H.P. Lovecraft. Through the Gates of the Silver Key

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 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.

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 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, 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 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.

For the rite of the silver key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that
black, haunted cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the
first gesture and syllable an aura of strange, awesome mutation was
apparent - a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and
space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognize as motion and
duration. Imperceptibly, such things as age and location ceased to have
any significance whatever. The day before, Randolph Carter had
miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinction between
boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain
store of images which had lost all connection with terrestrial scenes and
circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an inner
cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured
hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave;
neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not
so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph
Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind
revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he
received them.

By the time the rite was over, Carter knew that he was in no region whose
place could be told by Earth's geographers, and in no age whose date
history could fix; for the nature of what was happening was not wholly
unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it in the cryptical Pnakotic
fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad
Arab, Abdul Alhazred, had taken on significance when he had deciphered the
designs graven on the silver key. A gate had been unlocked - not, indeed,
the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth and time to that extension
of Earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate
leads fearsomely and perilously to the last Void which is outside all
earths, all universes, and all matter.

There would be a Guide - and a very terrible one; a Guide who had been an
entity of Earth millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and
when forgotten shapes moved on a steaming planet building strange cities
among whose last, crumbling ruins the first mammals were to play. Carter
remembered what the monstrous Necronomicon had vaguely and disconcertingly
adumbrated concerning that Guide:

"And while there are those," the mad Arab had written, "who have dared to
seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as guide, they would have
been more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in
the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may
those who pass ever return, for in the vastnesses transcending our world
are shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The Affair that shambleth
about in the night, the evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that
stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have and that
thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants thereof: - all these
Blacknesses are lesser than HE WHO guardeth the Gateway: HE WHO will guide
the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable devourers.
For He is 'UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth
as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE."

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines
amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and
imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these
things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and
undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into
the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of Earth may
grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs
outside time and the dimensions we know.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which
he somehow linked with Earth's primal, eon-forgotten past. Monstrous
living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork
that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation
and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were
cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts
where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into
space, or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the
images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no
stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position
as his whirling fancy supplied.

He had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where
galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and
elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kied, beyond forgotten
palaces with veined ivory columns that sleep lovely and unbroken under the
moon. Now, intoxicated with wider visions, he scarcely knew what he
sought. Thoughts of infinite and blasphemous daring rose in his mind, and
he knew he would face the dreaded Guide without fear, asking monstrous and
terrible things of him.

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of
stabilization. There were great masses of towering stone, carven into
alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of
some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered from a sky of no assignable
colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently
over what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals
more hexagonal than otherwise, and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined
shapes.

There was another shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed
to glide or float over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not
exactly permanent in outline, but held transient suggestions of something
remotely preceding or paralleling the human form, though half as large
again as an ordinary man. It seemed to be heavily cloaked, like the shapes
on the pedestals, with some neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not
detect any eye-holes through which it might gaze. Probably it did not need
to gaze, for it seemed to belong to an order of beings far outside the
merely physical in organization and faculties.

A moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to
his mind without sound or language. And though the name it uttered was a
dreaded and terrible one, Randolph Carter did not flinch in fear.

Instead, he spoke back, equally without sound or language, and made those
obeisances which the hideous Necronomicon had taught him to make. For this
shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since
Lomar rose out of the sea, and the Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth
to teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed the frightful Guide and
Guardian of the Gate - 'UMR AT-TAWIL, the ancient one, which the scribe
rendereth the PROLONGED OF LIFE.

The Guide knew, as he knew all things, of Carter's quest and coming, and
that this seeker of dreams and secrets stood before him unafraid. There
was no horror or malignity in what he radiated, and Carter wondered for a
moment whether the mad Arab's terrific blasphemous hints came from envy
and a baffled wish to do what was now about to be done. Or perhaps the
Guide reserved his horror and malignity for those who feared. As the
radiations continued, Carter eventually interpreted them in the form of
words.

"I am indeed that Most Ancient One," said the Guide, "of whom you know. We
have awaited you - the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though
long delayed. You have the key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now the
Ultimate Gate is ready for your trial. If you fear, you need not advance.
You may still go back unharmed, the way you came. But if you chose to
advance --"

The pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carter
hesitated not a moment, for a burning curiosity drove him on.

"I will advance," he radiated back, "and I accept you as my Guide."

At this reply the Guide seemed to make a sign by certain motions of his
robe which may or may not have involved the lifting of an arm or some
homologous member. A second sign followed, and from his well-learned lore
Carter knew that he was at last very close to the Ultimate Gate. The light
now changed to another inexplicable colour, and the shapes on the
quasi-hexagonal pedestals became more clearly defined. As they sat more
erect, their outlines became more like those of men, though Carter knew
that they could not be men. Upon their cloaked heads there now seemed to
rest tall, uncertainly coloured miters, strangely suggestive of those on
certain nameless figures chiseled by a forgotten sculptor along the living
cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary; while grasped in certain
folds of their swathings were long sceptres whose carven heads bodied
forth a grotesque and archaic mystery.

Carter guessed what they were and whence they came, and Whom they served;
and guessed, too, the price of their service. But he was still content,
for at one mighty venture he was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is
but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn
all who can see, even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceit
of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could
pause from their everlasting dreams to wreack a wrath on mankind. As well,
he might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. Now
the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him
with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres and radiating a message
which he understood:

"We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring
has made you one of us."

Carter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the
Most Ancient One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another
pedestal, taller than the rest, and at the center of the oddly curved line
- neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola - which they
formed, This, he guessed, was the Guide's own throne. Moving and rising in
a manner hardly definable, Carter took his seat; and as he did so he saw
that the Guide had seated himself.

Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was
holding something - some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe
as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked
Companions. It was a large sphere, or apparent sphere, of some obscurely
iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive
half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed
to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of Earth. There was a
suggestion of chanting or what human imagination might interpret as
chanting. Presently the quasi-sphere began to grow luminous, and as it
gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable colour, Carter saw
that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all
the mitered, scepter-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight,
curious swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of
unclassifiable light - resembling that of the quasi-sphere - played around
their shrouded heads.

The Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall,
coffin-shaped clock with the four hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy
ticking followed no known rhythm of Earth.

"You, Mr. de Marigny," he suddenly said to his learned host, "do not need
to be told the particularly alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on
the hexagonal pillars chanted and nodded. You are the only one else - in
America - who has had a taste of the Outer Extension. That clock - I
suppose it was sent to you by the Yogi poor Harley Warren used to talk
about -- the seer who said that he alone of living men had been to
Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng, and had borne certain things
away from that dreadful and forbidden city. I wonder how many of its
subtler properties you know? If my dreams and readings be correct, it was
made by those who knew much of the First Gateway. But let me go on with my
tale."

At last, continued the Swami, the swaying and the suggestion of chanting
ceased, the lambent nimbuses around the now drooping and motionless heads
faded, while the cloaked shapes slumped curiously on their pedestals. The
quasi-sphere, however, continued to pulsate with inexplicable light.
Carter felt that the Ancient Ones were sleeping as they had been when he
first saw them, and he wondered out of what cosmic dreams his coming had
aroused them. Slowly there filtered into his mind the truth that this
strange chanting ritual had been one of instruction, and that the
Companions had been chanted by the Most Ancient One into a new and
peculiar kind of sleep in order that their dreams might open the Ultimate
Gate to which the silver key was a passport. He knew that in the
profundity of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbed vastnesses
of utter and absolute outsideness, and that they were to accomplish that
which his presence had demanded.

The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving
instructions in some subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting
images of those things which he wished the Companions to dream: and Carter
knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured the prescribed thought,
there would be born the nucleus of a manifestation visible to his earthly
eyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes had achieved a oneness, that
manifestation would occur, and everything he required be materialized,
through concentration. He had seen such things on Earth - in India, where
the combined, projected will of a circle of adepts can make a thought take
tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaanat, of which few even dare speak.

Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could
not be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was
conscious of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful silver key
in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess
the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were
irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the
Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.

For the first time Carter realized how terrific utter silence, mental and
physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some
perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the Earth's
dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon
everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath, and
the glow of 'Umr at-Tawil's quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and
unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round
the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the
terrible Guide.

A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a
thousandfold. The strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the most
impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses while about the Ancient
Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there hovered an air of
the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into
immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his
face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of
drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A
great fear clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse of surging sea
lapping against its far off coast. But the moment of silence was broken -
the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical
sound or articulate words.

"The Man of Truth is beyond good and evil," intoned the voice that was not
a voice. 'The Man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The Man of Truth has
learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great
Impostor."

And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so
irresistibly drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not
unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave
within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensioned Earth.
He realized that he had been using the silver key - moving it in accord
with an unlearned and instinctive ritual closely akin to that which had
opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped his cheeks was,
he realized, no more or less than the adamantine mass of the solid wall
yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought with which the
Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind
determination, he floated forward - and through the Ultimate Gate.

Chapter Four

Randolph Carter's advance through the cyclopean bulk of masonry was like a
dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From
a great distance he felt triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness,
and after that the rustling of great wings, and impressions of sound like
the chirpings and murmurings of objects unknown on Earth or in the solar
system. Glancing backward, he saw not one gate alone but a multiplicity of
gates, at some of which clamoured Forms he strove not to remember.

And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the
Forms could give - a terror from which he could not flee because it was
connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of
stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and about
his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but it had not
disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed
point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he
realized in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but
many persons.

He was in many places at the same time. On Earth, on October 7, 1883, a
little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den in the hushed
evening light and running down the rocky slope, and through the
twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher's house in the hills
beyond Arkham; yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the
earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting
on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth's transdimensional
extension, Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter, in the unknown and
formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, in a chaos
of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him
close to the brink of madness, were a limitless confusion of beings which
he knew were as much himself as the local manifestation now beyond the
Ultimate Gate.

There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age
of Earth's history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending
knowledge, suspicion, and credibility; Carters of forms both human and
non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and
vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing in common with
earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets
and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life
drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally
himself. Some of the glimpses recalled dreams - both faint and vivid,
single and persistent - which he had had through the long years since he
first began to dream; and a few possessed a haunting, fascinating and
almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.

Faced with this realization, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of
supreme horror - horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of
that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient and abhorred
necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no
doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss
of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be
aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being
distinguished from other beings - that one no longer has a self - that is
the nameless summit of agony and dread.

He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be
sure whether he - the fragment or facet of an entity beyond the Ultimate
Gate - had been that one or some other. His self had been annihilated; and
yet he - if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of
individual existence, be such a thing as he - was equally aware of being
in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was as though his body
had been suddenly transformed into one of those many-limbed and
many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he contemplated the
aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern which was the original and
which the additions - if indeed (supremely monstrous thought!) there were
any original as distinguished from other embodiments.

Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter's
beyond-the-gate fragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of
horror to black, clutching pits of a horror still more profound. This time
it was largely external - a force of personality which at once confronted
and surrounded and pervaded him, and which in addition to its local
presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and likewise to be
co-existent with all time and conterminous with all space. There was no
visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept of combined
localism and identity and infinity lent a paralyzing terror beyond
anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of
existing.

In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of
destroyed individuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless
being and self - not merely a thing of one space-time continuum, but
allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded
sweep - the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches
fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret
cults of Earth had whispered of as Yog-Sothoth, and which has been a deity
under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the
Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an
untranslatable sign - yet in a flash the Carter-facet realized how slight
and fractional all these conceptions are.

And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that
smote and burned and thundered - a concentration of energy that blasted
its recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that paralleled in
an unearthly rhythm the curious swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the
flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the
First Gate. It was as though suns and worlds and universes had converged
upon one point whose very position in space they had conspired to
annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But amidst the greater
terror one lesser terror was diminished; for the searing waves appeared
somehow to isolate the Beyond-the-Gate Carter from his infinity of
duplicates - to restore, as it were, a certain amount of the illusion of
identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into
speech-forms known to him, and his sense of horror and oppression waned.
Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed
now only ineffably majestic.

"Randolph Carter," it seemed to say, "my manifestations on your planet's
extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have
returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater
freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and curiosities. You
wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten ivory cities in
orchid-heavy Kied, and to reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose
fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty toward a single red star
in a firmament alien to your Earth and to all matter. Now, with the
passing of two Gates, you wish loftier things. You would not flee like a
child from a scene disliked to a dream beloved, but would plunge like a
man into that last and inmost of secrets which lies behind all scenes and
dreams.

"What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I
have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet - five times only
to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to show you
the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet
before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield
a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil
still unrent before our eyes."

Chapter Five

A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome
silence full of the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed the
illimitable vastness of the void; yet the seeker knew that the Being was
still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental substance he
flung into the abyss: "I accept. I will not retreat."

The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the Being had heard.
And now there poured from that limitless Mind a flood of knowledge and
explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for
such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told
how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and
what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of
up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and
tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human
interests and connections - their hatreds, rages, loves and vanities;
their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faiths
contrary to reason and nature.

While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words
there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with
eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of
dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw
now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of
power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his
senses. From some inconceivable vantagepoint he looked upon prodigious
forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conception of being, size
and boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a
lifetime of cryptical study. He began to understand dimly why there could
exist at the same time the little boy Randolph Carter in the Arkham
farm-house in 1883, the misty form on the vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond
the First Gate, the fragment now facing the Presence in the limitless
abyss, and all the other Carters his fancy or perception envisaged.

Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his
understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his
present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every
figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some
corresponding figure of one more dimension - as a square is cut from a
cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions,
are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know
only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of
five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of
archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an
infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing - the three-dimensional
phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where 'Umr
at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as
reality, and band thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality,
it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality
is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is
substance and reality.

Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That
it has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion. Indeed, it is
itself really an illusion, for except to the narrow sight of beings in
limited dimensions there are no such things as past, present and future.
Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet that too is
illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously.

These revelations came with a god like solemnity which left Carter unable
to doubt. Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt
that they must be true in the light of that final cosmic reality which
belies all local perspectives and narrow partial views; and he was
familiar enough with profound speculations to be free from the bondage of
local and partial conceptions. Had his whole quest not been based upon a
faith in the unreality of the local and partial?

After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the
denizens of few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of
their consciousness, which views the external world from various cosmic
angles. As the Shapes produced by the cutting of a cone seem to vary with
the angles of cutting - being circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola
according to that angle, yet without any change in the cone itself - so do
the local aspects of an unchanged - and endless reality seem to change
with the cosmic angle of regarding. To this variety of angles Of
consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since with
rare exceptions they can not learn to control them. Only a few students of
forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have thereby
conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all
angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary
change-involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond
perspective, in accordance with their will.

As the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and
terrifiedly, the ultimate background of that riddle of lost individuality
which had at first so horrified him. His intuition pieced together the
fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of
the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have
come upon him - splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly
counterparts inside the First Gate, had not the magic of 'Umr at-Tawil
kept it from him in order that he might use the silver key with precision
for the Ultimate Gate's opening. Anxious for clearer knowledge, he sent
out waves of thought, asking more of the exact relationship between his
various facets - the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate, the fragment
still on the quasi-hexagonal pedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of
1883, the man of 1928, the various ancestral beings who had formed his
heritage and the bulwark of his ego, amid the nameless denizens of the
other eons and other worlds which that first hideous flash ultimate
perception had identified with him. Slowly the waves of the Being surged
out in reply, trying to make plain what was almost beyond the reach of an
earthly mind.

All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the
waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely
manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space outside
dimensions. Each local being - son, father, grandfather, and so on - and
each stage of individual being - infant, child, boy, man - is merely one
of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, caused
by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it.
Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors, both
human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only
phases of one ultimate, eternal "Carter" outside space and time - phantom
projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of
consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.

A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of
yesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard, Edmund Carter who
fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter
who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol
hordes from Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of those earlier
entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black,
plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythamil, the double planet that
once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a
remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythamil itself, or a
still remoter creature of trans-galactic Stronti, or a four-dimensioned
gaseous consciousness in an older space-time continuum, or a vegetable
brain of the future on a dark, radioactive comet of inconceivable orbit -
so on, in endless cosmic cycle.

The archetype, throbbed the waves, are the people of the Ultimate Abyss -
formless, ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the
low-dimensioned worlds. Chief among such was this informing Being
itself... which indeed was Carter's own archetype. The gutless zeal of
Carter and all his forebears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a natural
result of derivation from the Supreme Archetype. On every world all great
wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists, are facets of It.

Almost stunned with awe, and with a kind of terrifying delight, Randolph
Carter's consciousness did homage to that transcendent Entity from which
it was derived. As the waves paused again he pondered in the mighty
silence, thinking of strange tributes, stranger questions, and still
stranger requests. Curious concepts flowed conflictingly through a brain
dazed with unaccustomed vistas and unforeseen disclosures. It occurred to
him that, if these disclosures were literally true, he might bodily visit
all those infinitely distant ages and parts of the universe which he had
hitherto known only in dreams, could he but command the magic to change
the angle of his consciousness-plane. And did not the silver key supply
that magic? Had it not first changed him from a man in 1928 to a boy in
1883, and then to something quite outside time? Oddly, despite his present
apparent absence of body; he knew that the key was still with him.

While the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth the
thoughts and questions which assailed him. He knew that in this ultimate
abyss he was equidistant from every facet of his archetype - human or
non-human, terrestrial or ertra-terrestrial, galactic or tran-galactic;
and his curiosity regarding the other phases of his being - especially
those phases which were farthest from an earthly 1928 in time and space,
or which had most persistently haunted his dreams throughout life - was at
fever beat He felt that his archetypal Entity could at will send him
bodily to any of these phases of bygone and distant life by changing his
consciousness-plane and despite the marvels he had undergone he burned for
the further marvel of walking in the flesh through those grotesque and
incredible scenes which visions of the night had fragmentarily brought
him.

Without definite intention be was asking the Presence for access to a dim,
fantastic world whose five multi-coloured suns, alien constellations,
dizzily black crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers,
unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating cylinders had intruded again
and again upon his slumbers. That world, he felt vaguely, was in all the
conceivable cosmos the one most freely in touch with others; and he longed
to explore the vistas whose beginnings he had glimpsed, and to embark
through space to those still remoter worlds with which the clawed, snouted
denizens trafficked. There was no time for fear. As at all crises of his
strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity triumphed over everything else.

When the waves resumed their awesome pulsing, Carter knew that his
terrible request was granted. The Being was telling him of the nighted
gulfs through which he would have to pass of the unknown quintuple star in
an unsuspected galaxy around which the alien world revolved, and of the
burrowing inner horrors against which the clawed, snouted race of that
world perpetually fought. It told him, too, of how the angle of his
personal consciousness-plane, and the angle of his consciousness-plane
regarding the space-time elements of the sought-for world, would have to
be tilted simultaneously in order to restore to that world the
Carter-facet which had dwelt there.

The Presence wanted him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to
return from the remote and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated back
an impatient affirmation; confident that the silver key, which he felt was
with him and which he knew had tilted both world and personal planes in
throwing him back to 1883, contained those symbols which were meant. And
now the Being, grasping his impatience signified its readiness to
accomplish the monstrous precipitation. The waves abruptly ceased, and
there supervened a momentary stillness tense with nameless and dreadful
expectancy.

Then, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a
terrific thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an
intense concentration of energy which smote and hammered and seared
unbearably in the now-familiar rhythm of outer space, and which he could
not classify as either the blasting heat of a blazing star, or the
all-petrifying cold of the ultimate abyss. Bands and rays of colour
utterly foreign to any spectrum of our universe played and wove and
interlaced before him, and he was conscious of a frightful velocity of
motion. He caught one fleeting glimpse of a figure sitting alone upon a
cloudy throne more hexagonal than otherwise...

Chapter Six

As the Hindoo paused in his story he saw that de Marigny and Phillips were
watching him absorbedly. Aspinwall pretended to ignore the narrative and
kept his eyes ostentatiously on the papers before him. The alien-rhythmed
ticking of the coffin-shaped clock took on a new and portentous meaning,
while the fumes from the choked, neglected tripods wove themselves into
fantastic and inexplicable shapes, and formed disturbing combinations with
the grotesque figures of the draft-swayed tapestries. The old Negro who
had tended them was gone - perhaps some growing tension had frightened him
out of the house. An almost apologetic hesitancy hampered the speaker as
he resumed in his oddly labored yet idiomatic voice.

"You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe," he said, "but
you will find the tangible and material things ahead still barer. That is
the way of our minds. Marvels are doubly incredible when brought into
three dimensions from the vague regions of possible dream. I shall not try
to tell you much - that would be another and very different story. I will
tell only what you absolutely have to know."

Carter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm, had
found himself in what for a moment he thought was his old insistent dream.
He was, as many a night before, walking amidst throngs of clawed, snouted
beings through the streets of a labyrinth of inexplicably fashioned metal
under a plate of diverse solar colour; and as he looked down he saw that
his body was like those of the others - rugose, partly squamous, and
curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect-like yet not without a
caricaturish resemblance to the human outline. The silver key was still in
his grasp, though held by a noxious-looking claw.

In another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he felt rather as one just
awakened from a dream. The ultimate abyss - the Being - the entity of
absurd, outlandish race called Randolph Carter on a world of the future
not yet born - some of these things were parts of the persistent recurrent
dreams of the wizard Zkauba on the planet Yaddith. They were too
persistent - they interfered with his duties in weaving spells to keep the
frightful Dholes in their burrows, and became mixed up with his
recollections of the myriad real worlds he had visited in light-beam
envelopes. And now they had become quasi-real as never before. This heavy,
material silver key in his right upper claw, exact image of one he had
dreamt about meant no good. He must rest and reflect, and consult the
tablets of Nhing for advice on what to do. Climbing a metal wall in a lane
off the main concourse, he entered his apartment and approached the rack
of tablets.

Seven day-fractions later Zkauba squatted on his prism in awe and half
despair, for the truth had opened up a new and conflicting set of
memories. Nevermore could he know the peace of being one entity. For all
time and space he was two: Zkauba the wizard of Yaddith, disgusted with
the thought of the repellent earth-mammal Carter that he was to be and had
been, and Randolph Carter, of Boston on the Earth, shivering with fright
at the clawed, mantel thing which he had once been, and had become again.

The time units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami - whose laboured voice
was beginning to show signs of fatigue - made a tale in themselves which
could not be related in brief compass. There were trips to Stronti and
Mthura and Kath, and other worlds in the twenty-eight galaxies accessible
to the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith, and trips back
and forth through eons of time with the aid of the silver key and various
other symbols known to Yaddith's wizards. There were hideous struggles
with the bleached viscous Dholes in the primal tunnels that honeycombed
the planet. There were awed sessions in libraries amongst the massed lore
of ten thousand worlds living and dead. There were tense conferences with
other minds of Yaddith, including that of the Arch-Ancient Buo. Zkauba
told no one of what had befallen his personality, but when the Randolph
Carter facet was uppermost he would study furiously every possible means
of returning to the Earth and to human form, and would desperately
practice human speech with the alien throat-organs so ill adapted to it.

The Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the silver key was
unable to effect his return to human form. It was, as he deduced too late
from things he remembered, things he dreamed, and things he inferred from
the lore of Yaddith, a product of Hyperborea on Earth; with power over the
personal consciousness-angles of human beings alone. It could, however,
change the planetary angle and send the user at will through time in an
unchanged body. There had been an added spell which gave it limitless
powers it otherwise lacked; but this, too, was a human discovery -
peculiar to a spatially unreachable region, and not to be duplicated by
the wizards of Yaddith. It had been written on the undecipherable
parchment in the hideously carven box with the silver key, and Carter
bitterly lamented that he had left it behind. The now inaccessible Being
of the abyss had warned him to be sure of his symbols, and had doubtless
thought he lacked nothing.

As time wore on he strove harder and harder to utilize the monstrous lore
of Yaddith in finding a way back to the abyss and the omnipotent Entity.
With his new knowledge be could have done much toward reading the cryptic
parchment; but that power, under present conditions, was merely ironic.
There were times, however, when the Zkauba-facet was uppermost and when he
strove to erase the conflicting Carter-memories which troubled him.

Thus long spaces of time wore on - ages longer than the brain of man could
grasp, since the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged cycles. After
many hundreds of revolutions the Carter-facet seemed to gain on the
Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast periods calculating the distance of
Yaddith in space and time from the human Earth that was to be. The figures
were staggering eons of light-years beyond counting but the immemorial
lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp such things. He cultivated the
power of dreaming himself momentarily Earthward, and learned many things
about our planet that he had never known before. But he could not dream
the needed formula on the missing parchment.

Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith - which began

Lovecrafts Work Through the Gates of the Silver Key

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