Carter had seen, in Hindustan, how a thought concentration can become an entity with tangible presence and material existence, taking substance from the projected will of a circle of adepts. And these Ancient Ones were by their will vortex projecting him.
The Silver Key was in his hand. But the blank wall he faced was still adamantine firmness. There was not a vestige of a keyhole. There was scarcely a trace of the line which marked the meeting of the door with its jamb.
The Most Ancient had ceased chanting. For the first time Carter realized how terrific silence may be. The earlier quiet of the grotto had been enlivened by the earth pulse, that low pitched vibration which, though inaudible, nevertheless prevents a sense of utter silence. But now Carter’s own breathing was no longer perceptible. The silence of the abyss hovered like a presence in the vault. The eyes of the Most Ancient were now fixed upon the globe he held, and about his head there likewise glowed a nimbus of fire, greenish, shot with flashes of sulfur blue.
A dizziness overcame Carter, a whirling of all his senses, and an utter lack of orientation such as he had never known in the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blackness. He could see the Most Ancient Ones on each side of his throne of obsidian, yet there was a terrifying isolation. Then he felt himself floating through immeasurable depths. Waves of perfumed warmth lapped against his face as though he swam in a torrid rose-tinctured sea. It seemed that it was a sea of drugged wines whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched Carter as he saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far off coast.
“The man of truth is beyond Good and Evil,” intoned a great voice that filled the vault. “The man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an imposter.”
The outline of the gate was now very clearly visible. Carter at last realized that the Key was a symbol rather than that wherewith to open any lock; for that rose-drunken sea that lapped his cheeks was the adamantine mass of the granite wall yielding before the thought vortex the Ancient Ones had directed against it.
His advance through that prodigious bulk of eternal granite was
a falling through the immeasurable abysses between the stars. From a great distance, he heard the triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness. Then, as that tremendous fanfare died out, he heard the rustling of wings, and strange chirpings and murmurings. He glanced over his shoulder, he saw that which clamored at the gate; and he was glad that its granite had no keyhole, and that he alone held the Key.
Carter’s bewildered mind, as it recovered from the momentary horror of those that clamored in vain at the door they could not open, received a shock more stunning than that which his backward glance had given him. He realized of a sudden that he was at one time many persons.
The body and mind of Randolph Carter, of Arkham, still sat on that hexagonal block of obsidian with its terrific carvings that a man’s mind would have named grotesquely obscene. And this which he considered his ego, this entity at whose outrunning those who clamored at the gate had so pleased him, this was still not his ego. Even as that which sat enthroned among the Ancient Ones was not.
Randolph Carter now felt a supreme horror such as had not been hinted even at the height of that dreadful evening when two had ventured into a tomb, and but one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair aroused by a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to exist, to be aware of existence and yet to know that one no longer retains an identity that will serve as a distinction from every other entity; to know that one no longer has a self
He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Arkham; but in his terrific confusion, he knew not if he had been that one, or some other Carter. In his terror, he had the wild, outrageous sense of being at one time a multiplicity of Carters. His self had been annihilated, and yet he — if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be anything such as he — was aware of being, in some inconceivable way, a legion of selves. It was as though his body had suddenly been 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; save that this which assailed
the individuality of his self was a terror towering stupendously over all other outrages. Then Carter’s devastating terror itself became trifling before that which confronted and surrounded the personality- integration whereof Randolph Carter of Arkham had become an infinitesimal. It was at once a BEING, a force, an unlimited completeness of space, and a personal presence; nor was there any incongruity in that blending of heretofore unrelated concepts. In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyed individuality. The space-presence was addressing the element of that summation of Carters. It emanated prodigious waves that smote and burned and thundered an energy concentration that blasted Carter with unendurable violence. 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.
Carter understood, as, finally, it singled him out from the summation of Carters.
“Randolph Carter,” IT said, “my manifestations, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and innumerable domes rise mightily toward a single red, lurid star that glows in that alien firmament whose vault shelters the realm of Illusion.
“But it shall be otherwise. The ultimate mystery is about to be unveiled, rather than any throne which is but the transfiguration of an earthly fancy, and the refuge of one who is not pleased by that which he deems is reality. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets, you may, as before, exercise a free choice, and return to the other side of the Border without having the final veil stripped from your eyes.”
Then the resistless surges of super-cosmic energy subsided. There was a negation of vibration that left Carter in an awful stillness and loneliness. He was in an illimitable vastness and a void. And after a moment, Carter addressed the void:
“I accept, and I will not retreat.”
Whereupon the Space Presence returned and Carter understood what it said.
“You, Randolph Carter, have gone through the nethermost gulfs
of horror, and you have plumbed the uttermost abyss of space. We will therefore enlighten you.
“You have come from a world wherein each entity has a self, an individuality, a personality; and where all is limited by three directions, up-down, forward-backward, right-left. There are those among your scholars who have vaguely hinted that there may be other directions than those which your senses acknowledge. But none has pierced the veils and seen what you have viewed.
“In your three-dimensional cosmos of length, breadth, and thickness you have set up gods with three-dimensional fury, and hatred, and vengeance and vanity and craving for adulation.
“Your deities have demeaned themselves by craving sacrifices, and compelling the belief of that which is repugnant to the bit of you which has retained its contact with the realm wherein you alone have penetrated. The chief worship in your three-directioned world is that of a trinity whose anthropophagous cravings are satiated by your symbolic eating of the body of a god who was also a man.
“You are a race of idolaters who have made god after your own image.