In a house at No. 472, Cheyne Walk, five men assemble for a delightful dinner. Jessop, Arkright, Taylor and Dodgson (the narrator) all come to hear their host, Carnacki, tell one of his supernatural adventures. No discussion takes place until after the meal is finished and all have retired to the drawing room. It may be the Black Veil Case, or the Grey Dog Business or the Incident of the Three Straw Platters (titles worthy of Sherlock Holmes.) Sometimes the spooks are real, as often, they are not.
The man who solves these mysteries then relates them to his friends is largely a mystery himself. Is he rich? Probably. Has he trained in secret abbeys? Maybe. We find out very little about the man himself, except that he had lived with his widowed mother in Appledore on the South Coast when he was younger.
Even though we do not get a formal introduction to Carnacki’s past, we can tell he’s been at the ghost-finding business awhile. He has studied the mysterious Sigsand Manuscript (a precursor and partial source for Lovecraft’s Necronomicon) which tells of the hideous Saaamaaaa Ritual (with its “Unknown Last Line”), the inspiration of many of Carnacki’s experimental pseudo-scientific discoveries.
Being a professional ghost-breaker, Carnacki has many weapons in his arsenal against evil. The traditional pentacle and garlic, a revolver in his pocket and an open mind, Carnacki is ready for most phantoms or prankster alike. Much of his work is supported by his trusty camera. Dodgson (the thinly veiled Hodgson) examines some of Carnacki’s photos but finds them mysterious:
The bulk of the photographs were of interiors of different rooms and passages and in every one the girl might be seen, either full length in the distance or closer, with perhaps little more than a hand or arm or portion of the head or dress included in the photograph. All of these had evidently been taken with some definite aim that did not have for its first purpose the picturing of the girl, but obviously of her surroundings and they made me very curious, as you can imagine.
Two inventions of Carnacki’s own making are called for in special cases when camera and nerve fail. The first of these is the Electric Pentacle, with its battery powered vacuum tubes. Carnacki explains the idea behind the devise: … After that I came across Professor Gardner’s ‘Experiments with a Medium’. When they surrounded the Medium with a current of a certain number of vibrations in vacuum, he lost his position — almost as if it cut him from the Immaterial.
“That made me think, and led eventually to the Electric Pentacle, which is a most marvellous ‘Defense’ against certain manifestations. I used the shape of the defensive star for this protection because I have, personally, no doubt at all but that there is some extraordinary virtue in the old magic figure. Curious thing for a Twentieth Century man to admit, is it not? But then, as you all know, I never did, and never will allow myself to be blinded by a little cheap laughter. I ask questions and keep my eyes open! …
Even more experimental than the Electric Pentacle is the Color Defense Barriers. It works on a principle found in the Sigsand Ms.:
“‘… Avoid diversities of colour; nor stand ye within the barrier of the colour lights; for in colour hath Satan a delight. Nor can he abide in the Deep if ye adventure against him armed with red purple. So be warned. Neither forget that in blue, which is God’s colour in the Heavens, ye have safety.'”
The apparatus itself is explained: ‘You see, from that statement in the Sigsand manuscript I go my first notion for this new “defense” of mine. I have aimed to make it a “defense” and yet have “focusing” or “drawing” qualities such as the Sigsand hints at. I have experimented enormously, and I’ve proved that reds and purples — the two extremes of the spectrum — are fairly dangerous; so much so that I suspect they actually “draw” or “focus” the outside forces. Any action or “meddling” on the part of the experimentalist is tremendously enhanced in its effect if the action is taken within barriers composed of these colours, in certain proportions and tints.
‘In the same way blue is distinctly a “general defense”. Yellow appears to be neutral, and green a wonderful protection within limits. Orange, as far as I can tell, is slightly attractive and indigo is dangerous by itself in a limited way, but in certain combinations with the other colours it becomes a very powerful “defense”I’ve not yet discovered a tenth of the possibilities of these circles of
mine …’
Perhaps more important than all his devises is Carnacki’s philosophy which he states in the opening tale, a preface to all that will follow:
“… most people never quite know how much or how little they believe of matters ab-human or ab-normal, and generally they never have an opportunity to learn … I am as big a sceptic concerning the truth of ghost-tales as any man you are likely to meet; only I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things “on principle”, as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact. I view all reported “hauntings” as un-proven until I have examined into them, and I am bound to admit that ninety-nine cases in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth! Well, if it were not for the hundredth, I should have few stories to tell you — eh?
Carnacki’s statement is a declaration by the author that not all the Carnacki stories will end with supernatural explanations. Some do; some do not; and a few tred the middle line and do both simultaneously. As Dennis Wheatley says in the introduction to Carnacki the Ghost-Finder: “Of the six investigations recounted in this book, some prove to be fake hauntings and others genuine satanic manifestations. But I defy the reader to tell which is which until he reaches the climax of the story …”
THE CASES OF CARNACKI
just a quick note on the illustrations: these were done by Florence Briscoe for the magazine versions of the stories. More on Florence Briscoe here.
“The Thing Invisible” is the mysterious case of a haunted chapel owned by Sir Alfred Jarnock. Visitors to the church at night are said to die by a flying dagger. Even Jarnock’s butler, Bellett, is attacked by the weapon which hangs by the altar. The knife is thought to fly around in ghostly hands. Using photography, Carnacki quickly figures out that the dagger is thrown by a medieval mechanism, released by a trigger in the floor. It is Carnacki’s painful duty to tell Jarnock’s son that the old man is unstable and he has disassembled the mechanism.
“The Gateway of the Monster” is Carnacki’s first supernatural case and is referred to in other stories as the “Grey Room Case”. A room in the Anderson home has claimed the lives of all who have slept in it during the night. Sir Hulbert, the ancient progenitor of the Andersons, had boasted he and his family would sleep there a night. He escaped but his wife and child were found strangled. He returned the night following, to avoid a murder charge, and was in turn strangled to death.
The Sigsand Ms. provides the answer: “‘You see, the wind had come from that part of the room where the ring lay. I pondered the thought a lot. Then the shape — the inside of a pentacle. It had no ‘mounts’, and without mounts, as the Sigsand Ms. has it: — “Thee mownts wych are thee Five Hills of safetie. To lack is to gyve pow’r to thee daemon; and surlie to fayvor thee Evill Thynge.” You see, the very shape of the ring was significant. I determined to test it.’
To do this, Carnacki uses the Electric Pentacle for the first time. Like John Silence, he also uses a cat as a psychic barometer. Unlike Smoke (Silence’s cat) the cat does not survive but is crushed by the killer in the Grey Room, a gigantic phantom hand. The habitation proves to be a gateway through which some outer terror is gaining access to the house. Carnacki discovers that an old family heirloom, the Anderson’s Luck Ring, brought home from the Crusades, is the gateway. When Carnacki brings it inside the Electric Pentacle, the hand appears inside the protective barrier and almost kills him. Destroying the ring, he stops any further hauntings.
“The House Among the Laurels” is an annoying kind of story. After a long and very scary build up involving the Electric Pentacle, Hodgson disappoints by having the entire episode the work of robbers. Photography proves the use of wires. The slow rising of the terror is very skillfully done but the pay-off is such a let-down that you feel cheated of your time for having read the story (a matter or opinion, of course). This tale has become the blue print of the standard Scooby Doo cartoon plot. This is the kind of story M. R. James complained against in his introduction to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl and Other Tales of Mystery (1923) as: “…which belongs to a class of which I disapprove—the ghost-story which peters out into a natural explanation…”
“The Whistling Room” is perhaps Carnacki’s most often anthologized tale. It is a pretty standard Flaxman Low-style ghostbreaking tale much as E. & H. Heron would have written fifteen years earlier in Real Ghost Stories. A rich American, Sid K. Tassoc, buys Iastrae Castle in Ireland and makes wagers he can stay in the place despite its evil reputation. Carnacki comes to investigate the arcane noise of ‘the whistling room’. He uses many and various means to rule out ordinary culprits, perhaps the wager-holders. These include a necklace of garlic, sealing the openings with crosses of human hair, microphone recordings that produce no sounds, and a grid of wafers scientifically placed and charted.
Slowly Carnacki comes closer and closer to believing the sounds are supernatural. He is forced to return shortly to England, but upon his return he sneaks up to the window of the Whistling Room to see “two enormous, blackened lips, blistered and brutal, there in the pale moonlight…” He thinks he hears Tassoc calling for help and crashes into the room. He realizes he has been tricked by the evil spirit and nearly falls to his death in fleeing. His escape comes when some unseen force saves him by using the “Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual”. This deus ex machina is not overly explained, merely described as a voice “whispering quite audibly”.
In typical Flaxman Low style he concludes that the room must be pulled down and the bricks incinerated. It is only after the demolition begins he finds an engraving in stone inside the room. It reads in ancient Celtic: “Here in this room was burned Dian Tiansav, Jester of King Alzof, who made the Song of the Foolishness upon King Ermore of the Seventh Castle.”
From this information and an ancient scroll in the library, Carnacki pieces together the answer to the mystery. The east wing of Iastrae is the aforementioned seventh castle. In the Whistling Room, Dian Tiansav had been imprisoned by Ermore, his tongue cut from his head and then roasted alive in the great fireplace for his mocking the King. While he died he had whistled the insulting tune. After his death there “grew a power in that room” until no one would sleep in it. Later Ermore abandoned the castle.
The final result is not a groundbreaking tale but a well-written, standard piece of occult detection. A modern tale that features a similiar scene to when Carnacki and Tassoc sit on abed and listen to the noises attack the house at night is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Jackson’s version of the invasive noises is more powerful, perhaps because it is never explained.
“The Searcher of the End House” is a cake-and-eat-it-too-story. Taking place in Carnacki’s younger days, he relates the case to his friends because it has similar elements to the allusive Straw Platters Case. Living with his mother in Appledore, strange noises and two phantoms convince Carnacki that his home is haunted. A small girl ghost who hides from another, a sterner woman spirit, gives him part of an explanation for the slamming doors and hideous smell in the house. Later, surrounded by policemen, Carnacki tracks the odor to the basement and its well. In a wonderfully unexpected moment when something suddenly pops out of the well:
‘As my light struck the cage I saw that about two feet of it projected from the top of the well and there was something protruding up out of the water, into the cage. I stared, with a feeling that I recognised the thing; and then, as the other lantherns were opened I saw that it was a leg of mutton. The thing was held by a brawny fist and arm which were rising out of the water and I stood there, utterly stiff and bewildered, to see what was coming. In a moment there rose into view a great bearded face that I felt sure in that grim instant was the face of a drowned man, long dead. Then the face opened at the mouth-part and spluttered and coughed. Another big hand came into view and wiped the water from the eyes, which were blinked rapidly and then fixed themselves into a stare at the lights …’
But Carnacki is ready for any monsters, with an iron cage placed over the well. When the policemen see who has appeared in the cage, an explanation is forthcoming. The prisoner is Captain Tobias, a former owner of the house, and a criminal who wants the house back (supposedly to recover some stolen treasure). The Captain confesses to slamming the doors and dragging a rotting mutton leg about the house, using the secret passage in the well for entry, trying to scare away the Carnackis. Tobias makes no claim for creating the ghosts, giving us our ambiguous ending. A mystery fan would complain that Hodgson hasn’t played fair, while a horror fan finds Tobias a let down.
Like “Searcher of the End House”, “The Horse of the Invisible” is a both ways story but more successful. A young bride to be is plagued by the spirit of a horse-demon which always kills the Hisgin family women before they can marry. Carnacki can think of no protection and so confronts the dangerous phenomenon. The solution comes as a surprise: Parsket, the girl’s cousin, has been trying to scare off or even kill the fiancee, Beaumont. Only Parsket’s death at the end remains unexplainable. Was there actually an invisible horse, or was it only the man’s own guilt? Even Carnacki can not decide.
“The Haunted JARVEE” is a muddy, pointless piece, which should have been better. Hodgson’s fame as a writer rests largely on his early experiences at sea. Though his knowledge of ships and seamen is plain in this tale, it begins well, borrowing to some degree from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but never really goes anywhere. Carnacki gives a vague explanation of what might have caused the weird sight of the four approaching ships on the horizon and the ghostly humped-shaped images, but nothing more. He says:
… in my opinion she was a focus. That is a technical term which I can best explain by saying that she possessed the “attractive vibration” — that is the power to draw to her any psychic waves in the vicinity, much in the way of a medium. The way in which the “vibration” is acquired — to use a technical term again — is, of course, purely a matter for supposition. She may have developed it during the years, owing to a suitability of conditions or it may have been in her (“of her” is a better term) from the very day her keel was laid. I mean the direction in which she lay, the condition of the atmosphere, the state of the “electric tensions”, the very blows of the hammers and the accidental combining of materials suited to such an end — all might tend to such a thing. And this is only to speak of the known. The vast unknown it is vain to speculate upon in a brief chatter like this.
The pay-off for the dark, crowded tale is not sufficient for the effort. Hodgson used the theme with more skill in his novel, The Ghost Pirates (1909).
“The Find” is an anomaly. A detective story about a priceless book, it has no supernatural element. It does not even try to deceive like “The House in the Laurels” or “The Thing Invisible”. The plot concerns a double switch of old manuscripts. As a piece of mystery fiction, the tale succeeds better than some of the others in the book.
“The Hog” is Carnacki’s greatest story. A man, Bains, who is “ineffectively insulated from the Outer Monstrosities” comes to Carnacki after his doctor fails to cure him. The patient suffers from terrible nightmares in which he descends a deep hole at the bottom of which is an “unknown Horror” and the squealing and cries of a multitude of pigs. Bains is so overwrought from lack of sleep and the visions he is desperate.
Carnacki uses a special devise to create a gate to his foe:
“I unrolled about a foot of the ribbon and attached the loose end to an empty spool-roller (on the opposite side of the machine) which I had geared to the driving clock-work mechanism of the gramophone. Then I took the diaphragm and lowered it gently into place above the ribbon. Instead of the usual needle the diaphragm was fitted with a beautifully made metal-filament brush, about an inch broad, which just covered the whole breadth of the ribbon. This fine and fragile brush rested lightly the prepared surface of the paper, and when I started the machine the ribbon began to pass under the brush, and as it passed, the delicate metal-filament “bristles” followed every minute inequality of those tiny, irregular wave-like excrescences on the surface …”
Bains lie down inside Carnacki’s newest protection defense , the Colour Barrier, concentric rings of colored lights. As Carnacki explains red is the color of Satan and is no defense but an attractor. Blue is the color of the sky and the holy and will create a wall between evil and those inside. The detective uses certain colors to focus or attract evil and others to defend against it. This is the major improvement on the Electric Pentacle that can only defend. Bains is stationed inside the protective blue on a glass table. He is instructed to concentrate on the previous dreams but to not under any circumstances fall asleep.
Carnacki spends some time watching the various forms of evil take place around the device. These are smoky clouds that encircle the barrier and a black shadow that resembles the darkness inside a well. The defense works well against these until Bains falls asleep allowing the evil access to more and more space inside the color barriers. Hodgson creates a terrifying image of Carnacki holding Bains inside the blue circle watching the evil grow:
They fell away into a complete silence, and the rigid Bains grunted twice in my arms, as if answering. Then the storm of swine noise came again, beating up in a gignatic riot of brute sound that roared through the room, piping, squealing, grunting, and howling. And as it sank with a steady declination, there came a single gargantuan grunt out of some dreadful throat of monstrousness, and in one beat, the crashing chorus of unknown millions of swine came thundering and raging through the room again.
This newcomer is the Hog of the title. The Sigsand manuscript says of it:
“Ye Hogge wich ye Almighty alone hath power upon. If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle. For ye Hogge doth be of ye Outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end. And in that ye Hogge had once a power upon ye earth, so doth he crave sore to come again. And dreadful shall be ye harm to ye soul if ye continue to meddle, and to let ye beast come nigh. And I say unto all, if ye have brought this dire danger upon ye, have memory of ye cross, for of all sign hath ye Hogge a horror.”
The smoke that surrounds the desperate men grows to look more and more like a giant hog’s head, “a pallid, floating swine-face, framed in enormous blackness” with a terrible eye “…with a sort of hell-light of vile understanding shining at the back of it.” (This was wonderfully illustrated in color by A. R. Tilburne on the January 1947 cover of Weird Tales where the story was reprinted.) This head begins to overpower each color one at a time. Carnacki attempts to widen the blue circle then notices the hog’s head looking at him. He looks down in time to see Bains about to break the blue line. The detective has to restrain his patient by tying his arms behind him with his suspenders.
The Hog continues to destroy Carnacki’s color barriers. The shadows from the bottom of the well grow even stronger. Things look hopeless when the detective feels a “thing in the great heights was coming fast”. As the Sigsund manuscript said, those attacked by the Hog should think of the cross. In a similar deus ex machina move as in “The Whistling Room”, celestial forces rescue the two men and the Hog is banished, never to bother Bains’ sleep again. The forces of good, again, are not explained nor their appearance really justified.
Hodgson ends the story with a two thousand-word question and answer period with his four guests. The pedantic goobley-gook about psychic bodies versus physical bodies is for those who feel they need everything explained. For most, it is a dull denouement that takes far too long. What I find more interesting in the story than Hodgson’s odd ideas on belts of evil clouds surrounding the Earth is his use of scientific versus religious images in the story. His Color Barrier, cameras, recorders and electrical gizmos all speak of the scientist, a man who uses technology to deal with the Outer Monstrosities. But it is faith, an unexplainable holiness that rescues Bains and Carnacki. This seems to be Hodgson saying (perhaps unconsciously) that all the machinery in the world can’t replace spirituality. This is also the quintessential paradox that is the ghostbreaker. On the one hand a professor of Science (a doctor, detective and inventor) but on the other a magi or priest of ancient philosophy and faith. Walking in both worlds, the ghostbreakers can solve those cases that scientists or priests alone cannot.
Carnacki the Ghost-Finder is not Hodgson’s best work. It lacks the conviction of his sea tales, the sheer scope of terror of The House of the Borderlands and the originality of The Nightland. Carnacki was a potboiler. The stories were written for money and little else. So when talking about Hodgson and his importance to the genre of horror, Carnacki is of little import. So why not dismiss it?
The reason is simply this: Hodgson provides a bridge between the Victorian tales of Blackwood and earlier writers and attempts to re-cast the psychic detective in a newer, more action-oriented way. Granted the typical long-winded explanations remain but the events around them fairly churn with an anticipation lacking in earlier writers, with the exception of A. Conan Doyle, who is, without doubt, Hodgson’s primary influence.
Unlike Blackwood and his John Silence stories, Hodgson is not trying to convert or educate anyone. The book uses the Sigsand Ms. and the Electric Pentacle as a foil, but lacks conviction, perhaps because of the author’s lack of belief, a fault which is not found with his other works.
The occult investigators that would follow Carnacki were the legions of pulp ghost-breakers. Hodgson published in the magazines of Pre-World War I, the forerunners to the mass-produced pulps with their ragged edges and their cheap paper. Carnacki was the first of a new breed, the blue print for all the Jules de Grandins and the John Thunstones. He gave back the excitement of story-telling (whether well-supported or not) that the didactic Victorians had taken away.
Hodgson’s contribution to horror and the occult detective has become better acknowledged in recent years. New stories by A. F. Kidd, Rick Kennett and Willie Meikle have been written recently. One story is entitled “The Case of the Grey Dog” — an adventure Carnacki promises to relate someday but never gets around to. Had William Hope Hodgson survived World War I he might have written just a second set of tales. More likely the author had finished with his Holmesian creation and would have pursued more cosmic horrors like those in The Nightland or The House on the Borderland. Simple ghost-finding was not enough for his vast imagination.
