A quick post to offer our dear listeners a free Carnacki tale written by crumbling greydog a while ago. Downloadable and all, designed with a cover and Author’s Note at the end, but only available for four days. The story in question, ‘A Dark Trade’, was written for Carnacki: The Lost Cases (Ulthar, 2016). It’s the first and only ‘traditional’ Carnacki story from me, despite what people think. And it at least has the virtue of being relatively short – a mere four or five thousand words.
I don’t do Carnacki pastiches in general, and my ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’ series deliberately covers the period after his death, and the period when he was less well known, with the character as an aside or a passing mention (Willie Meikle, Chico Kidd and Brandon Barrows have served the pastiche side well, to name but three).
Lost Cases included three pieces by me: i) an introductory story that was, in effect, a really bad joke; ii) ‘A Dark Trade’, which is canonical and has a very uncomfortable theme beneath it, and iii) a very different tale – ‘Grey Dog’. ‘Grey Dog’ is my quintessential comment on Thomas Merton Carnacki’s life, and may be the only, or one of the only, stories which is entirely from his inner viewpoint. That one, which is in my collection A Persistence of Geraniums, has variously been described as “the best Carnacki story Hope Hodgson never wrote”, “too downbeat”, and “tragically sad”. I see it more as a meditation on life, and simply like its mood.
The story below hasn’t seen the light of day since that anthology. It has all the trappings you’d expect, but takes the Ghost Finder somewhere that ought to make monsters of the Outer Circle seem kind. Human evil bleeding into the ab-natural. Any more would sort of give it away.
This standalone version has been sent directly to all backers of the Occult Detective Quarterly Presents campaign, as a small token for their patience while we changed publishers and lost parcels and so on. I’ll make it downloadable here until Monday 27th May for anyone else who has an idle wish for it, and then it’s gone.