For me, as no doubt for many readers, this story is inextricably tangled up with memories of the 1968 TV adaptation, in which Michael Hordern manages to pivot so skilfully from high-handed, bumbling professor to terrorised victim of the spectre he’s unwittingly summoned.
Professor Parkins sets off from Cambridge for a working holiday at the coastal town of Burnstow. Walking on the beach near a ruin that his colleague has asked him to inspect, he finds an old whistle, then begins to make his way back to his lodgings:
He quickly rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand […] One last look behind, to measure the distance he had made since leaving the ruined Templars’ church, showed him a prospect of company on his walk, in the shape of a rather indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any progress.
It’s hard to know which is spookier: the “indistinct personage” on the lonely beach, or what later transpires in Parkins’s twin-bedded room…. The fact that the links between the ruins, the whistle, and the personage are themselves indistinct compounds the unease. What I find especially powerful are the elements that escape the story’s boundaries: living on the coast, I know that uncanny sense of believing there’s someone walking behind me on the beach at dusk; and I’ve never felt completely comfortable sleeping in a room where there’s an empty bed. Tucked away in the back of my copy of Darryl Jones’s excellent annotated edition, I found a cutting from the Guardian with some comments from Sarah Perry that resonate with me:
The conventions of ghost stories (the bespectacled don by the fireside! The anxious governess!) don’t seem to me cliched, any more than the presence of a detective in a crime novel is cliched. […] Their familiarity is a comfort, which of course makes the chill they deliver even colder.
First published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Jones, 1904. Collected in Collected Ghost Stories, ed. Darryl Jones, Oxford, 2011. Available online here
