H.P. Lovecraft. The Silver Key
The Silver Key
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926
Published January 1929 in Weird Tales, Vol. 13, No. 1, p. 41-49, 144.
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly
excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely,
unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened
upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at
last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the
river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans
tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with
veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people.
Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical
relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts
and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is
only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference
betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and
no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears
a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists,
and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him
his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because
their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the
blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from
something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or
existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the
darkness.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the
workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he
complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded
all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into
vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him
instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder
in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had
failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable,
they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred
dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.
So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common
events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies
of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the
animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a
greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven
gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams;
and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and
tragedy.
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and
meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses
contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have
recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the
extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life
of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less
worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly
reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he
became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in
a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or
inconsistency.
In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence
stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on
closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy
triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth
which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors;
or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as
literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting
the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make
earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science
confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might
have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the
sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal
fantasy.
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found
them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty
lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an
aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings
which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the
rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness
are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their
linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer
details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either
denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague
instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their
lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion,
yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more
unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of
fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.
Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness
and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason
rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild
brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had
discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off
priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning
apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude
notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all
Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the
light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with
preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off
the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to
think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present
thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless
universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost
these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic
interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and
pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal
sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous
through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault
with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute
foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their
elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next.
Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had
thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of
childhood and innocence.
Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as
befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading
under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything, but the
love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He
walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista
seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs
and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening
served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him
homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel was only
a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he served
from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought
friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the
sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all
his relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they would not
have understood his mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and
great-uncle Christopher could, and they were long dead.
Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when
dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or
fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not
think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down
all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability
blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The
convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the
myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions
debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social
satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and
because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned
them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he
urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their
sophistication had sapped all their life away.
It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in
the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the
commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their poverty and
barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry
and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender
palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and
muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind
trained above their own level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought
out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into
arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the
secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him
ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his
Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in
appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and
provided with sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound,
taste, and odour.
Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the
blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled
from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and sharing his
studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight in an
unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged where two had entered.
Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his
forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the
hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever
certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors
took him only to the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream
country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of any rest
or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for
dreams.
Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things,
Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of
his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bothered to
keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance a very
curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and
force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered
indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the strange hangings
from his walls and refitting the house as it was in his early boyhood -
purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.
With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his
relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and
sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of
magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years those
slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day things as
the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of something
stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome imminence which took the
form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think
of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often
awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a
quarter of a century.
Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The grey old
scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient
line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive men who
composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt wild secrets
of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph
Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He spoke, too, of that
Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft, and
who had placed in an antique box a great silver key handed down from his
ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to
find that box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid
no hand had raised for two centuries.
In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and
forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot
square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel no
person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise
when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That it
held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's father had
never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means
was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood
that he would find within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of
where and how to use it his grandfather had told him nothing.
An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous
faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity.
Inside, wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a huge key of tarnished
silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any legible explanation
there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only the strange
hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an antique reed. Carter
recognized the characters as those he had seen on a certain papyrus scroll
belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had vanished one
midmght in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he read
this scroll, and Carter shivered now.
But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of
ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though
showing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old
days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken.
They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of
all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source.
Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things,
and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted
Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his
people lay.
In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past
graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and
hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal
windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of
wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an
ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as
the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling
farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and
great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up
his car as he passed it, and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill
where his mother and her fathers before her were born, and where the old
white house still looked proudly across the road at the breathlessly
lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires
of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in
the farthest background.
Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seen
in over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and
at the bend half way up he paused to scan the outspread countryside golden
and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured out by a western sun.
All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in
this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown
solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted
lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, and clumps of faery
forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the
spectral wooded valley dipping down in shadow to dank hollows where
trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted roots.
Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was
seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the
great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed him
utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared the
trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it had been
left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death of his
strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his boyhood he had
revelled through long visits there, and had found weird marvels in the
woods beyond the orchard.
Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the
trees opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of
twilight meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple on Central Hill
in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the little
round windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in deep
shadow again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have come
from childish memory alone, since the old white church had long been torn
down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had read of it with
interest, for the paper had told about some strange burrows or passages
found in the rocky hill beneath.
Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its
familiarity after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle
Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times of his
boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping voice
could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet the tone
was haunting and unmistakable. To think that "Old Benijy" should still be
alive!
"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Wharbe ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt Marthy
plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoon
an' git back afur dark? Randy! Ran... dee!... He's the beatin'est boy fer
runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time a-settin' moonin'
raound that snake-den in the upper timberlot! ... Hey yew, Ran ... dee!"
Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across
his eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be;
had strayed very far away to places where he had not belonged, and was now
inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on the Kingsport steeple,
though he could easily have made it out with his pocket telescope; but he
knew his lateness was something very strange and unprecedented. He was not
sure he had his little telescope with him, and put his hand in his blouse
pocket to see. No, it was not there, but there was the big silver key he
had found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once
about an old unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped
the story abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to tell a child whose
head was already too full of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where
he had found the key, but something seemed very confused. He guessed it
was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing Parks
with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet
about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very
strangely, as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk
little Cockney.
"Ran ... dee! Ran ... dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"
A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on
the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.
"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye
can't answer a body! I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me
long ago! Dun't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over yer bein' off
arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he gits hum! Ye'd orta
know these here woods ain't no fitten place to be traipsin' this hour!
They's things abroad what dun't do nobody no good, as my gran'-sir knowed
afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wunt keep supper no longer!"
So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmered
through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of
small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the Pleiades
twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood black
against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not scold
too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle Chris well
enough to expect such things of the Carter blood. Randolph did not show
his key, but ate his supper in silence and protested only when bedtime
came. He sometimes dreamed better when awake, and he wanted to use that
key.
In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the upper
timberlot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair
by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently around the low-pitched room
with the rag carpet and exposed beams and corner-posts, and smiled only
when the orchard boughs scratched at the leaded panes of the rear window.
The trees and the hills were close to him, and formed the gates of that
timeless realm which was his true country.
Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and
being reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where
the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless knoll.
The floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great lichened rocks
rose vaguely here and there in the dim light like Druid monoliths among
the swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once in his ascent
Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little way off sang runic
incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipans and dryads.
Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded
"snake-den" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had
warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but
Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost
black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond - a haunting sepulchral
place whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious artifice.
On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way with matches
filched from the sitting-room matchsafe, and edging through the final
crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to himself. He could not
tell why he approached the farther wall so confidently, or why he
instinctively drew forth the great silver key as he did so. But on he
went, and when he danced back to the house that night he offered no
excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least the reproofs he gained
for ignoring the noon-tide dinner-horn altogether.
Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that
something occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His
cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his
senior; and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of
1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever
have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which he showed
in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to have picked up
an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things which, though at
the time without meaning, were later found to justify the singular
impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions, new names, and new
events appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now and
then recall wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless
word of undoubted connection with what was then far in the future. He did
not himself understand these words, or know why certain things made him
feel certain emotions; but fancied that some unremembered dream must be
responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when some
traveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends
remembered it when he was almost mortally wounded there in 1916, while
serving with the Foreign Legion in the Great War.
Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately
disappeared. His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently
with his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove off alone in his
car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the key
from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by the
grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he could not
name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his old
ancestral country around Arkham.
Half way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place,
they found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a box of
fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on
it. The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist or
palaeographer has been able to decipher or identify. Rain had long effaced
any possible footprints, though Boston investigators had something to say
about evidences of disturbances among the fallen timbers of the Carter
place. It was, they averred, as though someone had groped about the ruins
at no distant period. A common white handkerchief found among forest rocks
on the hillside beyond cannot be identified as belonging to the missing
man.
There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs,
but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he
is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which
only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has
merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever
come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and
yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow
believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.
I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a
certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond
the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad,
that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking
the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular
labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly,
I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in
its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and
mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.
