Whistle and I’ll come to you by MR James. Part 3.
Watch on KineScope.
When Parkins returned to his room, he found the little metal pipe where he had put it on the table. He looked at it carefully and realized that it was a whistle. He tried to blow it but it was full of earth, so he took out his knife and cleared the earth out onto a piece of paper, which he then shook out of the window. As he stood at the open window, he was surprised to see someone standing on the grass in front of the hotel, although it was almost midnight.
He shut the window and took the whistle over to the light to look at it again. He cleaned the dirt off and found that there were letters deeply cut along the side of the whistle.
QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT
‘Now, that’s Latin,’ he said to himself. ‘I think it means, “Who is this who is coming?” Well, the best way to find out is clearly to whistle for him.’
He put the whistle to his lips and blew, then stopped suddenly, surprised and pleased at the sound he had made. It was a soft sound, but also seemed to travel a long way. And it brought a picture ‘into his mind — a picture of a wide, dark place at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the middle a lonely figure… But at that moment, a real wind made his window shake, and the picture disappeared. The wind was so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white shape of a seabird’s wing outside the window.
He was so interested in the sound the whistle had made that he blew it again, this time more loudly. No picture came into his mind, but a sudden and very violent wind blew his window open with a crash. Both candles went out, and the wind seemed to be trying to pull the room to pieces. For twenty seconds Parkins battled to close the window again, but it was like trying to push back a burglar who was fighting to get in. Then the wind suddenly dropped for a moment, and the window banged shut and fastened itself. Parkins lit the candles and looked to see what damage had been done. There was none — not even a broken window. But the noise had woken the Colonel in the room above; Parkins could hear him walking around and talking to himself.
The wind continued to blow for a long time, beating against the house and crying like a creature in pain. Lying in bed, listening, Parkins thought that a less sensible person might imagine all kinds of unpleasant things. In fact, after a quarter of an hour, he thought that even sensible people would prefer not to hear this sound.
He noticed that one of his neighbours was finding it difficult to sleep, too. He could quite clearly hear someone not far away, turning over in bed again and again.
Sometimes when we close our eyes and try to sleep, we see pictures that are so unpleasant that we have to open our eyes again to make them disappear. This is what now happened to the Professor. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the same picture. There was a long beach with breakwaters running down to the sea, under a dark sky. He recognized it as the beach he had walked along earlier. Then, in the distance, he saw a man running along the beach, climbing desperately over the breakwaters and looking back over his shoulder all the time. Parkins could not see his face, but he knew that the man was terribly afraid. He was also nearly exhausted. Each breakwater was harder to climb than the last. ‘Will he get over this next one?’ thought Parkins. ‘It seems higher than the others.’ Yes, half climbing, half throwing himself, the man got over, and then fell to the ground, unable to get up again.
The picture had not yet shown any cause for the man’s fear, but now a distant figure appeared, moving very quickly. It wore a long, flowing garment, and there was something so strange about the way it moved that Parkins was very unwilling to see it any closer. It stopped, lifted its arms, bent down towards the sand, then ran, still bent over, down to the edge of the sea and back again. Now it straightened itself, and moved forward along the beach at a frightening speed. At last, it came to the breakwater where the man lay hidden. Again it ran down to the sea and back again, then lifted its arms and ran towards the breakwater.
It was always at this moment that Parkins was not brave enough to keep his eyes closed any longer. At last, he decided to light his candle, get out a book, and read for a while. The noise of the match and the sudden light seemed to alarm something near his bed — a rat, probably-which ran away across the floor. The match immediately went out, but a second one burnt better and Parkins lit the candle and opened his book. When he finally felt sleepy, he forgot, for the first time in his tidy, sensible life, to blow out the candle, and the next morning it was completely burnt down.