Whistle and I’ll come to you by MR James. Part 5.
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That evening, Colonel Wilson was unusually quiet and thoughtful during dinner and cards and, as they were going up to their rooms, he said to Parkins:
‘You know where I am if you need me during the night.’
‘Thank you, Colonel, but I don’t expect to call on you,’ replied Parkins. ‘Oh, I have that whistle I told you about. Would you like to see it?’
The Colonel turned the whistle over in his hands, looking at it carefully.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asked.
‘I’ll show it to the people at Cambridge when I get back and probably give it to the museum, if it’s any good.’
‘If it were mine,’ said the Colonel, ‘I’d throw it into the sea right now. But, of course, you and I don’t think the same way about these things. Good night.’
And he went off to his room.
There were no curtains at the windows in the Professor’s room. The previous night it had not mattered, but tonight there was a bright moon in a cloudless sky. Parkins was afraid that the moonlight might wake him up in the middle of the night, so he arranged a blanket, held up with a stick and his umbrella, which would stop the moonlight shining on to his bed. Soon he was comfortably in bed where he read a book for a while. Then he blew out his candle and went to sleep.
An hour or so later he was suddenly woken by a loud crash. In a moment, he realized that the blanket had fallen down and a bright moon was shining on his bed. Should he get up and put the blanket up again, or could he manage to sleep if he did not? He lay in bed for several minutes trying to decide what to do.
All at once, he turned over in bed, eyes wide open, listening hard. There had been a movement in the other bed! Was it a rat? The sound came again, something moving in the blankets and making the bed shake. No rat could make a noise like that, surely!
Suddenly his heart nearly stopped beating as a figure sat up in the empty bed. Parkins jumped out of his own bed and ran towards the window to get his stick. As he did so, the thing in the other bed slid to the floor and stood, with arms stretched out, between Parkins and the door.
Parkins stared at the creature in horror. He could not reach the door without touching it as he passed, and the thought of that touch made him feel sick.
Now it began to move, bending low and feeling its way with arms that were hidden in its flowing garment. Parkins realized with horror that it could not see. It turned away from him and, in doing so, touched the bed he had just left. It bent its head low and felt all over the bed in a way that made Parkins tremble with fear.
Realizing that the bed was empty, the creature moved forward into the moonlight, which shone in through the window. For the first time Parkins saw it clearly, but the only thing he could remember later was a horrible, a sickeningly horrible, face of crumpled cloth. The expression on that face he could not or would not describe, but it certainly drove him nearly mad with fear.
But he had no time to watch it for long. With frightening speed, the creature moved around the room, searching and feeling, and a corner of its flowing garment brushed across Parkins’ face. He screamed in horror, and at once, it jumped at him, driving him towards the window. The next moment Parkins was halfway through the window backwards, screaming again and again at the top of his voice, and the cloth face was pushed close into his own.
In that final second, the Colonel kicked the door open and was just in time to see the frightening sight at the window. When he reached the figures, only one was left. Parkins fell forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a crumpled bed sheet.
The Colonel asked no questions, but kept everyone out of the room, helped Parkins back to bed and, with a blanket round his shoulders, spent the rest of the night in the other bed.
The next morning Mr Rogers arrived and, to his surprise, was very warmly welcomed by the Professor. The three men discussed what to do for a long time. The Colonel, who remembered a similar experience in India, supposed that the creature, having no body of its own, had to make one out of the sheet from the bed. At the end of their talk, the Colonel left the hotel carrying between his finger and thumb a small piece of metal, which he threw into the sea as far as a strong arm could send it. Later, he burnt the sheet in the field behind the Globe.
As you can imagine, Professor Parkins’ opinions on some matters are now less certain than they used to be. He is also a more nervous person than he was. Even a coat hanging up on a door will alarm him, and the sight of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has given him more than one sleepless night.
THE END
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