Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show

by Steven Bryant

  The taxi trembled from the driver’s shaking. The old man offered him a one-hundred-dollar bill, certainly handsome remuneration under any circumstances, but the driver ignored it, and the vehicle abruptly sped off into the mist, its door still open.

  * * *

  “Dear me,” said the Professor. “What an excitable fellow. I do hope he’ll seek counseling for that nervous streak. Is everyone here? Gentlemen? Ladies? This way, please.”

  The game troupe followed Professor McDuff into the deep fog. It had been five London Midnight Ghost Show performances since Movie Night in a Wisconsin cemetery. Although the Professor had apologized profusely for that evening’s melodramatics, it was no secret that everyone felt reassured by the old fellow’s star qualities. Lucas still wished that transmogrification could be featured in the program. Furthermore, he wondered how to do that, how to change into something else entirely. What must it feel like?

  They all walked blindly for perhaps ten minutes, until they could see what appeared to be a faint flickering sun, low in the distance. As they pressed closer, the fog opened and the light revealed itself to be the revolving searchlight from an airport observation tower. All about them, taking off and landing, were the forgotten aircraft of many bygone eras. There were German fokkers piloted by World War I aviators. There were B-29 bombers in the control of young Allied airmen from World War II. Passenger flights said to have vanished into the Devil’s Triangle deposited passengers and carried new ones off into the haze. Experimental flying machines that predated the Wright brothers took to the air with confidence.

  “Flyboys!” the Gilbert girls shouted as one. Handsome young pilots in brown leather bomber jackets clearly appealed to them.

  A twin-engine Lockheed Electra from the thirties gleamed in the glow of the floodlights that surrounded it. The airplane stirred a memory in Lucas. He was certain he had seen that plane before. There had been an encyclopedia in his childhood home, long ago, with pictures.

  “Isn’t that—” he began.

  “Indeed it is,” said Professor McDuff. “That’s Amelia Earhart’s plane. She’s still doing South Pacific runs.”

  There was a pounding from within Oliver’s hatbox.

  “Okay?” Oliver said as he peeked inside.

  “S’awright!” Yorick said from within in a gruff voice.

  As everyone laughed, Lucas stole a glance at Columbine. He thought she looked as mysterious and alluring as Ingrid Bergman in her last scene from Casablanca. Here in this fog-enshrouded airport, her face shadowed by her wide-brimmed hat and her figure wrapped in a beige trench coat, she might have been a spy waiting for her letters of transit.

  With the aplomb of the seasoned magician that he was, Professor McDuff extracted a wad of tickets from thin air and fanned them as he would a hand of cards. He held tickets for Los Angeles, Atlantic City, New York City, and Buffalo.

  “We’ll see everyone back in two weeks,” he said. “Here we go, Hollywood first.”

  While most performers relaxed on a beach for their annual summer vacation, Professor McDuff’s crew saw the break as an opportunity for some lucrative moonlighting. Lucas marveled at the range of activity.

  The McClatter boys eagerly snatched six tickets to Los Angeles. Only a year ago, the boys had starred as sword-wielding skeletons in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Audiences praised what they had mistakenly perceived as special effects by the film’s stop-action genius, Ray Harryhausen.

  “Yorick? Eddie?”

  The Professor slid a ticket into the hatbox. Although most of Yorick’s movie appearances over the years had been decorative, last year he played the title role in a ghost story thriller, The Screaming Skull.

  Eddie too had recently been bitten by the Hollywood bug. Although for years he had posed as various villains in a wax museum at a Lake Pontchartrain amusement park, the rise in movies about juvenile delinquents had lured him west. Whenever a director needed a hoodlum to crash his hotrod into a wall, Eddie was his guy.

  “And you girls give my regards to Mr. Hitchcock,” said Professor McDuff as he offered their tickets. “I understand he’s built a delightful haunted house for the movie he is currently shooting.”

  “Alexandra is on tap for some body double work,” her sisters said. “In a shower!”

  The Gilbert girls eagerly accepted their tickets. They had appeared in forty-three films in their phantom career in Hollywood, whenever a director needed an actress who could hover above the floor or walk through walls or simply look beautiful for more hours in a row than any breathing ingénue could hope to do. Their most famous role had been as stunt doubles for Dracula’s three wives in the 1931 Bela Lugosi rendition of Dracula.

  The Professor turned to Columbine. “Atlantic City again, my dear?”

  “I have my admirers,” she said.

  Each year, on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, Columbine occupied a coin-operated fortune-telling booth, where she posed as a beautiful gypsy automaton, adorned with scarves and feathers. Because she dispensed wisdom that was far more accurate than readers find in newspaper horoscopes, tourists would line up in droves to deposit their nickels.

  “And you, Ollie. Do give my love to Charlie. I’m sorry I can’t be with you fellows this year at Long Island.”

  Since 1938, Oliver had served as an artist’s model for the famous New Yorker cartoonist, Charles Addams. Oliver’s likeness had shown up in dozens of Gothic cartoon drawings featuring him as the largest member of Mr. Addams’ celebrated “family.” Audiences would often notice the similarity, which lent Oliver an air of spooky familiarity. Too familiar by Lucas’s estimate. He didn’t want audiences to become curious. As for himself, Oliver and his co-models always enjoyed posing in the macabre scenarios that Mr. Addams concocted.

  “As last year,” the Professor continued, “Lucas will accompany me to the Lily Dale Spiritualist Camp near Buffalo. Meanwhile, I wish you all a pleasant flight. Or, if you prefer, you may use these tickets and take an actual airplane.”

  Lucas smiled at the Professor’s annual joke. Although some ghosts could theoretically take to the skies and fly long distances, it simply wasn’t done.

  As the gang began to drift off toward their respective planes, Columbine suddenly turned back.

  “Lucas?” she said from beneath the wide hat. “Don’t forget me.”

  Lucas gulped. They would be apart for only two weeks. Why would she say a thing like that?

  * * *

  Freshly arrived in New York, surveying their surroundings through matching pairs of sunglasses, Lucas and Professor McDuff found Lily Dale in full flower. The first year that the Professor took Lucas to this popular summer retreat, he described it as being something like a resort in the Catskills, except that “instead of charades and rumba lessons, folks talk to the dead.”

  As the Professor had explained to Lucas on their previous visit, summer was Lily Dale’s busy season. Although a few mediums inhabited the community year round, it was during the summer that the population of mediums, tourists, and ghosts increased dramatically.

  The serenity impressed Lucas upon arrival. Houses were painted in pastels. There were rarely any automobiles, so the streets were strangely quiet. Mediums, most of them women, passed back and forth in front of the old Maplewood Hotel on bicycles. Occasionally a spirit in Victorian dress would glide past on an antiquated bicycle and give Lucas a knowing wave. A year earlier, down at Cassadaga Lake, he had seen the ghost of an American Indian paddle by in a war canoe.

  The goings on in Lily Dale, according to Professor McDuff, paralleled the goings on in theatrical ghost shows. The Campbell brothers exhibited Spirit Paintings at Lily Dale in 1905, and instances of spirit photography were now on display in the Lily Dale museum. A medium named Jack Kelly drove a car blindfolded from Buffalo to Lily Dale in the 1940s. Modern-day mediums caused tables to rise, received messages chalked on school slates, and levitated spirit trumpets. One medium routinely raised a crowd of
ghosts, levitating several trumpets for them simultaneously.

  On her wide-screened porch, the medium Alice Monroe greeted Lucas and Professor McDuff warmly.

  “Ambrose, Lucas, so wonderful to see you again. Tell me about life in the theater. I’m all ears.”

  Professor McDuff had once explained to Lucas that the mediums at Lily Dale ached to take their little spirit show on the road, to reach new people night after night in a different theater, a different town. Alas, the Professor had to convince Miss Monroe that she would be playing to audiences of rowdy teenagers, not audiences of faithful spiritualists. Her powers were best displayed in the comfort of her own séance chamber.

  Whenever she could persuade him to visit, those powers included the assistance of Professor McDuff.

  “Is the accent in tune?” she said.

  “Oh, I say,” said Professor McDuff. “Cheerio and all that.”

  In his employ with Alice Monroe, Professor McDuff played the role of a spirit guide named Freddie Hollingsworth, an upper-crust British ghost. The Professor would appear in her séances by oozing through a wall of the chamber itself, like cream through a sieve. It was a feat that surprised and delighted Lucas the first time he saw him do it. This visual effect also delighted Miss Monroe’s clients, who paid handsomely to send messages through Freddie Hollingsworth to their departed acquaintances.

  “You’ve arrived at just the right moment, Lucas,” Miss Monroe said. “I believe there is a dance this evening, up at the old Assembly Hall.”

  Ghosts at Lily Dale were “hired help,” as Lucas well knew, and it wouldn’t do for them to socialize with the paying customers. All social activities for the spirits tended to be held out in the meeting hall in Leolyn Woods. But Lucas was not in the mood for a party. Lily Dale was a place to which people came to communicate with departed relatives. He wondered if it were possible for the departed to establish contact with the living, a way for him to finally communicate with his family. He had been looking forward to this summer break and this opportunity.

  “Nonsense,” Alice Monroe said when Lucas expressed little interest in a dance. “You should be up there with other young people, enjoying yourself. I shall be spending the evening over tea with Ambrose, catching up on old times.”

  Lucas raised an eyebrow. He thought that the Professor’s friendship with the very alive Miss Monroe was sufficiently close that it must be breaking some cosmic rule or other, but he wasn’t about to criticize.

  That night, the woods were so dark that Lucas felt he would never find the building. Only the muffled sounds of that new-fangled rock and roll music rescued him from his wanderings and drew him to the Assembly Hall. Inside, so many people were dancing that he couldn’t even see the band. A mirror ball turned slowly overhead, scattering flecks of light over the pale crowd.

  Lucas spotted a boy of about his age, with slicked-back hair, on the outskirts of the dancing frenzy. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” the boy replied.

  They both surveyed the dancing, moving a little as though they were enjoying the music.

  The band struck up a familiar tune called “That’ll Be The Day.”

  Lucas said, “Hey, isn’t that—”

  “It is indeed,” the other boy said. “The legendary Buddy Holly. He’s been on the Spirit Tour since February. There was a plane crash or something.”

  “He’s wildly popular,” said a female voice. “Rock and roll is all the rage in the afterlife.”

  Lucas was startled to find himself in the company of a girl about his size. Her froth of blond hair surrounded an astonishingly pretty face. She wore a bright pink blouse, rolled up blue jeans, bobby socks, and saddle shoes. Only her eyes and her pallor betrayed her post-mortal condition.

  “My name is Chloë,” she said. “And you two are…I’m getting Justin and Lucas.”

  “Hey, how did you do that?” said the other boy.

  Lucas merely smiled. He was too familiar with Columbine’s powers to be amazed. Even Yorick could get a name on most nights.

  Chloë looked back and forth from one boy to the other as if choosing between two equally repulsive options.

  “You,” she said at last, poking a finger into Lucas’s chest. “Come dance with me.” She turned and marched smartly into the fray of dancers, without looking back, clearly confident that Lucas was following. Out in the center of the dance floor, through the bouncing older dancers, Lucas occasionally caught a glimpse of the singer in the celebrated black glasses.

  Chloë turned to Lucas with a heartbreaking smile and began to dance. Lucas bounced along with the music. Once, on a small backstage television set during a rainy-day afternoon rehearsal, he and Oliver had watched some teens from Philadelphia on the new television dance show, “American Bandstand.” To Lucas’s surprise, he remembered what it was supposed to look like and didn’t find it very hard to do. He could even twirl this girl like the kids on television did.

  “Hey,” Chloë said. “You dance okay.”

  “Uh, thanks. You do too.”

  “I should. I used to dance in Shirley Temple movies. Before she grew up.”

  Lucas danced with Chloë the next night, and the next, and the night after that, and his friendship with her blossomed. His diary began to fill with entries that began “Chloë says…” and “Chloë thinks…” He found her easy to talk to. She told him of California in the thirties. He told her of life with a traveling ghost show. He told her about the Professor and Eddie, about Oliver and Yorick, about the Gilbert girls and the McClatter boys. He skipped over any talk of Columbine—just thinking about Columbine in Chloë’s presence felt weird—and he definitely avoided any mention of his family in Illinois, and his quest to find them.

  For although Lucas spent his nights on the dance floor or circling Cassadaga Lake with Chloë, he spent his days cooking up a scheme to contact his mother. Lily Dale boasted the highest concentration of spirit mediums in America. Surely one of them could penetrate the wall of negativity that had so successfully blocked Lucas's attempt at a phone call. Surely someone could help him past the conspiracy of deceptive mapmakers that denied the very existence of his hometown.

  On the final afternoon of Lucas’s visit, he approached the home of Leota Price. Miss Price’s powers were whispered of throughout the closed community, powers deemed even more impressive because Miss Price also happened to be blind. Although citizens occasionally saw her walking with her red-tipped white cane, she navigated the sidewalks and intersections of Lily Dale with remarkable ease.

  Once again Lucas’s financial holdings resided in a glass jar full of change. He was carrying this when he entered Miss Price’s séance parlor. Heavy wine-colored draperies lined the walls, and candles provided the only illumination. Miss Price was already waiting for him, per reservation. She was a tall lady with a face of powdered wrinkles. Her eyes were closed. Before her on her desk lay a pair of school slates and a crystal ball the size of a basketball. A phonograph record played a funeral march.

  “Welcome, Master Lucas Mackenzie,” Miss Price said in a decidedly haughty tone. “I trust you brought the prearranged fee. Be seated.”

  Lucas sat opposite Miss Price in a high-backed chair. When he placed the jar of money on the desk with a clink, Miss Price flinched at the sound of coins, but her eyes remained closed and her concentration firm.

  “A test to see if we can contact the spirits,” she announced. She cleaned both sides of each school slate and then sandwiched the two slates together in a little stack. Although Lucas was aware of the old ghost show trick of a secret flap to conceal “spirit messages,” he said nothing.

  Miss Price leaned toward him across the desk, placing her hands palm up on either side of the crystal ball.

  “Give me your hands,” she said, in the same imperious tone.

  When Lucas placed his hands in hers, Miss Price suddenly sat up stiffly and her eyelids snapped open. All Lucas could see were the eerie white
s that filled the spaces where her eyes should have been. She had no pupils.

  “Holy mackerel!” she exclaimed, her hoity-toity accent slipping. “Those are some mighty cold hands for a boy so young. You think maybe we should reverse the connection?”

  “Please, ma’am,” Lucas began. “I just want to get in touch—”

  “Quiet!” Miss Price insisted. “A deal’s a deal, bub. Lemme see what I can get.”

  With her eyes closed again, she seemed to go into a light trance.

  “Oh. This isn’t good,” she said at last. “I see trouble. Danger even. To someone close to you. Do you know a man named Hull?”

  Lucas did not.

  “Wait, there’s more. More danger. To someone else close to you. Do you know a man named Hoffman?”

  Again, Lucas did not.

  “Weird,” Miss Price said. “Maybe these bums are using aliases. But you came here to contact someone. We seem to be getting nowhere with names. I shall attempt to establish contact through emotional channels. I merely wish to know the gender. Do you wish to contact someone male or female?”

  “Uh, female.”

  “Someone attractive?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “And is this someone close to you?”

  Lucas hesitated.

  “That is, is it someone you love?”

  Lucas agreed. Who didn’t love his own mother?

  “Someone you love very much? Someone you love more than anyone else in the world?”

  Again Lucas agreed.

  “Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,” Miss Price beamed. “Hold tighter, and concentrate on the crystal.”