Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show Read online

  “That sounds like fun,” said Lucas, thoughtfully. “But they probably just wave luminous gauze around at the end. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Who does?” said the skull. “Of course, it’s always a good idea to keep an open mind.”

  Lucas studied the hat. “Are you a sailor?” he asked.

  “You could say that,” the skull replied. “I used to work on a boat.”

  “We’re thespians,” the tall one explained. “Actors in the theater. We’re in a ghost show of our own, just down the street at the Paramount. Always looking for new talent. Do you know anything about show business?”

  “I know a little about radio,” Lucas said. He would have added that he had recently built a five-tube superheterodyne receiver, but, oddly, he couldn’t remember when or where he had done so.

  “Close enough,” said the skull.

  “Sounds perfect,” said the green one.

  Lucas accompanied the two to the Paramount, whose own marquee announced it was showing a movie called To Catch a Thief by day and by night a stage show called Professor McDuff and His London Midnight Ghost Show. A pair of skeletons perched atop the marquee appeared to be looking at the three as they approached.

  As it was with the Neff show, a large crowd had gathered in anticipation of the performance. Each was in his Sunday finest. Three beautiful young ladies in matching red dresses gazed noticeably at Lucas. It was difficult to tell one young lady from the other.

  “Do you perform magic?” Lucas asked his companions, ignoring the girls’ stare.

  “Nothing to speak of,” the large fellow said. “That’s the Professor’s job. He’s our star attraction. You’re going to like him.”

  “I noticed his name in lights,” Lucas said. “Is he the boss?”

  “Boss?” said the skull. “Oh, he’s the boss all right. But it’s more than that. We’re a family.”

  With a large green hand, the big fellow held the door to the theater open for Lucas.

  “A family who could use the services of a young lad like yourself,” he said. “Especially a young radio whiz.”

  Lucas was escorted into an office where an old man sat at a desk. The man looked to be about sixty, with patches of white hair over his ears, and he had decorated the theater manager’s office with signs of the zodiac. Cardboard cutouts of Sagittarius and Capricorn and Aquarius dropped from the ceiling on threads. There was a large crystal ball on the desk next to a Ouija board, and there was a stuffed black cat with green eyes. A full-scale skeleton, like the ones above the marquee, sat in a chair near a wall. Lucas wondered if it was looking at him.

  “McDuff’s the name,” said the man. “Ambrose McDuff. Come in, my boy. Welcome to our little community.”

  “Are you the one they call the Professor?” Lucas said.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Professor McDuff. “And you are Lucas Mackenzie?’

  “Yes, but how did you know? I seem to be expected.”

  “Madame Lazorka told us,” the Professor said. “She knows things like that. She’s sixty-eight years young, so she always tells us, but that’s her story every year. She’s the psychic in our show. Dabbles in prophecy as well as mind-reading. Alas, she’s leaving the show in December. Marrying a fellow soothsayer from New Orleans and moving into a cottage deep in the nearby Bayou Sauvage.”

  Lucas wondered what Madame Lazorka did on stage. A theatrical mind reader could be amazing. He wondered if they planned to replace her.

  “I hear you are a wonderful magician,” Lucas said.

  “No, no, my boy, it’s you who are the real magician. They tell me you understand radio. Imagine, voices, complete conversations, traveling through the air. That’s magic. Completely unheard of when I was a boy.”

  “It’s not that hard, sir,” Lucas said. “If you have an antenna and a tuner and a detector, you can make one pretty easily.”

  The Professor laughed. “Easy for you to say. You must tell me all about it some day. But first, be seated. I’ll show you something.”

  Lucas took a chair opposite the desk and the Professor produced a deck of cards. After a quick shuffle, he spread the cards in a wide ribbon spread across his desk. It was the beginning of a card trick.

  “Now, take a card, any card at all.”

  * * *

  “We’re a family,” Yorick had said.

  Standing there in the Vernon Post Office, Lucas suddenly understood. That was it all along. He had traded one family for another. Suddenly he knew the answer to the postmaster’s question. He knew why he couldn’t send letters to his parents.

  High overhead a blast of thunder rent the Ohio sky and rolled like heavy drums across the state, dying away in fading rumbles.

  “Is it because…I’m dead?” Lucas asked. All ghosts are dead, he well knew, but Lucas had not seriously pondered the ramifications of that knowledge.

  “Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,” said Mr. Blackadder. “It confuses us, this ghostly estate of ours. We tend to forget that fundamental demarcation and what it means. Life, the old life, is over, you see? We can no longer communicate with those we left behind. The separation is eternal.”

  It was an enormous weight to bear. Lucas understood the finality of the situation, but it was hard to accept. He felt it so unfair that he could never tell his dad about designing a secret radio network, that he could never tell his mom about Columbine, that he could never tell Katie about being pals with a floating skull. His old family had its own life and was moving on to new experiences, just as he was moving on to new ones with Professor McDuff’s band of performers. His former family would eventually grow old, thinking of him less and less every day, until they too walked in the world of ghosts.

  “But people see us,” Lucas said, clinging to recent hopes. “They come to our show. We can touch them.”

  “Hence the confusion,” said the postmaster. “Yes, people can see us, even feel our presence, but we are more or less like actors in a movie to them. If you attend a movie starring some favorite actor, you can admire the show, but you can’t join him later for a cup of coffee or invite him home for dinner. The actor isn’t really there. Do you see?”

  Lucas slowly began to understand.

  “Of course,” the postmaster continued, “there are a few special individuals—adepts, I call them—who ‘see’ us better than others, individuals who know. Spirit mediums fall into this class, as do folks who work through the night, long past midnight, and folks with special occupations, such as directors of horror films. But even these can’t establish contact with their own families. There would be chaos if we could coexist with loved ones, and death would lose its meaning. No, it’s best that you simply forget about them. It gets easier as the years pass. Haven’t thought of my old mum in over fifty years.”

  If I can’t communicate with them, so be it, Lucas thought, wanting to cry at the notion but refusing to do so. But forget about them? He had already forgotten them for four years. He vowed to never forget them again.

  Above, the skies parted, and a hard steady rain began to fall.

  Chapter Nine

  The Starlite

  A fortnight following Lucas’s post office visit, a full moon floated over Covenanter Cemetery, in Bloomington, Indiana, where a planning session was in progress. Most of the group sat on tombstones, facing the Professor. Yorick was still missing, and the Gilbert girls were just out of sight on the other side of a stone wall, lying on the ground with their shirts off, trying to get a moontan.

  The nearby drive-in theater engagement had been a last-minute booking. The Professor and his troupe had never attempted a show outdoors.

  “Once again, my apologies for this sudden change in plans,” the Professor said. “As you know, it’s much easier to frighten people in an enclosed theater. Of course, there are precedents. Dr. Leon Franklin specializes in drive-in shows, as do my old pals Donn Davison and Kara-Kum. They invite the audiences to leave thei
r vehicles and to stand around the concession stand while they perform the show on its roof. I think it would be a much more interesting challenge to frighten our guests while they are still in their vehicles.”

  “If they stay in their cars, they will be too busy smooching to concentrate on our performances,” Oliver said.

  “They can do that during the films,” the Professor said. “Lucas?”

  “I’ve booked a pair of romances,” Lucas said. “We’ll open with I Married a Monster from Outer Space, which just came out, and we’ll close with a classic, The Bride of Frankenstein.”

  “The first one will put Oliver off girls,” Alexandra said over the wall.

  “He’ll think we are all space aliens,” said Belinda.

  “He’ll probably want a ride in our flying saucer,” said Clarice.

  “Har, har,” said Oliver, who nevertheless scanned the clear night sky.

  “We’ll present the show at the intermission, between films,” the Professor said. “I have some new ideas. With extra lighting from Eddie, the audience will be able to see a few of our larger mysteries if we perform them atop the concession stand. The Metamorphosis Trunk and Oliver’s guillotine number are sufficiently visible. A pity Yorick hasn’t returned, as it’s lovely when he floats in the air. No one has heard from him, I presume? Tsk, tsk. In his absence, I’ve decided to dredge up an old magical effect from the conjuring world, Blackstone’s Floating Light Bulb.”

  Eddie looked aghast. “Do you mean to like, fake it?” he asked.

  “Only partially,” the Professor said. “The Floating Light Bulb, as made famous by the great Blackstone, involves a bulb secretly lit by an internal battery. The bulb ‘floats’ via a black thread that the audience can’t see. In our case, I propose to tie one end of the thread to an upright atop the concession stand, and to let Clarice hold the other end as she floats in some nearby woods, just off the premises where she can’t be seen. Hence, it’s still accomplished by what the audience would call supernatural means.”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie said.

  Lucas knew that Eddie, like himself, missed Yorick’s bit in the show. This light bulb would not wear a hat or talk in a foreign accent. Lucas knew that everyone missed Yorick. According to Oliver, this was the longest he had ever stayed away.

  “Okay, let’s run down the list of the special equipment,” said the Professor. “Extra fright masks?”

  “Check,” said Lucas.

  “Extra lighting?”

  “Check,” said Eddie.

  “Trampoline?”

  “Check,” said Eddie.

  “Storm movie footage?”

  “Check,” said Lucas.

  “Excellent,” said Professor McDuff. “I believe our young motorists are in for a treat. Again, my apologies for the unusual booking. I do hope that no such surprises await us during our swing through southern Illinois next month. If anyone knows anything I should know about the Empress Theatre in Decatur or the Orpheum in Quincy or the Roxy in Alexandria, please advise me.”

  The words nearly rocked Lucas off his tombstone. A telephone operator had informed him emphatically that no such town as Alexandria existed, no atlas in any of the circuit libraries showed Alexandria on its maps, and his one attempt to mail a letter to his parents in Alexandria had been returned by the post office marked “Undeliverable,” handed to him in person by a stern Ohio postmaster. But now the show was headed to Alexandria! Lucas realized that the rules must have changed for him. Because he had accepted what death meant two weeks earlier, he was no longer banned from references to his former life.

  And the Roxy! That word fell into place in Lucas’s memory like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Lucas remembered that theater. He had been there every weekend. If the show played Alexandria, would his parents attend? His sister almost certainly would! She was a teenager by now. Would he be allowed to at least glimpse them? All Lucas knew was that the show would have to be wonderful, the best it had ever been.

  No one could have failed to notice Lucas’s being so distracted by the news. Lucas had poorly disguised his interest in a place called Alexandria over the past few months, and everyone in the cast seemed aware of his desire to reunite with his family.

  He glanced up and faced the group’s reaction. Columbine regarded him thoughtfully, Oliver twiddled his big green thumbs, the McClatter boys tried to stop themselves from rattling, and the three pretty faces of the Gilbert girls rose just high enough to permit the girls to peek over the wall. Only Eddie didn’t seem to get it.

  “Ah, Lucas,” said the Professor. “My apologies. It’s going to be difficult, and I appreciate your dilemma. If I could, I’d send you off to Lily Dale or someplace else, but you are indispensable to the show. Nor can I cancel the engagement, as lately every performance is important, and potentially our last. So we must proceed to Alexandria. Any attempt to establish contact with your parents would be, in a word, inadvisable. A night manager at a bowling alley might accept our kind, but a mother encountering a deceased child would find the experience unsettling, even if the fates did allow it.”

  “I understand, Professor,” said Lucas, still smarting from his scolding by the postmaster. “Ghosts never talk to living relatives. It can’t be done.”

  It was the first time he said the words aloud, and it made him feel small and alone.

  Lucas’s comment had an immediate discomforting effect on his fellow cast members. Some rolled their eyes, some exchanged glances, some looked away—down at their feet, over the gravestones, up at the moon. Even the McClatter boys traded questioning looks.

  The Professor, unable to ignore the reaction, clasped his hands behind his back and cleared his throat.

  “Perhaps never is too strong a word, Lucas,” he said. “Technically, communication between loved ones across the spiritual-earth plane divide does occur, but only in the rarest of circumstances. It happens through cryptic messages passed in séances, through materializations associated with some extreme emotional disturbance, or in situations where all parties know and accept that a given location is haunted. As I expect none of these situations to arise during our visit to Alexandria, you must keep a low profile. I shudder at what might happen if you don’t.”

  “I understand,” Lucas said. “It’s been a long time, anyway. I don’t even know if I would remember them.”

  Lucas had intended that last bit as a falsehood, to calm the Professor’s concerns, but it struck him as absolute truth. Would he recognize them immediately? It had been four years, after all, and everyone changes.

  Still, he thought, if there was a way to see them, and if we are going to Alexandria…

  But first, there was the little problem of an outdoor ghost show.

  * * *

  The night of the performance, the dying orange sun sank below the Indiana farmland like a vampire going to earth. Teenagers began turning off State Road 37 and into the Starlite Drive-in Theater, whose roadside marquee promised the usual scares.

  SPOOKS ON STAGE

  HORROR AT MIDNIGHT

  TWO CREATURE FEATURES

  THREE DOLLAR A CARLOAD—A DEAL SO GOOD IT’S SCARY

  Some honked their horns in what Lucas interpreted as anticipation, carloads of kids seeking a night of ghostly hokum and romantic hanky-panky.

  Curious as to what sort of teenagers might constitute a drive-in ghost show audience, Lucas manned the little roadside ticket booth himself. One of the McClatter boys sat alongside him to lend a spooky touch to each vehicle’s transaction.

  “Nice skeleton, Clyde,” said the driver of a Plymouth Fury. “Looks real.”

  If you only knew, Lucas thought.

  “Hey, you’re just a kid,” said the female driver of a two-tone Buick Century. “You better find your mommy before it gets dark. Things could get scary tonight.”

  “This better be good for three bucks,” said a young driver in a turquoise Dodge Lancer laden with teenage b
oys. “If it’s just some guy walking around the lot in a monster mask, we’re gonna want our money back.”

  The strangest car was a dark green DeSoto with windows tinted so black that Lucas couldn’t see inside. The driver’s window barely opened enough for a gloved hand to proffer a five-dollar bill.

  “Enjoy the show,” Lucas said to the mysterious driver as he passed him his change.

  But the window rolled back up and the stranger moved off without comment. Lucas noticed that the vehicle had Illinois license plates.

  “I hope you’re warning everyone,” said a girl in a Chevy Impala. “If you aren’t careful on a night like this, you could wind up like the couple in that ghost story, with a hook hanging off your door handle. It’s true, you know. My cousin knew those people.”

  “Take it outta this,” said the driver of a cream-colored Chevy hardtop with a molded grill. He wore a white tee shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his left sleeve. “What’s the deal tonight, Ace? Somebody waving a sheet around? How can you see anything from your car, anyway? Besides, we won’t have time to watch any stupid traveling monster show.”

  Lucas passed the fellow’s twenty over to the McClatter boy to make change.

  “That’s what you think, buster,” said the driver’s girlfriend. “They still haven’t caught that guy who got out of Sing Sing. The guy they call the Phantom. What if he were here, and he needed another car to make his getaway in? He’d probably just chloroform us, like he did those people in Ohio. That’s how he does it. No, sir, I’m not shutting my eyes tonight for anything.”

  Later, when Lucas met up with Professor McDuff during the first movie, the two were amazed that over a hundred cars had passed through the entrance.

  “I find this encouraging,” said the Professor. “There are over four thousand drive-in theaters in the United States. Perhaps this could prolong our career in show business, should indoor theaters finally close their doors to us.”