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