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.