Mrs J waved a handful of printed sheets of paper at her husband. "Have you seen these? Have you?" she demanded.

Mr J grunted and shifted in his armchair. His head did not come out from behind his newspaper. "What are they?"

"Bills! That's what!" Mrs J shoved the letters with their ominous, red headlines under her husband's nose. "And every last one of them is a final notice!"

Mr J folded his newspaper away and put it down beside him. "Hmm." He took and bills and leafed through them. "Don't worry. I'll deal with these."

"That's what you said last month!" Mrs J snatched the bills back. "And the month before that, too!"

"Well, there's no hurry, then." Mr J picked up his newspaper and set to reading it once more. "You know these are all just bluster. There's a procedure that has to be gone through before they cut us off."

There was a popping noise from the gas fire, and the flames from the burners went from blue, to orange, to yellow, and finally out. Mr J tutted and got up from his seat to fiddle with the knob on the side of the fireplace. The gas fire emitted a series of electric clicks, but refused to restart.

"There!" Mrs J said. "Gas bill." She threw a closely-printed sheet of paper into the carpet beside Mr J. "That was due three months ago!"

Mr J picked up the final demand letter and read it, a sheepish look on his face. "Well, I'll fix it now." He stood up and went for the telephone, putting the receiver against his ear. "Oh."

Mrs J glared at him. "What now?"

"I can't get a dial tone."

"Phone bill. Four months overdue." Mrs J waved another sheet of paper at her husband.

"I'll talk to them too."

"How?"

At this point, the lightbulb in the ceiling rose went out, plunging the room into darkness.

"Electricity bill?" Mr J asked.

"Five months overdue," Mrs J snarled.

"Oh."

The front door melted into a pool of purple goo, and a host of groping tentacles materialised in the gap left behind. Ominous chanting filled the air with leaden syllables. Mrs J batted away one of the pseudopods that was getting too close to her.

"You didn't?" she asked.

Mr J, his features cast into sharp relief by the otherworldly light that poured through the cracks in the walls, nodded in embarrassment. "That'll be the reality bill. I should have paid that six months ago."