ALL HALLOWS EVE

An unpublished story From the Soul Doctor series.

                             

You wanted a story and I suppose, it being All Hallow’s Eve, I could give you one. It’s what most people call Hallowe’en.  The reason why I call it by the former and not the latter name will become plain as you listen.

It was a wild October night. The western sky was still bright with sun, but with a scatter of storm-blue clouds beginning to rapidly build and blot it from sight.  I had been coming home from the north, from speaking at a conference, following the long, tedious road south.  Realising I had bitten off more than I could chew, I had pulled over into a motorway service station an hour back and phoned my friend in Norfolk, to see if I might cadge an overnight stay with him: he was delighted at the prospect, which was why I had come this winding way through Lincolnshire.

It was already nearly dark when the car started to make pathetic spluttering noises, followed by a series of more abrupt and alarming shudders. It stopped suddenly, the radio, radiator. and lights cutting out, leaving me stranded.  With night closing fast upon me, I found myself on the bend of an unfrequented B road in a car without electricity on All Hallows’s Eve.  In those days, the mobile phone was a brick-sized object. I looked at mine, only to find that it had run out of juice, and so had no means of calling the breakdown services. There would probably have been no signal anyway in those days when radio masts were a feature of built-up regions only!