Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show Read online

  Professor McDuff returned and made a big to-do of presenting Columbine a bouquet of blood-red roses, then escorted her offstage to continued applause and whistling.

  At the edge of the stage, with the girl safely in the wings, the Professor turned again and explained the rules of the blackout to the audience. “One: remain seated. Two: no flash photographs—our ghosts are bashful. And three: if something cold and dead should put its hands around your throat, you can always scream. And now,” the Professor added over the audience’s nervous laughter, “I give you the Curse of Frankenstein!”

  Fog oozed across the stage floor, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled. Lucas gave birth to all three effects: a thick white cloud issued from his Vapor-250 Atomizer, simulated lightning exploded from a bank of flashbulbs, and thunder from his Hollywood Sound Effects phonograph record erupted from speakers the size of refrigerators. With a deft replacement of the phonograph needle, he threw in one more extended rumble for good measure.

  “Ka-booooooom!”

  On this note, Oliver lurched out, doing his best to look like the Frankenstein monster from the movies. His green hue, some last-minute Hollywood stitches, and a pair of sparking neck electrodes constituted special effects that rivaled those of the best Hollywood monsters. The teenagers granted him full attention as the hulking actor grimaced, spread his arms, and began his recitations.

  Oliver’s low voice gave life to a selection of spooky rhymes. James Whitcomb Riley’s famous orphan told her witch tales, Edgar Allan Poe’s black bird perched ominously, Shakespeare’s witches issued their dire portents.

  But as entertaining as the actor’s recitations were, and despite his looking like someone to avoid in an old castle on a rainy night, his welcome began to wear on his young audience.

  “This isn’t the ‘Curse’ of Frankenstein,” an anguished voice said. “It’s the ‘Verse’ of Frankenstein.”

  The teens in the front rows began to throw things at the stage. Milk Duds, Chuckles, Tootsie Roll segments, and a hailstorm of popcorn filled the air. The “monster” waved these trifles aside as he continued his soliloquy.

  “That should do it,” Lucas said into the mike. “Cue the McClatter boys.”

  In military formation, six life-sized skeletons marched onto the stage. Two of them wheeled out an enormous guillotine as the others restrained Oliver.

  “Cool,” said a boy near the front of the theater. “Marionettes.”

  The skeletons dragged Oliver to the guillotine and forced his head through the opening. The device’s steel blade loomed eight feet above.

  “Murder most foul,” Oliver cried.

  With a smiling glance at the audience, one of the skeletons pulled a lever, and the heavy metal blade dropped with a sickening thunk.

  The audience gasped.

  At first, nothing happened, as though the blade had passed through Oliver’s neck without harming him—the old magician’s trick. Then gravity set in, and Oliver’s head slid down the face of the thing, leaving a bloody red stain, and fell to the floor. It rolled toward the audience, wobbling this way or that as an ear or nose went round.

  “EEEEEEEK!” the girls in the audience screamed as one.

  The oversized green head stopped just at the edge of the little stage. Its eyes were open and looking about wildly.

  The headless remainder of Oliver himself lumbered to its feet and began swinging its huge arms, knocking two of the skeletal McClatters aside in the process. On a quest for its head, it began walking toward the audience, with its arms held straight out, like a sleepwalker‘s. Just as it was about to step off the stage into the audience, Lucas directed Eddie to plunge the theater into total darkness. Even the blue illuminated exit sign faded from view.

  This time, everyone in the audience screamed. The blackness was terrifying.

  Lucas’s fingers played over the keys and toggles on his control panel, creating further screams, moans, and thunderclaps.

  The phonograph needle settled into a recording of “Zombie Jamboree” by the Kingston Trio. The McClatter boys, being phosphorescent and therefore visible in the dark, lined up like a Las Vegas chorus line at the edge of the stage and began dancing a frightening mountain jig. “NOOOOOOO!” More panicked teenagers screamed.

  “Launch the aerials,” Lucas commanded.

  Flying in formation, three glow-in-the-dark female ghosts soared low in the darkness, just above the audience’s heads, their arms trailing alongside their bodies. At first the boys in the theater oohed and aahed over their pretty faces and their scandalously loose shirts and their pale green glow.

  “Hey!” a girl shouted angrily. “I thought you came here to kiss me!”

  “It’s a slide projector,” said a boy in row 10. “They’re shining it onto the ceiling.”

  “Cheesecloth,” said another ghost show pundit. “I’ve read about this. They just treat it with luminous paint and wave it about.”

  Lucas loved the idea of gliding over the heads of the audience and wished he could do that. Surely Columbine couldn’t ignore a boy who could fly.

  But then the situation turned from romantic to revolting. The youthful faces that fueled the boys’ imaginations began to age at an alarming rate, decades falling away in a flash, until they became the faces of wrinkled hags. Their eyes glowed red. The gentle drift of the ghosts’ initial flight pattern gave way to a whirlwind of rocketing ectoplasm. The ghosts banked and swooped and buzzed their trapped victims. One of the phantoms shot straight up to the roof of the tiny theater, paused, and then dive-bombed back toward the audience. The teens in her flight path leaped from their seats to avoid being struck. Another plunged to the floor and zoomed along beneath the theater seats themselves, in that crusty netherworld of old popcorn and chewing gum. The excited teens leaped up onto their armrests as the spirit light flashed beneath their feet. The third ghost, to the shock of everyone who saw in the dim glow, lifted a boy into the air, planted a slobbery old grandmotherly kiss right on his lips, and dropped him back to earth.

  Lucas chose this moment of collective panic, when the entire assembly was on the verge of rushing to the exits—and perfectly timed to coincide with the finale of the skeleton song and dance number—to liberate the crowd from its fears. “Lights, Eddie,” he said into the microphone.

  “Got it, Squirt.”

  A single bright spotlight, so bright that some had to shield their eyes to look, revealed Professor McDuff standing center stage, smiling. The skeletons, frozen in their final configurations like characters in an anatomy class, drifted backward into the shadows.

  The Professor thanked the audience for attending, explained that the goings on had been “our little way of saying boo,” and introduced the feature film, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, starring Lon Chaney Jr., Glenn Strange, and Bela Lugosi, in their classic roles as The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, and Count Dracula. It was one of Lucas’s favorites, one he often fantasized about watching with Columbine.

  “And for any of you asking the question, ‘Do the dead return?’ our answer is, ‘Of course! We’ll see you next year.’ Pleasant nightmares.”

  The California high schoolers responded with enthusiastic applause.

  It was the same every night, wherever the show played across America. Part of it, Lucas figured, was that the teens enjoyed the show. Part of it was that the clapping masked the fact that many were still shaking from the strange goings on. And part of it, of course, was that the movie would give the lovebirds in the audience time to nuzzle with their sweeties in the dark, well after midnight, with no more fear of being interrupted by spooks that had seemed just a little too real. It was best, Lucas knew, that they not think too much about card skills no one could acquire in a single lifetime, about a floating skull that could steal thoughts, about an impossibly fast Houdini Trunk escape, about a beautiful girl who could see into tomorrow, about a decapitated giant, dancing skeletons, or floating ladies.

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bsp; Lucas flipped a switch and the film began. The projector lamp gave off a pleasantly familiar burning smell, and the filmstrip ratcheted noisily through the mechanism, casting the movie’s opening black and white images of London at night onto The Strand’s little screen.

  Later, there was to be a cast party in the theater manager’s office. Perhaps at the party, among the manager’s framed movie posters of King Kong, Godzilla, and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, amid the hubbub of post-show chitchat, Lucas might muster the courage to tell Columbine how wonderful she had been this evening, or to invite her for a stroll along the dark beach, only a block away. In his fantasy they walked barefoot in the sand, the black waves slapping the beach, alone beneath a silver moon and a spray of stars.

  Right, he thought. As if that were going to happen. Why would the flattery of a ten-year-old boy make the slightest impression on a girl who was already fifteen? Why would his beach-walk invitation hold the slightest interest to a girl who no doubt liked boys on the beach to be taller, with muscles? And what if he were older, more her age? Would she reject him anyway, prefer Eddie over him, or prefer someone else entirely?

  And so, once again, Lucas knew that he wouldn’t even speak to her. Rather, just before retiring, at sunup along with the rest of the cast, he would extract his diary from his little traveling suitcase, and he would draw, for the day’s date next to her name, in his small neat hand, his evaluation of her performance: four perfect stars. Lucas Mackenzie—boy critic.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, none of the teenagers settling in for the movie, the munchies, or the smooching opportunity seemed to notice the scratching noise coming from the back row.

  Gleefully entering notes into a little journal, and the only one of the audience who had pointedly not joined in the applause, was an adult named Harlan H. Hull. Mr. Hull—Doctor Hull to his colleagues and students—was ecstatic over his findings. He salivated over a possible book advance, a research grant, a guest appearance on television.

  Dr. Hull chaired the Paranormal Studies Department at Bradbury College, a distinguished liberal arts institution in upstate Illinois. From the moment he had entered the theater, armed with a battery of electronic sensors that the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover himself might have envied, Dr. Hull had been monitoring various energy fields.

  At first there were only hints. The needle on his Graviton Flux Indicator had registered surprising variations in body mass. If a stage show cutie could lower her body density that far, she could pass right through solid objects. Could the trunk have been normal? The spinning mirror on his Extensible Luminosity Gauge had picked up abnormally low dermal reflectivities. Could the psychic girl have been that pale?

  But then came conviction. Dr. Hull’s Remote Thermal Scanner 360 had provided the proof he had been chasing. With a pistol grip, a cross-hair gun sight, and a readout with glowing red numbers, the device resembled a hand-held Flash Gordon ray gun. The RTS 360 could measure body temperatures across a room to an accuracy of one tenth of one degree, and what Dr. Hull had determined was still making him shiver.

  If his readings were correct, he knew what he had feared to know.

  He now knew the talking skull had housed no hidden microphone, the trunk no secret panel, the guillotine no trick-shop blade. He knew the gyrating skeletons were not string puppets, the soaring phantoms neither magic lantern show nor chemically treated gauze.

  For every member of the show—from Professor McDuff to the yakking skull to the pale girl to the big green guy to the dancing skeletons to those floating hussies—had a body temperature of exactly fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of the grave. The room temperature of Eternity. In a word, everyone in this show was dead. There was no other way to say it.

  They had no business gallivanting around on stage before children. They belonged under the dirt, under the sod, under the feet of the living. And he was the one to put them there.

  “I’ve got you, my pretties,” Dr. Hull said aloud, twisting one of his long strands of white hair in his fingers. “At last, truth in advertising.”

  The London Midnight Ghost Show?

  Spooks run wild in the audience?

  Do the dead return?

  Yes, indeedy!

  And he had the proof!

  Chapter Two

  Midnight in the Garden of the Rich and Famous

  Professor McDuff’s London Midnight Ghost Show closed out its California leg with performances in Irvine, Downey, and West Covina.

  Fresh off a tiring string of engagements, the cast members sought an evening of rest and relaxation at their favorite West Coast retreat. It was deep night at the Forest Lawn Memorial Garden in Glendale, in the waning hours before sunup. The gates had opened to specters at midnight, and the lights from the sleeping city reflected faintly off the perpetual greater Los Angeles haze, bathing the darkened cemetery in that pink glow they use in funeral home state rooms, where the bodies are viewed. With a casual abandon, ghostly tourists from around the world drifted among the chapels and statuary, the pools and museums. In defiance of daylight custom, star-struck specters clustered at the gravesites of Hollywood legends, collecting autographs from the celebrated dead.

  Wending their way back from the Freedom Mausoleum, on a path relatively free of other spirit tourists, Lucas and Oliver walked side by side. Yorick floated along with them, a yakking satellite in a red beret. Since San Diego, he had been performing as the floating and talking head of Jacques Devereaux, a French gambler.

  “Mes amis,” said Yorick. “What a lovely night for a stroll, n’est-ce pas?”

  Oliver emitted a low growl. His great hands held the morning-after newspapers from the last three cities the troupe had played. Their headlines were in a tizzy over some issue of mortal concern that on a less worrisome evening might have engaged Oliver’s interest.

  CONVICT ESCAPES SING SING

  NATIONAL MANHUNT UNDER WAY

  FBI CLAIMS CAPTURE IMMINENT

  “Who cares about an escaped convict?” Oliver said. “It’s these drama critics that should be locked up. One of the papers characterizes my decapitation scene as a ‘puzzling interlude.’ Another calls it ‘in poor taste.’ And the third dismisses the guillotine as a ‘birthday party magic prop.’ If only they knew how it felt to do that stunt night after night. And not one of them praised, or even mentioned, my orations.”

  As everyone in the cast knew, Oliver’s pride in his oratorical skill harkened back to his show business roots in the Old West. Although the London Midnight Ghost Show press releases loved to hint that Oliver had been cobbled together from body parts in a laboratory, his true origins lay in a small caravan of actors that survived on sales of patent medicine to the cowboys who settled the western states of the United States. Oliver had risen from the position of sideshow Strong Man to that of the most accomplished orator of the tiny troupe, run by a fellow named Doc Erdnase. It was one of Doc Erdnase’s medicinal experiments gone awry, a sequence of special salt baths designed to impart the benefits of sunshine, that rendered Oliver more emerald than bronze. Although the sickly green hue might have faded with time, time ran out. The troupe awoke one morning on a prairie to find themselves surrounded by a considerably larger band of Indians. Alas, the assembly constituted a war party that expressed no interest in a frontier staging of Romeo and Juliet. The black smoke from the burned-out caravan eventually rose high in the buzzard-filled Western sky.

  Oliver continued his criticism of the reviews.

  “Of course, the ladies got all the attention,” he said. “As in, ‘Spook show cuties soar over love-struck spectators.’ Flying is a tad dramatic, don’t you think? These small-town critics always focus on the obvious.”

  Lucas wasn’t surprised that the Gilbert triplets—Alexandra, Belinda, and Clarice—rated such attention. Everyone loved them. The three were at that moment in the Great Mausoleum for an audience with the silver screen star W.C. Fields. The phantom comic openly adored the g
irls and looked forward to their annual visit. They had been Iowa farm girls the year they set out for Hollywood and stardom, but their trip and their futures were cut short when Sebastian Lesley, one of the silent screen’s most famous leading men, steered his 1920 silver Phaeton across a California highway centerline and into their path. His studio paid handsomely to cover up both the demises of the girls and the drunkenness of its star, then dropped him a year later for a younger actor they lured away from MGM.

  “What do they say about the Professor?” Lucas said. He didn’t dare ask about Columbine and would clamp his hands over his ears rather than hear any possible criticism of her.

  “Oh, he rated the usual praise for his card manipulation and his speed with the Houdini Trunk. But that’s all rather safe material, isn’t it? Classics from the old days, hardly a stretch?”

  Professor McDuff also currently occupied the Great Mausoleum, specifically the remote Sanctuary of Meditation, where he was in deep conference with Lon Chaney, the legendary Man of a Thousand Faces. A master of disguise throughout his film career, Mr. Chaney had designed the sparking electrodes that Oliver wore in the show. Everyone in the cast loved Mr. Chaney’s movies, and Lucas would often run Phantom of the Opera at special engagements.

  The Professor’s own rite of passage into this special world was something of a mystery to Lucas and the loyal cast. The most popular theory was that there had been a dispute, in France, over a high stakes card game. The dispute led to an early-morning duel, with pistols, in the misty woods near Fontainebleau. The Professor’s rival in the matter had been a famous marksman with a cruel heart. The year was 1841.

  Oliver might have continued to disparage the ineptitude of Southern California drama critics, but a small missile rocketed across his path, startling him so badly that all the papers flew from his hands.