James Baquet

M. R. James was a Cambridge antiquarian who wrote over 30 ghost stories. In his 1904 story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” a professor named Parkins tells his colleagues where he’s going for holiday, and one of them asks: Would he visit the ruins of an old monastery there and see if it’s worth a more formal expedition?

Parkins agrees. Exploring the beach at sundown, he literally stumbles on the ruins, and finds a small metal tube which he takes back to his room. On the way, he thinks he sees a figure following him down the beach.

After dinner, Parkins returns to his room and examines the object he found. It’s a whistle, with two Latin inscriptions. One says, “Thief, [if] you shall blow, you shall weep.” The other says, “Who is this who is coming?”

Despite their ominous tone, he blows the whistle — twice. The second time, a wind blows open the window of his room, and he struggles to close it again.

Now, Parkins’ room had a spare bed. After his window was blown open, he fancies he hears a rustling sound coming from that bed. When at last he falls asleep, he dreams of being chased down the beach by a figure “in pale, fluttering draperies” that he never sees clearly.

In the morning, the maid tells him the extra bed in his room was slept in. Parkins can’t account for this.

After another day’s golf, Parkins and his new friend Colonel Wilson return to the hotel and a local boy tells them he saw a mysterious figure in white waving at him from the window of the professor’s room. The two men check it out, but find nothing amiss. When Parkins shows the Colonel the whistle, he says if it were his, he’d throw it into the sea.

That night, after he falls asleep, Parkins wakes to hear the rustling in the spare bed again. As he ponders what to do, something suddenly sits up in the bed! He leaps up, but the creature places itself between him and the door. It sniffs and feels his bed to see if he’s there — it seems to be blind — and he sees its face in the moonlight, “an intensely horrible face of crumpled linen!” It moves toward him, and he is halfway out the window backwards when the Colonel breaks in and the creature collapses in a pile of sheets. The next morning, the Colonel hurls the whistle into the sea, and the sheets are burned behind the hotel.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. a person who studies old things

2. out of place

3. a fine cloth

4. cry

5. imagines

6. a boy

7. threatening

8. extra

9. thinks about

10. throws hard