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The Witnesses – Thomas Hennell

When I left this house it was to reach Bishop Raven’s grave, where a just man should be ready to light this candle.  My assurance about this thing was confirmed, and it seemed that I must meet certain men on the way; perhaps because they were rivals after some sort, but also because of their names, which rhymed with the event.

But my way proved very perplexing, though in this long evening it was by no means too late to distinguish a westerly direction for several miles.  All the street names were queer and goblinish; they seemed to have meanings which would start me off on false trails, in wrong directions.  So, I lost time, and when I asked the way it seemed that the streets and houses had been rearranged, or were shrunk to tiny imitation affairs.

Their brickwork was excessively, dangerously red, and they vanished away to almost nothing, in exaggerated perspectives.  Some gigantic cynic had leered on the town; and its aspect was shockingly struck awry.

Yet at last I was on the Great West Road, and leaving behind me the distant thumpings of Paddington station……………

The daylight had now departed.  A new factory, built of ferro concrete, glowed as though it were red hot.  The huge letters upon hoardings and the dazzling red lights on this building suddenly seemed to be imitated by the sprawling constellations overhead.  There was no translatable meaning, no understanding of this thing, yet the illusion of a primitive revelation, in the alphabet, was as vivid as an enlargement of perception.

So after I had continued for a few miles, the lights by the way seemed more meaningful; and then I came to a garage, or petrol station, whose crude signs seemed not to be unconsidered or carelessly vulgar, but quite intentionally insulting, as though they would wipe me across the face with their horrible red rags.  Several very ugly looking loafers were standing by a lorry, and to my astonishment they spoke to me in a jeering tone………..

But none of them touched me, and I hurried on, full of loathing.  They were not of a species to attack, nor yet could I shame them.  Presently they seemed less to have been real people than horrible counterfeits set there by the Spirit Sarcastic, to mock me and turn me out of my way.  Such signs of the powers of evil grew still more and more evident.