by BBCi Cult
As Atkins watched, Rassul reached into his jacket pocket and took out an hourglass. He held it up, and Atkins could see the final few grains of sand in the upper bowl. Then Rassul placed the hourglass on the rim of the sarcophagus, and bowed to his goddess. The muffled sound of the organ filtered through the floor, swelling as if it were emanating from the stonework itself.
Rassul was chanting now, his voice adding to the discordant frenzy. As he spoke, he raised his arms above his head, and the mummies beside the coffin mirrored his actions. Vanessa stood silent as the ceremony proceeded. But Atkins could see that the edges of her mouth were curling slightly upwards into the beginnings of a triumphant smile.
Atkins could sense the tension in the Doctor beside him. He was shaking his head slowly, clenching his fists by his sides. At last, as if unable to help himself any more, the Doctor shouted across the room: 'Stop this, Rassul. Stop it now before it's too late. Don't tempt Horus out of his lair or Osiris from the netherworld.'
'Be silent,' hissed Vanessa in reply. Her eyes were large and angry. As she raised her arm, and pointed accusingly at the Doctor, the two service robots also turned towards him. Atkins sensed the mummy behind them take a step forward. 'My time is now.' He could hear the power gathering behind Vanessa's words, could feel the tension in the stale air.
Then Rassul let out a piercing cry. His arms stretched up to their full extent, and his whole body went rigid for a second. Then he stepped back, arms open wide as if to welcome a friend. His voice was clear across the room as the chords of the organ died away. 'Nephthys, I conjure thee from the realm of the dead. Arise and do thy work.'The reply was almost melodious. A female voice, musical and strong. It sounded to Atkins like a pair of supreme tenors chanting their twin response.
'Here am I. I answer. I awake.'
But what Atkins found most surprising was that the voices came from behind him. And the two Shabti figures stepped forward from the back of the chamber, making their ponderous wooden way towards the sarcophagus.
Rassul shook his head in disbelief. 'This is not how it is written. What is your purpose here?'
'Doctor?' Tegan and Atkins both asked together.
The Doctor put his finger to his lips, then answered quietly. 'I think I told you, Shabti figures are provided to do the work of the deceased in the next life.'
'That's right,' Atkins said. 'Ushabti means answerer. They answer for the dead person.' He broke off. 'I see.'
'You mean all they've done is wake up the figures again? Terrific.'
'Oh no, Tegan,' the Doctor said. 'I'm afraid they may have done much more than that.'
The Shabti paused in front of the coffin. Twin statues, they stared across the casket at the woman they were carved to represent. She stared back in silence. When the figures spoke, it was in unison: 'We are the guardians. We protect the tomb of Nephthys from all who would enter. And we prevent the body of Nephthys from rising again. We answer for her.'
Rassul addressed them. 'You mean that the body cannot be restored?' There was a note of desperation, a dying cadence in his voice. 'But we were sent by Horus himself,' he was close to hysteria now. 'We will - we must - have Nephthys whole again, complete. It is the will of Horus.'
'We are her Shabti, as ordained and instructed by Horus. If you would wake Nephthys, then you must answer the question. If you truly act for Horus, you will know the answer.'
Rassul stepped up to the Shabti nearest him. 'Then ask your question,' he spat. 'If you act for Horus, you will know the secret of his power. Where is the focus for the eye of Horus?'
Rassul frowned for a moment. Then he threw his head back and let out a triumphant screech of laughter. 'The power of the Osirans devolves from the Great Sphinx in Egypt.' His face cracked into a smile.
'And the local focus point?'
The smile froze. Atkins could see the tracery of veins standing out on Rassul's bald scalp. 'Local?' He shook his head, and looked to Vanessa. 'Nephthys, where is the local focus?'
No reply.
'You draw energy from it, you must be able to tell where that energy comes from.' Vanessa stared back. Her mouth was still curled into a half smile. But her face was empty.
It was the Doctor who answered. 'It's over, Rassul.'
'Never,' shouted Rassul. 'Nephthys can deduce the position of the local power source.' 'You're missing the point,' the Doctor all but shouted back. 'Nephthys is only half there - she can't deduce anything.'
Rassul flinched, as if he had been hit. Then he turned to Vanessa. The two Shabti figures followed his gaze. She stared blankly back at them.
'No,' Rassul said as the Shabti pushed past him. 'No!' he shouted as they approached Vanessa. 'She can answer. She knows the response. We are true servants of Horus.'
But the Shabti figures ignored him and continued their ponderous progress towards Vanessa. She stared into space, waiting for them.
She was still staring as Rassul screamed at the service robots to attack the Shabti figures. She was still staring as he tried to stand between the Shabti and his goddess, to halt their advance. She was still staring as they hurled him out of their way across the room. He collapsed senseless at the base of the wall.
Then, out of an instinctive recognition that something was wrong, Nephthys started to back away from them.
The mummies beside the casket lumbered after the Shabti. The mummy behind Atkins pushed past and made its massive way across the chamber to help its mistress. Rassul was picking himself up from the floor as the two closer mummies reached the Shabti. It seemed an extremely unequal match as the two massive bandaged robots reached out their huge hands for the delicate wooden carved women.
The Shabti continued their progress as if nothing was happening. They shrugged off the grip of the mummies without seeming to notice the hindrance. As the mummies tried again to grab them, the figures turned in unison. The movement was almost graceful, hand and arm describing a lazy curve through the air. The two mummies collapsed to their knees, one toppled backwards, its legs still working, as flames and smoke erupted from its chest. The other staggered back to its feet as the third mummy joined it.
Vanessa had reached the wall. There was nowhere else for her to go. Rassul was regaining his consciousness, shouting and screaming at her to run, but the Shabti were closing in too quickly. She faced them with fear but no understanding in her eyes.
The surviving mummies dragged at the Shabti, tried to hold them back. But the twin figures reached out, and took the arms of their flesh and blood sister. They drew the arms out, away from her body. The mummies continued to pull at the Shabti, and they in turn continued their grotesque tug of war with Vanessa. She screamed.
Rassul had staggered back to his feet, and had almost reached them when Vanessa's body gave way to the strain. The blood and tissue splashed across the room and caught him in the face. He coughed and fell. And cried.
Atkins felt sick and horrified, but he was unable to look away. Across the room, the mummies battered uselessly at the blood-red figures tearing at the remains of their image. Rassul skidded and slipped on the wet floor, his sobs adding to the unholy sounds.
Atkins felt the Doctor's hand on his shoulder, and allowed himself to be turned away. The door behind them was slowly swinging shut. They hurled themselves against it, pushing their way through. The Doctor pulled his fingers from the stonework just as the wall sealed itself into place with a grinding finality. Through the thickness of the stone they could hear Rassul's wails and cries.
'That's interesting,' the Doctor said.
Atkins frowned at the contrast between his light tone and what they had just witnessed. The Doctor mistook his expression and pointed to the hieroglyphics carved into the hidden door. The Nephthys cartouche, the opening mechanism, was gone. In its place was a congealed volcanic mess, as if the stonework had been melted away.
'The sands of time wash us all clean,' the Doctor said quietly. 'No one will ever find their way through that. And if they do, I fancy th
ey won't find much left the other side.' Then he brightened. 'Still, all's well that ends well, eh?' And with that he strode back across the room and slapped Tegan on the shoulder.
She pulled away. 'Is that it?' she asked. Her voice was vibrant with suppressed emotion.
The Doctor seemed not to notice. 'Yes, I think so. A pretty good result considering. All over -'
'Doctor!' Tegan screamed at him, her whole body tense with anger.
'- bar the shouting.' The Doctor frowned, his eyebrows knitting together as he leaned towards her. 'Yes?' he asked irritably.
Tegan turned away, arms folded.
'What is it?' The Doctor asked the group collectively. 'What's wrong with her now?'
'I think she might be worried about Nyssa,' Atkins suggested quietly.
'Nyssa? Oh yes, I nearly forgot.' The Doctor fumbled in his pocket and drew out the TARDIS key. 'Well, let's go and wake her up then.' The cries from behind the stone door had subsided into faint sobs now. The noise of the fight between Shabti and mummies had completely subsided.
The old woman who had woken in the sarcophagus followed the Doctor to the TARDIS. It was only after he had unlocked the door and ushered her in ahead of him that he seemed to realize that nobody else was following. They were standing open-mouthed, watching him from the other side of the dais.
'Well, are you coming or not?' he demanded. From behind the sealed doorway came the faint sound of scratching. Fingernails scrabbling desperately on stone. Tegan and Atkins looked at each other in silence.
The Chronicler nodded slowly. So, when circumstances were varied, even by the tiniest of changes, the Doctor was still able to adapt and react. A point was made, and the Chronicler returned the holosphere's environment to its original settings.
Then he smiled, laid down his pen, and closed the book.
THE END
Author's Notes: Alternative Ending
Author's Notes
Author's Notes: Instalment One
The Sands of Time was the third Doctor Who novel I wrote for Virgin publishing after Theatre of War and System Shock. Having done one book set in the future well away from Earth, and one in - near enough - the present day, I wanted to vary it again. But I didn't just want to set a story partly in the past, I also wanted to play with the whole notion of time travel, which I felt had been largely neglected in the books and for that matter on television. There is far more potential to the concepts and paradoxes than just using the TARDIS to go to different times and places.
I also wanted to write a sequel to Pyramids of Mars. Again, the whole of Egyptian mythology and the legacy of the Mummy movies from Universal and Hammer had not, I felt, been fully exploited. Rebecca Levene was the editor at Virgin, and she was happy for me to produce a proposal for a sequel, but warned me that she felt it might be tricky given that Pyramids of Mars did rather establish that the last of the Osirans was now dead. But, undaunted, I set to work.
I always start a book by deciding what it is about (as opposed to what happens). This book would be about time and about Egyptology. That decided, I then roughed out a relatively simple storyline which I could embellish and expand. I had read about the 'mummy parties' that the Victorians occasionally held where people were invited to an evening event with drinks and food and the centrepiece was the unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy - ostensibly for educational purposes, but really just for the sensationalism of it. I loved the idea that the guests would gather, and someone would be late but they go ahead anyway - and when the decaying mummy is unwrapped, inside the genuine, ancient wrappings is the missing guest.
That idea obviously developed and evolved, and it gave me something to start from - how could this have happened? What had to take place before that moment for the story to work and where did it lead in consequence? Having got an idea of the shape of my story, I started to add detail. Research is a lovely academic-sounding term. In this case it meant I watched Pyramids of Mars to decide what elements I liked and wanted to include and expand on. Then I got myself copies of all the Universal mummy films and as many of the Hammer ones as I could find, and I watched them. As I went through I made notes of the sequences or ideas that really struck a chord with me and I wanted to include - like the mummy attacking an encampment of archaeologists in Egypt, or the image of the mummy carrying the heroine into a lake...
Having got a very rough story and a list of things to include, it is then a case of fitting it together like a jigsaw - what happens when? How does it all fit together? There is a balance to be found between including things for the sake of it, and letting your imagination encompass those elements and benefit from the mental exercise of discovering out how it all works. Once you have a story, the next thing to decide is how to tell it. In this case it was made more difficult given that the events don't follow a simple chronological sequence. So whose perception of those events, whose experience of them should the reader be privy to?
There needed to be a central thrust of the narrative, from which I could then decide on occasion to depart in order to clarify certain points and to conceal others. The hardest thing was to decide how to mix it up so it intrigues along the way, and falls into place at the end. So the opening sequence is a defining moment for the story, but we only discover its personal relevance to Rassul at the end of his story. Equally, the Doctor's visit to the Cranleigh wedding might seem like a gratuitous character moment, but it is essential to remind (or inform) readers of certain things that will be necessary to their understanding of the finale...
Another consideration I took into account was that I had been given six months to write Theatre of War, five to write System Shock, and this time Rebecca was hinting that I would get four months - if I was lucky. And I knew that in the next four months I would be travelling a lot to the USA on business. Luckily, laptop computers had been invented and I had one for my work. So I needed to structure the story so that a large part of it was in the form of relatively short chapters or chunks so I could write a complete, discrete section whenever I got some free time while travelling. I can still remember which piece I wrote in a coffee bar in Miami airport, which was accompanied by weak, fizzy American beer and a plate of nachos in a Marriott hotel in Atlanta, which on an uncomfortable chair at the departure gate of Birmingham International... Most of the short sequences between chapters were initially written like this.
Rebecca was very keen on the proposal, but had three problems with it. One was that she didn't like the title as she felt 'The Sands of Time' was a bit of a cliché. I liked it for the same reason, of course - and because it picked up on the Egyptian theme and the notion of time itself and an hourglass. Jokingly, I suggested we could call it Orion's Daughter and for a time it was going to be called Child of Orion - which explains some slightly stilted phraseology late on in the book. Luckily, rather than just insist, Rebecca asked her colleagues at Virgin what they thought, and everyone else liked The Sands of Time.
Her second problem was that Peter Darvill-Evans had said he wasn't sure it all worked and the various strands of the story fitted properly together. That wasn't to say that he thought it didn't, but that he would like us to be absolutely certain. So to fix that, I produced a flow chart showing the different storylines and following each of the main character's personal time line. It showed the intersections and dependencies. Having been writing a manual and an online tutorial on how to go about designing and writing event-driven and object-oriented program code that seemed to me to be the best way to check my 'narrative design'. What I didn't know is that Peter has a background in those adventure books where you choose the path through the book depending on what action you think the characters should take - and those are designed with a flow chart, not surprisingly. So Peter was well able to interpret what I sent in, and was so impressed he had this huge chart (I think it was about a dozen A4 pages taped together) hanging on the back of his door for several months. Probably so he could marvel at the insanity of the mind behind it.
Rebecca's th
ird point was really that she agreed with something I had worried about. In my letter accompanying the proposal (on 26 January 1995) I had said:
The main concern I have is that there is no character other than the Doctor and Tegan who goes right through the book. One way to fix this is to set the story after Time-flight, and have just the Doctor and Nyssa. Tegan's role can then be taken by another character - either one we already have (Atkins or Lord Kenilworth), or a new one (museum curator, street urchin, whatever). The only real change to the plot outline would then be to send the character to Norris's cottage by train and taxi rather than by car (in chapters 11 - 12). There again, it may not be a problem at all.
Rebecca agreed we needed to sort this out - with all the temporal to-ing and fro-ing, we really did need a point of view character for the reader apart from the regular TARDIS crew. Without this the book would have been mechanically sound and interesting, but somewhat cold and heartless. Luckily, I was able to fix this as I produced my flow chart and be certain I had not upset anything in the plot by having the character of Atkins travel with the Doctor for a while and experience the story pretty much as the reader does.
It also gave me a great character who I came to like a lot - my plan for him was that he should start out like the Anthony Hopkins character in The Remains of the Day but then his experiences soften and liberate him to the extent that I could give him the happy ending that Hopkins' butler is unable to achieve simply because of who he is. One of the problems of writing Doctor Who books (and to a lesser extent of any series fiction) is that for a novel to work, your central character has to learn and develop because of their experiences. Now, thanks to Rebacca's perceptive comments, I had a character who could do this in a way that the Doctor never can and his companions rarely manage.