Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show Read online

  At the end of I Married a Monster from Outer Space, as the defeated flying saucer fleet escaped from Earth and fled, each vehicle stood nestled in its proper space, tethered to a speaker stand. It was time to deliver the show’s favorite dirge through the heavy metal in-car speakers, effectively transforming each auto into its own self-contained ghost show performance chamber.

  Show time!

  Eddie lit the top of the concession stand well, with large floodlights mounted to the edges of the building. On this brilliantly lit makeshift stage in an Indiana clearing, the Professor opened with the Houdini Metamorphosis Trunk. Easily recognized as the magician in his red turban, he made the illusion more showy than usual by using both Alexandra and Belinda, locking both girls in the trunk and then amazingly exchanging places with the two of them. Because the girls wore tight jeans and bright red bikini tops, they easily attracted the notice of all the boys in the audience. There was no doubt that the costume update worked: horns honked insistently throughout the lot, the drive-in theater version of applause.

  Lucas monitored the show from his command post atop a freestanding ladder in front of the concession stand. The Midwestern night breeze ruffled his short hair, and the headphones felt secure over his ears. Wires from his instrument panel ran all the way back into the concession stand. He leaned into the top rung as the Professor introduced the Floating Light Bulb.

  “Okay, cue the spooky music,” Lucas said. “Perfect. Eddie, bring the lights down a couple of notches so the bulb shows.”

  Horns acknowledged the magic as the light bulb lit in the old man’s hands, with no apparent electrical connection. The honking continued to register appreciation as the Professor moved his hands away, and the light bulb hovered in the night air before him.

  “Perfect, Eddie, looks great. Okay, Columbine, you’ll be up next after the Professor. Columbine? Where are you?”

  The honking rose to the level of a traffic jam as the light bulb floated out over four rows of automobiles and then back to the Professor. By adjusting the height and the tension on the secret thread, Clarice floating in a nearby wooded area could move the light bulb at will, and the audience seemed to love the results.

  “Columbine?” Lucas tried again. “Where are you?” He peered this way and that from his post on the ladder, but all he could see was a dark population of automobiles parked in the bath of moonlight. A mist began to creep toward the theater lot from the nearby woods.

  “Oliver!” he appealed into his microphone. “You and the boys will have to go on next. I don’t know where Columbine has gotten off to. Let’s give them the guillotine number.”

  She had never missed a curtain before, and Lucas was in a panic to know what had happened to her. It felt as if a black fist were squeezing his heart. It was bad enough that Yorick was still missing.

  The cars fell silent when Oliver, in his best Frankenstein’s monster guise, began reciting snatches of popular ghost stories into the speakers. Fortunately the sight of the skeletons and the big guillotine revived audience interest, and the beeping resumed. The drive-in theater audience seemed to fancy a nice beheading.

  Following his decapitation, Oliver tumbled off the concession stand, hitting the ground with such a thump that a cloud of dust rose about him. Ever a trouper, he stood, brushed himself off, and hurtled headless into the concession stand, to no doubt strike fear into the hearts of the hot dog and snow cone customers.

  Lucas would have normally considered this Invasion of the Refreshment Stand to be a new fright night highlight, but he was far too concerned over Columbine. He wanted to cancel the show and begin an immediate search for her.

  With Oliver’s bit completed, he conversed desperately with the Professor. “I still don’t see her,” Lucas said into his ladder-top mike. “Should we segue directly to the finale?”

  “Dear, me, I suppose we shall have to. Oh, wait a moment. I think—yes! She’s coming up the ladder just now.”

  The Professor hurried onstage to introduce the suspiciously tardy girl as “the Grand Miss of Mystery, the Spook Show Sensation, the Princess of the Paranormal—the incomparable Columbine.”

  Columbine appeared a tad disheveled as she crossed the little stage with her patented leggy gait. She was wearing her usual white shift but not, apparently, her fire-red lipstick. Indeed she dabbed at her mouth with a small handkerchief.

  But where were you? Lucas wondered.

  Then Columbine took the microphone and everything seemed wonderful again.

  Into individual cars, she issued detailed psychic readings tailored to their occupants.

  “In the ’53 Mercury Monterey,” she began. “Greetings. I know you aren’t enjoying the evening, but it’s not your fault: your hearts’ desires are to be found elsewhere. A new boy and a new girl will move to your school in December. Get to know them.”

  She contemplated the sweep of cars.

  “To the four boys in the ’59 Ford Fairlane. Oh, lucky! Don’t laugh. You will start a rock and roll band and will one day play on ‘American Bandstand.’”

  Cars near the Ford honked in derision.

  “I see two girls in a white Thunderbird convertible. How nice to be sophomores! One of you will go to the homecoming dance with the quarterback of the football team. He will win the game for you with a last-minute touchdown pass. It won’t be his last pass of the evening.”

  From his elevated lookout atop the ladder, Lucas watched her with wonder as her shift fluttered in the warm breeze. He could only imagine sitting in an auto and listening to her magical voice delivered through a clunky drive-in speaker. Who wouldn’t want his fortune told? The show was going well, now that she had returned. And the Professor had promised a surprise during the “blackout,” if you could call it a blackout during an outdoor show.

  Columbine eventually concluded, and the Professor approached her with the usual bouquet of blood-red roses. But instead of accepting them, she hurriedly turned and rushed back down the ladder, leaving the Professor looking somewhat ill at ease holding a bouquet. He took a deep whiff and began his closing remarks.

  “Nice work, Columbine,” Lucas said into his mike. “Columbine? Now where did you go this time?”

  “Dear me,” the Professor said to the audience. “I do hope we’ve been able to give you a few goose bumps this evening. It’s perfectly new to us to be performing outdoors, and we hope you have enjoyed this little outing as much as we have. Next, we should like to present—”

  “Crank up the projector, Eddie,” said Lucas. “It’s Scary Time.”

  Suddenly a general alarm interrupted the Professor. A loud warning horn blared, and red lights flashed on and off throughout the theater grounds. Over the car speakers, a voice announced: “RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLES AT ONCE. LOCK YOUR DOORS AND ROLL UP YOUR WINDOWS. THE UNDEAD HAVE BEEN SEEN RISING FROM COVENANTER CEMETERY AND ARE DRIFTING IN THIS DIRECTION. RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLES AT ONCE.”

  The Professor, clutching his red turban, rushed offstage. Lights went out all over, the concession stand went black, and the projector began to roll, filling the screen with footage of an immense thunderstorm. Black clouds roiled, lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled through the in-car speakers. Recorded screams added to the thunderclaps as skeletons began to launch themselves high into the air. The McClatter boys, who couldn’t fly like the Gilbert girls, used a trampoline at the base of the movie screen to propel themselves into the night, creating the frightening image of flying skeletons against the onscreen thunderstorm. Finally, three lookalike witches in black dresses and pointy hats rose in the air on broomsticks above the concession stand, hovered there briefly, and then rocketed into the lot, swooping and weaving and diving among the cars.

  Throughout the theater grounds the teens huddled together in the centers of their autos as Professor McDuff’s spooks roamed among them. Occasionally, two of the McClatter boys worked together, suddenly pressing their bony bodies against both the passenger and driver si
des of the windshield. Others shook vehicles or yanked on the door handles. The “bewitched” Gilbert girls frightened the teens by flying far too fast and too close to their cars, laughing witchy laughs, their thorny broom straws scratching windows and paint jobs like fingernails across flesh.

  Lucas and Professor McDuff strolled among the cars and admired the unfolding spread of horror. Professor McDuff wore a hooded robe that kept his face in deep shadow, and Lucas wore a full head-covering Frankenstein mask ordered straight out of the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Even for a boy with a body temperature of fifty-nine degrees, it was hot inside the latex mask, but it was fun to be scary for a change.

  The Professor kept checking his pocket watch.

  “What’s up, Professor?” Lucas said through his layer of rubber.

  “Ah, it’s time. Ten…nine…eight…”

  Lucas looked around. What was going to happen?

  “…five…four…three…two…one…zero!”

  Lucas suddenly heard screaming from within all the cars around him. The doors flew open, and teenagers jumped outside. Then they all laughed at realizing how much they had been scared.

  Inside the cars, Lucas briefly saw phantoms he had never seen before, ghosts with ghoulish faces, ghosts that waved briefly and then faded from view.

  Professor McDuff assured Lucas that the teenagers would later attribute these “phantom hitchhikers” to wonderful special effects. Then the Professor shared the real story: “Just before the turn of the century, I attended a few theater classes at Indiana University, long enough to join a fraternity of outstanding fellows. A few of them now occupy the local cemeteries. When I learned we would be here, I contacted some of my old fraternity brothers and asked if they might be willing to participate in a theatrical finale to our show. As you have observed, the idea delighted them. They and some of their fellow residents were pleased to help out.”

  Around them, the teenagers stood laughing, apparently uncertain as to whether to return to their cars. Suddenly, among this crowd, Lucas spied a familiar face in the distance.

  “Excuse me, Professor,” he said. Lucas drew the mask from his face and marched into the crowd.

  He had seen Columbine standing with a young man in a white uniform.

  “Hey,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the fellow in uniform had disappeared into the mist or had evaporated like a ghost in a haunted house movie. By the time he reached her, she was alone.

  “Lucas!” Columbine said. She was standing barefoot in the white shift that she had worn for the performance, and she looked strangely guilty.

  “Who was that?” Lucas demanded.

  “Uh, ah,—”

  “I saw you. That fellow. Who was he?”

  “Oh, him. He is, ah, he was…a sailor. At Pearl Harbor. You know, when the Japanese invaded. He died in the first wave of the attack. He came to my booth in Atlantic City this summer. I told him I’d look him up if we were ever in Indiana.”

  “Before the show tonight, before you went on: were you in a car with him? Were you in a car kissing?”

  “Well, ah, there was an empty car—”

  “I can’t believe you were kissing. A stranger. Someone you hardly know. Before you went on. And after! Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  “You? You, Lucas?”

  It was at this point that Lucas would normally come to his senses and crumble, melting in the presence of the older, taller, and spectacularly beautiful Columbine, but something in him had changed. There would be no more immature gestures. He was past scuffling with a rival over a bouquet of flowers; he was past jumping off a rooftop to impress the girl.

  He felt different.

  Perhaps it was because he felt fourteen, and fourteen was almost fifteen. Perhaps it was the dancing with Chloë at Lily Dale, perhaps it was the bowling at Teaneck, perhaps it was because they were going to Alexandria.

  By now the drive-in teenagers had returned to their autos and the second feature had started. Frankenstein’s monster and his girlfriend loomed forty feet tall on a movie screen in the warm Indiana night. Silhouetted against this monster love affair, and visible to at least a few of the audience who were actually looking at the second feature, this boy and this girl who were finally noticing each other continued talking, long, long into the night.

  Chapter Ten

  Con Games

  A hum filled the room, like a religious chant. In a circle around the bed, Professor McDuff, Lucas, Oliver, Eddie, Alexandra, Belinda, Clarice, and the McClatter boys all held hands as they hummed. They were standing. On the bed and seemingly unconscious, garbed in a wispy white nightgown graced with delicate blue flowers, and draped in a thin white silk sheet, lay Columbine.

  “I can do this,” she had said. “It’s the only way.”

  The Professor had argued that her offer was highly dangerous, but he had run out of alternatives. Yorick had stayed away too long. As unlikely a possibility as it had once seemed, the Professor now openly suspected foul play. He had telephoned his friend, the Lily Dale medium Alice Monroe, and persuaded her to journey to the Paradise Lanes bowling alley in Teaneck, where they had last seen Yorick. She complied and reported back that she had experienced “a disturbance.” She also boasted bowling a high personal score of 143.

  The report confirmed the Professor’s fears, but Lucas saw no solution. How do you locate a disembodied human head that rarely shut up? You couldn’t file a missing person’s report. Yorick wasn’t even an entire person. And a missing items report in the want ads? Who didn’t have the odd skull or two rattling around in his cellar?

  “If I could fall into a deep hypnotic trance,” Columbine had said, “I might be able to pick up Yorick’s thoughts. I might be able to locate him.”

  “Out of the question,” Professor McDuff had said. “Far too dangerous. I’m certain Yorick will turn up, my dear. Never you mind.”

  Later, the Professor privately explained the danger to Lucas. In a profound hypnotic slumber, Columbine’s receptive mind could pick up the thoughts of not only those near her, but the thoughts of many throughout the world, as though she were a radio attuned to some cosmic mind frequency. The problem was that the jabbering of so many voices could lead to madness. She had attempted this dangerous hide-and-seek stunt once or twice in her former life in Salem, stories of which had surfaced in her witch trial.

  But the days had passed from August into September into October, and Yorick was still missing. He hadn’t telephoned, he hadn’t written, he hadn’t attempted to communicate telepathically.

  And so now Columbine lay on the bed, so still that she had them all worried. The deeper she slipped into her trance, the colder her body became, and the moisture in the room began to condense into droplets on her forehead. The humming helped her maintain the icy trance; the circle helped her focus on her needle-in-the-haystack search.

  Lucas ached to comfort her but didn’t know how. Despite his one deliriously happy evening conversing with Columbine at a drive-in theater, two weeks earlier, Lucas had reverted to his shy ways and not spoken to her since, other than through routine show-related communications. Nor had she approached him in any manner that might have suggested a warming of their relationship.

  The Gilbert girls shrieked as one when Columbine, her body stiff as though electrified, rose into the air a foot off the bed. It was an unexpected manifestation.

  Professor McDuff turned more pale than usual when she rose. He furrowed his brow. “Perhaps we should call off the search,” he said. “Perhaps we should wake her while there is still time.”

  But suddenly, as she floated, her lips began to move.

  “What is she saying?” said Oliver. “I can’t understand her.”

  Her words were an inaudible whisper.

  Lucas turned his head to the side and bent over her face until her lips brushed against his ear. His eyes widened as he began to comprehend. “You have to listen closely,” he said.
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  And so he became her voice.

  “There’s a prep school pupil in Poughkeepsie, heart-stoppingly shy, who wants to ask a girl to a Halloween dance,” Lucas relayed.

  He paused as Columbine whispered the contents of someone else’s head.

  “There’s a bashful girl in Bowling Green, who abhors anything athletic but wants to enter a city hula-hoop contest,” Lucas added.

  A dark look crossed his face as sinister secrets passed.

  “There’s the cold fear of the Phantom, the escaped convict from Sing Sing, hiding out in a third-floor room of a seedy hotel in Cincinnati,” Lucas revealed.

  His eyes widened as he grasped the scope of Columbine’s roaming.

  “There are thousands of secret fears and longings, joys and heartaches, hopes and sorrows, pains and pleasures, worries and consolations.”

  He felt like weeping as she transmitted so much sadness.

  “There are the fitful sleeps of children having nightmares, the lonely hours of young women who fear they will never fall in love, the empty dreams of old men sitting alone in bars.”

  And at last the thought that might end their search: “There’s a sense of loneliness and frustration and anger, much anger, of being confined in a glass tube, of being examined.”

  Columbine’s body descended away from Lucas so that she once again lay flat against the bed. Her eyes opened.

  “He’s in Illinois,” she said softly. “I’ve found him.”

  Relief filled the room. Grateful that she seemed okay, Lucas removed a handkerchief from a back pocket of his jeans and wiped the moisture off Columbine’s forehead.

  “That was so amazing,” he said. “I knew you could do it.”

  “Thank you, Lucas,” she said, turning her face to him. “Now, it’s up to you to rescue him.”

  The suggestion shocked Lucas. What was she thinking?

  The plan to rescue Yorick quickly evolved. Lucas was to lead the party, thanks to Columbine’s confidence and the Professor’s approval. He would take Oliver and Eddie along with him, and the McClatter boys would provide whatever support was necessary.