To return to Lovecraft: there is a moment when the traveller to other worlds, having passed utterly beyond all reassuring spatio-temporal co-ordinates to be exposed, in primal non-identity, before the withering gaze of some suppurating embodiment of Chaos, is nevertheless granted an instant of decision. The red pill / blue pill decision in The Matrix works along similar lines: go forwards through the final veil separating you from Ultimate Reality or retreat to a more or less contented, if delusional, accommodation with the consensus reality in which you formerly lived. Thus, Yog Sothoth in Through the Gates of the Silver Key:
“What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet - five times only to those you call men or those resembling them. I am ready to show you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes.”
And thus, in The Hellbound Heart:
“There are conditions of the nerve-endings,” [the Cenobite] said, “the like of which your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke.”“…yes?”
“Oh yes. Oh most certainly. Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.”
“Will you partake of them?” said the second Cenobite.
Frank looked at the scars and the hooks. Again, his tongue was deficient.
“Will you?”
It is somehow important that those who have reached this decision point should be few in number (“a handful at best”); those who have gone forward, fewer still. The point of decision is a point of final filtering or purification, of the most exacting ordeal. It is significant that in Through the Gates of the Silver Key, as in The Hellbound Heart, the decision - supposedly irreversible - to pass through the veil and become one of the elect turns out to be both a mistake and partially reversible. The revenant, the figure of horror, represents an attempt to escape the consequences of an infinite commitment.
“This world…it disappoints you?”: the opening pages of Lovecraft’s The Silver Key may be read as a treatise on disappointment, on the “chaos of hollowness and unrest” that is the “materialist“‘s world stripped of its phantasmatic support. (This, incidentally, is also the initial motivation for Neo’s quest in The Matrix. The fundamental phantasy supporting the supposed reality of the Matrix has lost its symbolic efficiency, so that he feels there is “something missing”: the world no longer appears to him as complete and whole). The Dunsanian “realm of dream” to which Randall Carter seeks access is accordingly a universe of harmony and wonder; but the chaosmos that is revealed to him in Through the Gates of the Silver Key is an abyss of which neither harmony nor disharmony can meaningfully be predicated.
Nevertheless, Carter’s mistake is not to pass into this “ultimate abyss” but to pass from it, to “a dim, fantastic world whose five multi-colored suns, alien constellations, dizzily black crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels and cryptical floating cylinders had intruded again and again upon his slumbers”. This passage is a descent, from the many-faceted non-identity of the universe of Carter-selves to the particular identity of a magician of that world, which immediately fissures to become a dual consciousness, part-human and part-alien. It is now that Carter becomes a revenant and a figure of horror.
Without the hieroglyphics of the box he has left behind on Earth, Carter is unable to ascend again to the point of convergence of his universe of selves. He must instead attempt a return to Earth through “ordinary” space-time to reclaim his estate. He thus arrives in his own house as a “clawed, tapir-snouted” alien magician, disguised with mask and turban as an Oriental gentleman and imitating human speech with the vocal apparatus of an inhuman throat. Furthermore, the alien consciousness with which Carter’s awareness now co-exists is suppressed by means of a drug of which he has only a limited supply: his body is subject to spells of maddened possession by its original owner. There is a touch of bathos about his condition.
Frank’s return from the beyond the veil is no less schizoid: he must reassemble a body sinew by sinew from the shed blood and freshly-mortal remains of the living. The body so constructed is not merely a partial body, a body lacking in organs, but seems to lack a more fundamental integrity: it is a body-of-parts, a fleshy assemblage that will remain unwholesome even when the final part is acquired. The most telling moment is when Kirsty realizes that Frank has stolen his brother’s skin, and rips off part of his face to reveal the flayed abomination beneath:
The bells were intolerable; they were pulping her thoughts, tolling her brain tissue to dust. At the rim of her sanity, she reached again for him, and this time he did not quite avoid her. Her nails raked the flesh of his check, and the skin, so recently grafted, slid away like silk. The blood-battered meat beneath came into horrid view.
What does this prove? We are all, by definition, flayed abominations beneath the skin. Frank could always have protested at being so recklessly and needlessly wounded, and maintained the pretence that he was Rory; perhaps in her dementia she clawed at him more forcefully than she thought. The act is revelatory not because of what it reveals, which is already known, but because it reveals the already-known as the truth.
This scene resembles a particular ruse of detective fiction, where the sleuth obtains a confession by presenting the perpetrator with evidence of his crime that the latter accepts as compelling: only the perpetrator’s knowledge of his own guilt prevents him from realising that there is another, perfectly reasonable, explanation (the sleuth must in turn disguise the fact that he knows this). The evidence thus only becomes evidence by producing an effect of evidence that retroactively validates it. This, then, is the clue to what the reconstituted Frank is lacking that makes him a monster rather than a miraculously resurrected human being. It is not, as we said, any particular anatomical part that is missing; but neither is it some mysterious “emergent” property or halo of completeness. What disarticulates Frank’s body is precisely the fact that he can no longer sustain the symbolic fiction of his own unblemished imago, and must experience his body as a real body, a cadaver, composed of grafts and vile expropriations.
The obvious parallel here is with Frankenstein’s monster, whose anatomical correctness does not prevent him from being a thing of shreds and patches. It is also clear that the inevitable fate of such a monster is to be taken apart again: it cannot be killed (being in some sense already dead) but must be dismembered, disassembled. Barker brings this off with a memorable splatter:
He was in extremis, hooked through in a dozen or more places, fresh wounds gouged in him even as she watched. Spreadeagled beneath the solitary bulb, body hauled to the limits of its endurance and beyond, he gave vent to shrieks that would have won pity from her, had she not learned better.[…]
Then he came unsewn.
His limbs separated from his torso, and his head from his shoulders, in a welter of bone shards and heat. She threw the door closed, as something thudded against it from the other side. His head, she guessed.
As the word “unsewn” suggests, this spectacular coming-apart is not the violation of a body’s integrity, but the abrupt reversal of its monstrous coming-together. It does not appeal to pity, not only because Frank is a morally monstrous killer, but because his sufferings are those of an unpitiable object, a meat-puppet.