Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show

by Steven Bryant

  “There are classes?” Lucas said.

  “Oh, yes, certainly. Class I entities are hardly more than shadows or memories, barely there, either physically or mentally. They are like a footprint in the grass or a depression in a sofa. Class IIs are those wispy apparitions you see floating about in the movies, hardly more substantial than fog. Mere vapor. Still, one must put up with them, and they account for ninety percent of the ‘ghost sightings’ that characterize most haunted houses. Class IIIs and IVs, such as our little band, are more physical; we’re reasonably solid creatures that more or less obey the laws of mortal physics. Oh, IIIs do come with certain handy powers, such as levitation or the ability to pass through solid barriers, while IVs have powers that tend to be unique, such as our dear Columbine’s capacity to see into the future. It was a gift she brought with her from the other side.”

  “Then you must be a IV, Professor. What is your special power?”

  A dark look crossed Professor McDuff’s face.

  “Oh, dear me, I don’t know that I have any. It takes enough out of me to penetrate a packing case once a night. A mere parlor stunt, hardly more remarkable than my old card manipulations from my earlier days. If I had any special powers, I’m certain you wouldn’t want to see them.”

  The dark look vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  “It’s not only your ghostly powers that may evolve,” the Professor added. “Your heart may grow too, Lucas. Most of us, as you know, are content to exist at the age at which we passed on. But when children enter our world, it is often the case that they continue to grow for a spell before settling at whatever ‘age’ befits their destiny. Emotionally, that is. Just give it time.”

  Lucas was amazed at these new insights. Classes? Special powers? Why had no one told him these things before?

  “What about Eddie?” Lucas asked. “What are his powers?”

  “Eddie is nothing like you. I’ll trust you not to let this get around, but Eddie is, as kindly as I can phrase it, a zombie. Simply reanimated flesh, the result of some voodoo practitioner messing about with a good-looking corpse. But Eddie’s not without a certain roughhouse charm, and he’s an excellent lighting technician.”

  A zombie? Lucas was amazed. Why had Oliver not told him this? Why hadn’t Yorick?

  “So that’s it, then?” Lucas said, trying to grapple with the scope and nature of the afterlife. “Ghosts and zombies?”

  “In our little troupe, yes. Then there are vampires, of course. Rather the riffraff of the afterworld. Filthy creatures, really, nothing like the European counts one sees in movies. They’re a bad lot, and doomed to stay that way, as lately they add to their numbers by turning only weaker humans. I am pleased that it’s just us and Eddie. We wouldn’t even have Eddie if it hadn’t been for a poker game in New Orleans. I was playing head to head with an old voodoo priestess.”

  “You won Eddie?”

  “Ah, in point of fact, I lost that hand. But Eddie lights our show beautifully. It wouldn’t look the same without him.”

  Lucas stifled a smile. As delightful as he found this new information, he could never be so cruel as to use it. Eddie wasn’t that bad a guy. He just needed to leave Columbine alone.

  “And you, Lucas? Is there any reason you are being so inquisitive this evening? So philosophical?”

  “Ah, no, I uh—”

  “It wouldn’t, by any chance, be your birthday?”

  * * *

  Although he didn’t really expect his friends to forget his birthday, the scale of the party took Lucas completely by surprise. In the funeral chapel, the McClatter boys had formed a musical sextet, with drums and guitars, a saxophone and tambourines, and the home’s dusty old pipe organ. They struck up “Happy Birthday to You” when Lucas and the Professor entered the room, followed by their favorite tune, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Black helium balloons floated in the air along with Yorick.

  Oliver beamed at the birthday boy. “Ten again, Master Lucas? You hardly look a day older than when you turned ten last year.”

  It was the standard joke in the troupe. No one ever aged. Each year, the same birthday was celebrated. Lucas considered it a cruel joke, not the gag itself but his inability to age. All children want to grow up, and the Professor’s earlier counsel hadn’t convinced him that he would be doing any growing soon.

  Lucas vaguely wondered how many birthdays had passed since he had been born, but the question hovered on his horizon for no more than a human heartbeat. A party was afoot.

  “Hiya, Squirt,” said Eddie in a sweater with a big E on his chest. “Happy birthday.”

  Each year the ladies in the troupe chose a theme for Lucas’s birthday party, and this year it was a back-to-school theme. Besides Eddie’s letter sweater, Oliver wore a football jersey, and Yorick topped himself off with a graduation mortarboard. Alexandra, Belinda, and Clarice dressed as cheerleaders, and Columbine came as the class egghead, complete with studious-looking spectacles and a Harvard sweatshirt that harkened back to her Massachusetts roots. The McClatters wore collegiate beanies, and the Professor looked more like a professor than ever in a tweed sport jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Lucas himself wore the cardboard crown assigned to the birthday boy or girl as the occasion dictated. King for a day!

  Ten black candles blazed on a white cake baked in the shape of a movie-cartoon ghost. The cake was ceremonial. They used the same one each year and just refreshed the frosting.

  Alexandra, Belinda, and Clarice led the singing of another round of “Happy Birthday to You” as the Skeleton Sextet played softly in the background.

  “Make a wish,” Oliver said.

  Lucas closed his eyes and secretly wished that he would impress Columbine before the evening played out. His plans to achieve that goal lay hidden in the funeral home’s attic. He was just about to blow out the candles to make the wish official when a window flew up and a chill breeze blew through the room, extinguishing the ten little flames.

  “Woooo!” everyone said. “Spooky!”

  The party progressed, its participants convening and disbanding in quiet nooks and cobwebbed crannies. As the evening wore on, the wind outdoors picked up, and Lucas seemed to have become invisible as he strolled among his friends.

  “I say it’s Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory, with the Candlestick,” Eddie suggested. Clarice flashed a card at him, and Eddie made a notation on his pad. The triplets loved board games and were always seeking a fourth to play with them. This little game of murder was one of their favorites.

  In another corner, spectacles perched on his nose, Oliver was reading a Louis L’Amour paperback. Hovering alongside, Yorick read over his shoulder.

  Columbine was in the next room, reclining in a casket with her long legs hanging over the sides, reading a copy of The Search for Bridey Murphy, a popular work on reincarnation.

  The Professor snoozed in a chair in the office. He’d once told Lucas that few locales gave him as much peace as funeral home headquarters.

  And the boys in the band continued to play, haunting melodies filling the air.

  So far as Lucas could determine, the coast was clear. No one was paying attention to him. He ascended to the attic and lit a candle. There in the flickering light, he removed the cardboard birthday crown and placed it on an old bureau. He wouldn’t need it where he was going.

  Of all the talents on stage in The London Midnight Ghost Show, the Gilbert girls’ flight impressed him most, and Lucas in turn assumed it would most impress Columbine if he could fly. How could she not be impressed by an airman?

  For months he had secretly embraced the legend of Icarus. He had studied the flying machine designs of Leonardo da Vinci, with their flapping and rotating silk-covered pine wings, some thirty-three feet across. He had summoned the craftsmanship and the courage of the Wright boys in Ohio. Soon his diary’s pages had begun to fill with diagrams, intricate designs for mechanisms that might support h
im in midair.

  And now to make it happen! From the backstages of America he had scavenged wood, wire, tubing, bicycle parts, pulleys, canvas, linen, leather, twine, and glue. From all this it now existed, the device hidden in the trunk in the attic, a pair of what might be described as strap-on batwings, with hand cranks and pedals.

  Given its fully extended twelve-foot wingspan, it wasn’t easy to get the contraption out the gable’s window and onto the roof, but Lucas prevailed. Three stories up, he teetered. He donned a pair of World War I aviator goggles and peered through their twin panes at the dark Texas horizon. His short hair whipped and his wings snapped in the wind, and he knew that he had little time in which to prove that, even at ten, he was older, more grown up, more accomplished than anyone had realized.

  “Watch!” he commanded as loudly as he could, but his word was no doubt lost on the wind rushing across the roof.

  Half boy, half kite, Lucas leaned into the breeze and pushed off with his toes.

  At first, he felt the lift on his arms as he pushed away. He was flying!

  No, he wasn’t. The wind had created a momentary sense of weightlessness. The moment passed, and Lucas became acutely aware that he was falling.

  He spun the hand cranks furiously and flailed his arms as the dark earth rushed toward him. Even as he fell, he realized that he didn’t fear crashing, only looking idiotic in Columbine’s eyes.

  At the last instant, he wondered how long it would take them to find him.

  There was a mercifully brief explosion of pain, and then all was black.

  * * *

  Emerging from his stupor, Lucas occasionally roused close enough to consciousness to hear voices nearby. He gradually sensed that he was lying on a cot and surrounded by the cast. The Gilbert girls—garbed in the nurse uniforms that they wore in mad scientist routines—fluttered about as though they were highly trained health care workers, though seemingly puzzled as to how to take the pulse of a patient who didn’t have one, or to check for fever in a body that seldom exceeded room temperature.

  “We were at your side—” said Alexandra.

  “—as soon as we changed into our nurse uniforms,” said Belinda.

  “Oliver picked you up with one hand,” said Clarice.

  “Columbine found you first, Master Lucas,” said Oliver. “She used her Inner Eye when we realized you had gone missing.”

  “What were you thinking, my boy?” said Professor McDuff.

  “Egad, you’re giving me a headache just thinking about it,” said Yorick.

  “Well, that was different, Squirt,” said Eddie. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

  “I think it’s a broken skull,” said Alexandra.

  “I think it’s a broken neck,” said Belinda.

  “I think it’s a broken heart,” said Clarice.

  Luca’s mind conjured questions: What is that smell, like medicine? Perhaps the formaldehyde?

  Columbine sat in a chair next to Lucas’s cot and held his hand in her lap.

  Is that happening, or am I dreaming? Just how big is the bump on my head? What is that smell?

  All of a sudden Lucas sat bolt upright on the cot. It came back to him, all of it, in a rush. That last night in the hospital, years ago. There had been the strong odor of medicine. There had been nurses fluttering about all night, looking grim. There had been talk that all his sister’s toys and clothing would have to be burned so that they wouldn’t lose her too. The word the doctors had whispered had not been whispered in years: diphtheria.

  For the first time since joining up with Professor McDuff, Lucas remembered his original family. His mom wore pedal pushers around the house and liked Eddy Arnold on the radio. Lucas’s dad ran a fashionable men’s clothing store. His sister, Katie, was two years older and was a girl scout.

  Katie! Lucas would have done anything for her. When Lucas was in the third grade, Katie had rescued him from a schoolyard bully. The boy was a fifth-grader, a dull-witted and stocky boy who had been held back a year in school. He’d forced Lucas face down in the dirt at a nearby ball diamond, with his arm wrenched up behind his back, demanding that Lucas fork over a Tales from the Crypt comic. Katie had come out of nowhere and clamped onto the boy’s ear with a ferocious grip, producing a howl from him that could be heard for blocks. The boy had never bothered Lucas again.

  Lucas recalled himself! He’d grown up loving the radio shows—“The Shadow,” “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” “The Green Hornet.” He had read his dad’s Popular Electronics magazines and loved to tinker. When he had turned ten he built his own crystal set out of some spare parts and a Quaker Oats box. It didn’t require a battery, and he had given it to Katie because she loved to listen to music stations in bed, deep into the night.

  And the movies! Lucas had regularly attended Saturday matinees featuring Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan and cartoon festivals at a little theater in downtown…Alexandria! Yes, that was his home. He lived in Alexandria, Illinois!

  How could he ever have forgotten any of this?

  The birthday Lucas had first turned ten, the last he would celebrate with his family, must have been in 1955. It was the year his father had promised a family vacation all the way to California, to a new place called Disneyland.

  And then Lucas realized: most of the others in Professor McDuff’s troupe had lived long ago, decades at least, and, in the cases of Columbine and the Professor, centuries. But not him! It was just 1959. Lucas himself would be only…fourteen! That meant that Lucas’s parents and sister were almost assuredly still alive.

  They would still remember him.

  Oh Mom oh Dad oh Katie.

  What were they doing now? Did they miss him, or had they moved on? Had he moved on? What would they think of him now?

  Lucas realized that it would probably defy every natural and supernatural law in the book, but he wanted, more than anything, to see them again. He wanted them to know he was fine.

  He wanted them to be proud of him.

  Chapter Four

  The Hull Hypothesis

  It was a dark, damp Thursday evening on the campus of Bradbury College in upstate Illinois, long after most students were safely tucked away in dormitories or fraternal houses. Dr. Harlan H. Hull insisted that his class, Parapsychology 402, be taught at night, when the imagination is more easily addressed. The class convened below ground, in the basement of the old Bradbury Museum of Natural History, famous as the oldest building on campus. Odors from musty exhibits gave it a creepy ambience, and year after year the college denied allegations that a graduate student had once hanged himself in an upper-floor lecture hall.

  Parapsychology 402, jokingly known on campus as Death 101, met at the far end of a dimly lit basement hallway. The students enrolled in it tended to loiter outside each week until a few classmates showed up, as none enjoyed walking that empty corridor alone.

  Dr. Hull selected his students carefully, and each brought a modest expertise to the seminar’s ghostly quest. One boy majored in Physics and knew about energy fields. Another was a Psychology student who knew about madness. A girl in Religious Studies was acquainted with worldwide beliefs on death and the afterlife. A pretty English major from Waukegan knew everything a girl might wish to know about ghosts in Victorian literature. And a dark, moody boy from the Mathematics department was often called upon to solve arcane calculations that mapped the complex relationship between life and afterlife.

  Dr. Hull’s obsession with ghosts (according to school legend, handed down from student to student over the years) extended back to his boyhood, when a girl he liked dared him to enter a county fair haunted house. Later he would discover that she was an accomplice of the grade school bullies who made life miserable for the bookish Harlan Hull.

  The so-called haunted house stood upon a flatbed that was trucked from one county fair to the next. Inside lay a tight maze that had to be negotiated in pitch darkness. The maze featured eerie s
ound effects of course, and luminous ghosts that leaped out at certain points, like a jack in the box.

  At least, that is how the Farley Brothers Carnival Spook-a-rama Haunted House was supposed to have worked. But somehow young Harlan took a wrong turn inside the mad, black maze, and he couldn’t find his way out. Only later did stories emerge claiming that the house was haunted by an evil spirit that could change the layout of the maze at will, or could appear to those trapped within as a rotting corpse wanting a sickening embrace. All that was known for sure was that Harlan was rescued two days later, the day before the carnival was to have moved on, and that the boy’s hair had turned completely white.

  “Just look at what you’ve done,” his mother said. “We’ll have to cut it off.”

  Young Harlan continued to suffer abuse at the hands of the bullies—his hair was the new object of ridicule—until a chance Saturday matinee gave him a new purpose in life. One of the animated cartoons that afternoon was a Mickey Mouse classic called Lonesome Ghosts, featuring Mickey, Donald Duck, and Goofy as the Ajax Ghost Exterminators. At that moment, Harlan Hull embraced his destiny to study, document, and whenever possible exterminate ghosts. He wanted them back in the ground where they belonged.

  It was the moment that led to his becoming the world’s foremost authority on the spirit world, knowledge he relished imparting to his select students or to likeminded professors at international conferences.

  Never mind those who thought he was a crackpot. After his trip to San Diego and his encounter with The London Midnight Ghost Show, he had all the proof he needed to silence his critics.

  Looking nervous as ever, the students filed in. Eighteen weeks into the spring semester, they had already critically examined photographs of such ghosts as the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the Screaming Skull of Wardley Hall, and the ghost on the Tulip Staircase of England’s National Maritime Museum. They had studied the architecture of such haunted homes as the Winchester House in California and Borley Rectory in England. There had been field trips to cemeteries, explorations of houses rumored to be haunted, and a midterm exam for which they had to answer questions posed to them via Ouija board.