"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.