The funeral is somewhere between a horror and a farce. Your Uncle Bernie would have liked it. He always did have a twisted sense of humour. As the row of mourners filed past the open coffin, the air was filled with groans of horror, shrieks of terror, sobbing and eventually a loud thump as your Great Aunt Mildred swoons to the floor, clutching her dicky heart.
"For heaven's sake," your mother tuts from the back of the queue as relatives run to help. "This is ridiculous. What were they thinking making it open casket?"
"My brother was very clear about the details of his own passing," your dad says sombrely. "Open casket, free access to the media, and dry ice. Lots and lots of dry ice."
As the queue moves forward and you near the coffin, the temperature drops several degrees. Torrents of thick white mist are pouring over the sides of the coffin.
"It's not a bloody rock concert," your mother hisses under her breath.
"Honey, the man was an eccentric zillionaire. He could have had himself turned into a diamond and blasted into the sun if he'd wanted. If his last request was for something a little more... showbiz, we owe him that much."
The woman in front of you swoons and is carried away, and you step up to the side of the coffin, breath steaming in the cold air as the flashes of the cameras of the local press burst all around. It isn't a pretty sight. The mortician has done the best with what little he had to work with, stitching the skin back together into a gristly patchwork. The face is an approximation. The body (if it can be called such a thing, as it little more than a sack of skin and a few lumps of gristle and fat) lies on a bed of dry ice crystals. It has been padded out to give it shape, but looks like an amateurish scarecrow. One of the glass eyes has popped out, cotton wool poking from the empty eye socket.
"The coroner couldn't explain it," your dad says in hushed tones, crossing himself. "They think he hit the water at such speed that it knocked his skeleton clean out of his body. All that was left was his skin."
"That's what you get for driving about on one of those things at his age," your mother mutters under her breath too quiet for your dad to hear. Her and your uncle had never seen eye to eye.
Dad lingers to say a few words, but the dry ice is making your feet cold and your socks damp, so you slip away and head to the room next door, where the mourners stand in small huddles, consoling one another. You gravitate towards the buffet. The rest of the congregation appear to have lost their appetites, granting you have free reign over the mini-sausages and triangular sandwiches. Unlike your Uncle's rich friends, you're not in a position to turn down free food. You've just finished piling your plate up when you feel a hand on your elbow and you turn to find somebody saying, "Could we talk privately for a moment?". It is...
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