Death's Excellent Vacation

by Charlaine Harris

  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.

  Home from America

  SHARAN NEWMAN

  Sharan Newman is a medieval historian. That is a constant in her life. As a writer, however, she has published fantasy (the Guinevere trilogy), eleven historical mysteries (the Catherine LeVendeur series), three nonfiction books, and a number of articles and short stories in several genres, including one in the Stephen King issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. For her most recent book, The Real History of the End of the World (Berkley, 2010), she was able to use all of these genres to find how people through history have envisioned the end of time. She lives on a mountainside in Oregon.

  PATRICK Anthony O’Reilly had dark curls, deep blue eyes, and a smile that could bewitch any woman from eight to eighty and beyond. He had the gift of gab, a hollow leg for porter and poteen, a fine tenor, and a cheerful readiness to join in any brawl going. Every St. Paddy’s Day he was sure to be found at Biddy McGraw’s pub, weeping in homesickness for Galway and cursing the English. In short, he was as fine an Irishman as ever came out of Cleveland.

  When his friends pointed out to him that his family had come over to America in 1880, Patrick brushed the fact aside as unimportant.

  “That doesn’t make me a whit less Irish,” he’d brag. “Four generations in America and not one of my family has ever married out.”

  “Who else would have you?” his friend Kevin once countered. “Might have done you some good if they had. They breed runts in your clan.”

  That was a low blow. Patrick hadn’t spoken to Kevin for a month after that. But what did you expect? Kevin was a typical American mongrel: Polish, Italian, and Irish. The best you could say about his family was that they were all Catholic. But it was the jab at his size that cut Pat so deeply. He was barely five foot two, with hair gel. His parents were even shorter; his mother not even five feet. Pat had had to develop a lot of charm to get himself noticed in a world of hulking football players and long-legged women.

  His size and youthful looks also meant that he could never get a pint without his ID being scrutinized with a magnifying glass. And sometimes even th
en, nervous bartenders shooed him out.

  At twenty-five he still lived with his parents and worked at the post office alongside his father, Michael, and his cousins, sorting mail from all over the world while never leaving his own neighborhood. The O’Reillys tended to stay close, enduring the teasing about their size as a unified and slightly daunting group. Over the generations, they had made the local post office their own, and it was rare that anyone over five and a half feet tall was given a job there.

  Pat rebelled inwardly at this extreme clannishness, but his secret desire was not to escape to a more varied culture. What he dreamed of most, with all his heart, was to return to the old country, not the Ireland of industry and high tech, but the land it had once been. Patrick O’Reilly really lived in a world of Celtic glory, of valiant battles and ancient adventures. He saw himself as the heir to Cu Chulainn and Niall of the Silver Hand. He was the navigator for St. Brendan, sailing beyond the edge of the horizon. He was one of the Wild Geese, following his king into exile. He was Michael Collins and Charles Parnell and Eamon de Valera, fighting tyranny.

  He was anyone but himself. Anywhere but the post office, watching stamps fly by from places he’d never see.

  Since he paid little for his room and board, Pat had spent years squirreling away his paychecks until he had enough to finally make the trip to Ireland in style. But now that there was a tidy sum in his account, he still felt uncomfortable taking anything out, even for the trip of a lifetime. The whole family was like that, not exactly miserly, but reluctant to spend on anything but the necessaries. Pat thought he’d escaped the trait until the time came to make a withdrawal. The only thing any O’Reilly ever spent money on was shoes. Not one of them would dream of appearing in knockoffs. The finest leather and the best construction were essential. Most of the family spent more on shoes than food.

  Perhaps he delayed the trip simply because he’d never gone anywhere without at least a few other O’Reillys. He’d tried to suggest to his parents that they make a family pilgrimage back to Ireland, but they always laughed and asked why he’d want to do that, when America had been so good to them all.

  “We were driven out of Ireland,” his mother, Eileen, reminded him. “No one wanted us there. We were starving and forced to work for nothing.”

  “That we were,” his father, Michael, nodded sagely over his briar pipe. “Here we’ve made our own Ireland, one that no one can invade. I wouldn’t go back there for all the gold in the world.”

  Eileen gave him a sharp glance of warning that Pat didn’t notice.

  “But you’ve never been there, either of you,” he whined. “Nor have your parents or anyone in the family. I just want to see the auld sod. I want to find my roots!”

  “Don’t be a muggins!” His dad cuffed him gently. “You don’t need to look for your roots. The trees are all around you.”

  Pat didn’t ask again, but he never stopped dreaming.

  ONE day in spring, Pat came home from a late shift, eager for the porter stew his mother usually left for him to warm up. Instead of a solitary dinner and a beer, he found the house full to the rafters with cousins, uncles, aunts, and other assorted O’Reilly attachments. No one said a word, a miracle akin to the Second Coming. There was only one reason Pat could imagine for such solemnity.

  “Who died?” he asked.

  His mother stood slowly. In her hands she gripped a large, bright green envelope, edged with gold. Pat noticed right away that it hadn’t gone through the post. There was no stamp, only a pristine blob of sealing wax. It didn’t look like a death notice. The gold seemed to shimmer like the Cuyahoga River in flames.

  Still no one spoke. This unnerved Patrick most. Normally a family gathering would have put a henhouse to shame, with all the squawks, shouts, bursts of laughter, wails of infants, and, of course, the firmly stated opinions that eventually would lead to blows.

  “Mom?” he asked warily.

  At last she broke the silence. “It’s come,” she quavered, clutching the envelope to her chest. “We haven’t been asked in fifty years, not since my granddad’s time. I thought they’d forgotten all about us.”

  She searched in her pocket for a tissue, too overwhelmed to continue. Her sister, Teresa, took over.

  “It’s the invitation to the summer gathering,” she told Patrick. “Only a thousand are so honored to be asked, and it happens only once every ten years.”

  “Imagine that,” Pat’s father murmured. “Out of all those millions of O’Reillys. And, when you add us up, that’s sixty-odd people right here. I thought we were never invited because they wouldn’t ask so many of us. Who’d have ever thought it?”

  Patrick was tired, hungry, and out of patience. “Will one of you either tell me what’s going on or else let me get to the kitchen for my stew?”

  “It’s Ireland!” Aunt Teresa looked at Pat as if he were dense. “We’re all going to the Beltane Gathering, the O’Reilly fine reunion. Now, young man, you’ll finally see just how deep your roots go.”

  Then the storm broke and everyone began to talk at once.

  Patrick paid no attention to the babble around him. Ireland! He couldn’t take it in. After all the years of denying any interest in it, suddenly everyone was acting as if they’d been given the key to Heaven. Of course, that had always been Pat’s attitude, but he was astounded to find that others had been harboring the same longing.

  The family immediately passed from chaos to high-gear efficiency. Dentist appointments were canceled, weddings postponed, mail stopped. The post office proved a problem, since their branch was almost totally staffed by O’Reillys or their in-laws. Pat was amazed that his father managed to get them all vacation time at once.

  “How did you do it, Dad?”

  Michael winked and tapped his nose. “I guess there’s a bit of the old craft still in me.” He gave Patrick a conspiratorial grin.

  Pat had no idea what his dad meant. Many of the things going on in those weeks before the journey bewildered him. The clothes his mother and the other women were packing came from trunks in the back of their closets. The bright colors and wild patterns were startling to him. He’d never seen any of them in anything but jeans or tailored dresses for church and parties. The men were equally odd, packing briar pipes and gnarled walking sticks that had also appeared in the depths of the storerooms.

  As the preparations grew more frantic, his confusion became tinged with a sense of dread that made no sense to him, either. He tried to shake it. This was his life’s dream. He didn’t want it spoiled by irrational worries. But the behavior of his elders gave him a sense that he was walking blindfolded on a staircase with no railing.

  “There’s something off about this. They’re keeping secrets,” he complained to his cousin Jerry. “The aunts and uncles, my mom and dad. When I come in, they all stop talking. If the phone rings when I’m home, they ask the caller to ring them later. My parents argue in whispers after they go to bed.”

  “Don’t be daft,” Jerry grinned. “You always did think the sun shone out your ass. They aren’t keeping anything from you. There hasn’t been a secret in this family since Aunt Kate ran off with the milkman. And we found that one out eventually.”

  “I never believed she’d decided to join the Carmelites and take a vow of silence.” Pat was momentarily diverted from his worry. “Aunt Kate even talked in her sleep.”

  “So, how do you think all of them together could be hiding some great, dark secret?” Jerry shook his head. “We need to celebrate, not mope about. After over a hundred years, we’re going home to Ireland! The first thing I’m going to do is have a proper draft Guinness. What about you?”

  Pat allowed his cousin to ramble on but couldn’t escape the belief that his parents’ generation was in a turmoil about the upcoming trip. They were all thrilled and excited, definitely. But there was an undercurrent in their conversations that made him nervous. Something about the gathering, or Gathering, was putting them all on edge.

&
nbsp; Eileen had no patience with his prodding.

  “We told you,” she snapped when he’d been at her about it all during dinner. “It’s a sort of family reunion.”

  “We have more family?” Patrick was aghast at the thought. “I suppose O’Reilly is a common name. So what could be so awful about that? Why are you all so jumpy? Is there something wrong with them?”

  “Of course not!” She thumped another serving of potatoes onto his plate. “I’ve never met them, but I’ve never heard anything bad about them, either.”

  “Then why haven’t I ever heard anything about them at all?” Patrick pushed the plate away. He knew that refusing food was guaranteed to get his mother’s attention, and her goat.

  Eileen’s lips tightened to a thin line. She took a deep breath before answering.

  “You’re hearing about them now,” she said in a dangerously quiet voice. Then she softened. “I’d tell you more, my darling, but the others think it best if you wait until we get there. You’ll understand then.”

  She got up and went to the kitchen for more gravy, but Patrick was sure he heard her mutter, “I hope.”

  ON May twenty-fifth, the day of the flight, the O’Reillys met in the boarding area at the airport. Patrick had never seen his entire family all in one place outside someone’s home or in church. It mortified him to realize what a loud, uncouth bunch they were. The children were running around, squealing with excitement, and Cousin Jerry was egging them on. The others were all hugging and greeting as if they hadn’t all been seeing one another every day for most of their lives. His cousin Liz had dyed her black hair a neon green in honor of the occasion. Pat tried to edge away from them, to pretend he was just another businessman for whom a trip across the Atlantic was nothing special.

  Of course they wouldn’t let him, but dragged him into the mob with jokes and claps on the back, all at eardrum-shattering decibels. Patrick felt the tips of his ears turning bright red. He vowed that as soon as they landed at Shannon, he was going to distance himself from these boorish tourists as soon as possible. They were going to Ireland to drink and party. He was on a sacred quest to find his heritage.