Through the Gates of the Silver Key
by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price
When this story first appeared, the editors described it as one which "for sheer imaginative daring goes beyond anything ever printed before." For Weird Tales that was saying a lot! The story behind its writing is interesting. You may have read Lovecraft's haunting tale The Silver Key, which was in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 3. E. Hoffmann Price, a weird author in his own right, had long been intrigued with the tale and had urged his friend Lovecraft to write a further episode. But Lovecraft put off so doing, until Price, inspired, sat down and wrote his own version of the adventure that the silver key opened upon. He sent this to Lovecraft, thereby forcing that author into action. Lovecraft proceeded to revise, "correct," and enlarge the Price manuscript, and so after a bit more work by both powerful imaginations the present striking novelette made its appearance.
Chapter 1
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-strewn 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
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