Randolph Carter's advance through that cyclopean bulk of masonry was
like a dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the
stars. From a great distance he felt triumphant, god-like surges of
deadly sweetness, and after that the rustling of great wings, and
impressions of sound like the chirpings and murmurings of objects
unknown on Earth or in the solar system. Glancing backward, he saw not
one gate alone, but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamored
Forms he strove not to remember.
And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the
Forms could give--a terror from which he could not flee because it was
connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of
stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and
about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but
it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph
Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the
Ultimate Gateway, he realized in a moment of consuming fright that he
was not one person, but many persons.
He was in many places at the same time. On Earth, on October 7, 1883,
a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den in the
hushed evening light and running down the rocky slope, and through
the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher's house in
the hills beyond Arkham; yet at that same moment, which was also
somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph
Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth's
transdimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter,
in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate.
And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and
monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a
limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the
local manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate.
There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected
age of Earth's history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity
transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility; Carters of forms
both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and
mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having
nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst
backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic
continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe
to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalled
dreams--both faint and vivid, single and persistent--which he had
had through the long years since he first began to dream; and a few
possessed a haunting, fascinating and almost horrible familiarity which
no earthly logic could explain.
Faced with this realization, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch
of supreme horror--horror such as had not been hinted even at the
climax of that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient
and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged.
No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which
flows from a loss of _identity_. Merging with nothingness is peaceful
oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no
longer a definite being distinguished from other beings--that one no
longer has a _self_--that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.
He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could
not be sure whether he--the fragment or facet of an entity beyond the
Ultimate Gate--had been that one or some other. His _self_ had been
annihilated; and yet he--if indeed there could, in view of that utter
nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as _he_--was equally
aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was
as though his body had been suddenly transformed into one of those
many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and
he contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern
which was the original and which the additions--if indeed (supremely
monstrous thought!) there _were_ any original as distinguished from
other embodiments.
Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter's
beyond-the-gate fragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of
horror to black, clutching pits of a horror still more profound. This
time it was largely external--a force or personality which at once
confronted and surrounded and pervaded him, and which in addition to
its local presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and likewise
to be co-existent with all time and conterminous with all space. There
was no visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept of
combined localism and identity and infinity lent a paralyzing terror
beyond anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable
of existing.
In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror
of destroyed individuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All
of limitless being and self--not merely a thing of one space-time
continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's
whole unbounded sweep--the last, utter sweep which has no confines and
which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which
certain secret cults of Earth had whispered of as _Yog-Sothoth_, and
which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans
of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of
the spiral nebulæ know by an untranslatable sign--yet in a flash the
Carter-facet realized how slight and fractional all these conceptions
are.
And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves
that smote and burned and thundered--a concentration of energy that
blasted its recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that
paralleled in an unearthly rhythm the curious swaying of the Ancient
Ones, and the flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling
region beyond the First Gate. It was as though suns and worlds and
universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space
they had conspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But
amidst the greater terror one lesser terror was diminished; for the
searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the Beyond-the-Gate Carter
from his infinity of duplicates--to restore, as it were, a certain
amount of the illusion of identity. After a time the hearer began to
translate the waves into speech-forms known to him, and his sense of
horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure awe, and what had
seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only ineffably majestic.
"Randolph Carter," it seemed to say, "my manifestations on your
planet's extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would
lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet
who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and
curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out
forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kled, and to reign on the opal
throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise
mighty toward a single red star in a filament alien to your Earth and
to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish loftier
things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a
dream beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of
secrets which lies behind all scenes and dreams.
"What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which
I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet--five times
only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to
show you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble
spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you
may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two
Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes."