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    Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (Annotated)
    Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (Annotated)
    Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (Annotated)
    Ebook261 pages4 hours

    Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (Annotated)

    By William Hope Hodgson

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    • This edition includes the following editor's analysis: The sea as the origin of horror, an indispensable mark of William Hope Hodgson's literature

    First published in 1913, “Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder” is a collection of occult detective short stories by English author William Hope Hodgson, featuring the titular protagonist.

    “Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder” presents us with intriguing detective stories in which the great Thomas Carnacki investigates the supernatural using scientific tools, such as photography, and tools that are augmented by theories of the supernatural, such as the electric pentacle, which uses vacuum tubes to repel supernatural forces.
    Carnacki can be described as the Sherlock of the occult world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherePembaBooks
    Release dateJan 27, 2023
    ISBN9791221361353
    Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (Annotated)
    Author

    William Hope Hodgson

    William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English author whose writing spanned genres from horror to fantasy to science fiction. His best-known works are The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, a futuristic novel depicting a grim vision of an earth without sun. 

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      Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (Annotated) - William Hope Hodgson

      William Hope Hodgson

      Carnacki, the Ghost Finder

      Table of contents

      The sea as the origin of horror, an indispensable mark of William Hope Hodgson's literature

      CARNACKI, THE GHOST FINDER

      THE GATEWAY OF THE MONSTER

      THE HOUSE AMONG THE LAURELS

      THE WHISTLING ROOM

      THE HORSE OF THE INVISIBLE

      THE SEARCHER OF THE END HOUSE

      THE THING INVISIBLE

      THE HOG

      THE HAUNTED JARVEE

      THE FIND

      The sea as the origin of horror, an indispensable mark of William Hope Hodgson's literature

      The life of the English author William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) is full of tribulations and curious anecdotes: he joined the merchant navy when he was very young, he tasted the gall of the sea (both the harshness of maritime life and the annoyance of his fellows, to the point that he had to prepare himself physically to face the taunts and quarrels of the sailors who harassed him). He turned to photography to portray life aboard ship. Fed up after eight years of sailing the seas, and using his knowledge and the work of his body, he ran a bodybuilding gym in an era before the cult of muscles. Finally, he tried his hand at writing, first with articles on physical education and bodybuilding and later with fiction. He survived on the emoluments obtained from the publication of his stories in numerous magazines, while his novels, although they won him some critical recognition, failed to meet sales expectations. He died during the First World War when he was hit by a German shell. It is fair to remember that he also earned a reputation as a saviour , a hero (in 1898 he received the Royal Humane Society medal for rescuing a sailor from dying in shark-filled waters).

      His texts suffered the vicissitudes of the minor or peripheral writer. Hodgson's wife, Betty Farnworth, fought for her husband's work not to be forgotten, although it was thanks to the insistence of Mr. Herman Charles Koenig that it was recovered. Koenig was responsible for introducing his books to H. P. Lovecraft (another minor and eccentric writer, in turn), who discussed his work in the now famous monograph that the American wrote on the horror genre (" Supernatural Horror in Literature," 1927). It is true that Lovecraft, nevertheless, noticed more in Hodgson's novels than in his stories, and that he blamed him for his relapse into an anachronistic style.

      The corpus of his literary production can be summarized in a collection of short stories, " Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913), and four novels: The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909) and The Night Land" (1912). He also wrote poems, articles on various subjects and a navigation diary.

      In The Navigation Diary he wrote down the main activities he carried out on the ship on duty, with annotation of the schedules, as well as the practice of some distractions such as physical training -either with his punching bag or with weights-, the improvisation of a dark room to develop his photographs or reading.

      It is worth mentioning an article in which Hodgson details his encounter at sea with a hurricane, an experience that he documented with photographs. It was a thrilling and harrowing voyage as he steered his ship towards the eye of the cyclone, riding over monstrous seas that kept on rising in a frightful manner... Hodgson tells us of the impenetrable darkness, the deafening noise of the wind, the huge waves that lashed and tossed the ship, the strange light phenomena caused by the electrical apparatus, the wreckage and accidents, the fear of never getting out of that chaos.

      All this accumulation of events and experiences at sea seep into his works, both in some novels (The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The Ghost Pirates) and in most of his short stories and poems. In the latter there is a perennial presence of the watery element: the sea appears personified as a wild entity, with all its might and strength subduing the human being, oblivious to any value system that is not the expression of its implacable laws. Nature wields before us its codes of violence. By the sea, some of the best poems are taken over by a voice that mentions death, that expresses the sensation of its imminence.

      Hodgson's stories can be classified under different headings. Most of them, and the best, needless to say, are of a marine theme. Hodgson never ceased to explore, from his own unpleasant experiences, the sea as a frame for his stories, the surrounding scenery of multiple nightmares, and as an atmosphere. A sea with which the characters will have to fight at every moment and in whose bosom awaits the unfathomable danger, the roar of horror. His literature is part of a long line that would include Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.

      Let us keep in mind that the sea is an ambivalent entity that has been charged, over the centuries, with numerous representations and symbolism. It is a space of transformation, a giver of life (food) and death. It is a way of communication between peoples and of discovery of lands. Habitat of monsters and home of the unknowable. Its tempestuous waters have also been imputed to be the image of the subconscious. And the shipwreck, emblem of every crisis, of every misfortune.

      In its limitless extension, the sea resembles a frenetic desert, a desert in which the infinite solidity of the sand particles is replaced by the deadly gathering of myriads of water drops (and in each of them awaits the promise of drowning, of asphyxiation). Life on the high seas thus becomes a daily test of survival and a liquid experience of confinement.

      Whoever frequents Hodgson's preternatural stories will observe that he often repeats some motifs, some circumstances, even some threatening beings. Thus, for example, a sort of viscous and unreal matter, a living being similar to an immense mould, populates stories such as The Derelict (1912) or The Voice in the Night (1907). In both cases, the gelatinous mass devours everything alive in its path, only Hodgson does not throw the characters into a futilely accelerated plot, but plucks the same string over and over again, obtaining a music of increasing tension, embedding in the reader's mind the anguish little by little.

      Fear can have the face of ghostly presences barely interviewed (as in The Habitants of Middle Islet), or it can also represent the encounter with natural forces such as the arrival of a cyclone (its imminence barely insinuated within a setting where strangeness takes over everything as in The ‘Shamraken’ Homeward-Bounder).

      The sea entails an ungovernable force when it unleashes its destructive capacity. Apart from being an antagonist, it contains in its bosom, as if it were an immense aquarium, a host of beings, an accursed fauna: octopuses, squids and giant crabs. Also the flora, with the passivity that we suppose it, rises in the form of intimidation: hence to fall in the Sargasso Sea that Hodgson's idea constitutes the advent of paralysis and perdition. The impossibility of escape.

      On our planet all beings have emerged from the waters since the origin. The primordial soup harboured the breeding ground for the first vestiges of cells to form. And, since then, water has played a primordial role. Millions of years passed before living things ventured fortunately to exist outside the oceans. Once they conquered the land, they adapted and disavowed their origin, even though their bodies only function through chemical reactions produced in aqueous media. For the terrestrial being, water is reminiscent of the origin and, simultaneously, a sign of the end, of death. To sail the seas is perhaps an exercise of archaeology in the memory of the original living forms, but also an attempt to play with death. Each wave resolves itself into the possibility of asphyxiation, of confinement. It is to this ancestral and perennial terror that the best pages of William Hope Hodgson tend to turn.

      The Editor, P.C. 2022

      CARNACKI, THE GHOST FINDER

      William Hope Hodgson

      THE GATEWAY OF THE MONSTER

      In response to Carnacki's usual card of invitation to have dinner and listen to a story, I arrived promptly at 427, Cheyne Walk, to find the three others who were always invited to these happy little times, there before me. Five minutes later, Carnacki, Arkright, Jessop, Taylor and I were all engaged in the pleasant occupation of dining.

      You've not been long away, this time, I remarked as I finished my soup; forgetting momentarily, Carnacki's dislike of being asked even to skirt the borders of his story until such time as he was ready. Then he would not stint words.

      That's all, he replied with brevity; and I changed the subject, remarking that I had been buying a new gun, to which piece of news he gave an intelligent nod, and a smile which I think showed a genuinely good-humoured appreciation of my intentional changing of the conversation.

      "As Dodgson was remarking just now, I've only been away a short time, and for a very good reason too - I've only been away a short distance. The exact locality I am afraid I must not tell you; but it is less than twenty miles from here; though, except for changing a name, that won't spoil the story. And it is a story too! One of the most extraordinary things I have ever run against.

      "I received a letter a fortnight ago from a man I must call Anderson, asking for an appointment. I arranged a time, and when he came, I found that he wished me to investigate, and see whether I could not clear up a long standing and well - too well - authenticated case of what he termed 'haunting.' He gave me very full particulars, and finally, as the thing seemed to present something unique, I decided to take it up.

      "Two days later, I drove to the house, late in the afternoon. I found it a very old place, standing quite alone in its own grounds. Anderson had left a letter with the butler, I found, pleading excuses for his absence, and leaving the whole house at my disposal for my investigations. The butler evidently knew the object of my visit, and I questioned him pretty thoroughly during dinner, which I had in rather lonely state. He is an old and privileged servant, and had the history of the Grey Room exact in detail. From him I learned more particulars regarding two things that Anderson had mentioned in but a casual manner. The first was that the door of the Grey Room would be heard in the dead of night to open, and slam heavily, and this even though the butler knew it was locked, and the key on the bunch in his pantry. The second was that the bedclothes would always be found torn off the bed, and hurled in a heap into a corner.

      "But it was the door slamming that chiefly bothered the old butler. Many and many a time, he told me, had he lain awake and just got shivering with fright, listening; for sometimes the door would be slammed time after time - thud! thud! thud! - so that sleep was impossible.

      "From Anderson, I knew already that the room had a history extending back over a hundred and fifty years. Three people had been strangled in it - an ancestor of his and his wife and child. This is authentic, as I had taken very great pains to discover, so that you can imagine it was with a feeling that I had a striking case to investigate, that I went upstairs after dinner to have a look at the Grey Room.

      "Peter, the old butler, was in rather a state about my going, and assured me with much solemnity that in all the twenty years of his service, no one had ever entered that room after nightfall. He begged me, in quite a fatherly way, to wait till the morning, when there would be no danger, and then he could accompany me himself.

      "Of course, I smiled a little at him, and told him not to bother. I explained that I should do no more than look around a bit, and perhaps affix a few seals. He need not fear; I was used to that sort of thing. But he shook his head, when I said that.

      "'There isn't many ghosts like ours, sir,' he assured me, with mournful pride. And, by Jove! he was right, as you will see.

      "I took a couple of candles, and Peter followed, with his bunch of keys. He unlocked the door; but would not come inside with me. He was evidently in a fright, and renewed his request, that I would put off my examination, until daylight. Of course, I laughed at him again, and told him he could stand sentry at the door, and catch anything that came out.

      "'It never comes outside, sir,' he said, in his funny, old, solemn manner. Somehow he managed to make me feel as if I were going to have the 'creeps' right away. Anyway, it was one to him, you know.

      "I left him there, and examined the room. It is a big apartment, and well furnished in the grand style, with a huge four-poster, which stands with its head to the end wall. There were two candles on the mantelpiece and two on each of the three tables that were in the room. I lit the lot, and after that the room felt a little less inhumanly dreary; though, mind you, it was quite fresh, and well kept in every way.

      "After I had taken a good look round I sealed lengths of baby ribbon across the windows, along the walls, over the pictures, and over the fireplace and the wall-closets. All the time, as I worked, the butler stood just without the door, and I could not persuade him to enter; though I jested with him a little, as I stretched the ribbons, and went here and there about my work. Every now and again, he would say: - 'You'll excuse me, I'm sure, sir; but I do wish you would come out, sir. I'm fair in a quake for you.'

      "I told him he need not wait; but he was loyal enough in his way to what he considered his duty. He said he could not go away and leave me all alone there. He apologised; but made it very clear that I did not realise the danger of the room; and I could see, generally, that he was in a pretty frightened state. All the same, I had to make the room so that I should know if anything material entered it; so I asked him not to bother me, unless he really heard something. He was beginning to get on my nerves, and the 'feel' of the room was bad enough, without making it any nastier.

      "For a time further, I worked, stretching ribbons across the floor, and sealing them, so that the merest touch would have broken them, were anyone to venture into the room in the dark with the intention of playing the fool. All this had taken me far longer than I had anticipated; and, suddenly, I heard a clock strike eleven. I had taken off my coat soon after commencing work; now, however, as I had practically made an end of all that I intended to do, I walked across to the settee, and picked it up. I was in the act of getting into it when the old butler's voice (he had not said a word for the last hour) came sharp and frightened: - 'Come out, sir, quick! There's something going to happen!' Jove! but I jumped, and then, in the same moment, one of the candles on the table to the left of the bed went out. Now whether it was the wind, or what, I do not know; but just for a moment, I was enough startled to make a run for the door; though I am glad to say that I pulled, up before I reached it. I simply could not bunk out, with the butler standing there, after having, as it were, read him a sort of lesson on 'bein' brave, y'know.' So I just turned right round, picked up the two candles off the mantelpiece, and walked across to the table near the bed. Well, I saw nothing. I blew out the candle that was still alight; then I went to those on the two other tables, and blew them out. Then, outside of the door, the old man called again: - 'Oh! sir, do be told! Do be told!'

      "'All right, Peter,' I said, and, by Jove, my voice was not as steady as I should have liked! I made for the door, and had a bit of work, not to start running. I took some thundering long strides, as you can imagine. Near the door, I had a sudden feeling that there was a cold wind in the room. It was almost as if the window had been suddenly opened a little. I got to the door and the old butler gave back a step, in a sort of instinctive way. 'Collar the candles, Peter!' I said, pretty sharply, and shoved them into his hands. I turned, and caught the handle, and slammed the door shut, with a crash. Somehow, do you know, as I did so, I thought I felt something pull back on it; but it must have been only fancy. I turned the key in the lock, and then again, double-locking the door. I felt easier then, and set-to and sealed the door. In addition, I put my card over the keyhole, and sealed it there; after which I pocketed the key, and went downstairs - with Peter; who was nervous and silent, leading the way. Poor old beggar! It had not struck me until that moment that he had been enduring a considerable strain during the last two or three hours.

      "About midnight, I went to bed. My room lay at the end of the corridor upon which opens the door of the Grey Room. I counted the doors between it and mine, and found that five rooms lay between. And I am sure you can understand that I was not sorry. Then, just as I was beginning to undress, an idea came to me, and I took my candle and sealing-wax, and sealed the doors of all the five rooms. If any door slammed in the night, I should know just which one.

      "I returned to my room, locked the door, and went to bed. I was waked suddenly from a deep sleep by a loud crash somewhere out in the passage. I sat up in bed and listened, but heard nothing. Then I lit my candle. I was in the very act of lighting it when there came the bang of a door being violently slammed, along the corridor. I jumped out of bed, and got my revolver. I unlocked my door, and went out into the passage, holding my candle high, and keeping the pistol ready. Then a queer thing happened. I could not go a step towards the Grey Room. You all know I am not really a cowardly chap. I've gone into too many cases connected with ghostly things, to be accused of that; but I tell you I funked it; simply funked it, just like any blessed kid. There was something precious unholy in the air that night. I backed into my bedroom, and shut and locked the door. Then I sat on the bed all night, and listened to the dismal thudding of a door up the corridor. The sound seemed to echo through all the house.

      "Daylight came at last, and I washed and dressed. The door had not slammed for about an hour, and I was getting back my nerve again. I felt ashamed of myself; though in some ways it was silly, for when you're meddling with that sort of thing, your nerve is bound to go, sometimes. And you just have to sit quiet and call yourself a coward until daylight. Sometimes it is more than just cowardice, I fancy. I believe at times it is something warning you, and fighting for you. But, all the same, I always feel mean and miserable, after a time like that.

      "When the day came properly, I opened my door, and, keeping my revolver handy, went quietly along the passage. I had to pass the head of the stairs, on the way, and who should I see coming up, but the old butler, carrying a cup of coffee. He had merely tucked his nightshirt into his trousers, and he had an old pair of carpet slippers on.

      "'Hello, Peter!' I said, feeling suddenly cheerful; for I was as glad as any lost child to have a live human being close to me. 'Where are you off to with the refreshments?'

      "The old man gave a start, and slopped some of the coffee. He stared up at me and I could see that he looked white and done-up. He came on up the stairs and held out the little tray to me. 'I'm very thankful indeed, Sir, to see you safe and well,' he said. 'I feared, one time, you might risk going into the Grey Room, Sir. I've lain awake all night, with the sound of the Door. And when it came light, I thought I'd make you a cup of coffee. I knew you would want to look at the seals, and somehow it seems safer if there's two, Sir.'

      "'Peter,' I said, 'you're a brick. This is very thoughtful of you.' And I drank the coffee. 'Come along,' I told him, and handed him back the tray. 'I'm going to have a look at what the Brutes have been up to. I simply hadn't the pluck to in the night.'

      "'I'm very thankful, Sir,' he replied. 'Flesh and blood can do nothing, Sir, against devils; and that's what's in the Grey Room after dark.'

      "I examined the seals on all the doors, as I went along, and found them right; but when I got to the Grey Room, the seal was broken; though the card, over the keyhole, was untouched. I ripped it off, and unlocked the door, and went in, rather cautiously, as you can imagine; but the whole room was empty of anything to frighten one, and there was heaps of light. I examined all my seals, and not a single one was disturbed. The old butler had followed me in, and, suddenly, he called out:- 'The bedclothes, Sir!'

      "I ran up to the bed, and looked over; and, surely, they were lying in the corner to the left of the bed. Jove! you can imagine how queer I felt. Something had been in the room. I stared for a while, from the bed, to the clothes on the floor. I had a feeling that I did not want to touch either. Old Peter, though, did not seem to be affected that way. He went over to the bed-coverings, and was going to pick them up, as, doubtless, he had done every day these twenty years back; but I stopped him. I wanted nothing touched, until I had finished my examination. This, I must have spent a full hour over, and then I let Peter straighten up the bed; after which we went out and I locked the door; for the room was getting on

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