Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show

by Steven Bryant

  A boss who can do that is worth having around indeed, Lucas thought.

  By the time Lucas rejoined his team with a steaming slice of pizza in hand for Eddie, Oliver had turned the page in the magazine to an advertisement for a 3-D comic called The House of Terror. As it cost only thirty-five cents, Lucas and his friends could barely wait to send in the requested cash, check, or money order.

  As to the bowling, it was the girls who noticed first. All the while they had been absorbed in Famous Monsters, the boys kept taking turns bowling. None had paid attention to the fact that, after nine frames, Lucas had a perfect game going. Every ball he rolled had produced a strike.

  Even Lucas seemed amazed when it was pointed out.

  “Just what were you doing on break?” asked Alexandra. “Spending your nights in a bowling alley?”

  “I’ve never seen a 300 game before,” said Belinda. “They’re very rare.”

  ‘You’ve gone all athletic on us,” said Clarice. “Where did this come from?”

  Lucas felt embarrassed by the attention. He was unaccustomed to being noticed, and he felt even more uncomfortable about it with Columbine in the room. The Gilbert girls weren’t the only ones to look stunning in pink satin jerseys.

  “Just dumb luck,” he said. “I’m sure to start throwing gutter balls now.”

  By Lucas’s next turn, the girls had all abandoned their game and huddled around the boys’ game.

  Lucas held the ball and faced the pins. What was going on? Was it just luck? Or was this some weird new power he was coming into? And no, he had not spent the break bowling. He had spent it on the dance floor with a little heartbreaker named Chloë. Was dancing also a new power? He had just assumed that dancing was something that came easy, like sneezing or chewing gum. Bowling felt the same. He wasn’t stronger, but his muscles just seemed to coordinate, and throwing strikes came as easy as twirling a girl on the dance floor. But even if bowling and dancing were new powers, these were just minor social skills, not something he could use in the show. Who would pay to watch a ten-year-old bowler? Who would pay to watch a fourteen-year-old bowler? Knowing that everyone was watching him, Lucas felt as if he couldn’t move.

  “You can do it, Lucas,” said Columbine.

  A hush fell over the bowling alley as Lucas finally released his ball. It rocketed down the polished hardwood, changed trajectory at just the last instant, and blasted into its target. Pins exploded in every direction.

  “Yes!” everyone cheered as Lucas recorded his tenth consecutive strike of the evening.

  The McClatter boys came clicking over to witness. Lucas obliged their curiosity by hurling yet another strike. He could do no wrong. By this time, Professor McDuff had also taken a serious interest. Lucas had bowled two strikes in this frame. Altogether: eleven in a row. One more and he could record a perfect game of 300.

  “Attaboy, Squirt” Eddie said. “I saw a fellow come close once, but he left one pin standing. A beautiful thing, though, even coming that close.”

  “Give me an L,” Alexandra said.

  “Give me a U,” Belinda said.

  “Give me a C-A-S.” Clarice finished.

  “You could do it, if you wanted to,” Columbine said to him quietly.

  But he didn’t want to. Not just then. He put the ball back in the ball return.

  “Where is Yorick?” he said. It had suddenly dawned on Lucas that no one had seen Yorick since early in the game. The four collegiate bowlers from lane 10 had apparently left earlier. The night manager no longer manned his post, nor did the lady who ran the snack bar occupy hers. The troupe was alone in the bowling alley.

  “Eddie, watch the girls. Ollie, Lucas, come with me,” said Professor McDuff. The three marched toward the restroom.

  “He’s done this before,” said Oliver. “He gets his feelings hurt, and he just takes off. Once he was gone for three weeks.”

  Inside the men’s room a window opened to the night. The gap was large enough that Yorick could have escaped through it if he had wished.

  “Uh, oh,” said Oliver.

  He leaned over and picked up something that had fallen behind the trashcan. It was Yorick’s derby, with its brim still bent up.

  “It might have fallen off when he went through the window,” Lucas said.

  “He never goes anywhere without some sort of headgear,” Oliver said. “He’s rather vain about it.”

  By the time they came out, Columbine had already checked the ladies’ room as well. Yorick was nowhere to be found.

  “We were sort of hard on him,” Lucas said. “We were teasing him about some stuff you could buy in the magazine.”

  Columbine gave him a hard look.

  “He never likes Bowling Night,” Oliver added.

  “I should have been paying closer attention,” said Professor McDuff. “I was working on our figures. Odd that no one else is here. It’s three-fifteen. Wasn’t there supposed to be a ladies’ league here at three? I’m sure that’s what that young fellow said.”

  It no longer seemed important for Lucas to finish a perfect game.

  “We should leave,” he said. “Something isn’t right here. Yorick knows where to find us.”

  No one questioned his logic. They all changed back into their own shoes, gathered their belongings, and headed for the door.

  Lucas was the last to depart the building. A bowling alley is a spooky place in the middle of the night, with shadows cast by unnatural neon colors. He thought of Oliver’s empty bowling ball bag, and a lump of sadness rose in his throat. It hurt to think of Yorick being alone in the night.

  Why had Yorick left his derby behind? Could he have been snatched? Who would do such a thing? Lucas stepped out into the night and looked up at the cold stars.

  Chapter Eight

  The Postmaster

  The United States Post Office in Vernon, Ohio, looked like a fortress. Its walls, vast slabs of granite four stories high, imposing enough to guard the gold at Ft. Knox, surrounded and protected the delicate hardware and human machinery that moved letters, postcards, and packages into and out of central Ohio. Gray clouds gathered and darkened directly over the structure as if to single it out for some special form of misery.

  At its entrance, amid the gathering gloom, Lucas was convinced that no one in the company suspected his being at the post office. Yorick was still missing—it had been over two weeks—and this weighed on everyone in the cast. Oliver seemed especially affected. He took to lying in bed all day reading Zane Grey Westerns. With one close friend missing and the other absorbed in the likes of Riders of the Purple Sage, Lucas became aware that no one was tracking his every movement. The others had long gotten over the fear that Lucas might soar off a rooftop again, and they left him to his ways. With this unexpected freedom, he found it easy to slip off to anyplace he chose, so long as he returned before his absence raised any alarms.

  Today that place was the Vernon Post Office. If anyone could get in touch with his family, Lucas had finally decided, it was the U.S. Mail.

  Filled with apprehension, he turned the brass doorknob and heaved the great door open.

  A cavernous interior lobby greeted him. High ceilings made miniatures of the few visitors conducting business, and a green marble floor appeared to extend forever. The vast chamber seemed immaculately clean, antiseptic, and footsteps echoed noticeably as people went about their business.

  Lucas approached the first service window, its opening guarded by vertical brass bars like the teller cages in banks. The window was so high that Lucas had to look straight up at it and therefore couldn’t see the employee behind it.

  “May I help you?” a lady behind the bars asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lucas said. “My name is Lucas Mackenzie. I’m expecting a letter. General Delivery.”

  Lucas tried to make his voice sound nonchalant, as though he picked up a General Delivery letter every day. He had set the correspondence in mot
ion himself a week earlier, when the show had played at the Victory Theatre in Dayton. It had taken only a moment to slip around the corner and drop the envelope into a mailbox on the street. Whether he would receive an answer or whether the letter would be returned unopened remained to be seen.

  He had composed his inquiry carefully.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie,

  Please do not be alarmed. I am not a crackpot. If you receive this letter, please write to me at L. Mackenzie, General Delivery, Vernon, Ohio.

  Yours truly,

  L. Mackenzie

  To the envelope he had licked and attached a four-cent stamp with Abraham Lincoln’s face on it, and he used the same Vernon address for the return address, in case the envelope had to be returned unopened. This was a distinct possibility, given that the atlases he had been checking in various small town libraries continued to contend that Alexandria, Illinois, was not even on the map.

  Lucas had considered adding “your former son” after his name, but he didn’t want to frighten his mom more than necessary. He appreciated that the letter itself would be shocking.

  “General Delivery, you say?” the lady said. “We don’t often get those. Just a moment. I’ll check.”

  Lucas heard her footsteps receding. Although he harbored little hope that today’s attempt would produce a reply—nothing he had tried in the past had worked—he nevertheless considered any attempt to contact his parents worth the effort.

  He looked down the corridor to where the other patrons were queuing up to send or receive packages. How many, he wondered, were trying to contact someone across the life-death divide?

  Presently the lady returned to her post. “Did you say your name was Lucas Mackenzie?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “In that case, this is most unusual,” the lady said. “You will need to speak to Mr. Blackadder. He’s our postmaster. Mr. Blackadder very much wishes to have a word with you. Down the hall to your left, please, and take the first door on your right.”

  Lucas found himself becoming more and more nervous as he walked alone down the extended hallway. If there had been a letter for him, why didn’t they just hand it over? Could there have been some simple problem, such as insufficient postage? Or worse, could they have somehow figured out what he was up to?

  Lucas passed a large bulletin board that featured posters with men’s faces. Wanted posters! He looked closely at one in particular, exhibiting the face of a hard-looking character with close-cropped hair named Jake “Scar” Hoffman, aka the Phantom. So this was the escaped convict Lucas had been hearing so much about. “Armed and dangerous,” it said. Lucas wondered where the Phantom was now. Didn’t those FBI agents at the bowling alley say he had a sweetie in southern Illinois?

  There was also a bank robber and a bunko artist among the collection, and Lucas couldn’t help imagining his own face among this rogues’ gallery, for bold defiance of supernatural law.

  He opened a door to another lengthy chamber in which, at its far end, the presumed postmaster himself sat stiffly behind an immense desk. Feeling as if he were being summoned to the principal for a capital school offense (filthy language? hitting a girl?), Lucas approached cautiously.

  Upon close inspection Lucas found the man to be tall, of considerable age, with silver hair, a pale, gaunt face, and dark, shadowed eyes beneath wild, shaggy gray eyebrows that seemed to burst outward from his head. Before the man, on the desk with a surface the size of a ping-pong table, lay a single, familiar envelope.

  Overhead, thunder rumbled ominously.

  “Master Mackenzie, I presume?” the man said. “Lucas Mackenzie?”

  Lucas nodded.

  “My name is Blackadder,” the man continued. “I’m the postmaster. This…letter, you see, has arrived at my desk. This is serious business. I’ve been postmaster here for seventy-five years, and this is our first incident of this nature.”

  Seventy-five years? Incident? Lucas looked harder at Mr. Blackadder, and then, finally, he understood: Mr. Blackadder was a ghost.

  And now that Lucas understood that, he understood what the “incident” must be.

  “You have posted this letter in an attempt to contact your former family,” Mr. Blackadder said. “Unless, of course, you wish to refute that—but I think not, yes? You won’t waste my time with a denial?”

  Lucas could see that the letter had not been opened, and this saddened him more than any trouble he might be in with the post office.

  “It’s been four years, sir,” he said. “I thought they might want to hear from me. To tell them, I guess, not to worry about me.”

  “Yes, yes, we all want to pass such sentiments to someone, but we can’t, can we? This foolish behavior must cease. This wastes the post office’s time. We had considered simply directing the letter to our Dead Letter Office. Our little joke, don’t you know? But this letter, marked ‘Undeliverable’ in red ink, requires my personal attention. It is incumbent upon me to make you understand why such letters can never be delivered. There’s a chair over there, boy. Be seated.”

  “I’d rather stand, sir, if I’m in trouble,” Lucas said.

  “Sit!” the postmaster commanded. “We need to talk, and I don’t want you fidgeting. I haven’t seen a boy in a while. Not a boy like you.”

  Once Lucas had dragged the chair over to the desk and sat, the postmaster began his interrogation.

  “Have you tried this before?” he asked. “That is, have you tried other methods, not involving the U.S. Mail?”

  “Once, I tried to telephone them,” Lucas said.

  Lucas remembered the upper level of the Gillioz Theater in Springfield, Missouri, remembered standing in a wooden and glass telephone booth, amazed to see the change in his jar vanishing before his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” the operator had said. “I don’t show an Alexandria. Perhaps you mean La Grange, La Salle, or Lake Forest?”

  “And why didn’t that work, telephoning them?” the postmaster asked.

  “Because I was speaking to a difficult telephone operator?”

  “Poppycock,” said the postmaster. “Don’t insult the telephone company. Try again.”

  “Because it was a long distance call?” Lucas guessed. “Too long?”

  “You’re getting warmer,” said the postmaster. “Did you try anything else? Spirit slates? A rapping hand? A Ouija board?”

  “I hired a medium at Lily Dale,” Lucas admitted. “She came highly recommended.” He remembered how the crystal ball in the séance chamber had filled with an eerie mist. Slowly the mist had cleared to reveal the face of Columbine. She had been wearing feathers in her hair, part of her Boardwalk costume. She was someone Lucas loved more than anyone else in the world.

  “And why didn’t that work?” the postmaster asked.

  “Because the medium was confused?” Lucas said. “Because I hadn’t been clear about whom I wanted her to contact?”

  “Are you sure about that?” the postmaster said.

  Lucas’s heart burned at the possibility that he loved Columbine more than he loved his mom, but he knew that it might be true.

  The postmaster stood up and walked slowly forward, passing right through his immense desk like a man wading through a stream, until he was standing squarely before Lucas. His eyebrows were intimidating.

  “You still aren’t seeing it, boy,” he said, “and it’s right before your eyes. Think! You must understand why you can’t communicate with your parents, through the post office or by any other means. Can you recall when you first hooked up with this phantom sideshow you’re with?”

  Lucas hadn’t thought of that night in years.

  * * *

  First, there had first been blackness, and then suddenly so much light that he had to squint, to shade his eyes with his hand.

  Broadway blazed with light, bedazzling the eye with word of its latest box office blockbusters. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at the
Morosco, Bus Stop at the Music Box, Witness for the Prosecution at the Henry Miller. The movie houses too attracted a mass of bodies that filled the sidewalks and spilled into the street. People were everywhere.

  Lucas didn’t know exactly why he was there, part of this crush of souls, or how he came to be there. It was as if he were in a dream, and because all things make sense inside dreams, it seemed right that he was where he was.

  His exact location was in front of the Criterion Theatre, whose marquee announced a Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis picture by day and at midnight an intriguing production called Dr. Neff and his Madhouse of Mystery. The latter attracted a smart-looking crowd in coats and ties for the men and fancy dresses for the ladies. Everyone in its queue seemed abuzz with anticipation.

  Lucas was studying the marquee and considering purchasing a ticket when he heard voices whispering behind him.

  “Do you think it’s him?” one voice said.

  “It must be,” said another. “Fits the description.”

  “I don’t know,” said the first. “Looks kind of small.”

  “Only one way to ascertain,” said the second. “Pop the question.”

  “Hey, buddy,” shouted the first voice. “New in town?”

  Lucas spun about so fast that he startled his commentators.

  “Whoa, big guy!” said the first. The voice emanated from a human skull floating five feet off the pavement. It was wearing a white sailor hat. Its companion rose to a bulky seven feet or so and looked to be a sickly green—perhaps, thought Lucas, a consequence of the flashy theatrical lighting. Although such a pair might have invited comment on a normal evening, even on Broadway at night, Lucas still felt as if he were walking about in a dream, and, in that case, everything continued to make sense.

  “I was just looking at this show,” Lucas said. “Do you fellows know anything about it?”

  “Could be, could be,” said the skull in the sailor hat.

  “It’s what is called a ghost show,” said the tall one. “First, the great Neff performs magic, at which he is a true master, and then they turn all the lights out and ghosts float over the heads of the audience. It’s a wonderful show.”