Darkness Creeping (9 page)

“Oooh!” said Karin.

“It must be worth big bucks!” said Randy.

“Never mind that,” snapped Grandfather. He put the little box down on the table. Randy and Karin couldn’t take their eyes off it.

“I want to give this to the right person before I die,” Grandfather said. “Your parents and your older brothers and sisters—they are worse than you. They hate the old ways, and the old things. They want to forget them. This is how I know that one of you must get this gift.”

“Thanks!” Randy reached out his hand, but Grandfather slapped it away.

“Not so fast.” He picked up the little box and handed it to Karin. Her eyes lit up, and she gazed at it as if it were a diamond ring in a jewelry box.

“You are the trustworthy one. Your cousin Randy here, he would trade this for a baseball card, yes?”

“No!” said Randy, but Karin knew that it probably depended on how good the baseball card was.

Grandfather turned his gaze back to Randy. “I bring you here, Randall, so you will always remember the honor you did not receive from me. Someday you will learn to respect old things.”

Randy scowled and pouted, and then said under his breath, “I don’t want it. It’s a girl’s thing, anyway.” But he knew that it was not.

Karin moved her finger across the rough jade and around the smooth gold button, then her fingertip came across the button and she started to press it. Grandfather gasped and pulled her finger away with his bony hand.

“You must not!” he cried out. “Can’t you read?”

“It’s in Chinese,” she said, looking at the Chinese characters written around the button.

Grandfather sighed.

“This has been in our family for forty-nine generations,” he said. “Fifty-one, now that I pass it on to you. It has been our family’s task all these years to guard this button with a clear heart, and a clean mind. Show no one. Tell no one. And never,
ever
press it.”

“But what does it do?” asked Karin.

Grandfather leaned closer, speaking in a raspy whisper.

“This,” he said, “is the button that ends the world.”

That evening Karin sat on a lumpy bed in one of the many upstairs bedrooms of her grandfather’s huge house. She puzzled over the puzzle box, practicing how it opened and closed. She had only seen her grandfather do it once, but once was all it took for her to memorize it.

Randy, who lay on the floor tossing a ball at the high ceiling, watched in disgust at how easily Karin could now open the box. She had a photographic memory, and she knew that it irritated Randy no end.

“He gave it to me because he knows I’ll take care of it.”

“
And
because you kiss up to him.”

Karin closed the puzzle box and practiced opening it again. There wasn’t much for the two of them to do on these annual family get-togethers. The other cousins were all either much younger or much older than Karin and Randy. The young ones were all asleep in the maze of bedrooms within Grandfather’s immense house. All the adults were downstairs, babbling about nothing important. Their jumbled voices drifted up the great staircase and echoed down the winding halls.

“You don’t believe any of that stuff about that stupid button, do you?” scoffed Randy, tossing his ball and watching how close he could come to hitting the light in the center of the ceiling.

Karin pulled out the little box from the center of the puzzle box.

“No . . . ” she said.

Randy smirked. “You
do
believe it—I can tell.” He tossed the ball again. “You’re as loony as he is.”

“I believe some of it,” said Karin. “You remember last year I showed everyone that genealogy I did?”

“Genie-what?”

“Genealogy—the family tree.”

“Oh yeah, that thing.”

“Well, our family does trace back to some sort of royalty. I’ll bet that this box really
was
passed down from our ancestors.”

“And do you believe it could destroy the world?”

Karin flipped open the little box. She regarded the gold button. It seemed so harmless, and yet . . .

“No,” she said. “Of course I don’t believe it. But it’s strange to think that people
did
believe it, maybe for thousands of years.”

“You think anyone’s ever pressed it?”

“Probably not,” said Karin. “They wouldn’t press it if they believed in it.”

“This is what I think,” said Randy. “A thousand years ago, we had this ancient Chinese nerd relative, and one day his friends gave him this box as a practical joke—and that idiot believed the joke.”

Karin tilted the little black box in her hand, and the button reflected a pinpoint of light that danced across the peeling wallpaper.

“I’ll bet you don’t even have the guts to press it,” said Randy, and then his ball went a bit too high, hitting the light above him and smashing it. Randy rolled out of the way just as the glass showered down to the warped wooden floor. Karin froze, closing her eyes and gripping the little black box.

In the silence that followed she could hear shouts from downstairs and the sound of feet running down the hallway toward them. Several people were wailing—it seemed a bit much just for some broken glass.

Randy’s father appeared at the door first.

“I’m sorry,” said Randy in a panic. “I didn’t mean it—it was an accident.”

But Karin could tell that her uncle wasn’t looking at the glass.

“Randy, Karin,” he said, not looking at all well. “I’m afraid something terrible has happened. It’s your grandfather.”

Grandfather’s funeral was held just a day later.

It was more convenient that way, since the whole family was already in town for the annual reunion. No one had expected him to die that night, especially the way it happened. He had fallen through a termite-eaten floorboard, right in front of all the relatives. Leave it to Grandfather to make such a dramatic exit from the world.

Karin’s mom had cried hysterically for most of that night. She had been talking to him when it happened. “Just like that,” she kept telling everybody. “He was talking to me—he was in the middle of a sentence,
in the middle of a word
—and then suddenly he wasn’t there. All that was left was a hole!”

To Karin this was more than an accident. Somehow the old man knew his time was coming. It made Karin wonder what else he might have known.

At the funeral, Karin watched as Randy, on the far side of the casket, squirmed away from his parents and came around to her. His mind, like hers, seemed to be less concerned with Grandfather and more concerned with what Grandfather had left behind. Randy began whispering to Karin while an old woman spoke a Chinese eulogy.

“Do you have it?” whispered Randy.

She knew what he was talking about. “Yes.”

“Where?”

“It’s in my purse. Leave me alone,” said Karin.

“Are you carrying it with you everywhere now?”

Karin sighed, and her parents threw Randy an angry look. Randy shut up, for a little while.

When the ceremony was over and everyone was walking back to the cars, Randy pulled Karin off on a detour through a maze of high tombstones—a place Karin didn’t want to be, but she didn’t resist. She didn’t want to think or talk about the button anymore, and yet at the same time, she wanted to talk about it more than anything.

“You must be curious,” said Randy.

“I thought you didn’t believe in the button,” Karin said.

“I don’t, but I can still be curious about it, can’t I?”

Karin reached into her purse and pulled out the little black box. She opened it to reveal the gold button.

Randy stared at it, practically drooling. He wanted that button, and Karin was beginning to wish that their grandfather had given it to him instead.

“I mean, look at it,” he said. “It’s not attached to anything.

If we took it apart, it would probably just be a gold button and a hollow box. Nothing but air inside.”

“You are
not
taking it apart,” Karin said sternly.

Randy leaned up against the back of a huge black stone and crossed his arms. “So what do you think it’s supposed to do? You think it’s supposed to send off nuclear missiles or something?”

“Don’t be dumb,” said Karin, chalking up another mark on her list of Stupid Randy Comments. “When this button was made, there were no missiles.”

“So then how is it supposed to end the world? Is it supposed to release evil spirits or something? Or send out poisonous gas? How?”

“I don’t know,” said Karin, and then she smirked. “Why don’t you go back to the grave and ask Grandfather?” And then she whispered, “Put your ear close to the ground. He might answer you.”

Randy punched Karin in the arm for that, and Karin whacked him back, hard.

“I don’t believe in that dumb thing for a second,” insisted Randy. “It’s not scientific. I don’t believe it.”

“Well, whether you believe it or not,” said Karin, “you don’t have to worry about it anymore, because you’re never going to see it again.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m putting it away for good, just like our ancestors did. I’m putting it in a safe place where no one will ever find it, until it’s my turn to pass it on.”

Karin slipped the little box back into her purse, thinking of all the places she could put it where it would be safe until she was about ninety years old. The problem was, she didn’t know of such a place.

That night was their last in Grandfather’s house. No one wanted to stay there anymore. It wasn’t just that he was dead, it was the way wood creaked when you walked on it—as if it could give way any moment the way it did beneath Grandfather. It was frightening to think that a house so big, which looked so sturdy, could be so fragile.

Karin did not sleep that night—not because of Grandfather’s death, and not because of the termite-eaten floorboards. She couldn’t sleep because of the box. If a box could have a spirit, then it was beginning to possess her. It seemed Randy had the same problem.