Recognition

"Recognition"  is a Cthulhu Mythos story by Brian Lumley, first published in Weirdbook 15 (1981). It was written four years earlier, in January 1977. 
Lumley has said that he almost made this a Titus Crow story, but decided that Crow was "too bold, daring and…inquisitive" to be the protagonist of this story.Haggopian and Other Stories, "Recognition" (introduction), by Brian Lumley (Subterranean Press, 2008).
==Synopsis==
An aristocrat gathers a team of occult specialists to identify and expel a malignant force that haunts one of his property--while his friend argues that when it comes to the supernatural, sometimes the less one knows, the better.
==Characters==
Lord David Marriot: A young, cultured upper-class gentleman with "fine and aristocratic" features. He seeks the identification and removal of a malignant influence from one of his family's properties, so that it might be resold.
Lawrence Danford: A retired clergyman, a "sprightly octogenarian." He is meant to exorcise the spirit that haunts the property, though when he hears its voice, he calls it “a monstrous presence" and declares, "I could not even try to exorcise … that!” He flees the estate.
Jason Lavery: A medium with the "alleged ability to speak in the tongue of the ghost, the possessing spirit. When he goes into a trance, he produces an "insane cough, whistle, and stutter of harshly alien syllables and cackling cachinnations," the only recognizable syllables of which approximated the name "Atlach-Nacha." Soon after this manifestation, he too abandons the project.
Jonathan Turnbull: Another medium, whose special skill is the ability to make an "automatic sketch" of an intrusive entity. He strikes the narrator as "damned arrogant...so sure of his theories and principles." He asks to be left alone in the estate; the next day, he is found "frozen, lying in a crystallized pool of his own blood," with a "thousand circular holes of about one-half inch in diameter penetrated deep into his body."
The Narrator: An "old friend of the family whose name does not really matter." The Marriot family has valued his advice "for many years, in all manner of problems."
==Setting==
The estate, not named in the story, is "a large, ungainly, mongrel architecture of dim and doubtful origins, standing gaunt and gloomily atmospheric in an acre of brooding oaks." It's surrounded by "nine acres of otherwise barren moors borderland"--the "borderland" reference suggesting a location in the far north of England, near the Scottish border.
The building currently on the property is only 250 years old, a previous--and larger--structure on the site having burned to the ground in 1618. The older building "is given brief mention in texts dating back almost to Roman times," and the site had been inhabited much earlier, possibly by "a druidic order or some such." When the Marriot family bought the property some 80 years before the events of the story, an "extensive cellar—a veritable maze of tunnels, rooms, and passages—was discovered during renovation." It appeared to be a place of worship, as examination turned up "a crude altar stone, a pair of ugly, fontlike basins, a number of particularly repugnant carvings of gargoyles or ‘gods,’ and other extremely ancient tools and bric-a-brac." Some of these artefacts were given to "the then curator of the antiquities section of the British Museum, but the carved figures were defaced and destroyed."
==Publication History==
After its initial appearance in Weirdbook 15, "Recognition" was reprinted in the anthology Uninvited Guests: Thirteen Unwelcome Visitors (William Kimber, 1984). It has also been included in collections of Lumley's work, including Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (Roc UK, 1993), A Coven of Vampires (Fedogan & Bremer, 1998), and Haggopian and Other Stories (Subterranean Press, 2008).
==References==
Category:Brian Lumley works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works