Name and Number

"Name and Number" is a Cthulhu Mythos story by Brian Lumley, featuring the occult investigator Titus Crow.  Written in 1981, it first appeared in the July 1982 issue of the Anglo-Italian fanzine Kadath. 
== Synopsis ==
Talking to his associate Henri-Laurent de Marigny, Crow claims responsibility for the death of a prominent arms merchant--and insists his intervention saved the world from the greatest threat it had ever faced.
== Characters ==
Henri-Laurent de Marigny: The story's narrator, he is looking back on events that happened many years earlier, in 1964, before his and Titus Crow's escape from the destruction of Blowne House (dated October 4, 1968) and de Marigny's return (at least eight years later)De Marigny is still missing in "The Black Recalled," which is set eight years after The Burrowers Beneath. from Elysia. De Marigny notes that his "deep interest in darkling matters...was probably inherited, sealed into my personality as a permanent stamp of my father, the great New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny."This character was introduced in H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price's 1934 story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." Henri mentions that "my father sent me out of America as a child in the late thirties"; the chronology suggests that he was born no earlier than the 1920s, making him a decade or so Crow's junior.) The story also refers to de Marigny and Crow's "involvement with the Wilmarth Foundation (that vast, august and amazingly covert body, dedicated to the detection and the destruction of Earth’s elder evil...)."This involvement is described in The Burrowers Beneath. 
Titus Crow: Reintroduced Crow as "one of London’s foremost occultists," de Marigny remarks on his stature, his leonine good looks, and the sheer weight of intellect which seemed invariably to shine out from behind those searching, dark eyes of his. In his flame-red, wide-sleeved dressing-gown, he might easily be some wizard from the pages of myth or fantasy.De Marigny tells him he is “the sanest man I ever met"--a judgement Crow demurs from. He does, however, accept the compliment that he is “one of the country’s greatest paleographers”--“second only to Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole," he agrees.
At the time of the story, Crow lives in a "bungalow dwelling on Leonard’s Heath known as Blowne House"--Leonard's Heath being a fictional park on the outskirts of London.
Sturm Magruser V: Born 1 April 1921 and died 4 March 1964, almost 43 years old. The head of Magruser Systems UK, a "weapons manufacturing company of world repute," and according to Crow "the greatest peril the world has ever faced!" His company owned 10 manufacturing plants in seven countries, including one outside Oxford. He offered the British military a "secret" national defence system "which will effectively make the atom bomb entirely obsolete." In fact, according to Crow, he “intended to destroy the world, reduce us to savagery, return us to the Dark Ages" and "turn the world into a desert"--and may possibly "have aimed at total destruction—no survivors at all!”
Magruser's father was Persian and his mother German; they both became naturalized Americans in the early 1900s, then moved to Britain during what Crow calls "McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities witch-hunts." Magruser changed his name after his parents died, adding the "V" apparently for numerological reasons. 
Physically, Magruser was albino, "with hair white as snow and flesh to match"; his "eyes were large, close together," and pink with scarlet pupils. "Tall and spindly," he has a large head with a "height and width which at one and the same time hinted of imbecility and genius."
Thelred Gustau: A scientist who asks Crow to work with him to decipher the contents of a container that appeared with the eruption of the Surtsey volcano in November 1963.Wikipedia, "Surtsey." Crow credits him with "great genius."
Mrs. Adams: Henri-Laurent de Marigny's housekeeper, who refers to Titus Crow as “that dreadful Crow person,” viewing him as a bad influence on her employer. 
== Mythos Connections ==
De Marigny list just a few of the highlights from Crow's library, a litany that includes several familiar Mythos tomes: the abhorrent Cthaat Aquadingen (in a binding of human skin!), Feery’s Original Notes on the Necronomicon (the complete book, as opposed to my own abridged copy), Wendy-Smith’s translation of the G’harne Fragments, a possibly faked but still priceless copy of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, Justin Geoffrey’s People of the Monolith, a literally fabulous Cultes des Goules (which, on my next birthday, having derived all he could from it, he would present to me), the Geph Transcriptions, Wardle’s Notes on Nitocris, Urbicus’ Frontier Garrison, circa AD 183, Plato on Atlantis, a rare, illustrated, pirated and privately printed Complete Works of Poe in three sumptuous volumes, the far more ancient works of such as Josephus, Magnus, Levi and Erdschluss, and a connected set of volumes on oceanic lore and legend which included such works as Gantley’s Hydrophinnae and Konrad von Gerner’s Fischbuch of 1598. 
== Publication History ==
After its initial appearance in Kadath, "Name and Number" has been reprinted in Lumley's collections The Compleat Crow (W. Paul Ganley, 1987), The Second Wish and Other Exhalations (New English Library, 1995), Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! (Tor, 2003), and Haggopian and Other Stories (Subterranean Press, 2008).
== References ==
Category:Brian Lumley works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works