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Through the Gates of the Silver Key
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1934
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Short Stories
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
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About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
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(1926)
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(1931)
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(1928)
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(1934)
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(1931)
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(1936)
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(1930)
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(1927)
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(1938)
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(1932)
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Chapter
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In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with
Bonkhata rugs of impressive age and workmanship, four men were sit-
ting around a document-strewn table. From the far corners, where odd
tripods of wrought iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly
aged Negro in somber 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 then
at hand. For there, 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 tedi-
um 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 re-
corded 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 forebears had come. And
it was amid these ancient, cryptically brooding hills that he had ulti-
mately 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 indecipherable parchments and queerly figured silver key
which that box had contained: matters of which Carter had also written
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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 gates 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 forebears
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. Ed-
mund 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 - pre-
sumably with Carter. Further than that there was no certain clue. Detect-
ives 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 hid had for it
when a boy. In Carter's boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed
homestead was still standing and tenanted by his great-uncle Christoph-
er. 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
shown 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 a 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 the copious seepage. Only the
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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 atten-
tion to whispers that spoke of stubby little tracks like those which Ran-
dolph 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 heelless 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 un-
lock the gates 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 Octo-
ber 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 pub-
lished 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 Gniorri 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 K. 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 arrangement.
It was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor - the distin-
guished 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
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