The Silver Key

The Silver Key is by H. P. Lovecraft, and tells that when Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams. Prior to that time, the text says, Randolph Carter had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space. Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of earthly minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls.

An old servant forced the carven lid, and inside, wrapped in a discolored parchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques, though of any legible explanation there was none. The text says that on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place they found a motor set carefully by the roadside, and in it a box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist or paleographer has been able to decipher or identify.