"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft and E Hoffmann Price, written in 1932 and '33 and published in 1934 on Weird Tales. It serves as a conclusion to the "Dream Cycle", begun with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, within the broader Cthulhu Mythos. It was one of Lovecraft's last stories before his death in 1937.
Following the events of the earlier story "The Silver Key", which itself is a sequel to The Dream-Quest, a meeting is being held to decide how to dispose of the estate of Randolph Carter, now vanished for several years and presumed dead. The meeting is joined by the mysterious Swami Chandraputra, who claims that Carter is indeed still alive and that he knows where he resides. To back his audacious claim, he recounts a tale of Carter's disappearance, according to which the man's hunger for greater knowledge drove him to use the mystical Silver Key to push himself entirely outside of knowable space, and into alien realms where he learned of strange truths, saw sights unseen by any earthly being, and endured long trials to return to his time and place.
The story is in the public domain, alongside all of Lovecraft's works, and can be read on the Internet Archive here
and on Project Gutenberg here. Since this story is both short, old, and freely available on the web, all spoilers are unmarked.
This story contains examples of:
- Alien Sky: The planet Yaddith is lit by five "multicolored suns" which cast a polychromatic light on its surface.
- Another Story for Another Time: While retelling Carter's life, Chandraputra notes that his stay on Yaddith lasted for thousands of years, and included ages of struggle with Zkauba for control of their shared body, consultations with sages and wizards, and journeys to other planets, but, in the interest of expediency and to avoid staying there all night to tell the minutiae of these events, he will have to quickly summarize the gist of it before moving on to Carter's return to Earth.
- Benevolent Abomination: Both 'Umr at-Tawil and Yog-Sothoth are communicative and interested in aiding Carter, at least insofar as he is an extension or facet of themselves, and 'Umr at-Tawil mentions having helped other beings of Earth, both human and not, transcend it in the way that Carter will. The narration also notes that, when talking about beings as cosmic and vast at these, it's absurd to suppose that they would care enough about humanity that they would seek to harm it as a goal in itself.
- Demonic Possession: An unusual variant. In the second half of the story, Randolph's mind is cast back into the past and into the body of an alien, resulting in a case of an otherworldly entity being possessed by a human. Zkauba otherwise responds as expected, as he perceives his new "passenger" as a hideous mental parasite and works desperately to exorcise himself of it while Randolph's own mind struggles equally hard to take full control of their body and use it to return home.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: In the first part, Randolph Carter gets to have a friendly chat with Yog-Sothoth, both the "central" entity itself and its projection in Earth's region of the universe.
- Dramatic Unmask: At the end, Chandraputra announces that he is actually Carter after his travels to other world and translation into an alien body, and is using a human disguise. The other do not believe him and, while they realize that Chandraputra's face is a mask, assume that he's a regular human fraudster. Aspinwall reacts by ripping off his mask to reveal his true self — and, indeed, this reveals the alien features of Carter's Yaddithian body underneath it.
- Fright Deathtrap: At the climax, when Aspinwall angrily tears off Chandraputra's mask, he reveals the alien features of Zkauba the Yaddithian, and dies of terror on the spot.
- Human Disguise: When preparing to return to Earth, Carter creates a loose costume and waxen mask with which to disguise Zkauba's alien body from human sight until he might be able to separate himself from their accidental fusion. In the climax, it is revealed that "Swami Chandraputra" is in fact this disguised self, and that beneath his baggy clothing and bearded mask there is still the alien body in which Carter's mind resides.
- Human Popsicle: Or Alien Popsicle, as the case may be. Yaddith is both in the remote past and extremely distant from Earth, so much so that a conventional interstellar journey would exceed even the immense lifespan of a Yaddithian. As such, Carter-in-Zkauba's body returns home by placing himself in suspended animation and remaining quiescent as his vessel crosses the billions of miles of empty space separating the two worlds.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: In "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", the second half deals with a space alien named Zkauba being possessed by the human sorcerer Randolph Carter, and who is "...disgusted by the thought of the repellant Earth-mammal" until Carter discovers a way to suppress Zkauba's personality entirely, and then proceeds to enter suspended animation until his host's homeworld is cold and dead, then travel thousands of lightyears to earth just so he can try to return to his body shortly after he left it, all while holding Zkauba prisoner in his own body. In essence, Zkauba takes the role of a typical Lovecraftian protagonist who comes into contact with and is possessed by a hideous alien entity before being cast away from his comfortably familiar pocket of space and into a distant, hostile alien realm.
- Pieces of God: Randolph Carter learns that all conscious beings are actually tiny aspects of Eldritch Abominations outside time and space, granted the illusion of individuality by their limited perception of the universe. Facing the Outer God Yog-Sothoth, he realizes that he and it are the same being.
