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.