Sleep Wherever

Over a seven-course dinner, the lavishness of which we could barely comprehend, our mysterious host, who went only by Mr. Q, laid out his offer:

“Boys, you’re ne’er-do-wells and vagrants, blights upon society. You are lowly scoundrels, and I should guess that, without outside assistance, you will continue to descend further into depravity.”

The speech contrasted harshly with the elegance of the food, and we, having never experienced such delicacies as Mr. Q provided, offered little resistance to his tirade.

He went on:

“But I would like to intercede. You see, I am a very wealthy man. And so, I am willing to bestow upon each of you a fortune, the likes of which would effectively ensure a life of luxury not just for you, but also for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. All you must do is spend the night within this house. At dawn, I will be waiting to give any who remain a check upon which is a number with more zeroes than you can count.”

I spoke up now:

“And if we don’t want to stay in your weird house?”

“Then you can leave at the conclusion of dinner,” Mr. Q said, taking no offense to my tone. “And, in fact, I will pay you forty dollars to do so. Just make your exit quickly, as the doors lock at eight and will not re-open before first light.”

Of course, within this information hid the contradiction that should have concerned all those assembled at the table. We assumed that when Mr. Q’s promise to reward “any who remain” meant all who did not walk away in the course of the night. And yet, how would we do so if the house locked at eight?

This remains a question to this day: what exactly happened to those who did not depart after dinner but were absent when the sun rose? Jeremy does not clarify. Whether he knows his friends’ various gruesome fates but refuses to say, or has repressed them, or has a hazy sense of the happenings that night, I have no idea. Occasionally, after a few cocktails, he will speak of things he claims to have witnessed: of skeletons dancing through the halls, of melting walls, of the squish under his shoe in a dark room that he knew, on some instinctual level, to be a human eye. But each image seems disconnected from all the others.

If you haven’t guessed, Jeremy was the lone soul present the next morning. Now, he exists as a cautionary tale about the limits of wealth’s reach. Mr. Q was true to his word and gave him a lavish sum, enough that Jeremy now splits his time between a mountain chateau and a beach house whose accumulated coastline dwarfs that of the neighboring beach resort, each one with its own staff. But he is not happy. He fears blinking, for even the glimpse of what lurks in his subconscious is enough to ruin his day. And he must sleep with his legs strapped to the bed, as he returns, in his dreams each night, to that horrifying evening spent at Mr. Q’s, and he fears, without restraint, his legs might carry him to the window and through it, such is his desperation for escape.

As for how I live to tell this tale, it’s simple: I took the other offer. After dinner, I made my swift departure and received forty dollars for the privilege. This money I used to purchase an air mattress, one with a convenient built-in pump, and now I can spend the night in any house!