Oct 28, 2015

Extract from Chapter 18 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':

Upstairs in the Natural History gallery, the operatives found themselves in a maze of tall, oppressive, dark, wood-framed glass cases hosting an array of stuffed animals frozen in postures apparently natural to them in life. A fox prowling in undergrowth; a stoat on hind legs in mid-‘Eek!’.

‘Taxi!’ bawled O’Singh, testing out his earlier observation that he might be able to hail a passing taxidermist. A decrepit gallery-minder sat just inside the door stirred from a doze and yelled, ‘Two sugars, please Eileen!’ and promptly fell back asleep. An agitated lady visiting with her young son somewhere over by the bats called for some quiet with a ‘Do you mind?’ based on the assumption that the guilty parties would or should.

Dr Pratt followed O’Singh, peering into the gloomy cabinets, arrested briefly by the model of the dodo keeping the company of other defunct birdlife. The passenger pigeon was there, as numerous as locusts in 19th Century America, as multitudinous as the dodo in the early 20th. A flock sighted in Ontario in 1866 was described as being one mile wide and 300 miles long, taking 14 hours to pass, estimated to comprise more than 3½ billion birds. The great auk, also, represented again in model form, the last breeding pair and egg destroyed in 1844 by three Icelandic fishermen with a positive attitude to ‘specicide’.