Through the gates of the silver keyLovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Science
Through the gates of the silver key
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Fantasy fiction; Horror tales; Paranormal fiction
Thus long spaces of time wore on--ages longer than the brain of man
could grasp, since the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged
cycles. After many hundreds of revolutions the Carter-facet seemed to
gain on the Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast periods calculating
the distance of Yaddith in space and time from the human Earth that
was to be. The figures were staggering--eons of light-years beyond
counting--but the immemorial lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp
such things. He cultivated the power of dreaming himself momentarily
Earthward, and learned many things about our planet that he had never
known before. But he could not dream the needed formula on the missing
parchment.
Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith--which
began when he found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always
dormant, yet without dissolution of the knowledge and memories of
Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let him perform a
voyage with a light-wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had
ever performed--a _bodily_ voyage through nameless eons and across
incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the Earth itself.
Once on Earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he
might be able somehow to find--and finish deciphering--the strangely
hieroglyphed parchment he had left in the car at Arkham; and with its
aid--and the key's--resume his normal terrestrial semblance.
He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he
had brought the planet-angle to the right eon (a thing impossible
to do while hurtling through space), Yaddith would be a dead world
dominated by triumphant Dholes, and that his escape in the light-wave
envelope would be a matter of grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of
how he must achieve suspended animation, in the manner of an adept, to
endure the eon-long flight through fathomless abysses. He knew, too,
that--assuming his voyage succeeded--he must immunize himself to the
bacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to a body from Yaddith.
Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human shape on Earth
until he might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that shape
in truth. Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed by
the people in horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be
some gold--luckily obtainable on Yaddith--to tide him over that period
of quest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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