Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad

Setting

Fictional town of Burnstow, East Coast of England, 1900s

Main Characters

Parkins: A young professor at Cambridge University, on a golfing holiday in Burnstow.

Summary

Parkins, readying for his holiday in Burnstow, has secured a room at The Globe Inn, though he is somewhat uncomfortable that the room has two beds. Before leaving, his colleague asks him to investigate the grounds of a ruined building with a view to its suitability for an archaeological dig.

On his first day at Burnstow, Parkins examines the site. He finds a hole in the masonry, containing a bronze whistle. As he returns to the inn along a desolate beach, he notes that “the shape of a rather indistinct personage” in the distance appears to be following him.

After dinner Parkins inspects the whistle in his room. He removes the soil from the whistle onto a sheet of paper and empties it out of the window, where he sees a figure “stationed on the shore, facing the inn”. Looking closely, he discovers an inscription on the whistle - “QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT”, which Parkins translates from Latin as “Who is this who is coming?” Upon blowing the whistle, there is a sudden rush of wind outside his window.

Unable to sleep that night, Parkins has visions of a man desperately running down the beach, anxiously looking back. The man collapses and Parkins sees “a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined”, moving with incredible speed towards him. Parkins reads himself to sleep. When he lights a candle he hears scurrying on his floor, like the sound of rats fleeing.

As Parkins prepares to leave the inn, the maid informs him that both beds in his room appeared slept in, the sheets on the other bed “crumpled and thrown about all ways”. He leaves to play golf with Colonel Wilson. When they return, they encounter a terrified boy running from the inn who says he has seen a strange, white figure waving at him from the window of Parkins’s room. They investigate and find the room locked, but the sheets on the unused bed twisted and contorted again.

That night, Parkins sees a figure sitting on the unused bed, making him jump from his bed to the window. As he does, the figure moves to the door, arms outspread, before it gropes blindly about the room, darting towards Parkins’s bed, and feeling about the pillow and sheets for his body. Realising he is no longer in bed, the apparition moves toward the window; Parkins sees “a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen”.

Parkins lets out a cry of disgust and the figure moves rapidly at him, its face “thrust close into his own”. Arriving just in time, Colonel Wilson kicks the door to Parkin’s room open. Before he reaches the window the apparition tumbles to the floor, a heap of bedsheets, while Parkins faints. The following day the hotel staff burn the linen from the room and the Colonel throws the whistle into the sea.