Whistling Jack ( VILLAGE TALES EP. 20 )

A disused path leads the storyteller to where a dog he walks looks fixedly, but nothing appears unusual. 

The dog is right and the storyteller regrets his wandering into something terrifying. 

On the brink of being lost he is drawn back by a familiar sound.

An animal’s senses of hearing and smell are phenomenal, what other finely tuned senses they possess we can only guess at. If you’ve ever had a pet, particularly a dog, you can get a feeling they are sensitive to things about which we have little or no knowledge.What I have found disconcerting is how a dog will sometimes look fixedly at something which they can apparently see, but we cannot. 

I no longer have a pet, my dog died some years ago, but as a favour I take Paul’s dog ‘Lola’ out for a walk. Paul has the village shop and gossip exchange, his description not mine. He seldom has the time to take Lola out for a good run so if I’m in the mood for a walk up onto the common and the woods beyond, I call in and see if Lola wants to accompany me.

Lola is a rescue dog and got her name from the boat she was found hiding in. She’s a Collie cross, predominantly black, with a white blaze and four white paws. She has the intelligence and energy of a Collie with the same desire to please. 

At the same point in our walk Lola would pause by the intersection of two footpaths. The one we were on, and another that crossed it almost at right angles that was hardly used, if at all. It possessed all the characteristics of a path with tall straight trees either sides, but lacked the trodden thread at its centre. I would turn to see Lola had stopped and was looking steadfastly down the overgrown path that we had passed to our right, if in fact a path was what it was or ever had been. She would hardly notice my return as I stood by her side and looked in the same direction trying to understand what it was that fascinated her. She would eventually look up wondering why it was I couldn’t see what she obviously could. 

Late one afternoon I was walking the same route on my own when I too stopped at the intersection and watched for a few minutes to see what, on many occasions, had caught Lola’s attention. There was nothing other than the narrow avenue of trees surrounding the mess of vegetation you would expect to have grown up where the light gets in, and people don’t. 

Having nothing better to do I took a few steps down where I thought a path might be. One can be drawn into these things happily but I remember feeling some reluctance, a foreboding, but dismissed it thinking it was merely due to me leaving the path I knew well and wandering into the unknown. Beneath my feet I could feel the firmness of what was once a path and when I moved to the side the lushness of the grass and foliage indicated I had deviated from it. After a while the path dropped into a narrow glade which, had it been summer, I could imagine being a very pleasant spot. As it was there was a misty dampness and a cold which suddenly gripped. It felt not unlike the occasions when you have sat too long in an unheated room, it surprises you that you could have got so cold without knowing it. I had already fastened my jacket and wrapped my scarf around me, but the cold was in me. Perhaps a chill breeze becomes concentrated into the glade by the trees which tower above on all sides. While I was trying to convincing myself of that theory, I was suddenly aware of the dreadful silence of the place. I’m not a person easily disturbed and I generally hold to reason but it was the deathly stillness which accompanied the silence that I found deeply disturbing. Without any real evidence I had the conviction I had wandered into somewhere I really wasn’t welcome. 

There comes a tipping point when we fear something is happening we can’t explain or excuse and it triggers our fight or flight instincts and if all we have is a feeling and nothing to fight, there is only one option. 

I traced what I thought was the path in front of me to where it became lost in the darkness of where the surrounding trees closed in again. It was deeply malevolent at the same time as it began drawing me toward it. Without thinking I began moving forward to what I can only describe as an inhabited darkness. As I moved closer I caught the sound of whistling from within. It was a tuneless whistle like some old men do. There is no melody to it and no rhythm. I tried to make sense of it and grasp the tune, as I might also grasp some reality, thinking that might help me understand that it was just a workman far off and the whistling was being carried to me on the breeze. I turned to look for the path that had brought me, but there seemed only to be the one, the one ahead. On all sides the trees had crowded in and crowded out the light. If there was another path it had become lost amongst so many dark arches all urging me towards the whistling within that had becoming a siren’s call, seductive, irresistible.

I had all but given up any resistance and taken a few steps in the direction of the darkness thinking there was nothing to fear, what possible harm could there be, when I sensed a distant rasping sound, so unlike the harmonious melody that the tuneless whistling had become. If only by its contrast did it grab what presence of mind I still possessed and like the drowning man might grasp at a straw I tried to hold on to it. I felt the urgency of the call again, and yet again. I pulled myself away and turned to where it thought it came from. There was something about the sound that was comforting, familiar, something I recognised. A step in its direction and the call grew stronger, drawing me away like a beacon. A few more steps and the trees around me began to lift away and what light there was left in the sky above made all about me appear green again. The more steps I took the more I began to recognise the call that had drawn me out of the glade until I knew what it was, it was the barking of a dog. Rising up out of the glade and looking down the overgrown path into the distance I could see Lola, standing with Paul by her side, looking fixedly towards me from the junction which I had left some time before, where she would always stand and see plainly what I couldn’t.

All Paul would tell me was that what I had heard was what, or who, some of the villagers refer to as ‘Whistling Jack’. Who he was and why is his dark presence still persists is another story, but not one I can yet tell, and perhaps one I should avoid.

Listen to Village Tales and other short stories from the HONKEYMOON CAFE

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Written and read by Barkley Johnson.