My stomach gurgled. The gastro that caused all this mayhem was returning. I rushed to the dunny and sat, bolting the door behind me. And there I stayed. I was puzzled. She had money—handfuls of it. She had jewellery, a whole bagful. How come then they needed to bludge off poor people like us? I didn’t understand. But at least that gave me some reason to turn against them. After a while, Evie must have realised where I had disappeared to and came hammering on the door. I pretended I wasn’t there. I had a paperback planted by the dunny for emergency reading. This was just such an emergency.

H. G. Wells wrote stories of the potential annihilation of humanity by its own hand, as in The Stolen Bacillus and other stories, but he wrote stories of all kinds, sci-fi and horror as well as straight drama. After The Stolen Bacillus came The Plattner, which notably contains The Argonauts of the Air, in which the Wright Brothers are anticipated by some ill-fated Englishmen over Hyde Park, several mysterious meetings with dead people, and the one where the witch-doctor’s effigy pursues the pith-hatted explorer all the way back to England, in Mr Porlock and the Porroh Man. The stories are spooky and well written, and in the title piece, (the curious name is only the name of the character) a laboratory explosion propels a man into a parallel universe.