The Button Pusher

I lived in a brownstone on the edge of a sprawling campus, sharing the top floor with my brother Leo and two friends, Mira and Jenna. It was a converted Victorian with high ceilings and creaky floors, and each of us had our own room with a tiny bathroom. In my room, by the bathroom door, I kept a small wooden shelf holding an old boombox, a relic from my childhood that I used to play cassette tapes on. It was a harmless piece of nostalgia, until it became the center of a nightly terror.

It started about a month into our lease. Around 3 a.m., I’d wake to the sharp, mechanical click of the boombox’s buttons being pressed. I never kept a tape in it, so the play button would engage with a hollow thunk, immediately followed by the whir of fast-forward or rewind spinning empty spindles, then a pause, then play again. It was rhythmic, almost methodical, as if someone were trying to coax sound from a silent machine. The first few nights, I dismissed it as a faulty player, maybe a loose spring. But the pattern was too precise, too deliberate, to be random.

I never peeked. I lay frozen under my quilt, heart thumping against my ribs, listening to those buttons click and whir for minutes on end. Sometimes I’d swear I felt a presence by the door, a faint pressure in the air, but I never had the courage to look. In the morning, the boombox would be exactly as I’d left it, buttons all off, dust undisturbed. I told Leo, but he laughed it off, said I was dreaming. Mira suggested I unplug it, which I did, but it didn’t stop. The clicks continued, now with a slight buzz from the unplugged speaker, like a ghost trying to hold a conversation.

One night, Leo and I were watching a movie in the living room. Jenna was out, and Mira was asleep in her room. It was close to midnight when I heard the familiar clicks from my bedroom down the hall. Leo raised an eyebrow. ‘There it is,’ he whispered, and we tiptoed to my door. The clicks were coming from inside, but when Leo pushed the door open, the room was empty, and the boombox sat silent on the shelf. ‘It’s your imagination, dude,’ he said, but I saw his hands trembling as he returned to the couch. He never stayed over after that.

The worst incident involved my niece, Lily. She was four, and my sister, Rachel, had brought her to stay for a week while she looked for an apartment. Rachel was in my room, organizing clothes in the closet, while Lily sat cross-legged on the floor near the bathroom door, playing with a doll. The boombox was there, silent and dusty. Suddenly, Lily looked up at the shelf with wide eyes and said, in a calm voice, ‘The man inside is pressing the buttons.’ Rachel froze, a shirt halfway into a drawer. ‘What man, sweetie?’ Lily pointed. ‘He’s pressing the buttons on the music box.’

That night, I moved the boombox into the hallway, thinking it might appease whatever was haunting it. But the clicks followed, coming from the hallway right outside my door. I could hear them between the floorboards, the sounds of play and fast-forward and rewind, as if someone were trying to play a cassette that didn’t exist. I finally threw the boombox into the dumpster behind the building, but that didn’t help either. The next morning, I found it back on my shelf, the buttons pressed down with a sticky residue, like something had been trying to force a cassette into the slot.

I stopped sleeping in my room. I crashed on the couch, but the clicks found me there too, coming from the kitchen, the bathroom, until they seemed to come from everywhere around me. My friends thought I was losing it. Leo moved out a week later. Then Mira and Jenna started staying at their boyfriends’ places. Rachel took Lily and left. I was alone in the brownstone, with the boombox and its relentless button presses.

The final night, I sat in the dark living room, surrounded by packing boxes. The boombox was on the coffee table in front of me, the play button engaged, the cassette spindles spinning silently. I hadn’t put a tape in, but I could hear a faint, high-pitched hum, like a voice trying to break through static. And then, from the speakers, came a whisper, so faint I almost missed it: ‘You forgot the tape.’

I don’t know what happened next. I woke up in the hospital with no memory of the last week. They told me I was found in my apartment, incoherent, clawing at the walls. They’ve kept me here ever since, and I can’t bring myself to tell them about the button pusher. But last night, I heard it again. The click. The whir. The press. And this time, it’s coming from the IV pump beside my bed.