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Title: The silver key

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Release date: April 6, 2023 [eBook #70478]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1928

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SILVER KEY ***





                            The SILVER KEY

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Weird Tales January 1929.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams.
Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly
excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely,
unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age
hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by
little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his
galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or
his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where
forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken
under the moon.

He had read too much of things as they are, and talked with too many
people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the
logical relations of things, and analyze the processes which shaped
his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten
that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which
there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those
born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the
other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for
that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly
ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were
inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they
might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of
reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because
their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as
the blind purpose grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something back to
nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of
the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained
the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world.
When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where
magic molded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of
his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight,
they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science,
bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's
dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose
laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and
was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of
our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common
events and emotions of earthly minds were more important than the
fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told
him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic plowman in real
life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its
hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered
from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking
sense of pity and tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle,
and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real
impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then
he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to
use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw
that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and
artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in
beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and
purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see
that even humor is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true
standard of consistency or inconsistency.

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him by the naïve trust of his fathers, for thence
stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only
on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and
prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid
truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its
professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to
keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal
race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly
people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step
of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness
killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had
they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in
their true guise of ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths,
he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not
know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no
standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the
dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly molded our
little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and
evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective,
whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers
think and feel, and whose fine details are different for every race
and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or
transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with
the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously
out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous
pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which
still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety
for those of license and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their
cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while
his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions
tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols
they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their
cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life
has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not
lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those
of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and
impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries.
Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom,
and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the
old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways
were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the
sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed
aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial
settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest;
till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended
usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal
sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous
through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found
fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute
foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their
elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the
next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the
world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the
secrets of childhood and innocence.

Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as
befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams
fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything,
but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and
station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed
because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow
sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the
first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once
known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew
how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred
him but little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion
of France. For a while he sought friends, but soon grew weary of the
crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their
visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and
out of touch with him, for they could not have understood his mental
life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher
could, and they were long dead.

Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off
when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction
or fulfilment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could
not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor
dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear
of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his
faery gardens. The convention of assumed piety spilt mawkishness on
his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant
human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled
allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his
old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to
please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were
very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he
lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all
their life away.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled
in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the
commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their poverty and
barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as
dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender
palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and
muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind
trained above their level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought
out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into
arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about
the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which
disturbed him ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and
furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for
each, hung in appropriate colors, furnished with befitting books and
objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light,
heat, sound, taste, and odor.

Once he heard of a man in the South who was shunned and feared for
the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets
smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and
sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one
midnight in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged
where two had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible
witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had
experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel
roofs, which made him seal for ever certain pages in the diary of a
wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of
reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth;
so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world
grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dream.

Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things,
Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories
of his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bother
to keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance
a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering.
Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and
he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the
strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in
his early boyhood--purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.

With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for
his relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and
sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of
magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years
those slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day
things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a
flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome
immanence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his
childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he
had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and
grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.

Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The gray
old scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their
ancient line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive
men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt
wild secrets of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first
Sir Randolph Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He
spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the
Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver
key handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle
visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak-box of
archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and
forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot
square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel
no person since Edmund Carter had dared open it. It gave forth no noise
when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That
it held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's
father had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron,
and no means was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter
vaguely understood that he would find within it some key to the lost
gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told
him nothing.

An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the
hideous faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced
familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discolored parchment, was a huge
key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any
legible explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and
held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an
antique reed. Carter recognized the characters as those he had seen
on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the
South who had vanished one midnight in a nameless cemetery. The man had
always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered now.

But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box
of ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and
though showing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens
of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not
be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the
mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden
and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge
himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills
to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the
lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past
graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale
and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the
crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic
bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw a group of giant elms
among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before,
and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was
the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little
evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north
side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and did not slacken till
he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her
were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across
the road at the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant
valley, with the distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints
of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthest background.

Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not
seen in over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the
foot, and at the bend half-way up he paused to scan the outspread
countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured
out by a western sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent
dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he
thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced
out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their
tumbled walls, the clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of
purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down
in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled
among swollen and distorted roots.

Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was
seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the
great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed
him utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared
the trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it
had been left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death
of his strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his
boyhood he had reveled through long visits there, and had found weird
marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.

Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in
the trees opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of
twilight meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple on Central
Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the
little round windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in
deep shadow again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have
come from childish memory alone, since the old white church had long
been torn down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had
read of it with interest, for the paper had told about some strange
burrows or passages found in the rocky hill beneath.

Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its
familiarity after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle
Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times of
his boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping
voice could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet
the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To think that "Old Benijy"
should still be alive!

"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Whar be ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt
Marthy plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in
the arternoon an' git back afur dark? Randy! Ran--dee!... He's the
beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time
a-settin' moonin' raound that snake-den in the upper timber-lot!...
Hey, yew, Ran--dee!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand
across his eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought
not to be; had strayed very far away to places where he had not
belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on
the Kingsport steeple, though he could easily have made it out with
his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness was something very
strange and unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope
with him, and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was
not there, but there was the big silver key he had found in a box
somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old
unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story
abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to tell a child whose head was
already too full of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where he
had found the key, but something seemed very confused. He guessed it
was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing Parks
with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet
about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very
strangely, as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk
little cockney.

"Ran--dee! Ran--dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"

A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced
on the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.

"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that
ye can't answer a body? I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a
heerd me long ago! Don't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over
yer bein' off arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he
gets hum! Ye'd orta know these here woods ain't no fitten place to be
traipsin' this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do nobody no good,
as my gran'sir' knowed afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wun't
keep supper no longer!"

So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars
glimmered through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow
light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the
Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof
stood black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and
did not scold too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew
Uncle Chris well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood.
Randolph did not show his key, but ate his supper in silence and
protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes dreamed better when
awake, and he wanted to use that key.

In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the
upper timber-lot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him
into his chair by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently around
the low-pitched room with the rag carpet and exposed beams and
corner-posts, and smiled only when the orchard boughs scratched at the
little leaded panes of the rear window. The trees and the hills were
close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which was his
true country.

Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and
being reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond,
where the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless
knoll. The floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great
lichened rocks rose vaguely here and there in the dim light like druid
monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once
in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little
way off sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and ægipans and
dryads.

Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded
"snake-den" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had
warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but
Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost
black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond--a haunting sepulchral
place whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious
artifice. On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way
with matches filched from the sitting-room match-safe, and edging
through the final crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to
himself. He could not tell why he approached the farther wall so
confidently, or why he instinctively drew forth the great silver key as
he did so. But on he went, and when he danced back to the house that
night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least
the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noontide dinner-horn altogether.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that
something occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His
cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his
senior and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of
1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can
ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which
he showed in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to
have picked up an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things
which, though at the time without meaning, were later found to justify
the singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions,
new names, and new events appeared one by one in the book of history,
people would now and then recall wonderingly how Carter had years
before let fall some careless word of undoubted connection with what
was then far in the future. He did not himself understand these words,
or know why certain things made him feel certain emotions; but fancied
that some unremembered dream must be responsible. It was as early as
1897 that he turned pale when some traveler mentioned the French town
of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it when he was almost
mortally wounded there in 1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion
in the Great War.

Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately
disappeared. His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently
with his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove off alone in
his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the
key from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by
the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he
could not name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his
old ancestral country around Arkham.

Half-way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter
place, they found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it
was a box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen
who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose
characters no linguist or paleographer has been able to decipher or
identify. Rain had long effaced any possible footprints, though Boston
investigators had something to say about evidences of disturbances
among the fallen timbers of the Carter place. It was, they averred,
as though someone had groped about the ruins at no distant period. A
common white handkerchief found among the forest rocks on the hillside
beyond can not be identified as belonging to the missing man.

There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs,
but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe
he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality,
which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think
he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he
will ever come back, I can not say. He wanted the lands of dreams he
had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a
key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.

[Illustration: "There the bearded and finny Gnorri
build their labyrinths."]

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in
a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumored in Ulthar,
beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of
Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass
overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build
their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this
rumor. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great
silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolized
all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.



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