Gwendy’s Final Task

“What is it you want me to do?” She would find out that much, at least, and then decide. If she could, that was; if he left the button box with her, she’d be stuck with it.

No, she thought, I won’t. I’ll weight the bag with rocks and throw it into Castle Lake.

“Seven proprietors since the year 2000. Each held it a shorter time. Five committed suicide. One took his whole family with him. Wife and three kiddos. Shotgun. He kept telling the police negotiator ‘the box made me do it, it was the button box.’ Of course they had no idea what he was talking about because by then it was gone. I had it back.”

“Dear God,” Gwendy whispered.

“One is in a mental asylum in Baltimore. He threw the button box into a crematorium furnace. Which did no good, of course. I committed him myself. The seventh, the last, only a month ago … I killed her. I didn’t want to, I was responsible for what she became, but I had no choice.” He paused. “Do you remember the colors, Gwendy? Not the red and the black, I know you remember those.”

Of course she remembered. The red button did whatever you wanted, for good or ill. The black one meant mass destruction. She remembered the other six just as well.

“They stand for the continents of the earth,” she said. “Light green, Asia. Dark green, Africa. Orange, Europe. Yellow, Australia. Blue is for North America and violet is for South America.”

“Yes. Good. You were a quick study even as a child. Later you may not be, but if you fight it … fight it hard, for all you’re worth …”

“I’m not following you.” Gwendy thought that the effect of the pills he’d taken was beginning to wear off.

“Never mind. The last proprietor was a woman named Patricia Vachon, from Vancouver. She was a schoolteacher working with mentally disabled children, and like you in many ways, Gwendy. Levelheaded, strong-willed, dedicated, and with a moral fiber that went bone-deep. Rightness as opposed to righteousness, if you see what I mean.”

Gwendy did.

“If existence is a chess game, with black pieces and white ones, Patricia Vachon stood firmly on the side of the white. I thought she might even be the White Queen, as you once were. Patricia had lovely dark skin, but she was of the white. The light. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Gwendy wasn’t very good at the kind of chess played on a board, Ryan always beat her on the occasions when she let him talk her into a game, but she had been very good at real-life chess during her years in the House of Representatives. There, she was always thinking three moves ahead. Sometimes four.

“I thought she was perfect,” Farris continued. “That she’d be able to take care of the box for years, perhaps even until we were able to decide how to dispose of it once and for all.”

“We? Who is we?”

Farris paid no attention. “I was wrong. Not about her, but about the box. I underestimated its growing power. I shouldn’t have, not after what happened to the others who came after you, Gwendy, but the Vachon woman seemed so right. Yet in the end the box destroyed her, too. Even before I put a bullet in her head, she was destroyed. I’m responsible.”

Tears began to trickle down Farris’s seamed cheeks. Gwendy observed them with incredulity. He was no longer the man she knew. He was …

Broken, she thought. He’s broken. Probably dying.

“She was going to push the black button. She was struggling mightily—heroically—against the impulse, but she actually had her thumb on it when I shot her. And pushing down. Luckily, one might say providentially, the buttons are hard to push. Very hard. As I’m sure you remember.”

Gwendy certainly did. The first time she tried to push one—it was the red button, as a kind of experiment—she thought they were dummies and the whole thing was a joke. It wasn’t, unless you considered the hundreds dead in the South American country of Guyana as a joke. How much of the Jonestown massacre was actually her fault she still didn’t know, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“How did you get there in time to stop her?”

“I monitor the box. Every time it’s used, I know. And usually I know when the proprietor is even thinking of using it. Not always, but there’s another way I can keep track.”

“When the levers are pulled?”

Richard Farris smiled and nodded.

There were two levers, one on each side of the box. One dispensed Morgan silver dollars, uncirculated and always date-stamped 1891. The other dispensed tiny but delicious chocolate animals. They were hard to resist, and Gwendy realized that made them the perfect way to monitor how often the proprietor was using the box. Handling it. Picking up its … what? Cooties? Germs? Its capacity to do evil?

Yes, that.