Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Time

Literature

He

He follows a disillusioned would-be poet through New York’s hidden courtyards to an old house whose occupant can reveal other periods of the city’s existence. A promised recovery of antique beauty exposes violence, temporal instability and the narrator’s own racial fears. The encounter ends with the host’s destruction and the visitor’s flight from the city.

5 min read · 1,040 words

Literature

Polaris

An unnamed man believes that his apparent waking life is a dream preventing him from returning to an endangered northern city. In Polaris, repeated visions become a recovered identity and a military duty, while the Pole Star seems to encourage the sleep that betrays both. The compact narrative ends without resolving which existence deserves to be called real.

5 min read · 844 words

Literature

The Shadow out of Time

An economics professor loses five years of ordinary memory while his body pursues inexplicable studies and journeys. Dreams of an alien archive later draw him to Australia, where the object he most fears to find would make his private past part of a civilization millions of years older than humanity.

12 min read · 2,338 words

Books & artifacts

The Silver Key

The silver key is Carter’s inherited means of passing beyond the limits of his present life. The Silver Key introduces it as an object associated with ancestry and the recovery of childhood dream. Through the Gates of the Silver Key gives its operation and limitations a more elaborate account, in which the accompanying parchment proves as important as the key itself.

6 min read · 1,054 words

Literature

The Silver Key

The Silver Key follows Randolph Carter’s loss of access to the dream worlds of his youth and his attempt to recover them through memory, ancestry and an inherited key. Its return to childhood is both an emotional quest and an apparent disruption of time. The ending leaves ordinary investigators with abandoned objects while a sympathetic dreamer proposes a very different destination.

7 min read · 1,346 words

Entities & creatures

Yog-Sothoth

Yog-Sothoth is associated with the boundaries of space and time, the opening of gates, forbidden invocation and a form of existence in which separate identities can become aspects of a larger whole. Its role ranges from the Whateleys’ attempted incursion at Dunwich to Randolph Carter’s encounter beyond the Ultimate Gate.

10 min read · 1,986 words