The Brass Button Box

In the autumn of 1987, my father, a retired railroad engineer with an obsession for local history, brought home a battered steamer trunk from an estate sale in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The trunk was said to have belonged to a Confederate officer, a certain Captain Elias Boone, who had died in the war. My father, ever the collector, was thrilled. The trunk smelled of camphor and old wool, and inside, nestled in yellowed tissue paper, was a uniform jacket, a pair of gloves, and a small brass button box. The buttons were odd—engraved with a single eye, not the typical military insignia. My mother, a practical woman, frowned at the trunk. ‘Why would you bring that into our house?’ she asked. But my father laughed it off, placing the trunk in the corner of the living room as a centerpiece.

I was ten that year, and our house was a creaky Victorian on the edge of town, surrounded by pine woods that seemed to swallow the light. The trunk fascinated me. I would open it when my parents were gone, running my fingers over the rough wool of the jacket, tracing the button holes, imagining a ghostly soldier. But the first sign that something was wrong came at night. I began to hear a faint, rhythmic tapping from the living room, like a finger drumming on wood. I’d tiptoe down, but the tapping would stop. The air would be cold, and the trunk’s lid would be slightly ajar, though I knew I had closed it.

My father dismissed my fears, saying it was the old house settling. But then my mother started having nightmares. She would wake up screaming, claiming she saw a tall figure in a gray uniform standing at the foot of her bed, pointing a finger at her. My father, ever the rationalist, said it was stress. But one night, I saw it myself. I had crept downstairs to get a glass of water, and there, in the dim light of the moon, stood a man in the Captain’s uniform. He was facing the trunk, his back to me. He turned slowly, and his face was not a face but a hollow darkness, and in his chest, where the buttons would be, there was a gaping hole with something black and writhing inside. I screamed, and he vanished.

After that, the activity intensified. The button box, which my father had kept on the mantelpiece, would move on its own. Sometimes we’d find it on the floor, spilling its contents. The buttons themselves seemed to multiply—we’d find single buttons in odd places: under the sofa, in the kitchen drawer, in my bed. Each one had that same eye engraved, and when I held one, I felt a deep, pulsing dread, as if something was watching me from within.

My father, now alarmed, consulted a local historian, who told him the story of Captain Boone. Boone had been a surgeon in the Confederate army, but he was also an occultist. He believed he could cheat death by transferring his soul into objects, specifically into buttons made of brass and bone. He had created a set of nine buttons, each one a vessel for a fragment of his soul. When he died, his body was buried, but his spirit was bound to the trunk, waiting for someone to open it and release him.

We tried to get rid of the trunk. We burned the uniform, but the buttons remained, scattered throughout the house. The historian said we needed to gather all nine buttons and return them to the trunk, then bury the trunk in consecrated ground. But we could only find seven. The house grew colder. My mother began to see the Captain everywhere, his hollow gaze fixed on her, his mouth moving silently, as if reciting a prayer. My father, now sleepless, refused to leave the house, saying the buttons were calling to him, demanding to be reunited.

Then, one night, I woke to a sound I had never heard before: a low, mournful humming. I followed it to the living room, where my father stood over the open trunk, his hands covered in black ichor, holding a single button. He turned to me, his eyes glazed, and whispered, ‘He says we must complete the set. He says he will grant us his knowledge.’ I grabbed the button from him and threw it into the fire. As it burned, the house shook, and a scream echoed through the walls. But the next morning, the trunk was gone, and the humming had stopped. We never found the last two buttons. But sometimes, late at night, I still hear a faint tap, tap, tap coming from the walls, and I know that Captain Boone is still waiting, just beyond the veil, for someone to finish what he started.