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by H. P. Lovecraft
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Title: Through the gates of the silver key
Authors: H. P. Lovecraft
E. Hoffmann Price
Release Date: July 11, 2023 [eBook #71167]
Language: English
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE GATES OF THE
SILVER KEY ***
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
By H. P. LOVECRAFT and E. HOFFMANN PRICE
_A colossal story of cosmic scope by two of the
greatest writers of weird fiction in the world today._
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key," published complete in this
issue, is an utterly amazing novelette. It is much more than a mere
piece of fiction, for it so far transcends human experiences, and even
the wildest dreams of human beings, that the ideas and thoughts set
forth in the tale are titanic. One searches the dictionaries in vain
for words to describe this brilliant and astounding tale, which for
sheer imaginative daring goes beyond anything ever printed before. It
is the joint product of two of your most popular authors.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales July 1934.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER 1
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with
Boukhara rugs of impressive age and workmanship, four men were sitting
around a document-strown table. From the far corners, where odd tripods
of wrought iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged
negro in 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 undecipherable parchments and queerly figured silver key
which that box had contained: matters of which Carter had also written
to others. Carter, he said, had told him that this key had come down
from his ancestors, and that it would help him to unlock the 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 had had for it when
a boy. In Carter's boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead was
still standing and tenanted by his great-uncle Christopher. He had
visited there often, and had talked singularly about the Snake Den.
People remembered what he had said about a deep fissure and an unknown
inner cave beyond, and speculated on the change he had 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 an
uncanny knack at prophesying future events.
* * * * *
It had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was
quite able to trace his footprints from the car. Inside the Snake Den
all was amorphous liquid mud, owing to 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 Gnorri build their singular
labyrinths.
It was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the
apportionment of Carter's estate to his heirs--all distant cousins--on
the ground that he was still alive in another time-dimension and might
well return some day. Against him was arrayed the legal talent of
one of the cousins, Ernest 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 arrangements.
It was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor--the
distinguished Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities,
Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. Carter had met de Marigny during the war,
when they both served in the French Foreign Legion, and had at once
cleaved to him because of their similar tastes and outlook. When, on
a memorable joint furlough, the learned young Creole had taken the
wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and had
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 have the dreams
of mystics against the harsh wisdom of the world?
* * * * *
Around the table in that strange room in the old French Quarter sat
the men who claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been
the usual legal advertisements of the conference in papers wherever
Carter'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 strongly
suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing I can recall to these
parchment characters--notice how all the letters seem to hang down
from horizontal word-bars--is the writing in a book poor Harley Warren
once had. It came from India while Carter and I were visiting him in
1919, and he never would tell us anything about it--said it would be
better if we didn't know, and hinted that it might have come originally
from some place other than the Earth. He took it with him in December,
when he went down into the vault in that old graveyard--but neither
he nor the book ever came to the surface again. Some time ago I sent
our friend here--the Swami Chandraputra--a memory-sketch of some of
those letters, and also a photostatic copy of the Carter parchment. He
believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain references
and consultations.
"But the key--Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious
arabesques were not letters, but seem to have belonged to the same
culture-tradition as the 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 Petræa the prodigious
domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved
darvishes--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-strown sands within bear witness
to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for which the cyclopean
sculptured hand vainly grasps.
"Why Carter didn't take the parchment as well as the key, we 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 in a harsh, shrill voice.
"We can know of Randolph Carter's wandering only what we dream. I have
been to many strange places in dreams, and have heard many strange and
significant things in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai. It does not appear
that the parchment was needed, for certainly Carter re-entered the
world of his boyhood dreams, and is now a king in Ilek-Vad."
Mr. Aspinwall grew doubly apoplectic-looking as he sputtered: "Can't
somebody shut that old fool up? We've had enough of these moonings. The
problem is to divide the property, and it's about time we got to it."
For the first time Swami Chandraputra spoke in his queerly alien voice.
"Gentlemen, there is more to this matter than you think. Mr. Aspinwall
does not do well to laugh at the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has
taken an incomplete view--perhaps because he has not dreamed enough.
I, myself, have done much dreaming. We in India have always done that,
just as all the Carters seem to have done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall, as a
maternal cousin, are naturally not a Carter. My own dreams, and certain
other sources of information, have told me a great deal which you
still find obscure. For example, Randolph Carter forgot that parchment
which he couldn't 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 2
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 farmhouse, and
nameless ruin. At the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport
gleamed in the ruddy blaze, he took out the key and made the needed
turnings and intonations. Only later did he 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 farmhouse.
Next morning he was up early and out through the twisted-boughed apple
orchard to the upper timber-lot where the mouth of the Snake Den
lurked black and forbidding amongst grotesque, over-nourished oaks. A
nameless expectancy was upon him, and he did not even notice the loss
of his handkerchief as he fumbled in his blouse pocket to see if the
queer silver key was safe. He crawled through the dark orifice with
tense, adventurous assurance, lighting his way with matches taken
from the sitting-room. In another moment he had wriggled through the
root-choked fissure at the farther end, and was in the vast, unknown
inner grotto whose ultimate rock wall seemed half like a monstrous and
consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, dripping wall he stood
silent and awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed.
Was that stony bulge above the keystone of the imagined arch really a
gigantic sculptured hand? Then he drew forth the silver key, and made
motions and intonations whose source he could only dimly remember. Was
anything forgotten? He knew only that he wished to cross the barrier to
the untrammelled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions
dissolved in the absolute.
CHAPTER 3
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 practised 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 Kled,
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 down from
a sky of no assignable color 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-colored 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 choose 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 color, 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 colored miters, strangely suggestive
of those on certain nameless figures chiselled 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 scepters 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 wreak a
wrath on mankind. As well, he thought, 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 scepters 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 color, 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 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
Atlaanât, 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 center 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 a 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 4
Randolph Carter's advance through that cyclopean bulk of masonry was
like a dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the
stars. From a great distance he felt triumphant, god-like 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 clamored
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 or 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 nebulæ 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 Kled, 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 filament 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 your eyes."
CHAPTER 5
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 vantage-point 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 farmhouse 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 brand 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, and the nameless denizens of the other eons and other worlds which
that first hideous flash of 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, radio-active comet of inconceivable orbit--and so on, in endless
cosmic cycle.
The archetypes, 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 glutless 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 extra-terrestrial,
galactic or trans-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 heat. 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 he was asking the Presence for access
to a dim, fantastic world whose five multicolored 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 warned 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 color
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 6
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
harder. 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 blaze of diverse solar color;
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, snouted thing which he had once been, and
had become again.
The time units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami--whose labored 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 practise 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 warmed 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 he 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 when he found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always
dormant, yet without dissolution of the knowledge and memories of
Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let him perform a
voyage with a light-wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had
ever performed--a _bodily_ voyage through nameless eons and across
incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the Earth itself.
Once on Earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he
might be able somehow to find--and finish deciphering--the strangely
hieroglyphed parchment he had left in the car at Arkham; and with its
aid--and the key's--resume his normal terrestrial semblance.
He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he
had brought the planet-angle to the right eon (a thing impossible
to do while hurtling through space), Yaddith would be a dead world
dominated by triumphant Dholes, and that his escape in the light-wave
envelope would be a matter of grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of
how he must achieve suspended animation, in the manner of an adept, to
endure the eon-long flight through fathomless abysses. He knew, too,
that--assuming his voyage succeeded--he must immunize himself to the
bacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to a body from Yaddith.
Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human shape on Earth
until he might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that shape
in truth. Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed by
the people in horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be
some gold--luckily obtainable on Yaddith--to tide him over that period
of quest.
Slowly Carter's plans went forward. He provided a light-wave
envelope of abnormal toughness, able to stand both the prodigious
time-transition and the unexampled flight through space. He tested all
his calculations, and sent forth his Earthward dreams again and again,
bringing them as close as possible to 1928. He practised suspended
animation with marvelous success. He discovered just the bacterial
agent he needed, and worked out the varying gravity-stress to which
he must become used. He artfully fashioned a waxen mask and loose
costume enabling him to pass among men as a human being of a sort,
and devised a doubly potent spell with which to hold back the Dholes
at the moment of his starting from the dead, black Yaddith of the
inconceivable future. He took care, too, to assemble a large supply of
the drugs--unobtainable on Earth--which would keep his Zkauba-facet
in abeyance till he might shed the Yaddith body, nor did he neglect a
small store of gold for earthly use.
The starting-day was a time of doubt and apprehension. Carter climbed
up to his envelope-platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple
star Nython, and crawled into the sheath of shining metal. He had just
room to perform the ritual of the silver key, and as he did so he
slowly started the levitation of his envelope. There was an appalling
seething and darkening of the day, and a hideous racking of pain. The
cosmos seemed to reel irresponsibly, and the other constellations
danced in a black sky.
[Illustration: "Below him the ground was festering with gigantic
Dholes."]
All at once Carter felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar
gulfs gnawed at the outside of his envelope, and he could see that he
floated free in space--the metal building from which he had started
having decayed years before. Below him the ground was festering with
gigantic Dholes; and even as he looked, one reared up several hundred
feet and levelled a bleached, viscous end at him. But his spells were
effective, and in another moment he was falling away from Yaddith,
unharmed.
CHAPTER 7
In that bizarre room in New Orleans, from which the old black servant
had instinctively fled, the odd voice of Swami Chandraputra grew
hoarser still.
"Gentlemen," he continued, "I will not ask you to believe these things
until I have shown you special proof. Accept it, then, as a myth, when
I tell you of the _thousands of light-years--thousands of years of
time, and uncounted billions of miles_ that Randolph Carter hurtled
through space as a nameless, alien entity in a thin envelope of
electron-activated metal. He timed his period of suspended animation
with utmost care, planning to have it end only a few years before the
time of landing on the Earth in or near 1928.
"He will never forget that awakening. Remember, gentlemen, that
before that eon-long sleep _he had lived consciously for thousands of
terrestrial years amidst the alien and horrible wonders of Yaddith_.
There was a hideous gnawing of cold, a cessation of menacing dreams,
and a glance through the eye-plates of the envelope. Stars, clusters,
nebulæ, on every hand--_and at last their outlines bore some kinship
to the constellations of Earth that he knew_.
"Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynarth
and Yuggoth on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the
hellish white fungi that spot it, learned an untellable secret from
the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter, and saw the horror on one of the
satellites, and gazed at the cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars'
ruddy disk. When the Earth drew near he saw it as a thin crescent which
swelled alarmingly in size. He slackened speed, though his sensations
of homecoming made him wish to lose not a moment. I will not try to
tell you of those sensations as I learned them from Carter.
"Well, toward the last Carter hovered about in the Earth's upper air
waiting till daylight came over the Western Hemisphere. He wanted to
land where he had left--near the Snake Den in the hills behind Arkham.
If any of you have been away from home long--and I know one of you
has--I leave it to you how the sight of New England's rolling hills
and great elms and gnarled orchards and ancient stone walls must have
affected him.
"He came down at dawn in the lower meadow of the old Carter place, and
was thankful for the silence and solitude. It was autumn, as when he
had left, and the smell of the hills was balm to his soul. He managed
to drag the metal envelope up the slope of the timber-lot into the
Snake Den, though it would not go through the weed-choked fissure to
the inner cave. It was there also that he covered his alien body with
the human clothing and waxen mask which would be necessary. He kept the
envelope here for over a year, till certain circumstances made a new
hiding-place necessary.
"He walked to Arkham--incidentally practising the management of his
body in human posture and against terrestrial gravity--and got his gold
changed to money at a bank. He also made some inquiries--posing as a
foreigner ignorant of much English--and found that the year was 1930,
only two years after the goal he had aimed at.
"Of course, his position was horrible. Unable to assert his identity,
forced to live on guard every moment, with certain difficulties
regarding food, and with a need to conserve the alien drug which kept
his Zkauba-facet dormant, he felt that he must act as quickly as
possible. Going to Boston and taking a room in the decaying West End,
where he could live cheaply and inconspicuously, he at once established
inquiries concerning Randolph Carter's estate and effects. It was then
that he learned how anxious Mr. Aspinwall, here, was to have the estate
divided, and how valiantly Mr. de Marigny and Mr. Phillips strove to
keep it intact."
The Hindoo bowed, though no expression crossed his dark, tranquil, and
thickly bearded face.
"Indirectly," he continued, "Carter secured a good copy of the missing
parchment and began working on its deciphering. I am glad to say that
I was able to help in all this--for he appealed to me quite early, and
through me came in touch with other mystics throughout the world. I
went to live with him in Boston--a wretched place in Chambers Street.
As for the parchment--I am pleased to help Mr. de Marigny in his
perplexity. To him let me say that the language of those hieroglyphics
is not Naacal, but R'lyehian, which was brought to Earth by the spawn
of Cthulhu countless ages ago. It is, of course, a translation--there
was an Hyperborean original millions of years earlier in the primal
tongue of Tsath-yo.
"There was more to decipher than Carter had looked for, but at no
time did he give up hope. Early this year he made great strides
through a book he imported from Nepal, and there is no question but
that he will win before long. Unfortunately, however, one handicap
has developed--the exhaustion of the alien drug which keeps the
Zkauba-facet dormant. This is not, however, as great a calamity as was
feared. Carter's personality is gaining in the body, and when Zkauba
comes uppermost--for shorter and shorter periods, and now only when
evoked by some unusual excitement--he is generally too dazed to undo
any of Carter's work. He can not find the metal envelope that would
take him back to Yaddith, for although he almost did, once, Carter hid
it anew at a time when the Zkauba-facet was wholly latent. All the harm
he has done is to frighten a few people and create certain nightmare
rumors among the Poles and Lithuanians of Boston's West End. So far, he
has never injured the careful disguise prepared by the Carter-facet,
though he sometimes throws it off so that parts have to be replaced. I
have seen what lies beneath--and it is not good to see.
"A month ago Carter saw the advertisement of this meeting, and knew
that he must act quickly to save his estate. He could not wait to
decipher the parchment and resume his human form. Consequently he
deputed me to act for him.
"Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he is
temporarily in an anomalous condition, but that within two or three
months at the outside he will be able to appear in proper form and
demand the custody of his estate. I am prepared to offer proof if
necessary. Therefore I beg that you will adjourn this meeting for an
indefinite period."
CHAPTER 8
De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotized, while
Aspinwall emitted a series of snorts and bellows. The old attorney's
disgust had by now surged into open rage, and he pounded the table with
an apoplectically veined fist. When he spoke, it was in a kind of bark.
"How long is this foolery to be borne? I've listened an hour to this
madman--this faker--and now he has the damned effrontery to say
Randolph Carter is alive--to ask us to postpone the settlement for no
good reason! Why don't you throw the scoundrel out, de Marigny? Do you
mean to make us all the butts of a charlatan or idiot?"
De Marigny quietly raised his hand and spoke softly.
"Let us think slowly and clearly. This has been a very singular
tale, and there are things in it which I, as a mystic not altogether
ignorant, recognize as far from impossible. Furthermore--since 1930 I
have received letters from the Swami which tally with his account."
As he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.
"Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognize much that
is significant in this story, and I have myself had many oddly
corroborative letters from the Swami during the last two years; but
some of these statements are very extreme. Is there not something
tangible which can be shown?"
At last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and
drawing an object from the pocket of his loose coat as he spoke.
"While none of you here has ever _seen_ the silver key itself, Messrs.
de Marigny and Phillips have seen photographs of it. _Does this look
familiar to you?_"
He fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand,
a heavy key of tarnished silver--nearly five inches long, of unknown
and utterly exotic workmanship, and covered from end to end with
hieroglyphs of the most bizarre description. De Marigny and Phillips
gasped.
"That's it!" cried de Marigny. "The camera doesn't lie. I couldn't be
mistaken!"
But Aspinwall had already launched a reply.
"Fools! What does it prove? If that's really the key that belonged to
my cousin, it's up to this foreigner--this damned nigger--to explain
how he got it! Randolph Carter vanished with the key four years ago.
How do we know he wasn't robbed and murdered? He was half crazy
himself, and in touch with still crazier people.
"Look here, you nigger--where did you get that key? Did you kill
Randolph Carter?"
The Swami's features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the
remote, irisless black eyes behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke
with great difficulty.
"Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of
proof that I _could_ give, but its effect upon everybody would not be
pleasant. Let us be reasonable. Here are some papers obviously written
since 1930, and in the unmistakable style of Randolph Carter."
He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed
it to the sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with
chaotic thoughts and a dawning feeling of supernal wonder.
"Of course the handwriting is almost illegible--but remember that
Randolph Carter now has no hands well adapted to forming human script."
Aspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly
perplexed, but he did not change his demeanor. The room was tense
with excitement and nameless dread, and the alien rhythm of the
coffin-shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny and
Phillips, though the lawyer seemed affected not at all.
Aspinwall spoke again. "These look like clever forgeries. If they
aren't, they may mean that Randolph Carter has been brought under the
control of people with no good purpose. There's only one thing to
do--have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you telephone for the
police?"
"Let us wait," answered their host. "I do not think this case calls for
the police. I have a certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a
mystic of real attainments. He says he is in the confidence of Randolph
Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can answer certain questions which
could be answered only by one in such confidence? I know Carter, and
can ask such questions. Let me get a book which I think will make a
good test."
He turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following
in a kind of automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying
closely the Hindoo who confronted him with abnormally impassive face.
Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily restored the silver key to his
pocket, the lawyer emitted a guttural shout.
"Hey, by Heaven! I've got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don't
believe he's an East Indian at all. That face--it isn't a face, but
a _mask_! I guess his story put that into my head, but it's true. It
never moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges. This fellow's
a common crook! He isn't even a foreigner--I've been watching his
language. He's a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens--he
knows his fingerprints could be spotted. Damn you, I'll pull that thing
off----"
"Stop!" The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond
all mere earthly fright. "I told you there was _another form of proof
which I could give if necessary_, and I warned you not to provoke me to
it. This red-faced old meddler is right--I'm not really an East Indian.
_This face is a mask, and what it covers is not human._ You others have
guessed--I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn't be pleasant if I took
that mask off--let it alone, Ernest. I may as well tell you that _I am
Randolph Carter_."
* * * * *
No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny
and Phillips, across the room, watched the workings of the red face
and studied the back of the turbaned figure that confronted him. The
clock's abnormal ticking was hideous, and the tripod fumes and swaying
arras danced a dance of death. The half-choking lawyer broke the
silence.
"No you don't, you crook--you can't scare me! You've reasons of your
own for not wanting that mask off. Maybe we'd know who you are. Off
with it----"
As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own
clumsily mittened members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and
surprize. De Marigny started toward the two, but paused confused as
the pseudo-Hindoo's shout of protest changed to a wholly inexplicable
rattling and buzzing sound. Aspinwall's red face was furious, and with
his free hand he made another lunge at his opponent's bushy beard.
This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the
whole waxen visage came loose from the turban and clung to the lawyer's
apoplectic fist.
As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips
and de Marigny saw his face convulsed with a wilder, deeper and more
hideous epilepsy of stark panic than ever they had seen on human
countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile released his other
hand and was standing as if dazed, making buzzing noises of a most
abnormal quality. Then the turbaned figure slumped oddly into a posture
scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward
the coffin-shaped clock that ticked out its cosmic and abnormal rhythm.
His now uncovered face was turned away, and de Marigny and Phillips
could not see what the lawyer's act had disclosed. Then their attention
was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the floor. The
spell was broken--but when they reached the old man he was dead.
Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami's receding back, de Marigny saw
one of the great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The
fumes of the olibanum were thick, and all that could be glimpsed of the
revealed hand was something long and black. Before the Creole could
reach the retreating figure, old Mr. Phillips laid a restraining hand
on his shoulder.
"Don't!" he whispered. "We don't know what we're up against. That other
facet, you know--Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith...."
The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the
watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with
the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound.
Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut
after it.
De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and
opened the clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating
out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings.
On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded
mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.
* * * * *
A year passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His
estate is still unsettled. The Boston address from which one "Swami
Chandraputra" sent inquiries to various mystics in 1930-31-32 was
indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortly before the
date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since. He
was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord
thinks the swarthy mask--which was duly exhibited--looks very much
like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connection with the
nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs. The hills behind
Arkham were searched for the "metal envelope," but nothing of the sort
was ever found. However, a clerk in Arkham's First National Bank does
recall a queer turbaned man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in
October, 1930.
De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business.
After all, what was proved? There was a story. There was a key which
might have been forged from one of the pictures Carter had freely
distributed in 1928. There were papers--all indecisive. There was a
masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the
strain and the olibanum fumes that act of vanishing in the clock might
easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of hypnotism.
Reason proclaims the "Swami" a criminal with designs on Randolph
Carter's estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock.
Was it rage _alone_ which caused it? And some things in that story....
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with
olibanum fumes, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny often sits listening
with vague sensations to the abnormal rhythm of that hieroglyphed,
coffin-shaped clock.
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