Former editor Grant Carrington is back with a short story about a play about a ghost ...

    It was a dismal tour, but beggars can't be choosers: at least I had the fortune to be playing Hamlet. Me, a thirty-year-old bits-and-pieces actor, playing the indecisive teenager. Well, if Olivier could do it at sixty, I guess Erskine Caldwell could do it at thirty.     I had just finished an off-off-Broadway spear-carrying role when my agent came up with this tour, sponsored by an educational foundation. They had rigged some kind of deal with Equity, as educational foundations will do, and, for each Equity member, there were three college drama students. And now we were stranded in East Hicksburg with half the troupe down with the flu.     Ed Stortz, our Claudius, had it the worst and was lying up in our grubby fleabag of a hotel, delirious with a hundred-and-two-degree temperature. The rest of us were staggering through rehearsal in the rundown old East Hicksburg Palladium.
    "The show must go on," the director had said. He was a drama professor from some unknown university and he was full of platitudes. While the pros groaned, the college students cheered . . . and the show went on.
    From somewhere in East Hicksburg, Bob Hantover came to take the part of Claudius. I had to admit that he wasn't half bad, better, in fact, than most of the pimply-faced students.

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