This post is brought to you by The Devil’s Defile: Weird Tales From Devil’s Gulch, edited by G. W. Thomas. The Weird West was never weirder in this shared world anthology set in a town haunted by ghosts and worse. “If Music Be the Food of Love” by M. D. Jackson gets things rolling with a man seeking a lost macabre masterpiece. “Dark Raven” by T. Neil Thomas follows hanging Judge Galbraith to a haunted house where he will win (or lose?) a bet. “The Black Lake” by Jack Mackenzie has a quest for the location of this terrible body of water. “The Ghost Gun” by G. W. Thomas is a portfolio of tales featuring Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope as he fills the Ghost Gun with monster bullets, knowing that one day he will have to face Death himself. This collection of interconnected tales features illustrations and cover by M. D. Jackson.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many tales of suspense and Horror but few are more Pulpy and creepy as “Lot No. 249”. A story like “The Brazilian Cat” is not supernatural but ACD gives some great thrills in this story about a man trapped in a age with a jaguar. He ventured into Egyptian magic with “The Ring of Thoth”, which has Egyptians resurrected in an H. Rider Haggard mode. Cool but not really scary. “Lot No. 249 does both of these things, Egyptian magic and a good chase scene with a mummy just a step behind you!
I was curious to see who used the story after Conan Doyle. The only Pulp magazine to reprint the story was Ghost Stories March 1931. Weird Tales need hardly have paid for such a reprint with Jules de Grandin doing all things Egyptian in that Pulp with: “The Grinning Mummy” (Weird Tales, December 1926), “The Jewel of the Seven Stones” (Weird Tales, April 1928), “Body and Soul” (Weird Tales, September 1928), “The Dust of Egypt” (Weird Tales, April 1930), “The Bleeding Mummy” (Weird Tales, November 1931), “The Dead-Alive Mummy” (Weird Tales, October 1935), “The Man in the Crescent Terrace” (Weird Tales, March 1946) and “The Ring of Bastet” (Weird Tales, September 1951).
The plot has four young men at Oxford. Abercrombie Smith, our protagonist, working on a medical degree. His sporting pal, Hastie, who warns him against another fellow named Bellingham. This fat and repulsive man lives in the room below Smith, and above them both is his friend, Monkhouse Lee. Smith dismisses Hastie’s complaint when he hears that Lee has a sister engaged to the creepy Bellingham.
Later we meet Bellingham when he suffers from a fainting spell. Abercrombie Smith enters his room and sees the wizard’s lair filled with occult paraphernalia that includes an actual mummy.
…The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its clawlike hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus, and in front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head thrown back, his widely-opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every expiration.
This is the Lot No. 249 of the title. The name of the Egyptian nobleman has been lost to the past and so it has only this numerical name from its auction sale. Bellingham hides a papyrus scroll after being revived from his spell, locking it in a drawer.
The mystery grows. Smith hears something moving around when Bellingham was visiting him. Were the rumors that the houseman Styles gossiped about true? Did Bellingham have a woman in his room? (A crime worthy of expulsion.) The man says he has a dog but Abercrombie Smith knows there is no dog. Later he hears about Long Norton, a rival of Bellingham’s. The man was attacked by what he asserted was not a man but something like an ape. The thing tried to choke him to death with steely claws.
Later Smith sees into Bellingham’s room while being called to an emergency. Poor old Monkhouse Lee has been thrown into the river by an unknown assailant. The student doctor finally puts all the pieces together. He had noticed that the mummy’s sarcophagus was empty then filled in only a moment’s time. He also heard a silent footstep behind him as he moved around. Smith realizes that Bellingham has resurrected his mummy and sent it after Lee for breaking up his engagement to Lee’s sister. Smith is foolish enough to confront the sorcerer.
That night Smith decides to visit his friend, Peterson, at Old’s, a town only a few miles away. While walking, he hears something moving quickly behind him. He sees the dark shape of the mummy and runs. Fortunately, Smith is a championship runner. He manages to crash through Peterson’s door in the nick of time, the weird pursuer making inhuman sounds behind him. (Not surprising, this is the scene artists love to draw!) Smith tells all to his old friend, then writes it all down for the police, in case… He has a plan that he will execute in the morning.
Smith buys a gun then gathers Hastie to help him, taking along a thick riding crop and a long knife. Hastie is to wait outside and only come if called. The doctor enters Bellingham’s room and starts a fire in the grate. The sorcerer demands to know what Smith is about. The man draws the gun and throws the knife to Bellingham. He is to cut up the mummy and place the parts in the fire. The magician refuses but sees that Smith will shoot him dead if needs be, complies. Then the strange plants used in the spell, and finally the scroll with the spell. Smith tells Bellingham if he sees any more unusual activity, he will return to finish the job, and leaves. Bellingham leaves Oxford for the Sudan, never to return.
I thought about the ending of this tale quite a bit. The basic idea of a university haunted by a sorcerer will appear again in Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918) as old Sax liked to re-write Doyle. Bellingham is replaced by Anthony Ferrara, and the terror goes on after matriculation. Rohmer has re-imagined the scenario at novel length. For more on this tale, go here.
But maybe even more interesting and less obvious is the classic Sword & Sorcery trope of the barbarian versus the sorcerer. Robert E. Howard would have read Doyle and the concept of a plot involving a brute warrior fighting and destroying an arcane wizard may have got some help from this idea (or Rohmer’s, as REH pastiched Rohmer in “Skull-Face”). Of course, Conan isn’t going to let Thoth Amon walk away like Smith did. The athletic university students versus the corpulent and twisted Bellingham echoes the bullies picking on the nerdy kid a bit, eh? Something Larry Niven took to task in “Not Long Before the End” (F&SF, April 1969) The story that most comes to mind is an L. Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter piece called “The Snout in the Dark” from Conan of Cimmeria (1969). Tuthmes uses a demon drawn by the wizard Muuru to slay his political opponents. If you combine Tuthmes and Muuru you get a kind of Bellingham.
Doyle’s original story first appeared in the American Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1892. ACD collected it for the first time in Round the Red Lamp (1894). The reception was good, with Kipling claiming the story gave him nightmares for years. (That’s saying something. Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” had a similar reputation among readers.) It may hold the claim of being the first story using a reanimated mummy as a monster. H. P. Lovecraft in “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” says: “…Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’”, a tale of arctic ghostliness, and “Lot No. 249”, wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill. ” That means Boris Karloff (1932) and Arnold Vosloo (1999) have ACD to thank. (Not to mention that guy (Eddie Parker) in Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy (1955).
Adaptations on TV and in films began with the earliest being on Conan Doyle Mystery and Adventure on the BBC in 1967. More easily found are Tales From the Darkside (1990) starring Christian Slater and the Christmas Ghost Story 2023 BBC version starring Kit Harrington. Not surprising, the ending gets changed for dramatic effect.
Conclusion
There can be little doubt that Doyle’s mummy story was influential. I mentioned Seabury Quinn’s Jules deGrandin at the beginning and even old Quinn shows a little influence. Not in any of the stories I mentioned above but in a non-Egyptian one called “The Poltergeist” (Weird Tales, October 1927), where Jules and Trowbridge are chased through the woods by an elemental monster. The old Weird Tales writer may have been influenced by another pair of writers as well. E. and H. Heron (the mother/son team of Katherine and Hesketh Prichard) ‘s “The Story of Baelbrow” (Pearson’s Magazine, April 1898) is another monster chase tale. That story also uses the term “elemental” but I can’t think the Prichards were inspired by anything less than “Lot No. 249”. Whatever the case, the trope of the man chased through the woods is a good one asis the reanimated mummy. Thanks, ACD!
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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