Lovecraft, H P & Price, E Hoffmann - Through The Gates Of The Silver Key

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Through the Gates of the Silver Key

by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price

Written Oct 1932-Apr 1933

Published July 1934 in Weird Tales, Vol. 24, No. 1, p. 60-85.

Chapter One

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bonkhata rugs of

impressive age and workmanship, four men were sitting 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 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 forebears had come. And it was amid these 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 indecipherable 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 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

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

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

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 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 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 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 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 unlock 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

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.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

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 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 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 shown him certain terrible secrets in the nighted

and immemorial crypts that burrow beneath that brooding, eon-weighted city, the

friendship was forever sealed. Carter's will had named de Marigny as executor, and now

that avid 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 had 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's 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, fan-lighted

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, mustached, and still

young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced, side-

whiskered, and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, gray, long-nosed, clean-

shaven, and stoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-committal in age - lean, with a

dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the turban of

a high-caste Brahman 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

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

both de Marigny and Phillips - who had corresponded with him - had been quick to

recognize 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. Colonel Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks nothing at all like

the hieroglyphics on that Easter Island war-club. The carvings on that box, though, do

strangely 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-bar - 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 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 Pettraea 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 retraced his

steps to say that his footprints on the garnet-strewn 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 can not 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 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,

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

beyond the River Skai. It does not appear that the parchment was needed, for certainly

Carter reentered 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 the

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 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 labored yet idiomatic speech, while before his audience there began to float

a picture of what had happened to Randolph Carter.

Chapter Two

The hills beyond 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, and 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 functions 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 up-hill 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

farm-house, and nameless nun. At the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

gleamed in the ruddy blaze, he took out the key and made the needed turnings and

intonations. Only later did he realize 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 farm-house.

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 untrammeled

land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolved in the absolute.

Chapter Three

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 return to our narrow, rigid,

objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic. As the Hindoo continued

his tale, he had difficulty in avoiding what seemed - even more than the notion of a man

transferred through the years to boyhood - an air of trivial, puerile extravagance. Mr.

Aspinwall, in disgust, gave an apoplectic snort and virtually stopped listening.

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ThroughtheGatesoftheSilverKeyThroughtheGatesoftheSilverKeybyH.P.LovecraftandE.HoffmannPriceWrittenOct1932-Apr1933PublishedJuly1934inWeirdTales,Vol.24,No.1,p.60-85.ChapterOneInavastroomhungwithstrangelyfiguredarrasandcarpetedwithBonkhatarugsofimpressiveageandworkmanship,fourmenweresittingaroundadocum...

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