a fox like you!” Kevin grabbed a fresh six-pack and a beach blanket. The two of them headed for the privacy on the other side of the sand mounds.

Meanwhile, the totally trashed Kimberly, teetering in Jerry’s lap, was so stoned she had become fixated on the glowing tracers trailing behind the bright red embers drifting up inside the fire’s curling smoke.

“You know,” said Jerry, seizing the moment, “if you were the new burger at McDonald’s, you’d be the McGorgeous.”

“Shut up,” said Kimberly, stumbling up, noisily slapping some sand off her bikini-bottomed butt. Then she burped. “Let’s go screw.”

And they left us, too.

Brenda Narramore and I were all alone.

We silently smoked more of her Dorals. She twirled off the plastic wrap on a second pack. The sand around us started to resemble one of those ashtrays near the elevators at a fancy hotel. Stubbed-out butts stood at attention like tiny tombstones all around us. My chest ached.

About two cigarettes later, I heard soft moans rise over the dunes to the east.

I gestured toward her beach bag. “You bring a good book? We might be stuck here awhile.”

She dug into the canvas sack. “Yeah.”

I recognized the burgundy cover: The Catcher in the Rye.

“Good book,” I said.

“You’ve read it?”

“Hasn’t everybody?”

“Not Donna and Kim.”

I nodded. Fiddled with the label on the Boone’s Farm wine bottle. “I read it when I was like twelve, I think.”

Brenda slid her glasses up her nose. “I actually like books more than boys. Sorry, David, but, most of the time, there’s more going on between the covers of a good book than between most men’s ears.”

I nodded again. Message received.

I jammed the half-empty bottle of sickly sweet wine into the sand and reached for another can of Falstaff. At least my beer had promised me “man size pleasure” tonight.

I choked down a foamy swig and said, “Cool job.”

“What?”

I nodded toward her book. “Being a catcher in the rye. Standing on a cliff in a swaying field of grain, watching out for a bunch of kids playing tag. If they come too close to the edge, I’d catch ’em, too. Save ’em.”

“It’s not a real job, David.”

“Should be.”

She cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Way too many people pushing kids off cliffs these days. Making them grow up too fast. Sending them off to die in pointless wars.”

Her face softened. “So, tell me, David—exactly how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You seem older. Wiser.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Good.”

“Far out.”

That made her smile grow. Her lips were plump and moist. “You’re not like other guys, are you, David?”

I laughed. “Correct-a-mundo. Most of the other guys I know are over there in the dunes making out with the other girls.” I drained my Falstaff.

“So, Dave? What do you do?”

“Huh?”

“What. Do. You. Do?”

“I go to school. Verona High. Next year, I’ll be a junior.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She moved closer. So close, I could smell the minty smoke trapped inside her tangled hair.

“That’s not who you are, Dave. What do you like to do when you’re you being you?”

I had heard college girls were into philosophical discussions about the meaning of life and stuff. Could shoot the bull all night. So I thought for a second. Gave an honest answer: “I like to draw some.”

“You’re an artist?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that. I just like to draw. I did that clown on the matchbook cover for the Famous Artists Correspondence School. Flunked.”

She grinned and dipped into her beach bag.

“Show me.” She held up a Bic ballpoint pen. “I’ll be the judge.”

“I usually work with a Flair or a Magic Marker . . .”

“Show me.”

Fine.

“You have any paper in there?” I asked.

She handed me her copy of Catcher in the Rye. “Draw inside it. On the blank pages up front.”

“Aw, I can’t do that.”

“It’s not a library book, Dave. It’s mine. I own it. I want you to draw in it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“What if I suck?”

“You won’t. Draw.”

So I flipped open the paperback cover. Started scribbling on a blank page near the front.

“You have pretty eyes,” she said.

“Thanks. They’re hazel,” I said without looking up from my sketch. “They change color depending on what I wear.”

“Fascinating.”

She arched up on her knees with both arms pinioned between her thighs so she could lean in and watch me draw.

Her breath was soft and rapid.

I had always had a knack for doodling cartoons. Read a lot of comic books when I was a kid. Really did take that Famous Artist test, only I drew Binky the Skunk, not the clown. Took a couple of their correspondence classes through the mail, too. And every time I hit the mall, I always checked out those humongous Michelangelo and Da Vinci art books at B. Dalton. However, the work of art I created for Brenda Narramore was chiefly inspired by the Bill Gallo School of cartooning as seen in the sports pages of the New York Daily News.

I drew her as a baseball catcher with a corked bottle of rye whiskey trapped in his mitt.

“Voilà!”

“Nice,” Brenda whispered, her voice as smoky as her ciggy-boo. “Sign it.”

I did.

“I was thinking about giving him a loaf of bread,” I said as I swirled out what my autograph still looks like to this day, “but the bottle was easier to draw. And how would you know it was rye bread? I’d have to dot it with seeds or something . . .”

I was babbling because Brenda Narramore had her warm hand prowling up my right knee, slowly creeping it higher, inching up and down toward my thigh. The front of my cutoffs was a pup tent.

Suddenly, Brenda stood and towered over me like the Colossus of Rhodes if Mr. Colossus had long tawny legs. She peeled her gauzy peasant blouse up over her head. Shook out her scrambled forest of hair.

“Have you ever drawn a nude, David?”

She held out her hand.

And, just like the other boys and girls that Saturday night, we headed off toward the privacy of the dunes.

WE slid down behind a protective bunker of sea grass and sand.

“I’ve never . . .” I mumbled as she unbuttoned my jeans.

“Don’t worry. I have.”

Her heavy breasts swayed as her fingers worked over my zipper.

“What about . . . ?”

She put a finger to my lips.

“Shhh. You’re just nervous.”

I nodded. I was.

“Here.” She dug into her beach bag. Found the crumpled Doral package. “Have another smoke. It’ll calm you down.”

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

She lit two fresh Dorals.

“We will, Dave. We will.”

That’s when I saw it. Behind her. Just above her shoulder.

She held out a cigarette. I didn’t take it.

“Dave?”

I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore.

How could I?

How could anyone?

Ten feet behind Brenda Narramore, lurching out of the shadows, was the demon of the dunes! An ancient, decrepit man—no, the gaunt walking skeleton of an old man, all jagged bone edges and drum-tight skin. He was hunched over in pain as if his spine were fused into a crooked hump. The thing was barefoot and cloaked in a shroud of white that only fluttered down to his knees, fully exposing the dried scabs and weeping blisters tattooing his shins.

I shoved Brenda away. Roughly. The two cigarettes she’d been holding fell like fire-streaking comets to the sand. I fumbled with my zipper.

“It’s . . .”

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. 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.

His hazel-green eyes.

My eyes.

“Stop!” he wheezes. “Now!”

And I know.

He is my wraith.

The ghost of a person on the verge of death sent forth to haunt himself.

He is me.

I am sixteen years old but staring at my own dying soul, shrouded in a white knit hospital blanket from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City where Brenda Narramore has come to say farewell to her long-ago summer love, where my wife has kept constant vigil, sleeping by my side in the hospital bed, forgiving me when I bribed an orderly to sneak me a pack of Marlboros so I could creep downstairs to the sidewalk with my rolling IV pole of postchemo drips to have one last smoke. My wife, who is weeping now because I am dying while the most crucial events of my life flash before my shuttering eyes.

I force my spirit back in time in an attempt to right the wrongs I did to myself.

“Stop!” I wheeze at my younger self. Me as I was and as I will become. “Now!”

I have, mercifully in my final moments, been given the opportunity to go back and warn myself.

On the beach.

In the funhouse.

My first cigarette and the one that got me hooked for good. The one I never quit from again.

Or did I?

I hear my withered lungs rattle. The inside of my chest itches and burns.

Did I heed my wraith’s command?

I will never know.

For if I did, I won’t be lying here dying while dreaming about 1975 and the demon in the dunes.