“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! Dun’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 gits 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 shew 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.15
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 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 ægipans16 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 1883.17 Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which he shewed 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 connexion 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 traveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre,18 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 palæographer 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 forest rocks on the hillside beyond cannot 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.19 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 cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream 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.
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 rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai,20 that a new king reigns on the opal throne in 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 rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its crypti
cal arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.
1. Written in the fall of 1926, it first appeared in Weird Tales 13, no. 1 (January 1929), 41–49, 144.
2. See “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” note 2, above, for reference to the other adventures of Randolph Carter, often viewed as Lovecraft’s alter ego. The autobiographical aspects of this story and its setting are explored in great detail in Kenneth W. Faig Jr.’s “‘The Silver Key’ and Lovecraft’s Childhood.”
3. Classical writers claim that there are two gates of dream, the Gates of Horn and Ivory, first described in Homer’s Odyssey, as follows: “Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fulfilment in all things for men. For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them” (vol. 2, book 19). Virgil’s Aeneid describes Aeneas’s return from the underworld after visiting his father, Anchises: “Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn; / Of polish’d ivory this, that of transparent horn: / True visions thro’ transparent horn arise; / Thro’ polish’d ivory pass deluding lies. / Of various things discoursing as he pass’d, / Anchises hither bends his steps at last. / Then, thro’ the gate of iv’ry, he dismiss’d / His valiant offspring and divining guest” (John Dryden translation, 1697).
4. Mentioned in Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
5. A great city on the river, also mentioned in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, as is the region of Kled.
6. A town in southwestern India, but with none of the attributes described here. Uncharacteristically, Narath is not mentioned elsewhere by Lovecraft.
7. A translucent variety of quartz or agate.
8. The Foreign Legion was created by King Louis Philippe in 1831 to permit foreigners (that is, non-French persons) to serve in France’s army. It saw extensive service on the Western Front in World War I, and many Americans and other foreign nationals enlisted in it at the outset of the Great War, serving with the Legion until their own countries entered the battle.
9. This is viewed by some scholars as Lovecraft’s criticism of the later work of Lord Dunsany, much of which is considered self-parody.
10. This tale is told in “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (here, above).
11. The events are recounted in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (here, below). This story was not written until January–March 1927 but evidently was in Lovecraft’s mind earlier.
12. Originally, “Saracen” referred only to those non-Arabic people who lived in the desert areas around the Roman province of Arabia; later, the term came to be synonymous with “Muslim.”
13. This occurred neither in Marblehead nor Salem and is no help in pinning down the identity of Carter’s Kingsport.
14. These are described in “The Festival” (here, above).
15. Carter thinks nothing of the presence of his Aunt Martha and Uncle Chris, though the latter has been dead for more than thirty years. Carter has slipped back in time to his boyhood and, as will been seen shortly, has become a boy again.
16. Aegipan is Pan in goat form; hence aegipans are satyrs.
17. Carter has not been to his great-uncle’s home for “more than 40 years,” placing the events described here in the mid-1920s.
18. A commune in Picardie, in the north of France. The American poet Alan Seeger (the folksinger Pete Seeger’s uncle) died there in 1916 after being mortally wounded in the Battle of the Somme.
19. Who is this narrator? In Lovecraft and Edgar Hoffmann Price’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” which purports to trace the whereabouts of the Randolph Carter of Lovecraft’s earlier story “The Silver Key,” the narrator of the latter is identified as Ward Phillips, an “elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who had enjoyed a long and close correspondence with Carter.” Curiously, according to S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft used “Ward Phillips” as a pseudonym in connection with poetry published prior to 1922 (I Am Providence, 209). Why would the narrator have any standing to oppose a probate administration?
20. First mentioned in “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920) and featured in “The Other Gods” (1933).
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward1
One of Lovecraft’s two long published tales (the third, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, was issued posthumously), this began as a short story. Lovecraft soon realized that he had more to say, but the work was speedily written. Meticulously researched and a virtual showcase for Lovecraft’s antiquarian interests, the story combines his frequent theme—that the unknown is often best left unknown—with a demonstration that New England was truly witch-haunted by its dark past. While he conveyed the same disturbing sense of deep-rooted local madness in “The Picture in the House,” here its impact is much wider than on one isolated old man.
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.
—BORELLUS2
I. A RESULT AND A PROLOGUE
1.
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island,3 there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character.
Lead-in to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, part 1. Weird Tales 35, no. 9 (May 1941) (artist: Harry Furman)
In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant.4 Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.
First page of the manuscript of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, now in the collection of the John Hay Library.
Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward’s family physician, affirms that the patient’s gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so
powerful and lucid did the youth’s mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward’s escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite’s hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems strangely easier in mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he thought any considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward’s father was told at once over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 32