"The Silver Key"

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, January 1929


Randolph Carter, age 30, has "lost the key to the gate of dreams." The groundedness of everyday life and the mundane world have worn him down, leaving him empty and depressed.  He explores many philosophies and spiritual paths, but nothing satisfies him.

He dreams one night of his grandfather, and his dream leads him to an antique key, inscribed with arabesque symbols, in the attic.  Taking the the key, he returns to his boyhood home in the backwoods of northeastern Massachusetts.  There he enters a cave that he played in as a boy.  In some unexplained way, he is returned to his 10 year-old self, in his past, and his adult self vanishes.  He also recalls that, at the age of 10, he had gained the ability to glimpse events in his future. 

The unnamed narrator tells us that he expects to meet Carter soon, in his own dreams, "in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt", where Carter is now the ruler.

"The Silver Key" is an odd, and I suspect, very personal story for ol' HPL.  It seems very much influenced by Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, a moving but frankly self-indulgent novel about an author struggling to reconcile his rich inner life with a rotten outer one, known to be one of HPL's favorites.  It is one of the last of his "Dreamlands"-related pieces, and full of wistful sadness.  Lovecraft would have been nearly 40 when he wrote this, and perhaps he was pining for his youth.  I have always found the story somewhat unsatisfying - it seems there should be more, somehow.  But at 50 myself, I find it rather moving.