Lord of the Worms

"Lord of the Worms" is a Cthulhu Mythos story by Brian Lumley, featuring the occult investigator Titus Crow. Written in 1982, it was first published in Weirdbook 17 in 1983. Lumley says that it is, in his opinion, the best Titus Crow story.Haggopian and Other Stories, "Name and Number" (introduction), by Brian Lumley (Subterranean Press, 2008).
A young Titus Crow, at loose ends after working for the British military during World War II, takes a job organizing the library of notorious occultist Julian Carstairs. He comes to realize that Carstairs actually has a more sinister purpose in mind for him--and finds himself in a battle of wits and will with his very identity at stake.
==Characters==
Titus Crow: A 29-year-old man, born December 2, 1916, whose "bent for the dark and mysterious side of life had early steeped him in obscure occult and esoteric matters." He worked for the British War Department during World War II, when he "advised the Ministry in respect of certain of Der Führer’s supernatural interests," and employed "the skills of the numerologist and cryptographer to crack the codes of his goose-stepping war machine."
Crow's father is an archaeologist; in discussing the "Oriental Institute’s work at Megiddo in Palestine" in 1937, he notes that "only a bout of ill health held me back from accompanying my father out to the site.”
Julian Carstairs: An "eccentric cult- or coven-leader" known as the “Modern Magus,” or “Lord of the Worms,” His "almost spectral face and figure" are "positively dismal." He is described as being "extremely tall and thin almost to the point of emaciation, with a broad forehead, thick dark hair and bushy eyebrows...with sunken cheeks and slightly stooped shoulders." 
Carstairs appears to be at least seventy years old, and possibly older than eighty-five--but in fact he is a collective worm-based entity who was born in 1602, in the Palestinian town of Chorazin, and has inhabited his current body since 1888. His previous incarnations, were, from 1602-68, a "dark, hawk-faced" Arab man; another Middle Eastern man, who wore the "rich dress of a sheik or prince," from 1668-1734; from 1734-90, a "statuesque, high-browed negro of forceful features and probably Ethiopian descent"; a "stern-faced young man in periwig and smallclothes" from 1790-1839; and from 1839-88, a "bearded, dark-eyed man...of unnatural pallor" who wore a monocle.
Taylor Ainsworth: A friend and a chemist whom Crow "had known and studied with in Edinburgh." His "interests in the more obscure aspects of chemistry had alienated him from both tutors and students alike," with some thinking him "more alchemist than chemist proper."
Harry Townley: Titus Crow's family doctor, born 1896 or earlier. He believed that "hypnotism, homeopathy, acupuncture and such" could be "tremendous aids to more orthodox treatments." In 1946, he is considering retiring from medicine to become a minister.
Sedgewick: The curator of the Rare Books Department at the British Museum. A "lean, learned gentleman" born c. 1881, he is "sharp-eyed and with a dry and wicked wit." Crow invariably calls him “sir.”
Garbett: A follower of Carstairs, noted for his "thick, guttural voice."
==Setting==
The story mainly takes place at The Barrows, Julian Carstairs' country house near Haslemere in Surrey, a real-world townWikipedia, "Haslemere." that is described as "quaint and picturesque." Found "at the end of a wooded, winding private road," the Barrows is a "large, two-storey house surrounded by a high stone wall" and "dark shrubbery, overgrown paths and gaunt-limbed oaks weighed down with festoons of unchecked ivy. The house has "a gloominess...inherent in its grimy upper windows, in the oak-shaded brickwork and shrouding shrubbery."
==Mythos Connections==
Carstairs' library at The Barrows is said to be "a veritable goldmine of occult lore," exceeding even "the less-public archives of such authoritative establishments as the British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale." Many of the books mentioned are core tomes of the Cthulhu Mythos, including "an amazingly pristine copy of du Nord’s Liber Ivonie," "Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis," and "d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules." Also on hand were the Pnakotic Manuscripts, The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and the R’lyeh Text, and even an "ancient, ebony-bound, gold-and-silver arabesqued tome which purported to be none other than the Al Azif itself!"
As is typical in Lumley's Mythos-connected libraries, there is "an incredible set of volumes concerning the theme of oceanic mysteries and horrors," including "such sinister-sounding titles as Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, the Cthaat Aquadingen, the German Unter Zee Kulten, le Fe’s Dwellers in the Depths, and Konrad von Gerner’s Fischbuch, circa 1598."
Crow borrows from Carstairs' library "E. L. de Marigny’s entertaining The Tarot: a Treatise"--foreshadowing Crow's later close association with Etienne-Laurent de Marigny's son Henri-Laurent Marigny.
Carstairs' library is also depicted as containing real-world magical texts, including Gauthier [Gautier] de Metz’s Image du Monde,Wikipedia, "Gautier de Metz." and The Key of Wisdom of Artephous [Artephius].Wikipedia, "Artephius."
===De Vermis Mysteriis===
Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis plays a pivotal role in the plot, and Lumley provides considerable lore--some newly invented--about that book. Sedgewick of the British Museum calls Prinn a Flemish "sorcerer, alchemist and necromancer. He was burned in Brussels. He wrote his book in prison shortly before his execution, and the manuscript found its way to Cologne where it was posthumously published.” Prinn "was a much-travelled man...and lived for many years among an order of Syrian wizards in the Jebel el Ansariye,"--the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range--and also lived in the ruins of Chorazin for some time.
The plot of "Lord of the Worms" is explained in a quote from the Saracenic Rituals chapter of De Vermis Mysteriis, where Prinn--after quoting Alhazred on "the Crypts of the Worm-Wizards of olden Irem"--testifies:In Syria, with my own Eyes, I Ludwig Prinn saw one Wizard of Years without Number transfer himself to the Person of a younger man, whose Number he had divined; when at the appointed Hour he spoke the Words of the Worm.De Vermis Mysteriis is also said to have chapters "on familiars, on the demons of the Cthulhu Myth Cycle, on divination, necromancy, elementals and vampires." The book has 16 chapters in all.
There is a Latin version of Prinn's work, as well as a German black-letter edition. The German was translated into English by Charles Leggett in 1821. There is also a much-abridged translation of the Saracenic Rituals by an anonymous author known as Clergyman X.
When Prinn quotes Abdul Alhazred on how "the soul of the devil-bought...fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws," (and citing "Ibn Schacabao" on how "happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes"), Lumley is in fact quoting Lovecraft's short story "The Festival," which ends with that quote the Necronomicon. Lumley's plot derives from the implication in Lovecraft's story that the narrator's "abnormally pulpy" relatives are in fact worms in human form that have fed upon his ancestors.
===Olaus Wormius===
When Titus Crow brings up the subject of worms, Sedgewick brings up Olaus Worm: “He was a Danish physician, an anatomist.... Around the turn of the 16th Century, I believe. Had a number of followers." This prompts Crow to ask: “Olaus Worm, eh? Could a Latinized version of that be Olaus Wormius, I wonder?” To which Sedgewick respond: “What, old Wormius who translated the Greek Necronomicon? No, not possible, for he was 13th Century.”
This is Lumley's attempt to square the fact that Lovecraft, in his "History of the Necronomicon," attributes a 1228 Latin translation of the Necronomicon to the real-world Danish scholar Olaus Wormius (1588-1654), whose name in Danish was Ole Worm.Wikipedia, "Olaus Wormius." Lumley posits a second, fictional figure with a similar name who lived in the proper century.
==Publication History==
Since its initial appearance in Weirdbook 17, "Lord of the Worms" has been reprinted in Lumley's collections The Compleat Crow (W. Paul Ganley, 1987), Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales (Roc UK, 1994), Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! (Tor, 2003), The Taint and Other Novellas (Subterranean Press, 2007), and Earth, Air, Fire & Water: Four Tales of Elemental Mythos Horror! (Fedogan & Bremer, 2017).
==References==
Category:Brian Lumley works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works