Part 21 (1/2)

Prior gestured for her to join them, introducing his guests as she made her way down the stairs.

As she reached the bottom, Prior took her hand. 'This is my daughter, Vanessa.'

'How do you do.' The Doctor dusted his hand on his lapel and offered it.

'Are you more Egyptian people?'

'Well, that rather depends on what you mean. We're not actually Egyptian by birth.'

'They're here for the mummy,' Prior said simply.

Vanessa looked at the Doctor, Tegan and Atkins. 'You're welcome to it,'

she said. 'I think the whole thing's creepy.' She smiled, her face instantly alive with humour. 'Would you like some tea? I'm sure dad didn't think to offer.'

'Er yes, thank you,' the Doctor looked round at his friends. 'That would be very nice.'

'I'll put the kettle on. Call me when you're back.' She turned sharply, her hair thrown outwards in a semi-circle of strands. As she reached the end of the hall, she looked back. 'You will stay for the party, won't you?' She did not wait for an answer.

Prior coughed. 'Tomorrow is her twenty-first birthday. We're having a bit of a bash tomorrow night. Mainly my friends, I'm afraid, though she has invited a couple of people from her old school. Along with James Norris of course, Vanessa's fiance. It's something of a double celebration now they've finally made their minds up.'

Prior unlocked the door under the stairs, opened it and gesturing for the Doctor to go first. 'Vanessa won't come down here now,' Prior said. 'Makes her feel funny seeing someone so dead, she says.'

'We may soon be able to allay her fears,' the Doctor said as he started down the stairs.

'Too right,' said Tegan as she followed him. 'She's not as dead as you think.'Prior said nothing, but followed Atkins down the stairs.

The room was surprisingly large, it probably extended under a good part of the house above. The floor was flagged with stone, and the walls were covered with heavy velvet curtains. Angled spotlights set into the ceiling made the room seem stark and bare, despite the various low tables and shelves around it. On each stood several relics, so that the whole place looked like a small museum.

'I've moved things round a bit,' Prior said. 'After the fire we put a proper staircase in when we restructured the house. Easier than the old trap door that used to be there. I use this as a sort of relic room now for my collection.'

At the far end of the room, on a raised dais, stood the sarcophagus. It was darkened with age and exposure to the moist English air, but was recognisably the same coffin. Tegan ran across to it.

'Are these genuine?' the Doctor asked, pausing by a display case. It contained an alabaster goblet, hieroglyphics on the rim picked out in blue pigment. The light inside the case shone through the cup making it seem to glow. Two handles projected from opposite sides, shaped like lotus flowers growing up and out from the base of the goblet. Beside it lay a dagger together with its embossed gold sheath. The blade was silver, the handle an intricate lacing of cloisonne.

Prior joined the Doctor. 'Magnificent, aren't they? And yes, they are genuine. The lotus wis.h.i.+ng cup, and Queen Ahhotpe's dagger.'

'Why is it called a wis.h.i.+ng cup?' asked Atkins.

'I imagine because of the inscription,' the Doctor indicated the coloured rim.

'The hieroglyphs probably wish for long life and happiness, or some such thing.'

Prior nodded. '”May the Ka live, and mayest thou spend millions of years, thou who lovest Thebes, sitting with thy face to the north wind, thy two eyes beholding happiness,”' he quoted. 'Or so Tobias St. John translated it.'

The Doctor nodded. 'Not at all bad, actually.'

'Doctor,' called Tegan impatiently from the coffin.

'All right, Tegan, all right. She's waited for a long time, a couple more minutes won't make much difference.'

'They will to me.'

The Doctor ignored her and examined the relics again. 'You obviously know and love the subject,' he told Prior.

'That's your fault.'

'Oh?'

'Oh yes. Well, indirectly. I knew nothing about Egypt, even where it was, until my uncle showed me the mummy soon before he died. It fascinated me. When he pa.s.sed away, I could afford to devote more time to the hobby. Now it's an obsession.' He smiled. 'Or so Vanessa tells me. She has little interest in the past. The future holds everything for the young. Like your impatient friend here.'

They made their way slowly to the sarcophagus, where Tegan was almost hopping with antic.i.p.ation. 'What does your wife think to it all?' she asked Prior as the Doctor leaned over the coffin and started examining the bandaged body within.

'My wife is dead.'

'I'm sorry.' Tegan looked away.

'You weren't to know. It was a long time ago. She died giving birth to Vanessa.'

The Doctor straightened up. 'Well, everything seems to be going swimmingly,' he said with a smile. 'In a few days she'll be back to normal.'

'A few days?'

'Tegan.' The Doctor raised a finger to stop her outburst.

Prior looked into the sarcophagus. Where the Doctor had pulled at the bandages there was an exposed area through which the bare flesh of an arm was showing. 'I realize that I have inherited an obligation of some sort to you people,' he said quietly. 'But I do think, Doctor, that you owe me some sort of explanation.'

They were in the drawing room. The layout and decor had changed surprisingly little over the last hundred years, although a large organ stood incongruously in one corner of the room. 'My late wife used to play,' Prior had commented when Tegan asked him pointedly why he possessed such a baroque piece of equipment.

The Doctor gave a brief and simplified explanation of events over tea. He glossed over the problems of timing and dates, suggesting but never actually stating that he and his friends were under a similar obligation to some unspecified ancestor to be there when Nyssa awoke. Explaining how she came to be sleeping inside the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy was rather less simple.

'I am aware of the notion of suspended animation,' Prior said huffily at one point as the Doctor tried to explain. 'I did some reading up on cryogenics a long time back, in a previous career. So while I don't understand what's happened, I can begin to believe it.''It all sounds complete nonsense to me,'

Vanessa said, offering round a plate of shortbread. 'But I failed science.'

'Snap,' said Tegan.

'You mean the nonsense or the science?'

Tegan laughed. 'Both. But you get used to believing nonsense when you're with the Doctor.'