Maverick academic, Professor O'Singh, believes he may bestow upon mankind the
ultimate gift – the key to all knowledge. Haplessly, and not until it’s too
late, does he realise that he’s precipitated the destruction of the planet.
Here is an excerpt, the first three chapters of The Investigations of the Para-Usual.
Candyman 1
‘Aerial burial!’ yelled the man, imagining the launching of his lifeless corpse into outer space.
His
considerable bulk was being rocked, about to be hauled upwards inside what was
the tight fit of an antiquated wooden lift car – the projectile coffin of his
imaginings; his pine overcoat, his pine spacesuit, as it were.
Lift
off.
‘Graveyard
declutter!’ he bellowed, seizing on another thought. Might outer space be the answer
to overcrowded cemeteries in the modern age? Much as as al fresco became ‘the
rage’ when the sinking of the dead beneath church flagstones was stretched to saturation
point?
Must
be the most morbid instance of sweeping under the carpet, it occurred – the Medieval
practice of burying people under paving slabs.
Even
as the lift cables took up the slack and began to strain, that single notion –
burials in space – catalysed thought connections that cracked and fizzed
pyrotechnically inside the bulky man’s cranium.
‘Negative
burial!’ he exclaimed. Burial in space must be considered negative burial,
because the deceased is headed in the opposite direction – up instead of down.
60,000 feet above the ground, rather
than 6 feet below.
‘Pushing down the daisies!’ the bulky one shouted.
‘Pushing down the daisies!’ the bulky one shouted.
The
big man squeezed his arms up the rattling walls of the lift and above his head
the way an escapologist might, reassigning his limbs in the preliminary stages
of escape. Thus, was he able to clasp his hands over his ears. He needed
desperately to crowd out those thoughts. He needed extreme focus. Supreme
concentration. He clamped his eyes firmly shut.
‘Come
on, O’Singh!’ he muttered, in the manner somewhat of somebody speaking in tongues.
‘Take strength from Strathclyde!’
Professor
Breville O’Singh was transported back in his mind to the University of Strathclyde,
preaching there from the stage of the amphitheatre, rolling his hands one over
the other to facilitate the order of his speech. Not rhythmically, but in the
fashion rather of a father dancing at a disco, to Sister Sledge.
A
bear-shaped man was O’Singh, or perhaps a man-shaped bear. A big man as
imposing a figure as Cassius Clay, though always looking sorry for the
imposition. Kind of limp, drawing in his bulk. Professor Breville O’Singh was
apologetically large.
‘When
asked a question to which there is any number of possible answers, we reply,
“How long is a piece of string?”’ observed Professor Breville O’Singh, from the
stage. ‘But equally we could ask, could we not, “How wide is a piece of string?”’
O’Singh
stopped to survey the reactions of his audience, a gaggle of professors, sat in
various attitudes of contemplation, in judgement, squinting into a blinding
low-angled shaft of Spring sunlight.
O’Singh’s
eyes popped open. The floor indicator light flickered on ‘4’.
‘Come
on, man! Erm… Extract from Exeter!’ he urged himself. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW):
