LOT NO. 249 by Arthur Conan Doyle: “Lot 249 is all the title he has now.”

MY OTHER REVIEWS OF MISCELLANEOUS HORROR AND GHOST STORIES: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/

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LOT NO. 249 

“He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat.”

A code for our times? — as well as for our vulnerable green world and the monarch who fights, as spoken on the recent Christmas Day, to defend it….

“…a formidable green-covered volume, adorned with great coloured maps of that strange internal kingdom of which we are the hapless and helpless monarchs.”

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A dog or a woman, a toad or a dove. This is a dark and wonderful discovery of a story to read, after seeing its recent adaptation as a Christmas Eve TV tradition. The main reason to read it is because I noticed — perhaps for the first time ever? — that 249 is BDI in alphabetical order, being an anagram of ‘bid’, something you would have needed ironically to do so as to bring something deliberate on yourself…

“Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up.”

I now feel, having read this work, that there is something obliquely and instinctively meaningful going on, amid the candlelit, otherwise civilised gentlemanliness of an Oxford college and its latent horror (“…there was something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and pringled in his skin”) and the setting alive, as in Frankenstein, of an ancient mummy because of a squabble towards a near drowning caused by the betrothal to someone’s sister. More broken triangles nearer halfway towards 2 from 3…? — ‘the spiral and irregular stair’, — ‘Smith bounded up the stairs, taking three at a time,’ the game of cricket (“half-volleys and long hops”) and oarsmanship (“…pulling a steady thirty-six, while his opponent, with a jerky forty…”)…

“From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge.”

“The half-moon lay in the west between two Gothic pinnacles,…”

“…a glimpse of a scraggy neck, and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams.”

LOT NO. 249 — the ‘NO.’ bid against evil: or an insidious bidding by YES?