The Numbers

This is a follow-up to “The Typewriter” that you can read here.

He was sure that the typewriter was some kind of oracle and had given him six lottery numbers which he had used for his lottery ticket entry. He didn't play often but always only bought one, because only one set of numbers can win a lottery draw. He never watched the draw but preferred to check his numbers in the Sunday paper, he could never understand how people bought tickets and then watched the live draw.

This is what he typed on it hoping for a lottery win

“The Winning Lottery Numbers For December 17th 2022 are:

6 13 19 25 38 57”

He went to the corner shop and picked up a paper and a litre of milk, and then walked home. He opened the paper and checked the numbers, and he didn’t even get one. The magic typewriter had failed him. To be honest, he really didn’t expect to win, it would be a ridiculous situation if he could win every supposedly random game by typing something on an ancient typewriter.

The documents he found with it implied that it may have some kind of predictive power, but the other alternative was that this was the tool of a serial killer who just used it to plan who his next victim was. In that case, was the murderer ever brought to justice and was the murderer the old man?

He was thinking that maybe he should hand all this over to the police, and maybe those murders could be marked as solved. How could he have believed that there was any magic, however dark, in those keys? Part of him still wanted to believe there was some power there but his more sensible side said there was nothing.

Now he started having darker thoughts, there were people he didn’t like, who had done him wrong and deserved some kind of comeuppance. What if he used the typewriter to plan their punishment? Maybe that would work, although the reality was that he hoped it wouldn’t work. Because if it did, it would give him an absolutely loathsome power to hurt people, and he did not feel that he was a bad person. Having said that, that was before his fingers touched the cursed keys of that possibly hellish typewriter.

He looked at the typewriter. There was a guy called John Rowley who had been promoted, but he had missed out despite being better qualified than Rowley.

The typing started.:

“John Rowley was involved in a serious car accident, resulting in his hospitalisation for six months. At that time he lost his job and was unable to keep up the rent payments on his apartment and the hire purchase agreement on his car.”

He dated the sheet and then took it out and wondered if he should put it with the old man’s sheets. He was now worried, what if that happened to Rowley? Would that make him a criminal?

If Rowley were put in hospital, he might be offered Rowley’s position and the money that came with it, and if it happened he could then target others whose misfortune might benefit him.

Why was he thinking like this? He had never done anything illegal but now he was thinking of hurting people to benefit himself. If only those numbers on the lottery had come up, this would not be happening.

Maybe it was the Devil engineering this to send him to hell when he died, or maybe it was just the way life went.

So now it was time to wait and see if anything happened to Rowley. If something did then he may have his hands on an awful power, but if nothing happened the typewriter was definitely going to an antique shop.

This story terminates here: