By H. P. LOVECRAFT and E. HOFFMANN PRICE
A colossal story of cosmic scope by two of the greatest writers ofweird fiction in the world today.
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key," published complete in thisissue, is an utterly amazing novelette. It is much more than a merepiece of fiction, for it so far transcends human experiences, and eventhe wildest dreams of human beings, that the ideas and thoughts setforth in the tale are titanic. One searches the dictionaries in vainfor words to describe this brilliant and astounding tale, which forsheer imaginative daring goes beyond anything ever printed before. Itis 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 withBoukhara rugs of impressive age and workmanship, four men were sittingaround a document-strown table. From the far corners, where odd tripodsof wrought iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly agednegro in somber livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while ina deep niche on one side there ticked a curious, coffin-shaped clockwhose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not movein consonance with any time system known on this planet. It was asingular and disturbing room, but well fitted to the business then athand. For there, in the New Orleans home of this continent's greatestmystic, mathematician and orientalist, there was being settled at lastthe estate of a scarcely less great mystic, scholar, author and dreamerwho had vanished from the face of the earth four years before.
Randolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tediumand limitations of waking reality in the beckoning vistas of dreamsand fabled avenues of other dimensions, disappeared from the sightof 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 thosewho inferred from his curious novels many episodes more bizarre thanany in his recorded history. His association with Harley Warren, theSouth Carolina mystic whose studies in the primal Naacal language ofthe Himalayan priests had led to such outrageous conclusions, hadbeen close. Indeed, it was he who—one mist-mad, terrible night in anancient graveyard—had seen Warren descend into a dank and nitrousvault, never to emerge. Carter lived in Boston, but it was from thewild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that all hisforebears had come. And it was amid these ancient, cryptically broodinghills that he had ultimately vanished.
His old servant, Parks—who died early in 1930—had spoken of thestrangely aromatic and hideously carven box he had found in the attic,and of the undecipherable parchments and queerly figured silver keywhich that box had contained: matters of which Carter had also writtento others. Carter, he said, had told him that this key had come downfrom his ancestors, and that it would help him to unlock the gates tohis lost boyhood, and to strange dimensions and fantastic realms whichhe had hitherto visited only in vague, brief and elusive dreams. Thenone 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-grownroad in the hills behind crumbling Arkham—the hills wh