All Hallows Eve
To Lester Furnival, standing on Westminster Bridge at twilight, the lights of the city and the drone of a friendly plane overhead were symbols of the peace, a return to the natural order of life. Lester slowly became conscious, however, of a silence that was unnatural. Lester realized that she was dead.
A vital and passionate young woman killed in a plane crash, she first found herself alone in the city with Evelyn, the friend who was killed with her. She realized that theirs was never a true friendship. As the two dead women tried to establish a genuine relationship in the afterlife, they became involved in the affairs of the living. Lester’s husband Richard had an artist friend, Jonathan, who was in
love with Betty, a school friend whom Lester and Evelyn had never liked. Betty was completely dominated by her mother, Lady Wallingford, who was a disciple of a mysterious faith healer who called himself Simon the Clerk.
Lady Wallingford and Betty called to see a portrait of Father Simon commissioned from Jonathan. Jonathan, a Christian, had without realizing it revealed in the portrait the essence of evil, which Simon represented. Lady Wallingford, infuriated, called off Betty’s engagement to Jonathan and took Betty away. Jonathan called on Richard for help. The conflict between mother and lover for possession of Betty became the conflict between the God of love and the power of darkness for the human soul.
Surrounded by a band of zealous converts, preaching to a mesmerized audience in his shabby backstreet headquarters, Simon was the reembodiment of Simon the Magus, of the Jew who rejected Christ. Simon was, in fact, the Antichrist. Exploiting the devotion of Lady Wallingford, he conceived Betty to be his agent and feared that his power over his daughter was threatened by her love for Jonathan. Simon decided that the time had come for the final magical operation that would separate her human soul from her
body and substitute his will in its place. He was thwarted by love in action. At each crisis, he made a mistake, because his
magic powers could not perceive what love can do. When Simon went to Betty’s bedroom to perform the final operation of magic, Lester was there, having gone to ask Betty’s forgiveness for rejecting her friendship. Betty’s forgiveness of Lester released Lester’s spirit; Lester’s love sustained Betty and became Betty’s substitute to receive Simon’s magic. Lester was already dead, so Simon’s magic had no effect on her, and Betty was released from his spell to rebel against her mother and rejoin Jonathan. The defeated Simon then turned his attention to the wretched soul of Evelyn, who had sought his aid to regain her power of persecuting Betty. Lester tried to rescue Evelyn, as she had rescued Betty, by joining her within Evelyn’s miserably deformed physical body, which Simon created for her with his magic powers. Simon attempted to control Evelyn’s body and use it to trap Betty, Jonathan, and Richard. Lester, however, exercised a greater control through the power of love and warned them in time for them to expose Simon and bring his work and his house to ruins.
The climax of the action took place on a gray, rainy Halloween, All Hallows
eve, when the deformed body, containing the souls of Lester and Evelyn, moved through the streets of London and kept a rendezvous at Jonathan’s flat. The engaged couple had invited the bereaved Richard to join them for dinner. When Lester wanted to warn Richard of the approach of the magical body, she thought of the telephone. Having begged two pennies from a passerby, she went into a telephone booth opposite the Charing Cross underground station. When Richard came to the phone, he heard Lester’s voice as clearly as he had seen her form several times in the last few days. She gave him the message that they had to wait at the flat until the old woman came. Instead of going out to dinner, they spread a meal of bread, cheese, cold cuts, and wine, and thus prepared themselves for the crisis of All Hallows Eve. After meeting, the three living friends took the deformed body with them in a taxi through the rainy midnight streets of London to the darkened house where Simon and Lady Wallingford were stalled in their last desperate act of magic. Love triumphed over evil; Lester disappeared in a blaze of white light.
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