The Plattner Story: He Vanished in Flame—and Returned with the Truth

A routine chemistry lesson ends with an explosion—and Gottfried Plattner vanishes without leaving so much as a scrap of clothing behind. Nine days later, he crashes back into the world bruised, bleeding, and physically impossible: his heart is on the wrong side, his organs are reversed, and even his right and left hands seem to have exchanged places.

Plattner insists that the blast hurled him completely outside ordinary space. In the strange world where he awakens, the sky is black, a vast green sun rises over barren hills, and the familiar streets and rooms of Sussexville appear only as pale, ghostlike images. He can see the people he knows, but they cannot see or hear him. Some pass directly through his body.

Then he discovers he is not alone.

Across this desolate landscape drift countless pale human faces—the mysterious Watchers of the Living. Some resemble the dead. They hover near people still alive, observing them with grief, anger, tenderness, or helpless regret. Among them Plattner recognizes the faces of his own parents.

As the days pass, he begins to understand that this other world may exist beside ours at every moment, invisible only because we cannot see it. His final encounter brings him terrifyingly close to the moment of death itself—and sends him violently back into our world.

First published in 1896, The Plattner Story is one of H. G. Wells’ most imaginative early science-fiction tales, combining the mathematical possibility of a fourth dimension with a haunting vision of what may be watching us from beyond ordinary existence.