Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show

by Steven Bryant

  Lucas couldn’t help but wonder what Columbine thought of him. Since their shared encounter at the drive-in, had she come to appreciate him as more mature than before? But as flattered as he was that Columbine had appointed him the leader, and no matter how grown-up he felt, he hardly saw himself as a hero. Surely there were more qualified candidates.

  “It would be faster to fly,” Lucas suggested to Professor McDuff. Whatever they were up against, Lucas felt a flying creature capable of dispatching vampires was surely more up to the task—far more capable than a boy leading a motley crew of misfits.

  “Oh, heavens, no,” said the Professor. “This is an operation that calls for stealth. Flying would be far too dangerous, what with power lines and thunderstorms and the start of hunting season. They haven’t harmed him yet. The train will be more than adequate. You will do fine, Lucas.”

  * * *

  Two nights later, at the Bradbury Museum of Natural History, on the Bradbury College campus, the night watchman paused as if he had heard a noise. He froze where he stood in the large exhibit hall, and he tilted his head, listening. The hall was so empty at this hour that if anyone dared breathe, it could be heard.

  After a full five minutes with no further sounds issuing from the shadows, the night watchman pressed the switch on his powerful Ray-O-Vac flashlight. The lantern’s beam panned over the taxidermy exhibits—a mountain puma, a North American moose with antlers six feet across, a Kodiak bear standing on its hind legs—but none of these seemed to stir the guard’s interest.

  He next turned his flashlight beam to the Homo sapiens exhibit. Nothing there appeared amiss, except that where there used to be one adult human skeleton, there were now seven.

  “Hmph,” the guard said aloud. “Someone must have received a grant for some more bones.”

  As the guard turned away, six of the skeletons in the exhibit quietly reconfigured themselves to look like a Broadway chorus line, each waving good-bye to the retreating night watchman. The original Homo sapiens skeleton began to shake in anger.

  “You guys get out of here,” it hissed when the guard finally left the premises, the door clicking shut behind him. “You’re going to get me into trouble. All of you.”

  Three more figures then emerged from the shadows and converged on a locked door at one end of the hall. Lucas, Oliver, and Eddie each wore a black sweatshirt with a raccoon-like black mask across his eyes.

  Lucas struck a match and read the sign posted above the padlock.

  TOP SECRET

  For access contact Dr. Harlan H. Hull, Paranormal Studies Department

  Hull. It was a name Lucas had heard somewhere before. What business did this guy have with Yorick?

  The small band of intruders seemed momentarily stymied. The door posed a problem.

  “I used to be able to pick locks in New Orleans,” Eddie whispered.

  “The Gilbert girls could just pass through it,” Lucas said. “We should have brought them along.”

  “Perhaps if we just give it a pull,” Oliver said. He grasped the door handle and gave a tug. With a crunch of metal and wood, the entire door came off in his hand, padlock and all.

  Lucas exploded in laughter, his hand flying to his mouth to stifle the noise. He quickly looked back in the direction where they had last seen the guard. He certainly didn’t want the fellow returning.

  Fortunately, the far door remained closed, and Lucas turned back to the gaping hole. “Well, now it isn’t locked!” he said. “They’ll never figure out we were here.”

  Beyond the open doorway, a rumbly snoring sound emanated from the center of the room.

  Oliver cupped a hand to one ear. “I’d recognize that buzz saw noise anywhere,” he said.

  And so they found Yorick snoozing away. He rested on a small pedestal enclosed in a glass tube, just as Columbine had described. Wires attached to him with circles of adhesive tape led to a bank of instruments on the wall behind him.

  Oliver removed a fountain pen from his suit pocket and began to tap gently on the glass.

  “Whassat?” the startled prisoner cried, looking up at Oliver’s masked face. “Aaugh!”

  “You didn’t tell us you were enrolling in college,” Lucas said. “Wow, you look like a science experiment on ‘Watch Mr. Wizard.’”

  “Oh, so now the kid’s a comedian?” Yorick said. “How long have I been in here? Are you palookas going to get me out, or what? And what’s with the Lone Ranger masks?”

  In Yorick’s place on the pedestal, the gang left a novelty shop windup plastic “talking” skull, the kind advertised in Famous Monsters of Filmland. If this Dr. Hull character wanted a talking skull, Lucas felt, he would now have one.

  With a clean escape from the campus, the team soon enjoyed a bouncy train ride back to the tour. Because the late-night run of the Illinois Central was virtually a phantom train itself, hurtling past sleeping communities, no passengers paid attention to Oliver with his green hue or to the McClatter boys, who sat alone and were absorbed in the sports pages of the Chicago Tribune. Lucas and Eddie sat side by side facing Oliver and Yorick, with Yorick floating above his seat cushion in a University of Illinois stocking cap that Lucas bought him at the train station.

  Yorick described the experiments to which he had been subjected.

  “The guy wanted me to talk,” he said. “He’s on to all of us. It was just my dumb luck to get snatched at the bowling alley.”

  Lucas said, “I bowled eleven strikes in a row.”

  “Who cares?” Yorick exploded. “I’m trying to tell you what happened. There were microphones everywhere, with tape recorders running, in case I had some words of wisdom they wanted for posterity.” He paused. “Eleven? That’s not bad.”

  Lucas grinned.

  “Anyway,” Yorick continued, “first they attached electrodes to see if they could pick up brain waves. When that didn’t work—and no jokes, you goofballs!—they tried sending the juice the other way to see if they could shock me into letting out a scream. I had to hold the darn scream until the middle of the night! They submerged me in water, they stuck me in the refrigerator, they x-rayed me, and they showed me pictures of skulls belonging to famous women in history. One more night and I might have cracked.”

  Lucas looked out the train window. They passed small town after small town, brief sequences of lights whooshing past, and then darkness again. So many lives, going on without him. Just as lives were going on in Alexandria, which they would visit in only four weeks. Would his friends like Alexandria? Would Columbine?

  Lucas was excited at the prospect of seeing his hometown after four years, to visit favorite haunts, but he began to dread what he might learn if he did encounter his family. Did they spend their days going to work or to school or to movies or to parks without thinking of him? Ever? He had been gone over four years now. Perhaps they never thought of him. After all, the things a family does with a ten-year-old boy, such as flying kites and riding bicycles and playing Sorry on a family card table, they probably just don’t do anymore if that boy isn’t around. They move on. His parents surely owned a television set by now. Katie probably had boyfriends. Perhaps, Lucas thought, he didn’t want to know what their lives were like now.

  “So it was Miss Long Legs who found me?” said Yorick. “I’ll have to thank her. At least someone missed me. So what’s the deal, kid? Is she your girlfriend now or what?”

  “Oh, please,” said Lucas. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  But Lucas noticed, for the first time, that Eddie didn’t chime in and claim her to be his girlfriend.

  * * *

  With everyone reunited, Professor McDuff took Yorick’s story seriously and came to a startling decision.

  “We must rid ourselves of this ridiculous academic,” he said. “This so-called Dr. Harlan H. Hull. Our kind have always had to deal with such troublemakers. From now on, we shall conduct our program in the manner of all the other midnight spook show
s. In the grand tradition of Rajah Raboid’s Spookeasy and Francisco’s Mid-nite Spook Frolic and John Calvert’s Inner Sanctum Hour, we shall, to use Eddie’s words, fake it.”

  The prospect was breathtaking. To use magic shop methods when every bit in the program could be performed for real added an element of danger. More than they ever had, the cast faced the opportunity for failure, for looking foolish. Secret sliding panels could get stuck, threads could break. Disaster lurked at every turn.

  The first step was to acquire the apparatus. A magic shop in Michigan supplied a nice Houdini Metamorphosis Trunk with a secret opening in the back. They replaced Oliver’s guillotine with a mail-order facsimile from Ohio. This so-called “six-foot-tall French Head Chopper,” with a secret second blade, came painted in red and appeared to be about as substantial as an old ironing board.

  “It’s so small,” Oliver said.

  “So the blade never really passes through the neck?” said Yorick. “Oliver will still be in one piece? That’s so lame. Who would pay to watch that?”

  The Professor decided to keep the Floating Light Bulb in the act, though without the help of Clarice bobbing in the air in the woods. Indoors, the Professor would utilize a more traditional hookup, with one end of the thread pinned to his lapel and the other tied to a post in the wings.

  “So I’m out?” Yorick said. “I’m not in the show?”

  “On the contrary,” Professor McDuff assured him. “We’re featuring you in the blackout. Take a look.”

  The Professor produced the ad copy for the show at the Orpheum in Quincy, Illinois.

  ONE NIGHT ONLY

  MIDNIGHT SPOOK SHOW

  PHANTOM SKULL TO HAUNT LOCAL THEATER

  “Wow,” said Yorick. “Top billing! But aren’t you concerned that this might attract the attention of that nutcase professor from Bradbury College?”

  “Oh, I’m counting on it,” said Professor McDuff. “I have a few surprises for him.”

  * * *

  On the night of the show in Quincy, Dr. Harlan H. Hull was indeed on hand for the Phantom Skull edition of The London Midnight Ghost Show, and he wasn’t alone. Accompanying him was none other than Nachman the Incredible, the nation’s leading debunker of spirit phenomena. A magician turned scientific investigator, following in a tradition dating back to Houdini’s time, Nachman appeared frequently on late-night television with Jack Paar, and Dr. Hull knew that Nachman’s was the one voice America would trust. The two sat alone in the back row of the theater, at some distance from the scattered clusters of teenagers that attended the performance.

  “There are no such things as ghosts,” Nachman said as they had entered the theater. “I have a standing offer of ten thousand dollars for anyone who can prove me wrong.”

  “Then I hope you have your checkbook and pen handy,” said Dr. Hull, “for tonight you are about to see an entire theater full of ghosts.”

  It wasn’t Nachman’s reward that Dr. Hull wanted, but his credibility as the nation’s leading skeptic. Dr. Hull remained furious that his private office had been violated. He had been escorting an important private investor, one of Bradbury’s richest alumni, to inspect his first captured spiritual entity, only to find his door off the hinges. A novelty shop gag skull chattered away in place of his prize exhibit. The incredulous investor vowed that Bradbury would never see another dime from him.

  Oh, thought Dr. Hull, it would be a pleasure to expose these vaudeville spooks. He would hound them back into their graves with a wave of righteous outrage, from clergy, from children’s organizations, from decency societies, from educators, from scientists, from concerned parents, and from chest-beating politicians.

  It had happened once before, Dr. Hull knew, at an amusement park in West Virginia. A nest of ghosts had been discovered there and driven back into the earth, screeching, at the hands of a torch-wielding sheriff hoping to be senator and a mob of like-minded ministers.

  Of course the follow-up studies suggested that things might have gone better, given that a dozen guests perished when the entire amusement park burned to the ground, but the authorities blamed the fire on a lightning bolt from the storm rather than on the torches.

  The evening’s performance in Quincy began with exhibitions of thought reading. The show’s triplet beauties, dressed in evening gowns that showed off their fall tans, distributed slips of paper and pencils so that audience members could jot down questions. The show’s host, that Professor McDuff—The Man Who Knows All—could then answer the questions in his mysterious fashion, seemingly without ever reading them. His red turban gave him the look of an Eastern mystic.

  The young ladies collected the slips, dropped them into a clear plastic bowl, and passed the container to the pale, meaty fellow who ascended to the stage and placed it on a table near the Professor. Meanwhile, the Professor had tied a blindfold around his eyes and now indeed seemed completely devoid of vision.

  He reached into the container and extracted one of the folded billets of paper. Holding it to his temple, he announced, “I have a question from one L.S. She wants to know if she will have more children.”

  “Oh!” a lady exclaimed from the audience. “That’s me.”

  “I cannot see you,” the Professor said, “but I do see one more trip to the hospital nursery. I suggest you stock up on pink booties.”

  The Professor let the slip of paper drop to the floor as he reached into the container for another. Again, with no possible way of reading it, he announced, “This is for J.B. He wants to know if he should ask Marianne to marry him.”

  A flurry of activity arose from the audience in the apparent vicinity of “J.B.”

  “The decision is up to you, but you are running out of time. Others are thinking of asking her as well.”

  “You see,” Dr. Hull whispered. “He couldn’t possibly know the contents of those slips of paper. It’s clearly supernatural forces at play.”

  “Poppycock,” Nachman whispered back. “When the pasty fellow took the bowl to the stage, he passed momentarily behind that curtain, there on the right. In that brief instant, he switched containers. The slips the Professor is holding are blank. Someone else is opening the real slips and reading them into a microphone. The turban and blindfold the Professor is wearing are concealing the earphones that deliver the information to him. I am shocked that you were so easily fooled.”

  For the show’s second demonstration, the Professor introduced Columbine. As always, the teenage boys in the audience reacted rowdily as she took the stage. It didn’t take a psychic to know what was on their minds.

  “For any who may have felt written questions opened the door to skullduggery,” the Professor glared in the direction of Dr. Hull and Nachman, “we shall proceed with unwritten questions. As I pass among the audience, merely whisper your questions to me, and Columbine, the Teenage Oracle, will answer them from the stage.”

  He was true to his word. As he wandered along an aisle, teenage girls and boys whispered secret questions to Professor McDuff.

  “Can you answer this young lady’s question?” the Professor addressed Columbine. “Promptly, please.”

  “She wants to know if her boyfriend is true to her alone,” Columbine immediately responded.

  A squeal from the young lady revealed that Columbine had divined her question.

  “All I can say is that you should enjoy the time you spend with him. But high school is not a time to expect miracles.”

  Audience members sitting near the couple laughed.

  “There,” whispered Dr. Hull. “She knew the question without ever hearing it. Explain that if you can.”

  “It’s merely the old Zancig code,” Nachman said. “The two of them concoct a list of up to ninety-nine questions. I doubt that more than ten are actually needed for a typical youth crowd such as this. Next, the leading word of each sentence the Professor utters is assigned a numerical value. For example, I equals 1, Go equals 2, Can equals 3,
and so on. The Professor led off his remarks with ‘Can’ and ‘Promptly,’ which, if I recall the code correctly, represents 38. It’s the number of letters in the words, you see? And question 38 on the list must have been ‘Is my boyfriend/girlfriend true to me alone?’ It’s simple memory, Hull, not magic.”

  The physical stunts on the program met with varying degrees of success. Professor McDuff performed the Metamorphosis Trunk trick with one of the ladies. Although the two exchanged places successfully, the exchange took far longer than Dr Hull had ever witnessed. One of the teens in the audience shouted, “Hurry up, already.”

  The guillotine trick was a disaster. The big green fellow was simply too large for the device. His neck got stuck in the opening, and the bottom blade descended well before the top blade ever left its original position, exposing the method. Because the actor couldn’t get his neck unstuck, he had to stand and walk off the stage wearing the apparatus like a dog collar. The teens in the audience howled with laughter.

  Dr. Hull fumed. Why were Professor McDuff and his company being so inept this evening? He chewed thoughtfully on one of his long strands of white hair.

  The final demonstration before the blackout proved far more successful. Professor McDuff invited the mayor of Quincy to the stage along with the editor of the local newspaper. The mayor verified that he had received a small locked chest in the mail a week earlier, sent to him by Professor McDuff. He also verified that he had kept the chest in a locked safe in his office, to which only he had the combination. The newspaper editor brought along a copy of the evening paper, and he verified that there was no way anyone could have known the evening’s headline a week in advance.

  Professor McDuff offered the mayor a skeleton key, and he stood back as the mayor opened the chest. From within, the mayor removed a written prediction and held it up for all to see. The editor held up his newspaper at the same time. Both the prediction and the newspaper read the same.