Deaths Excellent Vacation

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