“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.
“Proprietors who pull the levers too frequently to get the chocolates or the dollars raise red flags. I knew that was happening with the Vachon woman, and I was disappointed, but I thought I had more time to find another proprietor. I was wrong. When I reached her, she had already pushed one of the other buttons. Probably just to take the pressure off for a little while, poor woman.”
Gwendy felt cold all over. The hair on the back of her neck stirred. “Which one?”
“Light green.”
“When?” Her first thought was of the Fukushima disaster, when a tsunami caused a Japanese nuclear reactor to melt down. But Fukushima was at least seven years ago, maybe more.
“Near the end of this October. I don’t blame her. She held on as long as she could. Even while her thumb was on that light green button, trying to overcome a compulsion too strong to resist, she was thinking, Please, no explosion. Please no earthquake. Please, no volcano or tidal wave.”
“You heard this in your head. Telepathically.”
“When someone touches one of the buttons, even the lightest caress, I go online, so to speak. But I was far away, on other business. I got there as quickly as I could, and I was in time to stop her before she could push the one you call the Cancer Button, but I was too late to stop her from pushing the Asia button.”
He ran a hand through his thinning hair, knocking his little round hat askew, making him look like someone in an old-time musical about to start tap-dancing.
“This was just four weeks ago.”
Gwendy spun her mind back, trying to think of a disaster that had occurred in one of the Asian countries during that timespan. She was sure there’d been plenty of tragedy and death, but she couldn’t think of a mega-disaster strong enough to displace Donald Trump from the lead story on the evening news.
“Maybe I should know, but I don’t,” she said. “An oil refinery explosion? Maybe a nerve gas attack?” Knowing either would be too small. Things like the red button handled the small stuff.
Jonestown, for instance.
“It could have been much, much worse,” Farris said. “She held back as well as she could, and against mighty forces from the black side of the board. But it’s bad enough. Only two people have died so far, one of them the owner of what in Wuhan Province is called a wet market. That’s a place where—”
“Where meat is sold, I know that.” She leaned forward. “Are you talking about a sickness, Mr. Farris? Something like MERS or SARS?”
“I’m talking a plague. Only two dead now, but many more are sick. Some are carrying the disease and don’t even know it. The Chinese government isn’t sure yet, but they suspect. When they do know, they’ll try to cover it up. As a result it’s going to spread. It’s going to be very, very bad.”
“What can I do?”
“That’s what I’m going to tell you. And I’ll help, if I can.”
“But you’re—”
She doesn’t want to finish, but he does it for her. “Dying? Oh yes, I suppose I am. But do you know what that means?”
Gwendy shook her head, for a moment thinking of her mother, and a night when they looked up at the stars.
Farris smiled. “Neither do I, dear girl. Neither do I.”
14
WHEN GWENDY PETERSON WAS a young girl, she and her best friend Olive Kepnes played a game called “Mermaids” at the Castle Rock Community Pool. They waded side-by-side into the shallow end until the water, chilly even in August, reached the middle of their chests. Then they took turns sitting on the bottom while the other girl remained standing and recited a series of secret, made-up words. Once her breath gave out and she resurfaced, the underwater girl—the Mermaid—would try to guess what had been said. There were no winners or losers in this game. It was simply for fun.
When Gwendy opens her eyes to the bright overhead lights, the memory notebook pinned against her chest by one tightly clenched fist, Olive Kepnes and this long-ago game is the first thought that pops into her head. The voice coming from the other side of the shiny white door, no more than a half dozen feet away, sounds distant and garbled, like she’s hearing it from underwater.
She lifts her head and looks around, her eyes settling on the black and silver Keurig coffee maker. She blinks at it in confusion. She knows she’s on a rocket ship traveling through space, she remembers that much, but what in the blue blazes is a coffee machine doing there?