All Hallows' Eve
Authors: Charles Williams
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CHARLES WILLIAMS
“One of the most gifted and influential Christian writers England has produced this century.” â
Time
“[Williams has a] profound insight into Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of his novels.” âT. S. Eliot
“Reading Charles Williams is an unforgettable experience. It proves that one can write about the weird and fantastic in such a compelling manner as to appeal to any reader of modern novels.” â
The Saturday Review of Literature
“Charles Williams took the form of the thriller and used it to create an extraordinary genre that has sometimes been called âspiritual shockers.' His books are immensely worth reading, even if you consider yourself unspiritual and immune to shock.” âHumphrey Carpenter, author of
The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends
“With a powerful imagination fed by trinitarian and incarnational faith, Charles Williams used fiction to explore how people react when the supernatural enters their lives, and how then to find the path of peace. The fantasy novels that result make a riveting read.” âJ. I. Packer, theologian and author of
Knowing God
All Hallows' Eve
“The work of a gifted man and obviously the expression of devoutly held convictions ⦠No stranger novel has crossed my path in years.” â
The New York Times
“A story that makes a real word of supernatural ⦠A tale of horror surpassing even the works of the recognized masters.” â
Chicago Sunday Tribune
“A strange story ⦠poignant beauty such as prose fiction rarely achieves. The final impression is more as if the three books of the
Divine Comedy
had been compressed into one novel.” â
The New York Times Book Review
Many Dimensions
“A great English believer unites the seen with the unseen in a glory and a terror that are unforgettable.” â
New York Herald Tribune
“It is satire, romance, thriller, morality and glimpses of eternity all rolled into one.” â
The New York Times
All Hallows' Eve
A Novel
Charles Williams
CONTENTS
Chapter One
THE NEW LIFE
She was standing on Westminster Bridge. It was twilight, but the City was no longer dark. The street lamps along the Embankment were still dimmed, but in the buildings shutters and blinds and curtains had been removed or left undrawn, and the lights were coming out there like the first faint stars above. Those lights were the peace. It was true that formal peace was not yet in being; all that had happened was that fighting had ceased. The enemy, as enemy, no longer existed and one more crisis of agony was done. Labor, intelligence, patienceâmuch need for these; and much certainty of boredom and suffering and misery, but no longer the sick vigils and daily despair.
Lester Furnival stood and looked at the City while the twilight deepened. The devastated areas were hidden; much was to be done but could be. In the distance she could hear an occasional plane. Its sound gave her a greater sense of relief than the silence. It was precisely not dangerous; it promised a truer safety than all the squadrons of fighters and bombers had held. Something was ended and those remote engines told her so. The moon was not yet risen; the river was dark below. She put her hand on the parapet and looked at it; it should make no more bandages if she could help it. It was not a bad hand, though it was neither so clean nor so smooth as it had been years ago, before the war. It was twenty-five now and to her that seemed a great age. She went on looking at it for a long while, in the silence and the peace, until it occurred to her that the silence was very prolonged, except for that recurrent solitary plane. No one, all the time she had been standing there, had crossed the bridge; no voice, no step, no car had sounded in the deepening night.
She took her hand off the wall and turned. The bridge was as empty as the river; no vehicles or pedestrians here, no craft there. In all that City she might have been the only living thing. She had been so impressed by the sense of security and peace while she had been looking down at the river that only now did she begin to try and remember why she was there on the bridge. There was a confused sense in her mind that she was on her way somewhere; she was either going to or coming from her own flat. It might have been to meet Richard, though she had an idea that Richard, or someone with Richard, had told her not to come. But she could not think of anyone, except Richard, who was at all likely to do so, and anyhow she knew she had been determined to come. It was all mixed up with that crash which had put everything out of her head; and as she lifted her eyes, she saw beyond the Houses and the Abbey the cause of the crash, the plane lying half in the river and half on the Embankment. She looked at it with a sense of its importance to her, but she could not tell why it should seem so important. Her only immediate concern with it seemed to be that it might have blocked the direct road home to her flat, which lay beyond Millbank and was where Richard was or would be and her own chief affairs. She thought of it with pleasure; it was reasonably new and fresh, and they had been lucky to get it when Richard and she had been married yesterday. At leastâyesterday? well, not yesterday but not very much longer than yesterday, only the other day. It had been the other day. The word for a moment worried her; it had been indeed another, a separate, day. She felt as if she had almost lost her memory of it, yet she knew she had not. She had been married and to Richard.
The plane, in the thickening darkness, was now but a thicker darkness, and distinguishable only because her eyes were still fixed on it. If she moved she would lose it. If she lost it, she would be left in the midst of thisâthis
lull
. She knew the sudden London lulls well enough, but this lull was lasting absurdly long. All the lulls she had ever known were not as deep as this, in which there seemed no movement at all, if the gentle agitation of the now visible stars were less than movement, or the steady flow of the river beneath her; she had at least seen that flowingâor had she? was that also still? She was alone with this night in the Cityâa night of peace and lights and stars, and of bridges and streets she knew, but all in a silence she did not know, so that if she yielded to the silence she would not know those other things, and the whole place would be different and dreadful.
She stood up from the parapet against which she had been leaning, and shook herself impatiently. “I'm moithering,” she said in a word she had picked up from a Red Cross companion, and took a step forward. If she could not get directly along Millbank, she must go round. Fortunately the City was at least partially lit now. The lights in the houses shone out and by them she could see more clearly than in the bad old days. Also she could see into them; and somewhere in her there was a small desire to see someoneâa woman reading, children playing, a man listening to the wireless; something of that humanity which must be near, but of which on that lonely bridge she could feel nothing. She turned her face towards Westminster and began to walk.
She had hardly taken a dozen steps when she stopped. In the first moment, she thought it was only the echo of her own steps that she heard, but immediately she knew it was not. Someone else, at last, was there; someone else was coming, and coming quickly. Her heart leaped and subsided; the sound at once delighted and frightened her. But she grew angry with this sort of dallying, this over-consciousness of sensation. It was more like Richard than herself. Richard could be aware of sensation so and yet take it in its stride; it was apt to distract her. She had admired him for it and still did; only now she was a little envious and irritated. She blamed Richard for her own incapacity. She had paused and before she could go on she knew the steps. They were his. Six months of marriage had not dulled the recognition; she knew the true time of it at once. It was Richard himself coming. She went quickly on.
In a few moments she saw him; her eyes as well as her ears recognized him. Her relief increased her anger. Why had he let her in for this inconvenience? had they arranged to meet? if so, why had he not been there? why had she been kept waiting? and what had she been doing while she had been kept? The lingering lack of memory drove her on and increased her irritation. He was coming. His fair bare head shone dark-gold under a farther street lamp; under the nearer they came face to face.
He stopped dead as he saw her and his face went white. Then he sprang towards her. She threw up her hand as if to keep him off. She said, with a coldness against her deeper will, but she could not help it, “Where have you been? what have you been doing? I've been waiting.”
He said, “How did you get out? what do you meanâwaiting?”
The question startled her. She stared at him. His own gaze was troubled and almost inimical; there was something in him which scared her more. She wondered if she were going to faint, for he seemed almost to float before her in the air and to be far away. She said, “What do
you
mean? Where are you going? Richard!”