Gwendy’s Final Task

Farris fumbled in his suitcoat and brought out a bottle of pills. He started to cough again before he could get the cap off and the bottle dropped from his unsteady fingers. It came to rest against the drawstring bag. Gwendy picked it up. It was a brown pharmacy bottle, but there was no information on the label, just a series of runes that made her strangely dizzy. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and saw the word DINUTIA, which meant nothing to her. The next time she blinked, the dizzying runes were back.

“How many?”

He was coughing too hard to reply but held up two fingers. She pushed the cap off and brought out two small pills that looked like the Ranexa her father took for his angina. She put them in Farris’s outstretched hand (there were no lines on it; the palm was perfectly smooth), and when he popped them in his mouth, she was alarmed to see tiny beads of blood on his lips. He swallowed, took a breath, then another, deeper one. Some color bloomed in his cheeks, and when it did she could see a little of the man she’d first met on Castle View, near the top of the Suicide Stairs, all those years ago.

His coughing eased, then stopped. He held out his hand for the bottle. Gwendy looked inside before putting the cap on. There were only half a dozen pills left. Maybe eight. He returned the bottle to his inner coat pocket, sat back, and looked out at the darkened backyard. “That’s better.”

“Is it heart medicine?”

“No.”

“A cancer drug?” Her mother had taken both Oncovin and Abraxane, although neither of them looked like the little white pills Farris had taken.

“If you really must know, Gwendy—you were always curious—there are many things wrong with me and they’re all crowding in at once. The years I was forgiven—there have been many—are rushing back like hungry diners into a restaurant.” He offered his charming little smile. “I’m their buffet.”

“How old are you?”

Farris shook his head. “We have more important things to talk about, and my time is short. There’s trouble, and the thing inside that canvas bag is responsible. Do you remember the last time we spoke?”

Gwendy does, vividly. She was at Portland South Airpark, sitting on a bench while Ryan went to park the car. Her luggage, including the button box in her carry-on bag, was piled around her. Richard Farris sat down and said they should palaver a spell before they were interrupted. And so they did. When the palaver was done, the button box was gone from her bag. Presto change-o, now you see it, now you don’t. And the same was true of Farris himself. She had turned her head for a moment, and when she looked back, he was gone. She’d thought then she would never see him again.

“I remember.”

“Twenty years ago that was.” He kept his voice low, but the rasp was gone, his fingers were no longer trembling, and his color was good. All just for the time being, Gwendy thought—she had nursed her mother through her last illness, and her father was now in slow but steady decline. Pills could only do so much, and for so long. “You were a lowly House of Representatives back-bencher then, one among hundreds. Now you’re gunning for a seat of genuine power.”

Gwendy gave a quiet laugh. She was sure Richard Farris knew a great deal, but if he thought she was going to beat Paul Magowan and ascend to the United States Senate, he understood jack shit about Maine politics.

Farris smiled as if he knew exactly what she was thinking (an uncomfortable idea, which didn’t make it wrong). Then the smile faded. “The first time you had the box, your proprietorship lasted six years. Remarkable. It’s passed through seven sets of hands just since that day at the airport.”

“The second time I had it was barely the blink of an eye,” Gwendy said. “Long enough to save my mother’s life—I still believe that—but not much longer.”

“That was an emergency. This is another.” Farris toed the canvas bag between her slippered feet with an expression of distaste. “This thing. This goddamned thing. How I hate it. How I loathe it.”

Gwendy had no idea how to reply to that, but she knew how she felt: scared. Her mother’s old saying came to mind: this is NG.

“Every year it gains power. Every year its ability to do good grows weaker and its ability to do evil grows stronger. Do you remember the black button, Gwendy?”

“Of course I do.” Speaking through numb lips. “I used to call it the Cancer Button.”

He nodded. “A good name for it. That’s the one with the power to end everything. Not just life on Earth but Earth itself. And each year the proprietors of the box feel a stronger compulsion to push it.”

“Don’t say that.” She sounded watery, on the verge of tears. “Oh please, Mr. Farris, don’t say that.”

“Do you think I want to?” he asked. “Do you think I even want to be here, tasking you with this—excuse the language—this fucking thing for a third time? But I have to, Gwendy. There is simply no one else I trust to do what needs to be done, and no one else who may—I say may—be able to do it.”