About Me
The Casebook of Carnacki - Curse of the Mummy's TombI am Thomas Carnacki a detective who specialises in supernatural mysteries.I am a open-minded skeptic in the sense that I investigate beginning, with the assumption that there is a human agency behind each of the hauntings, and if that is eliminated,I use my knowledge of the occult,i employ a variety of scientific methods in my investigations, as well as resorting to more traditional folk-lore.
I like to invite friends, to come to dinner and hear my latest adventure. Everyone settles into their favourite chairs, and I tell my latest adventure without interruption.-"The Gateway of the Monster"-In an ancient mansion, the bedroom known as the Grey Room was the site of a grisly murder generations ago. Carnacki is summoned to investigate a noisy spirit that tears off the bedclothes and spends each night slamming the door(s). Carnacki uses the electric pentacle to spend the night in the room and investigate. The manifestation is far more powerful than he expects, and he spends a miserable, terrified night in the pentacle while a horrible apparition in the form of a human hand pounds at his defenses. The next day Carnacki discovers in the room the fabled "luck ring," and he brings it with him into the pentacle. This proves unwise, though, as at nightfall the vicious entity begins to pour out of the ring itself and Carnacki is inside the pentacle with it! He barely escapes with his life, while the entity is trapped; he finally ends the haunting by melting down the ring into a lump of slag within his protective barrier.-"The House Among the Laurels"-A deserted mansion displays signs of haunting, including what appears to be blood dripping from the ceiling, and several men have been found dead in the house. Is it a prank or a haunting? Carnacki recruits a group of burly local men to investigate, along with several dogs, and they attempt to stay the night within the mansion. During their ordeal doors slam, the fire goes out, a dog is killed, and the entire group bolts from the house in terror. Upon studying his photograph, Carnacki realizes that he and the men have been played for fools. His photograph shows a wire, too fine to see in the dark, lowered from the ceiling to remove the hook holding the door open. The "blood drip" is colored water, and the "ghosts" are actually a criminal gang living in secret rooms in the mansion and playing a trick on him, taking advantage of the local legends to frighten away interlopers.-"The Whistling Room"-When a chamber in a mansion manifests a loud, eerie whistling, Detective Carnacki is called to investigate. He makes an exceedingly thorough search of the room, but can find no explanation. He is still not convinced of the supernatural nature of the sound until he climbs a ladder and peers into the room: the floor of the room itself is puckering like a pair of grotesque, blistered lips. He hears Tassoc, the mansion's owner, calling for help, and enters the room via the window. But Tassoc is not in the room -- only an extraordinarily dangerous supernatural entity. Carnacki is saved only by the intervention of an unknown, second being, which utters the unknown last line of the Saamaa ritual, temporarily rendering the whistling entity powerless. With that, Carnacki throws himself through the window to escape. He then has the room demolished, and all parts burned in a blast furnace within a protective pentacle, including an ancient inscription in Celtic. According to legend, a court jester was once killed in the room's fireplace, and whistled as he was roasted to death.-"The Horse of the Invisible".... -Carnacki investigates a haunting in his own mother's house. In this somewhat complicated tale, the first indication that something is amiss comes when Carnacki, up late reading, hears his mother knocking, so he thinks, on the banister to tell him to go to his bed. She does not remember doing so the next day, and it happens again the following night. When Carnacki looks in on her, he finds her door open, but she is sound asleep. A strange mildew smell is in the bedroom. Carnacki investigates the house, including the three cellars, but can find no explanation.The opening of the door happens again the following night, and this time while Carnacki is speaking to his mother the two of them hear a door slam twice downstairs. The smell of mildew is powerful as Carnacki investigates the house. More doors are heard slamming in the night, but Carnacki can find nothing. The next day, he consults the landlord, and learns something of the house's mysterious history, which includes a former tenant named Captain Tobias, and rumors of a ghostly woman. Several previous tenants had left upon seeing this apparition. The landlord agrees to spend the night in the house as well. In the dead of night, the two see a ghostly, naked child running through the house. The vision appears so strange that the two have little doubt that it is a supernatural manifestation. The landlord claims to see a woman, apparently searching for the child, although Carnacki cannot see it. And as if that wasn't strange enough, all of the seals on the doors are unbroken. As they debate what they have seen, the mildew smell returns, more powerful than ever. The downstairs passages are wet with grotesquely shaped footprints. In his nervousness, the landlord accidentally fires his revolver. No one is hit, but the police arrive to investigate. The physical evidence convinces the officer that an investigation is in order. As they wind up their tour, they find that a second officer has seen the ghostly woman. The men follow the wet footprints and smell into the cellars; on the top step, they find a wriggling maggot. Through their investigation of the third cellar, they find that the prints stop at a disused well, filled with water. They watch the well for the rest of the night, but nothing more happens.The next evening, the men reconvene in the basement with lamps, a tripwire, and a wire cage to suspend over the well. Carnacki locks and seals the doors. As they keep watch, the ghostly child again manifests, apparently fleeing from an unseen pursuer. All present again claim to see a woman, Carnacki not included; he does, however, see all the metal objects in the basement shining strangely, but of course, the others cannot see this. While they watch, something is heard to emerge from the well, giving off the horrible smell; Carnacki lowers the cage, and when the men uncover the lanterns they discover that they have caught Captain Tobias, carrying a leg of spoiled mutton. He came in through a secret passage at the bottom of the well. We learn that Captain Tobias is wanted for smuggling, after being released from prison only a few weeks earlier. He is apparently trying to drive out the tenants of his old home so that he can retrieve smuggled goods; the sounds heard previously were the sound of him entering a hidden passage in Carnacki's mother's bedroom, but the wooden panels have warped with age, and so make a clicking sound.As for the ghost, Captain Tobias also reports that he has seen the woman and child. Carnacki believes that "...the Woman and the Child were not only two complete and different entities; but even they were each not in quite the same planes of existence." He thinks the men may have witnessed the ghost of a wayward unborn child that refused to accept birth into the natural world and which was thus pulled back by what Sigsand called "thee Haggs." Carnacki goes on to say "it leaves us with the conception of a child's soul adrift half-way between two lives, and running through Eternity from Something incredible and inconceivable (because not understood) to our senses."-"The Thing Invisible"-A chapel attached to an Edwardian manor house contains an ancient, cursed dagger that has just apparently murdered someone of its own accord, and naturally, Carnacki is called in to investigate. He spends the night in the chapel wearing armor with his camera ready to photograph any mysterious phenomena. All night he hears mysterious noises. As he approaches the altar, the dagger nearly kills him. The photographic evidence settles it, though -- there is a rational explanation. The somewhat demented elderly gentleman of the manor house has armed an ancient trap that guards the altar: a spring mechanism designed to fling the dagger when the altar gate is opened. Carnacki uncovers the truth because of a subtle difference between the "before" and "after" photographs of the altar's cast iron metalwork.-"The Haunted Jarvee"-Carnacki decides to go for a voyage aboard the Jarvee, his old friend Captain Thompson's antique sailing ship, for purposes of rejuvenation, but also to investigate the ambiguous complaints of ghosts his friend had been making for some time. Carnacki performs his standard methods of exhaustively and completely searching the designated area to eliminate obvious physical causes of a haunting. Finding nothing, Carnacki is left to wait. After four days, whilst performing his usual patrol along the ship's poop with the Captain, his old friend suddenly points out to him a shadow of some sort on the ocean's surface, speeding towards the ship. He notices similar shadows converging on the ship from all of the cardinal directions. The closer they get to the Jarvee, the harder it is to see them, and eventually they disappear from sight. Carnacki, the Captain and the rest of the crew retire, and the night goes normally, until about eleven o'clock, when a furious storm bursts upon the ship without a hint of warning. Refusing to send men up above to lower the sails and masts because of previous experiences in which he did just that, and his men were hurled to their death, Captain Thompson forces them to sit out the storm completely unprepared, and the Jarvee suffers tremendous damages. Observing all this, Carnacki guesses that the phenomenon is caused by vibrations, so when he observes the shadows convering on the ship again the next day, he sets up a device to emit repellant vibrations. The ship is then struck by a furious squall, which tears one of the sails right off of the ropes. It isn't until 2 A.M that the squall passes, followed by an entire week of calm seas, with a furious wind storm every night.During this week of calm, however, Carnacki is left to experiment with his repellant vibrations, until finally, he is given the distinct impression that his experiments are producing results, and he finally convinces Captain Thompson to allow him to set up his machine to emit the vibrations at full power, without stopping, starting at sunset. Afraid for their lives, Carnacki orders the crew to stay below decks, padlocking the doors and making the first and eighth signs of the Saaamaaa Ritual, connected with triple lines crossed at every seventh inch. The Captain and the three mates demand to accompany him during the night, and Carnacki reluctantly agrees. He draws a pentacle with chalk around the machine emitting the vibrations, and around the Captain and his mates. He then erects the Electric Pentacle and turns the vibration machine on. Soon after, he and the Captain witness the mysterious shadows racing towards the ship. Strange, purple lightning is then witnessed, but it is not accompanied by thunder. Soon after, the ship undergoes a series of strange "shudderings" before it starts to tip onto its side, sending the Electric Pentacle sliding, and forcing Carnacki, Captain Thompson and his three mates to hold on for dear life. Carnacki is forced to shut his machine off.Predictably, there is a booming of thunder, and a furious storm starts raging. Towards morning, the storm calms, and soon after, the Jarvee is running before a strong wind - but a leak has been sprung, and two days after, they are forced to abandon ship and take to the boats.The Jarvee sinks to the bottom of the ocean.After he finishes his tale, Dodgson, the narrator asks what caused the haunting. Carnacki then explains his theory of "focuses", saying that the Jarvee, for whatever reason, be it the particular mood a builder was in as he hammered a nail home, or the tree that makes up a certain board, was a focal point for "attractive vibrations". He summarizes by saying that it is impossible for him to know fully why the Jarvee was being haunted, and he could only make suppositions.
