No one is here with them. The sweater will never be found. The other girl grows up, lives a long and happy life. Meggie goes out to L.A. and meets the demon lover.

W-A-I-T

After that, the only thing the planchette says, over and over, is Meggie’s name. It’s all very romantic.

(1974) Twenty-two people disappear from a nudist colony in Lake Apopka. People disappear all the time. Let’s be honest: the only thing interesting here is that these people were naked. And that no one ever saw them again. Funny, right?

(1990) It’s one of the ten most iconic movie kisses of all time. In the top five, surely. You and Meggie, the demon lover and his monster girl; vampires sharing a kiss as the sun comes up. Both of you wearing so much makeup it still astonishes you that anyone would ever recognize you on the street.

It’s hard for the demon lover to grow old.

Florida is California on a Troma budget. That’s what the demon lover thinks, anyway. Special effects blew the budget on bugs and bad weather.

He parks in a meadowy space, recently mowed, alongside other rental cars, the usual catering and equipment vans. There are two gateposts with a chain between them. No fence. Eternal I endure.

There is an evil smell. Does it belong to the place or to him? The demon lover sniffs under his arm.

It’s an end-of-the-world sky, a snakes-and-ladders landscape: low emerald trees pulled lower by vines; chalk and apricot anthills (the demon lover imagines the bones of a nudist under every one); shallow water-filled declivities scummed with algae, lime and gold and black.

The blot of the lake. That’s another theory: the lake.

A storm is coming.

He doesn’t get out of his car. He rolls the window down and watches the storm come in. Let’s look at him looking at it. A pretty thing admiring a pretty thing. Abandoned site of a mass disappearance, muddy violet clouds, silver veils of rain driving down the lake, the tabloid prince of darkness, Meggie’s demon lover arriving in all his splendor. The only thing to spoil it are the bugs. And the sex tape.