“Names aren’t knowing, I agree with you there, but we’re not strangers, you and I. I know you, and I know this thing I have was made for someone like you. Someone who is young and set solidly on her feet. I felt you, Gwendy, long before I saw you. And here you are.” He moves to the end of the bench and pats the seat. “Come sit beside me.”
Gwendy walks to the bench, feeling like a girl in a dream. “Are you… Mr. Farris, do you want to hurt me?”
He smiles. “Grab you? Pull you into the bushes and perhaps have my wicked way with you?” He points across the path and forty feet or so up it. There, two or three dozen kids wearing Castle Rock Day Camp t-shirts are playing on the slides and swings and monkey bars while four camp counselors watch over them. “I don’t think I’d get away with that, do you? And besides, young girls don’t interest me sexually. They don’t interest me at all, as a rule, but as I’ve already said—or at least implied—you are different. Now sit down.”
She sits. The sweat coating her body has turned cold. She has an idea that, despite all his fine talk, he will now try to kiss her, and never mind the playground kids and their teenage minders just up the way. But he doesn’t. He reaches under the bench and brings out a canvas bag with a drawstring top. He pulls it open and removes a beautiful mahogany box, the wood glowing a brown so rich that she can glimpse tiny red glints deep in its finish. It’s about fifteen inches long, maybe a foot wide, and half that deep. She wants it at once, and not just because it’s a beautiful thing. She wants it because it’s hers. Like something really valuable, really loved, that was lost so long ago it was almost forgotten but is now found again. Like she owned it in another life where she was a princess, or something.
“What is it?” Gwendy asks in a small voice.
“A button box,” he says. “Your button box. Look.”
He tilts it so she can see small buttons on top of the box, six in rows of two, and a single at each end. Eight in all. The pairs are light green and dark green, yellow and orange, blue and violet. One of the end-buttons is red. The other is black. There’s also a small lever at each end of the box, and what looks like a slot in the middle.
“The buttons are very hard to push,” says Farris. “You have to use your thumb, and put some real muscle into it. Which is a good thing, believe me. Wouldn’t want to make any mistakes with those, oh no. Especially not with the black one.”
Gwendy has forgotten to feel afraid of the man. She’s fascinated by the box, and when he hands it to her, she takes it. She was expecting it to be heavy—mahogany is a heavy wood, after all, plus who knows what might be inside—but it’s not. She could bounce it up and down on her tented fingers. Gwendy runs a finger over the glassy, slightly convex surface of the buttons, seeming to almost feel the colors lighting up her skin.
“Why? What do they do?”
“We’ll discuss them later. For now, direct your attention to the little levers. They’re much easier to pull than the buttons are to push; your little finger is enough. When you pull the one on the left end—next to the red button—it will dispense a chocolate treat in the shape of an animal.”
“I don’t—” Gwendy begins.
“You don’t take candy from strangers, I know,” Farris says, and rolls his eyes in a way that makes her giggle. “Aren’t we past that, Gwendy?”
“It’s not what I was going to say. I don’t eat chocolate, is what I was going to say. Not this summer. How will I ever lose any weight if I eat candy? Believe me, once I start, I can’t stop. And chocolate is the worst. I’m like a chocoholic.”
“Ah, but that’s the beauty of the chocolates the button box dispenses,” says Richard Farris. “They are small, not much bigger than jelly beans, and very sweet… but after you eat one, you won’t want another. You’ll want your meals, but not seconds on anything. And you won’t want any other treats, either. Especially those late-night waistline killers.”
Gwendy, until this summer prone to making herself Fluffernutters an hour or so before bedtime, knows exactly what he’s talking about. Also, she’s always starving after her morning runs.
“It sounds like some weird diet product,” she says. “The kind that stuffs you up and then makes you pee like crazy. My granny tried some of that stuff, and it made her sick after a week or so.”
“Nope. Just chocolate. But pure. Not like a candybar from the store. Try it.”
She debates the idea, but not for long. She curls her pinky around the lever—it’s too small to operate easily with any of the others—and pulls. The slot opens. A narrow wooden shelf slides out. On it is a chocolate rabbit, no bigger than a jellybean, just as Mr. Farris said.
She picks it up and looks at it with amazed wonder. “Wow. Look at the fur. The ears! And the cute little eyes.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “A beautiful thing, isn’t it? Now pop it in! Quick!”
Gwendy does so without even thinking about it, and sweetness floods her mouth. He’s right, she never tasted a Hershey bar this good. She can’t remember ever having tasted anything this good. That gorgeous flavor isn’t just in her mouth; it’s in her whole head. As it melts on her tongue, the little shelf slides back in, and the slot closes.
“Good?” he asks.
“Mmm.” It’s all she can manage. If this were ordinary candy, she’d be like a rat in a science experiment, working that little lever until it broke off or until the dispenser stopped dispensing. But she doesn’t want another. And she doesn’t think she’ll be stopping for a Slushee at the snack bar on the far side of the playground, either. She’s not hungry at all. She’s…
“Are you satisfied?” Farris asks.
“Yes!” That’s the word, all right. She has never been so satisfied with anything, not even the two-wheeler she got for her ninth birthday.
“Good. Tomorrow you’ll probably want another one, and you can have another one if you do, because you’ll have the button box. It’s your box, at least for now.”
“How many chocolate animals are inside?”
Instead of answering her question, he invites her to pull the lever at the other end of the box.
“Does it give a different kind of candy?”
“Try it and see.”
She curls her pinky around the small lever and pulls it. This time when the shelf slides out of the slot, there’s a silver coin on it, so large and shiny she has to squint against the morning light that bounces off it. She picks it up and the shelf slides back in. The coin is heavy in her hand. On it is a woman in profile. She’s wearing what looks like a tiara. Below her is a semicircle of stars, interrupted by the date: 1891. Above her are the words E Pluribus Unum.
“That is a Morgan silver dollar,” Farris tells her in a lecturely voice. “Almost half an ounce of pure silver. Created by Mr. George Morgan, who was just thirty years old when he engraved the likeness of Anna Willess Williams, a Philadelphia matron, to go on what you’d call the ‘heads’ side of the coin. The American Eagle is on the tails side.”
“It’s beautiful,” she breathes, and then—with huge reluctance—she holds it out to him.
Farris crosses his hands on his chest and shakes his head. “It’s not mine, Gwendy. It’s yours. Everything that comes out of the box is yours—the candy and the coins—because the box is yours. The current numismatic value of that Morgan dollar is just shy of six hundred dollars, by the way.”
“I… I can’t take it,” she says. Her voice is distant in her own ears. She feels (as she did when she first started her runs up the Suicide Stairs two months ago) that she may faint. “I didn’t do anything to earn it.”