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Through the Gates of the Silver Key
By H. P. Lovecraft
and E. Hoffmann Price
I.
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bokhara rugs of impressive
age and workmanship four men were sitting around a document-strown table. From the far corners,
where odd tripods of wrought-iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged negro
in sombre livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there
ticked a curious coffin-shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands
did not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet. It was a singular and
disturbing room, but well fitted to the business now at hand. For here, in the New Orleans home
of this continent’s greatest mystic, mathematician, and orientalist, there was being
settled at last the estate of a scarcely less great mystic, scholar, author, and dreamer who
had vanished from the face of the earth four years before.
Randolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tedium and
limitations of waking reality in the beckoning vistas of dreams and fabled avenues of other
dimensions, disappeared from the sight of man on the seventh of October, 1928, at the age of
fifty-four. His career had been a strange and lonely one, and there were those who inferred
from his curious novels many episodes more bizarre than any in his recorded history. His association
with Harley Warren, the South Carolina mystic whose studies in the primal Naacal language of
the Himalayan priests had led to such outrageous conclusions, had been close. Indeed, it was
he who—one mist-mad, terrible night in an ancient graveyard—had seen Warren descend
into a dank and nitrous vault, never to emerge. Carter lived in Boston, but it was from the
wild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that all his forbears had come.
And it was amid those ancient, cryptically brooding hills that he had ultimately vanished.
His old servant Parks—who died early in 1930—had spoken of the
strangely aromatic and hideously carven box he had found in the attic, and of the undecipherable
parchments and queerly figured silver key which that box had contained; matters of which Carter
had also written to others. Carter, he said, had told him that this key had come down from his
ancestors, and that it would help him to unlock the gate to his lost boyhood, and to strange
dimensions and fantastic realms which he had hitherto visited only in vague, brief, and elusive
dreams. Then one day Carter took the box and its contents and rode away in his car, never to
return.
Later on people found the car at the side of an old, grass-grown road in the
hills behind crumbling Arkham—the hills where Carter’s forbears had once dwelt,
and where the ruined cellar of the great Carter homestead still gaped to the sky. It was in
a grove of tall elms near by that another of the Carters had mysteriously vanished in 1781,
and not far away was the half-rotted cottage where Goody Fowler the witch had brewed her ominous
potions still earlier. The region had been settled in 1692 by fugitives from the witchcraft
trials in Salem, and even now it bore a name for vaguely ominous things scarcely to be envisaged.
Edmund Carter had fled from the shadow of Gallows Hill just in time, and the tales of his sorceries
were many. Now, it seemed, his lone descendant had gone somewhere to join him.
In the car they found the hideously carved box of fragrant wood, and the parchment
which no man could read. The Silver Key was gone—presumably with Carter. Further than
that there was no certain clue. Detectives from Boston said that the fallen timbers of the
old Carter place seemed oddly disturbed, and somebody found a handkerchief on the rock-ridged,
sinisterly wooded slope behind the ruins near the dreaded cave called the “Snake-Den”.
It was then that the country legends about the Snake-Den gained a new vitality. Farmers whispered
of the blasphemous uses to which old Edmund Carter the wizard had put that horrible grotto,
and added later tales about the fondness which Randolph Carter himself had had for it when a
boy. In Carter’s boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead was still standing and
tenanted by his great-uncle Christopher. He had visited there often, and had talked singularly
about the Snake-Den. People remembered what he had said about a deep fissure and an unknown
inner cave beyond, and speculated on the change he had shewn after spending one whole memorable
day in the cavern when he was nine. That was in October, too—and ever after that he had
seemed to have an uncanny knack at prophesying future events.
It had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was quite
able to trace his footprints from the car. Inside the Snake-Den all was amorphous liquid mud
owing to copious seepage. Only the ignorant rustics whispered about the prints they thought
they spied where the great elms overhang the road, and on the sinister hillside near the Snake-Den,
where the handkerchief was found. Who could pay attention to whispers that spoke of stubby little
tracks like those which Randolph Carter’s square-toed boots made when he was a small boy?
It was as crazy a notion as that other whisper—that the tracks of old Benijah Corey’s
peculiar heel-less boots had met the stubby little tracks in the road. Old Benijah had been
the Carters’ hired man when Randolph was young—but he had died thirty years ago.
It must have been these whispers—plus Carter’s own statement to
Parks and others that the queerly arabesqued Silver Key would help him unlock the gate of his
lost boyhood—which caused a number of mystical students to declare that the missing man
had actually doubled back on the trail of time and returned through forty-five years to that
other October day in 1883 when he had stayed in the Snake-Den as a small boy. When he came out
that night, they argued, he had somehow made the whole trip to 1928 and back—for did he
not thereafter know of things which were to happen later? And yet he had never spoken of anything
to happen after 1928.
One student—an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who had
enjoyed a long and close correspondence with Carter—had a still more elaborate theory,
and believed that Carter had not only returned to boyhood, but achieved a further liberation,
roving at will through the prismatic vistas of boyhood dream. After a strange vision this man
published a tale of Carter’s vanishing, in which he hinted that the lost one now reigned
as king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs
of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular
labyrinths.
It was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the apportionment
of Carter’s estate to his heirs—all distant cousins—on the ground that he
was still alive in another time-dimension and might well return some day. Against him was arrayed
the legal talent of one of the cousins, Ernest B. Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years Carter’s
senior, but keen as a youth in forensic battles. For four years the contest had raged, but
now the time for apportionment had come, and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to be
the scene of the arrangements.
It was the home of Carter’s literary and financial executor—the
distinguished Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny.
Carter had met de Marigny during the war, when they both served in the French Foreign Legion,
and had at once cleaved to him because of their similar tastes and outlook. When, on a memorable
joint furlough, the learned young Creole had taken the wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in
the south of France, and had shewn him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial
crypts that burrow beneath that brooding, aeon-weighted city, the friendship was forever sealed.
Carter’s will had named de Marigny as executor, and now that vivid scholar was reluctantly
presiding over the settlement of the estate. It was sad work for him, for like the old Rhode-Islander
he did not believe that Carter was dead. But what weight have the dreams of mystics against
the harsh wisdom of the world?
Around the table in that strange room in the old French quarter sat the men
who claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal advertisements of
the conference in papers wherever Carter heirs were thought to live, yet only four now sat listening
to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubbling
of the courtyard fountain beyond half-curtained, fanlighted windows. As the hours wore on the
faces of the four were half-shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods, which, piled recklessly
with fuel, seemed to need less and less attention from the silently gliding and increasingly
nervous old negro.
There was Etienne de Marigny himself—slim, dark, handsome, moustached,
and still young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced, side-whiskered,
and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, grey, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and
stoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-committal in age—lean, and with a dark, bearded,
singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahmin
and having night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance
behind the features. He had announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benares
with important information to give; and both de Marigny and Phillips—who had corresponded
with him—had been quick to recognise the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. His
speech had an oddly forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal
apparatus; yet his language was as easy, correct, and idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon’s.
In general attire he was the normal European civilian, but his loose clothes sat peculiarly
badly on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large white mittens gave him
an air of exotic eccentricity.
De Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter’s car, was speaking.
“No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr. Phillips,
here, also gives it up. Col. Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks nothing at all
like the hieroglyphs on that Easter Island wooden club. The carvings on that box, though, do
strongly suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing I can recall to these parchment characters—notice
how all the letters seem to hang down from horizontal word-bars—is the writing in a book
poor Harley Warren once had. It came from India while Carter and I were visiting him in 1919,
and he never would tell us anything about it. Said it would be better if we didn’t know,
and hinted that it might have come originally from some place other than the earth. He took
it with him in December when he went down into the vault in that old graveyard—but neither
he nor the book ever came to the surface again. Some time ago I sent our friend here—the
Swami Chandraputra—a memory-sketch of some of those letters, and also a photostatic copy
of the Carter parchment. He believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain references
and consultations.
“But the key—Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious arabesques
were not letters, but seem to have belonged to the same culture-tradition as the hieroglyphs
on the parchment. Carter always spoke of being on the point of solving the mystery, though he
never gave details. Once he grew almost poetic about the whole business. That antique Silver
Key, he said, would unlock the successive doors that bar our free march down the mighty corridors
of space and time to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shaddad with his terrific
genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petraea the prodigious domes and uncounted
minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved dervishes—wrote Carter—and thirst-crazed
nomads have returned to tell of that monumental portal, and of the Hand that is sculptured above
the keystone of the arch, but no man has passed and returned to say that his footprints on the
garnet-strown sands within bear witness to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for which
the Cyclopean sculptured Hand vainly grasps.
“Why Carter didn’t take the parchment as well as the key, we cannot
say. Perhaps he forgot it—or perhaps he forbore to take it through recollection of one
who had taken a book of like characters into a vault and never returned. Or perhaps it was really
immaterial to what he wished to do.”
As de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke in a harsh, shrill voice.
“We can know of Randolph Carter’s wandering only what we dream.
I have been to many strange places in dreams, and have heard many strange and significant things
in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai. It does not appear that the parchment was needed, for certainly
Carter reëntered the world of his boyhood dreams, and is now a king in Ilek-Vad.”
Mr. Aspinwall grew doubly apoplectic-looking as he sputtered.
“Can’t somebody shut that old fool up? We’ve had enough of
these moonings. The problem is to divide the property, and it’s about time we got to it.”
For the first time Swami Chandraputra spoke in his queerly alien voice.
“Gentlemen, there is more to this matter than you think. Mr. Aspinwall
does not do well to laugh at the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has taken an incomplete view—perhaps
because he has not dreamed enough. I, myself, have done much dreaming—we in India have
always done that, just as all the Carters seem to have done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall, as a maternal
cousin, are naturally not a Carter. My own dreams, and certain other sources of information,
have told me a great deal which you still find obscure. For example, Randolph Carter forgot
that parchment—which he couldn’t then decipher—yet it would have been well
for him had he remembered to take it. You see, I have really learned pretty much what happened
to Carter after he left his car with the Silver Key at sunset on that seventh of October, four
years ago.”
Aspinwall audibly sneered, but the others sat up with heightened interest.
The smoke from the tripods increased, and the crazy ticking of that coffin-shaped clock seemed
to fall into bizarre patterns like the dots and dashes of some alien and insoluble telegraph
message from outer space. The Hindoo leaned back, half closed his eyes, and continued in that
oddly laboured yet idiomatic voice, while before his audience there began to float a picture
of what had happened to Randolph Carter.
II.
The hills behind Arkham are full of a strange magic—something, perhaps, which the old
wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth when
he fled there from Salem in 1692. As soon as Randolph Carter was back among them he knew that
he was close to one of the gates which a few audacious, abhorred, and alien-souled men have
blasted through titan walls betwixt the world and the outside absolute. Here, he felt, and on
this day of the year, he could carry out with success the message he had deciphered months before
from the arabesques of that tarnished and incredibly ancient Silver Key. He knew now how it
must be rotated, how it must be held up to the setting sun, and what syllables of ceremony must
be intoned into the void at the ninth and last turning. In a spot as close to a dark polarity
and induced gate as this, it could not fail in its primary function. Certainly, he would rest
that night in the lost boyhood for which he had never ceased to mourn.
He got out of the car with the key in his pocket, walking uphill deeper and
deeper into the shadowy core of that brooding, haunted countryside of winding road, vine-grown
stone wall, black woodland, gnarled, neglected orchard, gaping-windowed, deserted farmhouse,
and nameless ruin. At the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport gleamed in the ruddy
blaze, he took out the key and made the needed turnings and intonations. Only later did he realise
how soon the ritual had taken effect.
Then in the deepening twilight he had heard a voice out of the past. Old Benijah
Corey, his great-uncle’s hired man. Had not old Benijah been dead for thirty years? Thirty
years before when? What was time? Where had he been? Why was it strange that Benijah should
be calling him on this seventh of October, 1883? Was he not out later than Aunt Martha had told
him to stay? What was this key in his blouse pocket, where his little telescope—given
him by his father on his ninth birthday two months before—ought to be? Had he found it
in the attic at home? Would it unlock the mystic pylon which his sharp eye had traced amidst
the jagged rocks at the back of that inner cave behind the Snake-Den on the hill? That was the
place they always coupled with old Edmund Carter the wizard. People wouldn’t go there,
and nobody but him had ever noticed or squirmed through the root-choked fissure to that great
black inner chamber with the pylon. Whose hands had carved that hint of a pylon out of the living
rock? Old Wizard Edmund’s—or others that he had conjured up and commanded?
That evening little Randolph ate supper with Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha in the old gambrel-roofed
farmhouse.
Next morning he was up early, and out through the twisted-boughed apple orchard
to the upper timber-lot where the mouth of the Snake-Den lurked black and forbidding amongst
grotesque, overnourished oaks. A nameless expectancy was upon him, and he did not even notice
the loss of his handkerchief as he fumbled in his blouse pocket to see if the queer Silver Key
was safe. He crawled through the dark orifice with tense, adventurous assurance, lighting his
way with matches taken from the sitting-room. In another moment he had wriggled through the
root-choked fissure at the farther end, and was in the vast, unknown inner grotto whose ultimate
rock wall seemed half like a monstrous and consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, dripping
wall he stood silent and awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed. Was that stony
bulge above the keystone of the imagined arch really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then he drew
forth the Silver Key, and made motions and intonations whose source he could only dimly remember.
Was anything forgotten? He knew only that he wished to cross the barrier to the untrammelled
land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute.
III.
What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions,
and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic dreams,
and are taken as matters of course till we