“All Hallow’s Eve” by Charles Williams

Seeing as it’s Halloween, I thought I’d discuss my favorite ghost story: “All Hallow’s Eve” by Charles Williams. A relatively unknown member of the famed group of writers and academics Inklings, featuring such luminaries of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, none other than T.S. Eliot was one of Williams’ biggest advocates, writing an introduction for each of Williams’ final three novels including “All Hallow’s Eve.”

Here is the novel’s opening paragraph, published in 1945 at the end of World War II:

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 starts 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 an enemy, no longer existed and one more crisis of agony was done. Labor, intelligence, patience — much 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 disappeared. The devastated areas were hidden; much as was to be done but could be. In the distance she would hear an occasional plane. Its sound gave her a grater sense of relief than the silence. 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, thought 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.

Halloween reminds us of many things and as writers, if we pay attention, we may uncover memories, feelings, sensations, and fears we can use in our stories. So as you traverse your Halloween evening, co-mingling with ghouls and goblins, be mindful of your own ghost stories, events and experiences that haunt you from your past.

Then at some point, go to the library and check out “All Hallow’s Eve.” It is an excellent story well told by an enormously talented writer.

Happy Halloween!

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