Gwendy's Button Box

by Stephen King

  Gwendy pushes herself up in time to see Frankie coming at her, grabbing for her with one hand and trying to get something out of the pocket of his camo pants with the other. Before he can touch her, Harry tackles him and they go reeling into the closet, falling and pulling down more dresses and skirts and pants and tops, so at first Gwendy can see nothing but a pile of clothes that appears to be breathing.

  Then a hand emerges—a dirty hand with blue webbing tattooed across the back. It paws around aimlessly at first, then finds the button box. Gwendy tries to scream, but nothing comes out; her throat is locked tight. The box comes down corner first. Once…then twice…then three times. The first time it connects with Harry’s head, the sound is muffled by clothes. The second time it’s louder. The third time, the hit produces a sickening crack, like a breaking branch, and the corner of the box is coated with blood and hair.

  The clothes heave and slide. Frankie emerges, still holding the button box in one tattooed hand. He’s grinning. Behind him she can see Harry. His eyes are closed, his mouth hangs open.

  “Don’t know what this is, pretty girl, but it hits real good.”

  She darts past him. He doesn’t try to stop her. She goes on her knees beside Harry and lifts his head with one hand. She cups the other palm in front of his nose and mouth, but she already knows. The box used to be light, but for a while tonight it was heavy, because it wanted to be heavy. Frankie Stone has used it to crush the top of Harry Streeter’s skull. There is no breath on her palm.

  “You killed him! You filthy son of a bitch, you killed him!”

  “Yeah, well, maybe. Whatever.” He seems uninterested in the dead boy; his eyes are busily crawling over Gwendy’s body, and she understands he’s crazy. A box that can destroy the world is in the hands of a crazy person who thinks he’s a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL or something like that. “What is this thing? Besides where you store your silver dollars, that is? How much are they worth, Gwennie? And what do these buttons do?”

  He touches the green one, then the violet one, and as his grimy thumb moves toward the black one, Gwendy does the only thing she can think of. Only she doesn’t think, she just acts. Her bra closes in front, and now she opens it. “Do you want to play with those buttons, or with mine?”

  Frankie grins, exposing teeth that would make even a hardened dentist wince and turn away. He reaches into his pocket again, and pulls out a knife. It reminds her of Lenny’s, except there’s no Semper Fi engraved on it. “Get over on the bed, Prom Queen. Don’t bother taking off your panties. I want to cut them off you. If you lay real still, maybe I won’t cut what’s underneath.”

  “Did he send you?” Gwendy asks. She’s sitting on her bottom now, with her feet on the floor and her legs drawn up to hide her breasts. With luck, one look at them is all this sick bastard is going to get. “Did Mr. Farris send you to take the box? Did he want you to have it?” Although the evidence seems to point to this, it’s hard to believe.

  He’s frowning. “Mr. who?”

  “Farris. Black suit? Little black hat that goes wherever it wants to?”

  “I don’t know any Mr. F—”

  That’s when she lashes out, once again not thinking…although later it will occur to her that the box might have been thinking for her. His eyes widen and the hand holding the knife pistons forward, driving through her foot and coming out the other side in a bouquet of blood. She shrieks as her heel slams into Frankie’s chest, driving him back into the closet. She snatches up the box, and at the same time she pushes the red button, she screams, “Rot in hell!”

  30

  Gwendy Peterson graduates from Brown summa cum laude in June of 1984. There has been no running track for her since her senior spring in high school; the knife-wound in her foot got infected while she was in the hospital, and although it cleared eventually, she lost a piece of it. She still walks with a limp, although now it is barely discernable.

  She goes out to dinner with her parents after the ceremony, and they have a fine time. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson even break their long abstinence with a bottle of champagne to toast their daughter, who is bound for Columbia grad school, or—perhaps—the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She thinks she might have a novel in her. Maybe more than one.

  “And is there a man in your life?” Mrs. Peterson asks. Her color is high and her eyes are bright from the unaccustomed alcohol.

  Gwendy shakes her head, smiling. “No man currently.”

  Nor, she thinks, will there be in the future. She already has a significant other; it’s a box with eight buttons on top and two levers on the side. She still eats the occasional chocolate, but she hasn’t taken one of the silver dollars in years. The ones she did have are gone, parceled out one or two at a time for books, rent (oh God, the luxury of a single apartment), and an upgrade from the Fiesta to a Subaru Outback (which outraged her mother, but she got over it eventually).

  “Well,” says Mr. Peterson, “there’s time for that.”

  “Yes.” Gwendy smiles. “I have plenty of time.”

  31

  She’s going to spend the summer in Castle Rock, so when her parents have gone back to their hotel, she packs up the last of her things, stowing the button box at the very bottom of her trunk. During her time at Brown, she kept the awful thing in a safe deposit box in the Bank of Rhode Island, something she wishes she had thought of doing sooner, but she was just a kid when she got it, a kid, goddammit, and what do kids know? Kids stow valuables in cavities under trees, or behind loose stones in cellars prone to flooding, or in closets. In closets, for Christ’s sake! Once she gets to Columbia (or Iowa City, if the Writers’ Workshop accepts her), it will go into another safety deposit box, and as far as she’s concerned, it can stay there forever.

  She decides to have a slice of coffee cake and a glass of milk before going to bed. She gets as far as the living room, and there she stops cold. Sitting on the desk where she has attended to her studies for the last two years, next to a framed picture of Harry Streeter, is a small, neat black hat. She has no doubt that it’s the one she last saw on the day she and Harry were flying that kite on the baseball field. Such a happy day that was. Maybe the last happy one.

  “Come on out here, Gwendy,” Mr. Farris calls from the kitchen. “Set a spell, as they say down south.”

  She walks into the kitchen, feeling like a visitor in her own body. Mr. Farris, in his neat black suit and not looking a day older, sits at the kitchen table. He has a piece of the coffee cake and a glass of milk. Her own cake and milk are waiting for her.

  He looks her up and down, but—as on that day ten years ago when she first met him at the top of the Suicide Stairs—without salacious intent. “What a fine young woman you’ve grown into, Gwendy Peterson!”

  She doesn’t thank him for the compliment, but she sits down. To her, this conversation seems long overdue. Probably not to him; she has an idea that Mr. Farris has his own schedule, and he always stays on it. What she says is, “I locked up when I went out. I always lock up. And the door was still locked when I came back. I always make sure. That’s a habit I got into on the day Harry died. Do you know about Harry? If you knew I wanted coffee cake and milk, I suppose you do.”

  “Of course. I know a great deal about you, Gwendy. As for the locks…” He waves it aside, as if to say pish-tush.

  “Have you come for the box?” She hears both eagerness and reluctance in her voice. A strange combination, but one she knows quite well.

  He ignores this, at least for the time being. “As I said, I know a great deal about you, but I don’t know exactly what happened on the day the Stone kid came to your house. There’s always a crisis with the button box—a moment of truth, one could say—and when it comes, my ability to…see…is lost. Tell me what happened.”

  “Do I have to?”

  He raises a hand and turns it over, as if to say Up to you.

  “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “And never will, would be my guess. This is your one cha
nce.”

  “I said I hoped he’d rot in hell, and I pushed the red button at the same time. I didn’t mean it literally, but he’d just killed the boy I loved, he’d just stuck a knife right through my fucking foot, and it was what came out. I never thought he’d actually…”

  Only he did.

  She falls silent, remembering how Frankie’s face began to turn black, how his eyes first went cloudy and then lolled forward in their sockets. How his mouth drooped, the lower lip unrolling like a shade with a broken spring. His scream—surprise? agony? both? she doesn’t know—that blew the teeth right out of his putrefying gums in a shower of yellow and black. His jaw tearing loose; his chin falling all the way down to his chest; the ghastly ripping sound his neck made when it tore open. The rivers of pus from his cheeks as they pulled apart like rotting sailcloth—

  “I don’t know if he rotted in hell, but he certainly rotted,” Gwendy says. She pushes away the coffee cake. She no longer wants it.

  “What was your story?” he asks. “Tell me that. You must have thought remarkably fast.”

  “I don’t know if I did or not. I’ve always wondered if the box did the thinking for me.”

  She waits for him to respond. He doesn’t, so she goes on.

  “I closed my eyes and pushed the red button again while I imagined Frankie gone. I concentrated on that as hard as I could, and when I opened my eyes, only Harry was in the closet.” She shakes her head wonderingly. “It worked.”

  “Of course it worked,” Mr. Farris says. “The red button is very…versatile, shall we say? Yes, let’s say that. But in ten years you only pushed it a few times, showing you to be a person of strong will and stronger restraint. I salute you for that.” And he actually does, with his glass of milk.

  “Even once was too much,” she says. “I caused Jonestown.”

  “You give yourself far too much credit,” he says sharply. “Jim Jones caused Jonestown. The so-called Reverend was as crazy as a rat in a rainbarrel. Paranoid, mother-fixated, and full of deadly conceit. As for your friend Olive, I know you’ve always felt you were somehow responsible for her suicide, but I assure you that’s not the case. Olive had ISSUES. Your word for it.”

  She stares at him, amazed. How much of her life has he been peering into, like a pervert (Frankie Stone, for instance) going through her underwear drawer?

  “One of those issues was her stepfather. He…how shall I put it? He fiddled with her.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack. And you know the truth about young Mr. Stone.”

  She does. The police tied him to at least four other rapes and two attempted rapes in the Castle Rock area. Perhaps also to the rape-murder of a girl in Cleaves Mills. The cops are less sure about that one, but Gwendy’s positive it was him.

  “Stone was fixated on you for years, Gwendy, and he got exactly what he deserved. He was responsible for the death of your Mr. Streeter, not the button box.”

  She barely hears this. She’s remembering what she usually banishes from her mind. Except in dreams, when she can’t. “I told the police that Harry kept Frankie from raping me, that they fought, that Harry was killed and Frankie ran away. I suppose they’re still looking for him. I hid the box in my dresser, along with the coins. I thought about dipping one of my high heel shoes in Harry’s blood to explain the…the bludgeoning…but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In the end it didn’t matter. They just assumed Frankie took the murder weapon with him.”

  Mr. Farris nods. “It’s far from a case of all’s well that ends well, but as well as can be, at least.”

  Gwendy’s face breaks into a bitter smile that makes her look years older than twenty-two. “You make it all sound so good. As if I were Saint Gwendy. I know better. If you hadn’t given me that goddamn box, things would have been different.”

  “If Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t gotten a job at the Texas Book Depository, Kennedy would have finished out his term,” Mr. Farris says. “You can if things until you go crazy, my girl.”

  “Spin it any way you want, Mr. Farris, but if you’d never given me that box, Harry would still be alive. And Olive.”

  He considers. “Harry? Yes, maybe. Maybe. Olive, however, was doomed. You bear no responsibility for her, believe me.” He smiles. “And good news! You’re going to be accepted at Iowa! Your first novel…” He grins. “Well, let that be a surprise. I’ll only say that you’ll want to wear your prettiest dress when you pick up your award.”

  “What award?” She is both surprised and a little disgusted at how greedy she is for this news.

  He once more waves his hand in that pish-tush gesture. “I’ve said enough. Any more, and I’ll bend the course of your future, so please don’t tempt me. I might give in if you did, because I like you, Gwendy. Your proprietorship of the box has been…exceptional. I know the burden it’s been, sometimes like carrying an invisible packsack full of rocks on your back, but you will never know the good you’ve done. The disasters you’ve averted. When used with bad intent—which you never did, by the way, even your experiment with Guyana was done out of simple curiosity—the box has an unimaginable capacity for evil. When left alone, it can be a strong force for good.”

  “My parents were on the way to alcoholism,” Gwendy says. “Looking back on it, I’m almost sure of that. But they stopped drinking.”

  “Yes, and who knows how many worse things the box might have prevented during your proprietorship? Not even I know. Mass slaughters? A dirty suitcase bomb planted in Grand Central Station? The assassination of a leader that might have sparked World War III? It hasn’t stopped everything—we both read the newspapers—but I’ll tell you one thing, Gwendy.” He leans forward, pinning her with his eyes. “It has stopped a lot. A lot.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’ll thank you to give me the button box. Your work is done—at least that part of your work is done. You still have many things to tell the world…and the world will listen. You will entertain people, which is the greatest gift a man or woman can have. You’ll make them laugh, cry, gasp, think. By the time you’re thirty-five, you’ll have a computer to write on instead of a typewriter, but both are button boxes of a kind, wouldn’t you say? You will live a long life—”

  “How long?” Again she feels that mixture of greed and reluctance.

  “That I will not tell you, only that you will die surrounded by friends, in a pretty nightgown with blue flowers on the hem. There will be sun shining in your window, and before you pass you will look out and see a squadron of birds flying south. A final image of the world’s beauty. There will be a little pain. Not much.”

  He takes a bite of his coffee cake, then stands.

  “Very tasty, but I’m already late for my next appointment. The box, please.”

  “Who gets it next? Or can you not tell me that, either?”

  “Not sure. I have my eye on a boy in a little town called Pescadero, about an hour south of San Francisco. You will never meet him. I hope, Gwendy, he’s as good a custodian as you have been.”

  He bends toward her and kisses her on the cheek. The touch of his lips makes her happy, the way the little chocolate animals always did.

  “It’s at the bottom of my trunk,” Gwendy says. “In the bedroom. The trunk’s not locked…although I guess that wouldn’t cause you any problems even if it was.” She laughs, then sobers. “I just…I don’t want to touch it again, or even look at it. Because if I did…”

  He’s smiling, but his eyes are grave. “If you did, you might want to keep it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sit here, then. Finish your coffee cake. It really is good.”

  He leaves her.

  32

  Gwendy sits. She eats her coffee cake in small slow bites, washing each one down with a tiny sip of milk. She hears the squeak her trunk lid makes when it goes up. She hears the squeak when the lid is lowered again. She hears the snap-snap of the latches being considerately closed. She hears his f
ootsteps approach the door to the hall, and pause there. Will he say goodbye?

  He does not. The door opens and softly closes. Mr. Richard Farris, first encountered on a bench at the top of Castle View’s Suicide Stairs, has left her life. Gwendy sits for another minute, finishing the last bite of her cake and thinking of a book she wants to write, a sprawling saga about a small town in Maine, one very much like her own. There will be love and horror. She isn’t ready yet, but she thinks the time will come quite soon; two years, five at most. Then she will sit down at her typewriter—her button box—and start tapping away.

  At last, she gets up and walks into the living room. There’s a spring in her step. Already she feels lighter. The small black hat is no longer on her desk, but he’s left her something, anyway: an 1891 Morgan silver dollar. She picks it up, turning it this way and that so its uncirculated surface can catch the light. Then she laughs and puts it in her pocket.

  About the Authors

  Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes The Bill Hodges Trilogy, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Revival, Doctor Sleep, and Under the Dome. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

  Richard Chizmar’s fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and multiple editions of The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. He has won two World Fantasy awards, four International Horror Guild awards, and the HWA’s Board of Trustee’s award. His third short story collection, A Long December, was recently published to starred reviews in both Kirkus and Booklist, and was featured in Entertainment Weekly. Chizmar’s work has been translated into many languages throughout the world, and he has appeared at numerous conferences as a writing instructor, guest speaker, panelist, and guest of honor. Please visit the author’s website at RichardChizmar.com.