It was one week away from Pulaski High School’s production of Macbeth, and Lexi Rodgers was starting to worry. As Pulaski Theatre’s stage manager, her to-do list was longer than one of Hamlet’s monologues. And speaking of Hamlet’s monologues, as she crossed in front of the stage, Lexi heard Jordan Juarez and Mackenzie Avon arguing about their Literature homework again.
“How can the two of you even think of homework at a time like this? We have…” Lexi checked her watch. “6 days, 13 hours, and 42 minutes until opening night, and we’ve got to focus on Mac…”
“Don’t say it!” Jordan yelled, jumping off the stage and rushing to Lexi.
“Weren’t you paying attention when Ms. Garcia-Smith explained that saying the name of ‘The Scottish Play’ is bad luck?” Mackenzie added, her concerned voice dropping almost to a whisper on the play’s nickname.
Lexi rolled her eyes. “The only bad luck here is that Andrew can’t memorize his monologue, Heather hasn’t finished the special effects, and three of our stage lights are burnt out. And absolutely none of that has to do with…” She paused, savoring the look of superstitious fright in her friends’ eyes. “…Macbeth.” Just the mention of the play’s name made Jordan’s and Mackenzie’s hearts beat faster in anticipation of some terrible tragedy. This couldn’t be a real superstition, right? After all, the only stories anyone ever heard of Scottish Play-related tragedies came from cousins of siblings of neighbors of friends.
Well, everyone in Pulaski Theatre was someone’s friend’s neighbor’s sibling’s cousin when the stage lights splintered with an awful crash on the floor, sending bright burning sparks flitting around the stage like fairies, setting every surface they encountered ablaze. Fire alarms blared as Ms. Garcia-Smith frantically herded everyone out of the theater.
“Just bad luck,” Lexi murmured as she hurried up the central aisle, ashes stinging against her back. “It had nothing to do with Macbeth.” Yet the second she pronounced the name of the play again, the ashes whirled into a frenzy, becoming a strong wind that seemed to rip the bricks from the walls and reassemble them into a castle in the center of the stage. The bricks appeared to change as the fire licked at them, their paint melting away to reveal the ancient stones beneath.
“The castle from the play…” Mackenzie said with a mix of fear and awe as she stopped suddenly in the aisle. “The curse is real!”
“It can’t be,” Lexi said as she squeezed her eyes shut and prayed that she was dreaming. “There can’t really be a curse on Macbeth.” Upon the third mention of the play, disembodied laughter rang off the bricks of the castle. The laughter reached a crescendo as a shadow, a man draped in a cloak and wearing a crown on his head, stepped through the swirling ashes and onto the stage.
“Aye,” the shadow said in a voice dripping with a thick Scottish accent. “There be a curse on the play that lyin’ Shakespeare wrote to stain me honor. For hundreds of years, ye thespian-sorts have been tellin’ a wicked tale on a stage built on lies. But I shall have me revenge!”
“What do you want, O good king Macbeth?” Jordan asked, falling to his knees in a humble bow.
“I want ye to leave this accursed theater and ne’er speak of me play ever again! Leave me to reclaim me kingdom here and let me spirit spend the rest of this wretched eternity haunting the halls of this castle.”
Upon Macbeth’s command, the wind carrying the ashes grew into massive, howling gusts that encircled the actors and blurred Lexi’s view of the stage. Above the ashes, she saw the fires blazing up the catwalk and towards the wooden beams of the ceiling. The roof wouldn’t hold under the burnt ceiling.
“Oh, no.” Lexi blinked through the ashes as she ran down the center aisle, her late nights of set design and soundchecks giving her total confidence with the theater’s layout. “Having a roof collapse on me will put me so far behind schedule with this play.”
Lexi ran to the side door and found herself backstage. She grabbed a fire extinguisher and swept it ahead of her like a flashlight, clearing a way to the catwalk ladder. Above the swirling ashes, she saw Jordan and Mackenzie stumbling over the seats, lost on their way to the exit. As with everything with this play, Lexi was their last hope.
Yet despite being in the center of the flames, Lexi felt no heat. She saw only red, yellow, and orange lights flickering along the catwalk. And did she hear a fog machine running? Lexi reached up and pulled the valve for the sprinkler system, extinguishing the fire in front of the castle and causing the ashes to settle like falling snowflakes. In the middle of the soggy stage were Andrew, wearing a robe and a crown, and Heather, holding pulleys with a large brick tied to one end of each.
“Just a little special treat before opening night?” Andrew shrugged.
“Yeah – the opening night you were hoping to delay until you could memorize all your lines,” Heather muttered.
As Ms. Garcia-Smith led the two of them away for a lecture on fire safety, Lexi climbed down from the catwalk, where Jordan and Mackenzie eagerly embraced her.
“For all the times you joke about saving our lives, tonight you actually did,” Mackenzie said. “But how did Heather make the stage lights fall down? She’s never had to do anything like that for the show.”
Lexi couldn’t answer, but she swore she could hear the laughter of Macbeth’s ghost ringing throughout the theatre.
Based on a prompt by Bryn Donovan: It’s bad luck in the theatre to call the Shakespeare play Macbeth by name, but someone in the company keeps doing it anyway… and the superstition proves true. (From https://www.bryndonovan.com/2016/09/19/50-spooky-writing-prompts-for-horror-thriller-ghost-and-mystery-stories/)
