Whistler
Charlie whistled. Incessantly.
Charlie had whistled ever since, at the age of five or six, his father had taught him the secret. His was a sunny disposition which no misfortune could ever darken; in him there were no hidden shadows, no bitter memories, no nooks and crannies where sorrow could take residence and grow. He was shallow, but he was happy. And he whistled.
His unremitting cheerfulness had won him many friends: everybody loved Charlie, although most people could only take him in small doses. The only person, apart from his parents, who had ever endured more than a day or two of his company - his former wife - had finally exploded one morning and in the grip of a menstrual rage had bellowed at him "Why the fuck can’t you be miserable like everyone else?" before hurling a particularly hideous vase at him (Charlie had bought it as an anniversary present for her the previous year - he had the aesthetic sensibilities of a flatworm) and stomping out, never to return. The vase had missed and shattered against a wall. Charlie had whistled as he swept up the debris.
Charlie’s mouth music carried him through life. Occasionally he would render any popular song which was sufficiently catchy for it to have registered on his consciousness, but most of the time he simply trilled like a demented budgerigar. Indeed, his whistling had become such a constant part of his life that he was largely unaware of it. Until one morning ...
***
He had taken his usual route to work (he was employed as a delivery driver, a job which gave him much satisfaction and which kept him away from his work-place for most of every day, thus helping to keep his workmates happy), a route which involved using a pedestrian underpass to avoid crossing a busy and rather dangerous main thoroughfare. As was his custom he took advantage of the acoustics in the underpass to attempt a rather more complex melody than would normally be the case, happily savouring the extra resonance which the echo imparted to his whistling.
He’d made his way jauntily down half of the passage before the need to concentrate on side-stepping a large pile of dog-shit caused him temporarily to fall silent. To his surprise the echo did not die immediately but carried on for several seconds. Indeed it seemed to him that it continued the melody from the point at which he’d broken off, although the song itself - some mindless ditty sung by half a dozen pretty but otherwise meagrely-talented girls - was so repetitious that it wasn’t easy to tell. Startled, he whistled a little more of the song and then fell silent again. The echo died with him this time, and he shrugged off the previous delay as some kind of aberration and continued on his way.
He had a busy day. The food warehouse for which he worked was the largest grocery wholesaler in the area and consequently he had little time for thought, a situation which suited him fine. A day of constant motion, filled with trivial human contact, was the sort of day which fuelled Charlie’s cheeriness, and by the time he’d begun his walk back home from the warehouse his whistling was audible for dozens of yards in every direction.
His journey through the underpass was without troubling incident this time, although he noticed that the echo of his footsteps seemed a little delayed, almost as though someone was following him. "Imagination!" he thought, although it would’ve been difficult to find anyone who knew him who would be prepared to grant him much more in the way of imagination than that exhibited by the average corpse.
***
Charlie’s evening passed as most of Charlie’s evenings did: phone calls to friends (his friends generally welcomed his calls with rather more enthusiasm than they welcomed his visits: after all he couldn’t whistle and talk at the same time), a game of chess with one of the other lodgers in the guest-house (he was a lousy chess-player, but bore every defeat - even against his landlady’s eight year-old nephew - with his usual unfailing good humour), a late supper of cheese and crackers and, finally, bed.
It was as he was performing his nightly ablutions in the communal bathroom, whistling happily to himself as he did so, that he noticed the return of the underpass phenomenon. He’d stopped whistling to brush his teeth and the echo continued for what had to be at least a minute afterwards. In fact it wasn’t an echo! Charlie had been whistling a formless, rambling sequence of notes but the echo had responded with a snatch of ‘Good Day Sunshine’, Charlie’s favourite Beatles song.
He strained his ears for a repetition, but the bathroom - indeed the entire house - seemed almost eerily silent. He shuddered, hurriedly brushed his teeth, and retreated as rapidly as he could to his room and the security of his bed. For once he didn’t whistle as he climbed into his striped pyjamas, and sleep did not, as usual, claim him instantly. Instead he found himself listening intently, and it took a conscious effort to relax enough to sink into oblivion.
***
By the following morning Charlie’s good humour had returned. He had no real explanation for what had occurred the previous night but he was not by nature a brooder and the sun was shining and he felt good.
Charlie broke into a whistle as he applied marmalade generously to his buttered toast, poured himself a nice strong cup of tea and settled down at the table. He bit into the toast and ...
From out of nowhere ‘Good Day Sunshine’ returned, and this time it didn’t stop. Stunned, Charlie listened, his toast still held to his mouth by a suddenly limp hand as the whole song, complete with choruses and middle eight, filled the room. When it had finally ceased Charlie felt himself torn between the urge to ransack the room in search of the hidden whistler (although he knew that there couldn’t possibly be anyone in there with him) and the urge to get out into the sane world as soon as possible.
The latter urge was the one which prevailed in the end, and in consequence he found himself at work a good half hour earlier than usual, despite having been delayed by opting to cross the main road rather than using the underpass. He hadn’t whistled once during the whole journey.
The day which followed was a nightmare. Every time Charlie recovered enough of his buoyancy to begin whistling, the mysterious whistler responded with ‘Good Day Sunshine’: sometimes just a brief excerpt, sometimes the whole thing, but always the same song. By midday Charlie had, for the first time in his life, begun to feel bad-tempered - he’d even snapped at an especially dense and officious supermarket security guard who’d insisted on scrutinising every last piece of paperwork connected with the delivery, asking endless idiotic questions before he could be convinced that Charlie was not a terrorist bent on bringing an explosive end to the grocery trade.
By four o’clock he’d had enough and he abandoned the attempt to complete his round, growling "not feeling well" at the warehouse supervisor as he handed in his keys, an excuse that was readily believed since the man had never before seen Charlie exhibit anything other than light-heartedness and an almost cloying bonhomie.
***
Charlie spent that evening in a state that - had he ever experienced it before - he would have recognised as depression. He’d - illogically he knew, since the whistling followed him around - searched his room repeatedly for concealed tape recorders and had to restrain himself from phoning a friend of his known to be a practical joker to accuse him of perpetrating an exceptionally unpleasant prank.
In fact he couldn’t bear the thought of phoning anyone at all, couldn’t bear the thought of chess, couldn’t bear anything. Despite his misery he more than once found himself pursing his lips to whistle and each time desisted with a shudder.
The night dragged on into an eternity in which he sat listlessly staring into space waiting for enough fatigue to accumulate to allow him to sleep. When at last, towards dawn, he fell asleep in the chair in which he was sitting he had uneasy, fragmentary dreams in which he was pursued down a tunnel by an unseen whistling train.
***
When he woke it was light outside and he could hear bird-song and the sound of children playing. It was so normal that for a moment he couldn’t recall the cause of the previous day’s agitation. But then, so low that it was only just audible, he heard someone whistling ‘Good Day Sunshine’.
As his attention was drawn towards it the shrill noise gradually grew in volume - sourceless, directionless - until it was loud enough to be distinct without drowning out any of the sounds which were coming from outside. Despair engulfed him.
As an experiment he once more tried whistling himself - reasoning that if his own whistling had started it up it might put a stop to it - but no matter how often he started and stopped the constant irritating melody persisted in haunting him. For a while he even found a brief pleasure in harmonising with the unseen minstrel, but this quickly palled and was replaced once more by depression.
He phoned in sick - the first time in more than twenty years of continuous employment - and made an appointment to see his doctor.
***
The wait for the afternoon appointment had been almost more than Charlie could bear. That damned song had pursued him everywhere: down to the local shopping precinct while he picked up his newspaper, all the way to the small park where it was his custom to feed the ducks on scraps of stale bread, and then all the way home again.
Back in his room he’d become so desperate that he’d buried his head in pillows but it was no good - although the whistling seemed to come from some indeterminate source outside him its volume was in no way lessened either by the pillows, or the plugs of cotton wool he inserted in his ears, or indeed by a combination of both.
By the time he reached the doctor’s surgery he was in a state of profound and very visible agitation, so much so in fact that the doctor had to force him through several minutes of deep breathing before he was sufficiently composed to speak.
"Now then," he said in the traditional opening gambit of all doctors, "what seems to be the trouble?"
"There’s a whistle after me!", replied Charlie.
"Eh?"
It took several minutes for the doctor to assemble something like a coherent statement from Charlie, and when he’d finally arrived at the point he found himself not much the wiser.
"Well, it could be tinnitus," he said, "or an auditory hallucination caused by a problem in the brain itself."
Charlie looked alarmed.
"Not to worry," said the doctor breezily, attempting to convey more confidence than he actually felt, "I’ll write you out a prescription for something to settle your nerves and something to help you to sleep, and we’ll get you to the hospital for a check-up."
"But ..." began Charlie but by the operation of some magical procedure known only to doctors he found himself outside the surgery clutching a prescription and a letter to the hospital without having had the chance to complete his sentence.
"Oh well," he thought, "there’s no help for it then. Better get to the hospital."
He sighed at the thought of the rest of a beautiful sunny afternoon being wasted on the proddings and pokings of the medical profession, but there really wasn’t any alternative, was there?
***
In fact it had been far worse than he’d imagined. After a nurse, and then a doctor, had listened to his story, they’d minutely examined his ears and then made a further appointment for a scan the following day. They’d all been polite enough but Charlie had the impression that no-one was really listening to him, and by the time it was all over he’d been close to tears.
In the meanwhile that song had continued to plague him mercilessly, whistled by the unseen assailant who, Charlie had realised to his chagrin, was far more talented than he could ever be. The more often he repeated it the more embellishments and refinements he added to it, until it had become almost symphonic in its structure. Whoever the bastard was, Charlie hated him, and he had never hated anyone in his entire life before.
***
The week of waiting for the results to filter back from the hospital to his doctor had proved to be almost unendurable - although the tranquillisers and sleeping pills had helped a little, as had Charlie’s decision to demolish his entire collection of Beatles records with a hammer (with the exception of ‘Revolver’, which he melted in a frying pan. The pan was ruined, of course, but the satisfaction had been unbelievable; thank goodness he’d never bought himself a CD player - vinyl was so much easier to destroy).
When the day finally came he found himself almost eager to return to the surgery. Surely they’d found some nice, curable condition that would free him once and for all ...
"No," said the doctor, "nothing at all, I’m afraid."
"But there must be!" wailed Charlie.
"No. No damage to the ear-drums; no sign of a brain tumour. I think it might be an idea to make you an appointment to see a psychiatrist ..."
But by this time Charlie was no longer listening. He left the surgery in a state of dazed unbelief. On his way home he found himself in an off-licence and - practically unheard of for him - bought himself a bottle of scotch.
Just as he turned to leave the little, bird-like old lady behind the counter startled him by saying "Oh, I love that song!"
"What?"
"‘Good Day Sunshine’, isn’t it? You whistle very well, young man."
Charlie fled in terror.
***
It was late when Charlie finished the last of the scotch. He was - for the first time since his twenty-first birthday party - completely, utterly, invincibly pissed.
His head felt heavy and unwieldy and his tongue had turned into a squirming lizard which defeated his every attempt to form words: "Ishza basar,’" he said more than once of the unknown whistler, "gonna killim."
At last it got to be too much for him. The room had begun to rotate in a sedately but unnerving fashion around him and he felt sick.
"Gotta ge’out," he told himself, "geshum freshair."
He ricocheted like a pinball off the walls in the landing as he made his uncertain way down the stairs to the front door. His lurch down the path to the street was anything but graceful, and he’d used the front door to steady himself as he went through it, which meant that he’d pulled it shut behind him with a crash that must have woken up just about everyone in the street.
Once through the gate he allowed instinct to provide him with a direction for a progress which was too ungainly to be dignified with the word ‘walk’. He shambled and stumbled on in a bleary haze for an uncertain length of time until he came back to some of his senses with the realisation that he was entering the familiar underpass that led him to his workplace.
He stopped for a second.
"Wothehell," he said. He was far too drunk to be afraid.
The lighting in the underpass was feeble at the best of times, and the demise of most of the bulbs in a section about two thirds of the way down it meant that it was thick with shadows. He strode, or rather swayed, on obliviously until one of the shadows seemed to detach itself from the others and move into his path.
He halted and blinked, trying to clear his eyes.
"Wothehell," he said, and a flicker from one of the bulbs behind the shadow caused a shady tendril to drift from its centre and touch his lips.
He felt something cold and thin enter his mouth and uncoil down his throat. Of their own accord his lips pursed themselves and his lungs worked and he began to whistle. For the first time in more than a week, against his will, he began to whistle.
The all-too-familiar notes of ‘Good Day Sunshine’ began to assemble themselves in the air, and as he breathed out a mist seemed to accompany them, to issue from his lips and be absorbed by the shadow.
Faster and faster he whistled, almost too fast to draw breath, and the mist that flowed from his lips came thicker and thicker, and as it touched the shadow it seemed to glow within and take form. Arms and legs took shape, indistinct at first but growing firm and thick; then a vague impression of a torso clothed in a rumpled raincoat; and at last, as the air in Charlie’s lungs gave out and his heart burst, he saw his own face grinning back at him from the phantom head of the shadow.
***
Much later, in the chilly twilight of not-quite-dawn, a man passed the heap of rags carelessly dumped at the side of the underpass and, barely seeing them in the gloom, carried on his way to work. He whistled as he went, not even noticing the strange delayed echo that followed him down the tunnel.
Charlie had whistled ever since, at the age of five or six, his father had taught him the secret. His was a sunny disposition which no misfortune could ever darken; in him there were no hidden shadows, no bitter memories, no nooks and crannies where sorrow could take residence and grow. He was shallow, but he was happy. And he whistled.
His unremitting cheerfulness had won him many friends: everybody loved Charlie, although most people could only take him in small doses. The only person, apart from his parents, who had ever endured more than a day or two of his company - his former wife - had finally exploded one morning and in the grip of a menstrual rage had bellowed at him "Why the fuck can’t you be miserable like everyone else?" before hurling a particularly hideous vase at him (Charlie had bought it as an anniversary present for her the previous year - he had the aesthetic sensibilities of a flatworm) and stomping out, never to return. The vase had missed and shattered against a wall. Charlie had whistled as he swept up the debris.
Charlie’s mouth music carried him through life. Occasionally he would render any popular song which was sufficiently catchy for it to have registered on his consciousness, but most of the time he simply trilled like a demented budgerigar. Indeed, his whistling had become such a constant part of his life that he was largely unaware of it. Until one morning ...
***
He had taken his usual route to work (he was employed as a delivery driver, a job which gave him much satisfaction and which kept him away from his work-place for most of every day, thus helping to keep his workmates happy), a route which involved using a pedestrian underpass to avoid crossing a busy and rather dangerous main thoroughfare. As was his custom he took advantage of the acoustics in the underpass to attempt a rather more complex melody than would normally be the case, happily savouring the extra resonance which the echo imparted to his whistling.
He’d made his way jauntily down half of the passage before the need to concentrate on side-stepping a large pile of dog-shit caused him temporarily to fall silent. To his surprise the echo did not die immediately but carried on for several seconds. Indeed it seemed to him that it continued the melody from the point at which he’d broken off, although the song itself - some mindless ditty sung by half a dozen pretty but otherwise meagrely-talented girls - was so repetitious that it wasn’t easy to tell. Startled, he whistled a little more of the song and then fell silent again. The echo died with him this time, and he shrugged off the previous delay as some kind of aberration and continued on his way.
He had a busy day. The food warehouse for which he worked was the largest grocery wholesaler in the area and consequently he had little time for thought, a situation which suited him fine. A day of constant motion, filled with trivial human contact, was the sort of day which fuelled Charlie’s cheeriness, and by the time he’d begun his walk back home from the warehouse his whistling was audible for dozens of yards in every direction.
His journey through the underpass was without troubling incident this time, although he noticed that the echo of his footsteps seemed a little delayed, almost as though someone was following him. "Imagination!" he thought, although it would’ve been difficult to find anyone who knew him who would be prepared to grant him much more in the way of imagination than that exhibited by the average corpse.
***
Charlie’s evening passed as most of Charlie’s evenings did: phone calls to friends (his friends generally welcomed his calls with rather more enthusiasm than they welcomed his visits: after all he couldn’t whistle and talk at the same time), a game of chess with one of the other lodgers in the guest-house (he was a lousy chess-player, but bore every defeat - even against his landlady’s eight year-old nephew - with his usual unfailing good humour), a late supper of cheese and crackers and, finally, bed.
It was as he was performing his nightly ablutions in the communal bathroom, whistling happily to himself as he did so, that he noticed the return of the underpass phenomenon. He’d stopped whistling to brush his teeth and the echo continued for what had to be at least a minute afterwards. In fact it wasn’t an echo! Charlie had been whistling a formless, rambling sequence of notes but the echo had responded with a snatch of ‘Good Day Sunshine’, Charlie’s favourite Beatles song.
He strained his ears for a repetition, but the bathroom - indeed the entire house - seemed almost eerily silent. He shuddered, hurriedly brushed his teeth, and retreated as rapidly as he could to his room and the security of his bed. For once he didn’t whistle as he climbed into his striped pyjamas, and sleep did not, as usual, claim him instantly. Instead he found himself listening intently, and it took a conscious effort to relax enough to sink into oblivion.
***
By the following morning Charlie’s good humour had returned. He had no real explanation for what had occurred the previous night but he was not by nature a brooder and the sun was shining and he felt good.
Charlie broke into a whistle as he applied marmalade generously to his buttered toast, poured himself a nice strong cup of tea and settled down at the table. He bit into the toast and ...
From out of nowhere ‘Good Day Sunshine’ returned, and this time it didn’t stop. Stunned, Charlie listened, his toast still held to his mouth by a suddenly limp hand as the whole song, complete with choruses and middle eight, filled the room. When it had finally ceased Charlie felt himself torn between the urge to ransack the room in search of the hidden whistler (although he knew that there couldn’t possibly be anyone in there with him) and the urge to get out into the sane world as soon as possible.
The latter urge was the one which prevailed in the end, and in consequence he found himself at work a good half hour earlier than usual, despite having been delayed by opting to cross the main road rather than using the underpass. He hadn’t whistled once during the whole journey.
The day which followed was a nightmare. Every time Charlie recovered enough of his buoyancy to begin whistling, the mysterious whistler responded with ‘Good Day Sunshine’: sometimes just a brief excerpt, sometimes the whole thing, but always the same song. By midday Charlie had, for the first time in his life, begun to feel bad-tempered - he’d even snapped at an especially dense and officious supermarket security guard who’d insisted on scrutinising every last piece of paperwork connected with the delivery, asking endless idiotic questions before he could be convinced that Charlie was not a terrorist bent on bringing an explosive end to the grocery trade.
By four o’clock he’d had enough and he abandoned the attempt to complete his round, growling "not feeling well" at the warehouse supervisor as he handed in his keys, an excuse that was readily believed since the man had never before seen Charlie exhibit anything other than light-heartedness and an almost cloying bonhomie.
***
Charlie spent that evening in a state that - had he ever experienced it before - he would have recognised as depression. He’d - illogically he knew, since the whistling followed him around - searched his room repeatedly for concealed tape recorders and had to restrain himself from phoning a friend of his known to be a practical joker to accuse him of perpetrating an exceptionally unpleasant prank.
In fact he couldn’t bear the thought of phoning anyone at all, couldn’t bear the thought of chess, couldn’t bear anything. Despite his misery he more than once found himself pursing his lips to whistle and each time desisted with a shudder.
The night dragged on into an eternity in which he sat listlessly staring into space waiting for enough fatigue to accumulate to allow him to sleep. When at last, towards dawn, he fell asleep in the chair in which he was sitting he had uneasy, fragmentary dreams in which he was pursued down a tunnel by an unseen whistling train.
***
When he woke it was light outside and he could hear bird-song and the sound of children playing. It was so normal that for a moment he couldn’t recall the cause of the previous day’s agitation. But then, so low that it was only just audible, he heard someone whistling ‘Good Day Sunshine’.
As his attention was drawn towards it the shrill noise gradually grew in volume - sourceless, directionless - until it was loud enough to be distinct without drowning out any of the sounds which were coming from outside. Despair engulfed him.
As an experiment he once more tried whistling himself - reasoning that if his own whistling had started it up it might put a stop to it - but no matter how often he started and stopped the constant irritating melody persisted in haunting him. For a while he even found a brief pleasure in harmonising with the unseen minstrel, but this quickly palled and was replaced once more by depression.
He phoned in sick - the first time in more than twenty years of continuous employment - and made an appointment to see his doctor.
***
The wait for the afternoon appointment had been almost more than Charlie could bear. That damned song had pursued him everywhere: down to the local shopping precinct while he picked up his newspaper, all the way to the small park where it was his custom to feed the ducks on scraps of stale bread, and then all the way home again.
Back in his room he’d become so desperate that he’d buried his head in pillows but it was no good - although the whistling seemed to come from some indeterminate source outside him its volume was in no way lessened either by the pillows, or the plugs of cotton wool he inserted in his ears, or indeed by a combination of both.
By the time he reached the doctor’s surgery he was in a state of profound and very visible agitation, so much so in fact that the doctor had to force him through several minutes of deep breathing before he was sufficiently composed to speak.
"Now then," he said in the traditional opening gambit of all doctors, "what seems to be the trouble?"
"There’s a whistle after me!", replied Charlie.
"Eh?"
It took several minutes for the doctor to assemble something like a coherent statement from Charlie, and when he’d finally arrived at the point he found himself not much the wiser.
"Well, it could be tinnitus," he said, "or an auditory hallucination caused by a problem in the brain itself."
Charlie looked alarmed.
"Not to worry," said the doctor breezily, attempting to convey more confidence than he actually felt, "I’ll write you out a prescription for something to settle your nerves and something to help you to sleep, and we’ll get you to the hospital for a check-up."
"But ..." began Charlie but by the operation of some magical procedure known only to doctors he found himself outside the surgery clutching a prescription and a letter to the hospital without having had the chance to complete his sentence.
"Oh well," he thought, "there’s no help for it then. Better get to the hospital."
He sighed at the thought of the rest of a beautiful sunny afternoon being wasted on the proddings and pokings of the medical profession, but there really wasn’t any alternative, was there?
***
In fact it had been far worse than he’d imagined. After a nurse, and then a doctor, had listened to his story, they’d minutely examined his ears and then made a further appointment for a scan the following day. They’d all been polite enough but Charlie had the impression that no-one was really listening to him, and by the time it was all over he’d been close to tears.
In the meanwhile that song had continued to plague him mercilessly, whistled by the unseen assailant who, Charlie had realised to his chagrin, was far more talented than he could ever be. The more often he repeated it the more embellishments and refinements he added to it, until it had become almost symphonic in its structure. Whoever the bastard was, Charlie hated him, and he had never hated anyone in his entire life before.
***
The week of waiting for the results to filter back from the hospital to his doctor had proved to be almost unendurable - although the tranquillisers and sleeping pills had helped a little, as had Charlie’s decision to demolish his entire collection of Beatles records with a hammer (with the exception of ‘Revolver’, which he melted in a frying pan. The pan was ruined, of course, but the satisfaction had been unbelievable; thank goodness he’d never bought himself a CD player - vinyl was so much easier to destroy).
When the day finally came he found himself almost eager to return to the surgery. Surely they’d found some nice, curable condition that would free him once and for all ...
"No," said the doctor, "nothing at all, I’m afraid."
"But there must be!" wailed Charlie.
"No. No damage to the ear-drums; no sign of a brain tumour. I think it might be an idea to make you an appointment to see a psychiatrist ..."
But by this time Charlie was no longer listening. He left the surgery in a state of dazed unbelief. On his way home he found himself in an off-licence and - practically unheard of for him - bought himself a bottle of scotch.
Just as he turned to leave the little, bird-like old lady behind the counter startled him by saying "Oh, I love that song!"
"What?"
"‘Good Day Sunshine’, isn’t it? You whistle very well, young man."
Charlie fled in terror.
***
It was late when Charlie finished the last of the scotch. He was - for the first time since his twenty-first birthday party - completely, utterly, invincibly pissed.
His head felt heavy and unwieldy and his tongue had turned into a squirming lizard which defeated his every attempt to form words: "Ishza basar,’" he said more than once of the unknown whistler, "gonna killim."
At last it got to be too much for him. The room had begun to rotate in a sedately but unnerving fashion around him and he felt sick.
"Gotta ge’out," he told himself, "geshum freshair."
He ricocheted like a pinball off the walls in the landing as he made his uncertain way down the stairs to the front door. His lurch down the path to the street was anything but graceful, and he’d used the front door to steady himself as he went through it, which meant that he’d pulled it shut behind him with a crash that must have woken up just about everyone in the street.
Once through the gate he allowed instinct to provide him with a direction for a progress which was too ungainly to be dignified with the word ‘walk’. He shambled and stumbled on in a bleary haze for an uncertain length of time until he came back to some of his senses with the realisation that he was entering the familiar underpass that led him to his workplace.
He stopped for a second.
"Wothehell," he said. He was far too drunk to be afraid.
The lighting in the underpass was feeble at the best of times, and the demise of most of the bulbs in a section about two thirds of the way down it meant that it was thick with shadows. He strode, or rather swayed, on obliviously until one of the shadows seemed to detach itself from the others and move into his path.
He halted and blinked, trying to clear his eyes.
"Wothehell," he said, and a flicker from one of the bulbs behind the shadow caused a shady tendril to drift from its centre and touch his lips.
He felt something cold and thin enter his mouth and uncoil down his throat. Of their own accord his lips pursed themselves and his lungs worked and he began to whistle. For the first time in more than a week, against his will, he began to whistle.
The all-too-familiar notes of ‘Good Day Sunshine’ began to assemble themselves in the air, and as he breathed out a mist seemed to accompany them, to issue from his lips and be absorbed by the shadow.
Faster and faster he whistled, almost too fast to draw breath, and the mist that flowed from his lips came thicker and thicker, and as it touched the shadow it seemed to glow within and take form. Arms and legs took shape, indistinct at first but growing firm and thick; then a vague impression of a torso clothed in a rumpled raincoat; and at last, as the air in Charlie’s lungs gave out and his heart burst, he saw his own face grinning back at him from the phantom head of the shadow.
***
Much later, in the chilly twilight of not-quite-dawn, a man passed the heap of rags carelessly dumped at the side of the underpass and, barely seeing them in the gloom, carried on his way to work. He whistled as he went, not even noticing the strange delayed echo that followed him down the tunnel.
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