Et Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Fiction, Drama, Science Fiction

4.9 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Et in Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams Lord Arglay, retired Chief Justice and seeker of forgotten knowledge, sets out for a quiet scholarly errand in the English countryside—only to find the landscape subtly warped, time grown strangely dense, and a chimney smoking where no fire burns. Drawn by a narrow path to a door that seems to wait for him alone, he enters a place where memory thickens, boundaries blur, and the air presses with the weight of something ancient and unyielding. Each step leads him deeper into a mystery that threatens not just understanding, but escape itself. First published in The London Mercury, December 1935.  Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a British novelist, poet, and critic associated with the Inklings. He wrote metaphysical thrillers—War in Heaven, Descent into Hell, All Hallows’ Eve—exploring theology, myth, and the supernatural. Join Our Podia Community for 100s of Ad Free Ghost Stories https://www.classicghost.com/ghost-stories-episodes/buy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, must be the new parent posse chat. We're not even new. Our kids are eight.
0:05.0	Or, as Eddie says, 96 months. He moved off grid. Can't confirm he's still on grid.
0:11.0	And he's got another one on the way. He won't have the coverage to live stream the birth, will he?
0:16.0	Well, here at Tesco Mobile, we've made sure he has 99% network coverage.
0:21.2	So he could if he wanted to.
0:22.6	Oh, sign me up.
0:24.0	It pays to be connected.
0:25.5	Tesco Mobile, every little helps.
0:27.5	Over 99% UK population coverage on 4G.
0:33.5	Everybody dies, don't they?
0:40.5	Everybody come back, isn't that sir?
0:44.4	You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?
0:47.5	How do the date come back, mother?
0:50.1	What's the secret?
0:51.2	At in Sempiterum Pereant, by Charles Williams.
0:57.0	Lord Argley came easily down the road.
1:01.0	About him, the spring was as gaudy as the restraint imposed by English geography ever lets it be.
1:08.0	The last village lay a couple of miles behind him, as far in front he had been
1:13.2	told was a main road, on which he could meet a motor-bus to carry him near his destination.
1:19.0	A casual conversation in the club had revealed to him some months before that in a country
1:24.0	house of England there was supposed to lie a few yet unpublished legal opinions of the Lord Chancellor Bacon.
1:31.3	Lord Arglay, being no longer Chief Justice, and having finished and published his history of organic law,
	...

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