




                  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.