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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MikeJesus on 2024-11-12 01:02:29+00:00.
Alyssa was a wonderful person to have around the flat. She was bright, she was funny and she had all sorts of attractive friends she would introduce me to. When Henry started dating her, I was psyched.
For the most part at least.
Alyssa was a wonderful person, but she was a terrible cook. What made the situation considerably worse was that she was a passionate cook. Henry and I would survive on delivery pizza for the most part, yet every couple of weeks Henry’s girlfriend would drop by and treat the two of us to dinner.
Most of the stuff in our fridge was well past its expiry date and Alyssa’s approach to recipes was the wrong kind of improvisational, yet we’d still let her cook and then pretended to enjoy her food. She was, after all, a wonderful person aside from the whole cooking thing.
Alyssa was a wonderful person, yet, years later, I think it was her liberal interpretation of quiche that began Henry Willow’s journey towards madness.
The meal was far from good, yet it wasn’t until the morning that Alyssa’s culinary skills truly revealed their horror. For three days I existed on a diet of Gatorade and white rice. When I finally ventured past our front door for a grocery run, I felt like a changed man. When I met Henry in the kitchen, it was clear he had changed as well.
Once before, Henry had complained about his dreams. He was going through a bout of insomnia and swallowed an unhealthy amount of sleeping pills to put it to rest. The morning after his sleeping pill experiment, he told me about a dream where he was a spider, or something along those lines.
The morning that we had both recovered from our food poisoning, Henry spoke of his dreams once more. This time, however, he was brimming with passion and fear.
I can’t remember exactly what Henry told me that morning. It’s been decades since the two of us roomed together and the man’s speech was frantic. Apparently, in his sleep, my roommate had been visited by a heavenly being that imparted news of his future. Henry spoke of “Hybrid creatures ruling the world” and “The final century of Man” and a bunch of other things which made me think that the food poisoning had dislodged some screws in his brain.
When Henry mentioned that this heavenly being had given him the winning numbers for the draw of the lottery at the end of the school year — I latched onto that.
It seemed funny.
In comparison to the other things my roommate was saying, it seemed sane.
I laughed and asked him to give me the numbers. I did, after all, suffer from the same poisoning and would be no richer for it.
Henry did not find my joke funny. He was uncomfortable. His fever dream communion had been unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He struggled to understand most of what was imparted to him in the dream, yet he was scared that its apocalyptic predictions were correct.
I, once again, laughed. I assured him that what he had experienced was simply a particularly nasty fever and that he would forget about it in no time. I assured him he would be fine and that no hybrid beasts would rule the world.
Henry seemed to calm at my assurances, and for a moment I felt like I was sitting in the kitchen with my good old easy-going roommate, yet after that morning Henry changed.
We both studied in the sciences, but neither of us were especially studious. Henry in particular had a habit of skipping lectures and borrowing the essays of his more academically gifted classmates. It honestly was a miracle that Henry had managed to pass his first year of university. Henry had always been a slacker, yet his communion with the dream-being radically changed his ways.
I seldom saw the guy around the flat anymore. Henry wholeheartedly committed his whole life to school. He attended every lecture, ceased all of his social activities and even broke up with Alyssa. Apparently, he needed to focus on his schoolwork. Apparently, that’s what the dream-being demanded of him.
My roommate had stopped drinking or smoking or having any kind of fun. He didn’t seem interested in hanging out with me and, after a couple bounced invitations, I let him have his solitude. I just let my life carry on without him.
After the first post-quiche morning, I had forgotten all about the lottery numbers.
Henry had not.
I was coming back from class at the end of the semester when I heard the television was on. The lottery draw, specifically.
Henry was sitting on the couch with a bottle of scotch. Expensive stuff. Lagavulin. There was a dent in the bottle, but he was sitting rigid like a man in an electric chair. He didn’t even notice me coming in.
I grabbed myself a glass and asked Henry for permission. He barely noticed me. All his attention was focused on the television. A bunch of yellow and blue balls were bouncing around a studio aquarium.
Our friendship had long faded by then. It even took me a solid minute to remember the lottery aspect of Henry’s prophetic dream. When the thought did finally connect, I exclaimed and tried making conversation but Henry would have no part of it.
His attention was focused solely on the numbers being drawn.
One by one his body tensed. When the count was halfway through, he downed the rest of his glass and took a deep breath. Henry didn’t budge an inch until the final number was read. As the presenter turned her speech to a crawl for suspense, his eyes remained glued to the screen, unblinking.
When the final number was read Henry gasped for air. He collapsed into himself, like a man mortally wounded.
I refilled my drink and patted him on the shoulder. Judging by his reaction, I presumed the dream numbers had been wrong. I said something to that effect and started to refill his glass as well.
From his nigh catatonic state, Henry grabbed my arm and stopped me from pouring. His words were cold as ice and scarcely resembled my old friend. He told me to never underestimate him again. Visibly frustrated, Henry brought out his winning ticket and waved it in my face.
The numbers matched.
On screen, the announcer was screaming about a winner in a haze of confetti but there was no joy in Henry’s eyes. He wasn’t celebrating his winnings. He was angry at me for doubting his bizarre visions.
Seeing my old friend suddenly rich, I tried calming down the situation. I asked Henry how he was going to spend his winnings. I tried to remind him of all the cool destinations both of us dreamed about traveling to back when we first became buds.
This calmed him down, somewhat. Henry took another deep breath and apologized. The lottery results were a constant source of worry. The months he had spent dedicating himself to science would have been in vain had the numbers not matched. He was simply emotional.
With another deep breath Henry rose and started for his bedroom. Yet, perhaps sensing my confusion, he stopped.
It’s been decades, but what Henry said will forever stick in my skull.
Henry told me, in the calmest of tones, his plans for the future. All of his winnings were to be invested into specific stocks so that his fortune may grow. Henry didn’t tell me where his dreams suggested he invest, but he did wave around his winning ticket as he spoke. He seemed quite pleased with himself.
Henry said that for his long term plans he required a lot of capital. In the meantime, he had learned as much as he could from university and would take his leave in the morning after exams. Before I could even ask the question, Henry said his rent would be covered in full. Then, with a handshake, he bid me goodbye.
The next morning, Henry’s room was bare and the man was gone. He stayed true to his promise, and wired me his share of the rent for the next couple of months and I even briefly got to sublet his room to one of Alyssa’s friends.
She’s my wife now, so I too, in a way, in a less optimal way, won the lottery.
I still think about Henry a lot — the horrible quiche, that morning tea, his ramblings about hybrid creatures and the final century. Those thoughts linger and, I must admit, frighten me. Yet they’re not the reason why I have spent years trying to track the man down.
I want to speak to Henry again. I want us to hang out, like old college buddies, like we used to back in the day. I want to see Henry and when I see Henry, I would ask him for a single thing:
Just a bit of stock advice.