Illustration: The laws of shadows

In May 1904 a young artist called James McBryde wrote excitedly to his great friend M.R. James. ‘I don’t think I have ever done anything I liked better than illustrating your stories. To begin with I sat down and learned advanced perspective and the laws of shadows…’

The illustration (right) is one of four that McBryde made for James’s first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and it depicts one of the most chilling moments in supernatural literature: the climax of Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. Professor Parkins, of Cambridge University, holidaying alone one blustery Christmas vacation beside the sea in Suffolk, is attacked by a bed sheet in his hotel room in the middle of the night.

McBryde captures perfectly the bleak atmosphere of the tale and the stark terror of its finale. Told in James’s dry, unhurried style Oh, Whistle… is, nonetheless, a story full of frantic movement — of stumbling and flapping, scurrying and darting, leaping and running — and the same sense of agitation is brilliantly conveyed in the picture. Those uncanny, wriggling shadows seem to zoom in on Parkins, trapping him in that shaft of moonlight. The bedsheets roll on, like a wave about to break over him. But the picture is more than an entirely apt complement to the tale. Without it James might never have published his stories in the first place.