Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover M.R. James’ “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” first published in 1904 in James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Spoilers ahead!
Parkins, Professor of Ontography at Cambridge, has taken up golfing and will spend his winter holiday at the seaside village of Burnstow, improving his game. A serious-minded young man, he means to combine golf with study, and has reserved a room at the Globe Inn large enough to serve as both bedroom and office. He’s not well-pleased that there’s an unnecessary second bed in the room, however.
A colleague asks Parkins to check whether the nearby ruins of a Templar preceptory might repay a dig. Parkins agrees to inspect the site. He’s less inclined to accommodate Rogers, who proposes sharing the double-bedded room. When Rogers laughingly suggests he might “keep the ghosts off,” his reluctant roommate takes offense. Allowing such false beliefs “would be a renunciation of all that [he holds] most sacred.”
At the hotel Parkins meets Colonel Wilson, with whom he golfs the next day. He returns to the inn along the shingle beach, intent on finding the ruins. He succeeds, and near an altar-like mound uses his pocket knife to excavate a hole in ancient masonry. Within he finds a small cylindrical metal object, which he pockets.
He hurries homeward in the dusk. A belated beachgoer to his rear seems to be running without making much progress. Parkins doesn’t wait for him. In “his unenlightened days,” he read of uncanny meetings under such lonely circumstances. Luckily, his follower has no horns.
After dinner, Parkins examines his find. The bronze cylinder resembles a dog-whistle. He clears its interior of earth and notes two inscriptions on its sides: One’s a cryptic arrangement of four syllables: FLA-FUR-BIS-FLE. The other is QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT: Who is this who is coming. Parkins blows the whistle, which emits a soft note soft that seems to come from an “infinite distance.” A picture forms in his mind of a lone figure on a dark, windy expanse. Wind throws open the casement bay windows. A seabird’s white wing glints outside. His candles blow out; he must wrestle the windows closed in the dark.
The sudden windstorm keeps Parkins awake. Some nearby guest also tosses restlessly. Whenever he closes his eyes, Parkins envisions a man fleeing along a beach, pursued by a figure in pale draperies that moves with alarming swiftness, stooping as if to sniff out prey. It dashes at the groyne behind which the man crouches, and Parkins must open his eyes. Resigned to insomnia, he strikes a match. The glare makes something—rats perhaps—scurry from his bedside. He lights a candle and reads until sleep comes.
In the morning, the maid asks which bed she should put an extra blanket on—both beds were disordered before she remade them. Parkins supposes he disturbed the spare bed unpacking. While they’re golfing, Colonel Wilson mentions last night’s wind. In his hometown, people would say someone had whistled it up. Parkins warns he’s a strong disbeliever in the supernatural. He supposes fisherfolk believe in whistled-up winds out of ignorance. Wilson disagrees. There’s generally something to enduring folk beliefs. Hearing about Parkins’ excavated whistle, Wilson advises against using it—you never know what Papists might have been up to.
As they approach the inn, a boy in frantic flight runs into Wilson, then clings to him howling. A pale figure “wived” at him from Parkins’ window. He couldn’t see its face, but he knew it “warn’t a right thing.” Wilson accompanies Parkins to his room, where someone’s again rumpled the spare bed. The servants insist that they haven’t been there.
After dinner, Parkins shows Wilson the whistle. Parkins supposes he’ll give the artifact to a museum. Wilson would “chuck it straight into the sea.” That night Parkins rigs a screen to keep out the full moonlight. Its collapse wakes him. While he’s debating whether to re-rig the screen, the spare bed’s sheets rustle and shake, too violently for rodent production. Then a figure sits up in the bed.
Parkins bounds up. The figure blocks him, arms outspread, between the beds. Parkins doesn’t dare dash for the door—the idea of the thing touching him is intolerable. It gropes about as if blind, feeling over Parkins’ pillows. Then it moves into the light, revealing a horrible face made of crumpled linen. Its drapery sweeps Parkins’ face; he lurches backward, halfway out the window, screaming. Seconds before he either falls or goes mad, Wilson breaks in. The horror collapses. Parkins faints. On the floor before him lies a “tumbled heap of bedclothes.”
Wilson gets Parkins into bed and spends the night on guard. The next day Rogers arrives and consults with the pair. An explanation’s concocted to reassure the inn staff and guests. Then Wilson goes to the beach and throws something far out to sea. Later, behind the inn, something’s burned.
The whistle-summoned thing was apparently made of nothing more material than the bedclothes. Wilson thinks its only weapon was fear. The incident has confirmed his opinion of Papists, while Parkins’ views on the supernatural have changed. His nerves have suffered, too, so that clothing hung on a door can startle him, and a scarecrow in the winter dusk costs him sleepless nights.
What’s Cyclopean: Colonel Wilson develops “incarnadined features” in frustration at Parkins’ initial golf skills. James’ descriptions do not extend to sportsball terminology: “the golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper intervals”.
The Degenerate Dutch: The narrator describes Parkins as “an old woman—rather henlike” despite deserving respect for his sincerity. Colonel Wilson worries about using objects belonging to “Papists,” since “you never knew what they might not have been up to.”
Weirdbuilding: In horror, it’s more interesting when there are two beds.
Libronomicon: Rogers misquotes Dickens’ Dombey and Son. Parkins reads unspecified books, presumably not that one, while trying to overcome wind-induced insomnia.
The “minor poet” quoted in describing Colonel Wilson’s voice must be very minor, as all search results for “like some great bourdon in a minster tower” refer to this very story.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Fear of the bedsheet ghost goes “nigh to maddening” Parkins, but he is cleared of the suspicion of delirium tremens (i.e., alcohol withdrawal). He does retain a trauma reaction to hanging sheets and scarecrows.
Anne’s Commentary
I’ve read “Oh, Whistle” a dozen times, but this reread is the first time I stopped to wonder just what it is that Professor Parkins studies. James’ protagonists are often professors or scholars or at least enthusiastic amateurs in some esoteric subject, but ontography? Is that some specialized branch of geography? Did James scribble down photography or ornithology, a hen-scratching the printer misread? The author might have thought ontography sounded so much more esoteric that he never bothered to correct the error. Who, after all, was going to question James’ academic authority? We’re sitting around the crackling Yule log breathless for the horrors sure to follow his drily humorous opening. Parkins could have dedicated his life to researching the anal openings of dung beetles (or onts, as they’re technically called.) Fine, bring on the monsters.
Actually, James’ Christmas audiences at Cambridge might have interrupted him to ask what an ontographer was. Or maybe they got the joke and merely chortled in their cups of spirituous cheer. Once somebody laughs knowingly, only an Upper Class Twit would reveal their ignorance by asking what’s so funny.
Anyhow, at long last this week I looked up ontography. It is a Thing Humanity Is Not Meant to Understand, except perhaps for students of object-oriented philosophy. One such student is Graham Harman, who in “Ontography: The Rise of Objects” writes that he wanted to “add another term to the mix [of philosophical subdisciplines], in a half-joking spirit.” He and an unnamed “party guest” were discussing “Oh, Whistle” and trying to remember the academic specialty of its protagonist. Harman thought it was something in the natural sciences. Consulting the text, he discovered it was—ontography. Ontography, not ontology, which is a standard term in metaphysics for the study of being. That’s where being is defined as reality and all the entities within it. If ontology grapples with the theory of existence, then ontography should deal with its description, its writing or drawing down. Kind of like while geology is the study of the earth, geography makes the maps?
Harman continues:
“M. R. James meant it [ontography] as an absurd term, not as a compliment. But the same was true of ‘impressionist,’ ‘fauvist,’ ‘queer’… It’s often a good idea to pick up an insult and use it as the name for a school of discipline.”
On StackExchange, a writer named Chris supplies this resource for those who might want to dive into the treacherous conjunction between “ontography” and weird fiction:
“Ontography as a ‘working method’ is beautifully explained in Graham Harman’s book ‘Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.’ The context is Lovecraft’s writing, but the principles can be applied elsewhere.”
This is a book that’s going on my Amazon shopping list—available both on Kindle and in paper!
By calling Parkins a Professor of Ontography, James is indeed taking the piss on his hyperintellectual character—and doubtless on some real-life acquaintances. In “Oh, Whistle,” however, the made-up discipline is more than a joke. A Cambridge don of James’ day could have figured out the neologism by reducing it to its Greek components, ontos (being) and graphos (drawing or writing.) Ontography would then be the perfect subject for a fellow like Parkins, “strictly truthful,” matter-of-fact in a dry and humorless way, but still estimable for his sincere convictions. When Parkins tells Rogers that “a man in [his] position” can’t appear to sanction belief in ghosts, he means he’s a man for whom only things measurable and describable can be entities and belong to reality as a whole. Ghosts do not cut it for Parkins. In fact, to concede to the mere possibility of their existence would be “a renunciation of all that [he holds] most sacred.”
Don’t jest about ghosts around Parkins! Neither before nor after his golfing holiday in Burnstow, though for different reasons. He arrives contemptuous of folk wisdom—the “folk” are simply ignorant of natural laws governing weather. He’s particularly impervious to intimations of the supernatural, such as bedside lurkers that scuttle away from light and beds mysteriously disordered. In the childish days before he embraced reason, Parkins might have been scared by an indistinct person running after him without making any progress, but after all, this one has no devilish horns or wings. The Latin inscription on the whistle, Who is this who is coming, doesn’t give him pause. Me, I’d want to know who’s coming before I whistle. Then he attributes his terrible post-whistling visions—not dreams, for he’s sleepless—not to premonitions of danger but to “morbid reflections of his walk”.
You have to love a character so oblivious to supernatural peril that he dismisses the warning signs until it’s too late, after which he suffers the additional trauma of a worldview utterly shattered. Whatever his malign visitant was, ghost or demon or some other creature from beyond but not beyond enough, he must either include it in his ontography or give up ontography altogether.
He must also stay away from farms, because scarecrows at dusk are nuclear-level triggers.
Not that I’d personally know…
Ruthanna’s Commentary
We found it! The original bedsheet ghost! I’ll never look at a stereotyped Halloween costume the same way again. Bedsheet ghosts are, in fact, much creepier if you imagine that there’s no mortal underneath, just a laundry-inhabiting spirit with the power of scaring you into self-defenestration. We have nothing to fear but fear itself, but honestly I’ve never found that as reassuring as intended. Fear itself is pretty scary.
But why do the Knights Templar, in specific, have a magical whistle that summons a bedsheet ghost?
Presumably the answer, as Colonel Wilson suggests, has something to do with the centuries-old rivalry between Catholics and Protestants. Unfortunately I am precisely the wrong person to have useful insights here, being mostly aware that when Catholics and Protestants fight, they frequently take it out on the Jews, and when they don’t, they sometimes cooperate in same. So I can’t entirely tell whether James shares Wilson’s sentiments, or is making as much mockery of his prejudice as of academic ego. James was the son of an Anglican clergyman, as well as a medieval researcher who did his own share of excavations. His views, like his admirer Lovecraft’s, were generally reactionary; unlike Lovecraft he disliked agnostics (Aldous Huxley in particular) and presumably atheists as well. So regardless of his feelings on church knights, the firmly rational Parkins seems an unsurprising target for an unmistakable supernatural experience.
A protagonist with a tendency toward disbelief does have advantages. Characters prone to jumping at shadows don’t jump nearly so impressively when something more than shadow looms. A haunt has to be dramatic to break through the denial, and the drama of the revelation is increased when it requires a real change of worldview. King likewise leverages this contrast in Pet Sematary, where Louis has to cope with the possibility of life after death even while steeling himself for the practicalities of an undead pet. James doesn’t focus on that shift as directly as King or Lovecraft, but the opening dialogue suggests that Rogers as solo tenant would’ve experienced a different story.
That opening frame is interesting. I tend towards impatience with extra layers of framing—I’ve been heard to grumble a time or ten about why we’re hearing about the horror from someone who heard the story afterwards from someone who was friends with the guy who encountered the horror. But this frame is not only fun, but fits with James’ tendency to share his ghost stories with friends at Christmas. Under those circumstances the extra layer then adds realism and immediacy: James could plausibly have been in a faculty meeting with Parkins, and have heard about his vacation afterward. Parkins as narrator would be clearly fictional; James as narrator is telling a work story. He may snark about professorial ego, but he respects his colleague even if he doesn’t entirely like him. And he sympathizes with his terrifying experience.
Which brings us back to the bedsheet ghost, and that whistle. The whistle seems almost extraneous. It’s perfectly possible, after all, to get stuck with a ghostly roommate through no fault of your own. But it is—especially for academics—scarier that a casual expression of curiosity might result in such a thing. (Scarier for everyone but the hotel owner, who can with relief counter the negative Yelp review by arguing that the room isn’t normally haunted.) What the Templars might have done with the whistle is left as an exercise for the reader. Ruin the sleep of people they’re planning to fight the next day? Require self-inflicted penance for knights who don’t show proper bravery?
Or maybe they confiscated it from some blasphemous foe and kept it to prevent further use—take that, Colonel Wilson!
Next week, we wrap up Part I of Pet Sematary with Chapters 33-35.
