The Only Ones (22 page)

And that was all there was. The journal ended there. Martin sat with it open in his lap for a moment. Then he peeled back the pages, prepared to read it all over again. Not all of it made sense, but it gripped him just the same.

A voice came from across the room: “Is it a good book?”

Martin looked up, expecting Darla. A response of “Excuse me?” was perched on his lips, but it didn’t come out. It couldn’t.

Because standing in the doorway was a woman. Her stringy blond hair was hanging haphazardly over her face. Her feet were sheathed in pink bunny slippers. She wore a floral dress with a puffy white winter coat over it. A large digital watch decorated her left wrist. When she stepped forward, she put a dirty finger to her lips.

“They don’t let you read anything that’s not approved, you know?” she whispered.

“I … I …”

The woman was at least twice Martin’s age, probably three times. As she got closer, he could see that her lips were chapped and broken, peppered with blood.

“They’re coming back, I’m sure,” she went on. “And they can’t have you in the wrong room. Especially in my room.” With each word her voice grew more agitated. Strands of tensed muscle hollowed out valleys in her neck.

“This is no one’s room,” Martin made the mistake of saying.

“So I’m no one now?” she barked back.

“I didn’t say that.”

“And is that why you put me in that cage?”

“I …”

“You took my kitten,” she roared. “What did you do with my kitten?”

Even if he’d had an answer, it was too late. The woman lunged at Martin, and before he could defend himself, she had her hands around his throat. Her thumbs pressed down on his windpipe and sent a jolt into his chest. It was the most terrible feeling he had ever known. He tried to knock her
back with his hands, and she thrust her knees forward and pinned his biceps to the bed. In her eyes there was a singular look. He could have been wrong, but he felt they were telling him something: “It’s your fault.”

As the feeling drained from his face and dizziness worked worms into his skull, Martin decided to let go. He had never given much thought to dying, and he didn’t give much more thought to it now. All he knew was that his life had been leading to this moment, to this room, to this woman, whoever she was.

He closed his eyes.

When he felt her hands pull away from his throat, he assumed that his adventure had come to its conclusion. His story had come to an end.

PART IV

“Lane?”

“Yes?”

“We’re concerned about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“You lock yourself away for hours. And you build this …”

“Art, Mom. It’s art.”

“Art is painting the ocean. Or maybe a portrait. Have you tried those?”

“Jeez. Could you be more old-fashioned?”

“When you’re my age—”

“I’ll be all alone, eating cat food and talking to the rosebushes. Is that what you’re afraid of?”

“I’m afraid that a twelve-year-old girl knows what she wants, but not what she needs.”

“I need you to leave.”

I
f it was Henry who greeted souls in the afterlife, then Martin wanted back to the land of the living. Ruddy and sweaty and saddled with a breathy stink, Henry’s face looked down on Martin’s.

“You alive?” Henry asked.

“Am I?”

“Yeah, you’re alive. Dead guys don’t say squat,” Henry grumbled as he backed away.

“Was I dreaming?” Martin asked, sitting up from the bed. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

“Naw,” Henry said. “You were gettin’ choked by some woman.”

“You saw her too?”

“I pulled her off you, stupid,” Henry said, shaking his head.

“Who was she?”

“I dunno, your girlfriend. She took off down the hall. Why you askin’ me?”

“Well, ’cause …” Martin ran his fingers across his neck. It felt hot.

“I don’t know who she is, but I know where she’s goin’,” Henry told him. “If you care.”

Martin stood from the bed. The journal was on the floor, so he picked it up. He looked at the closing passages again. “I care.”

Almost all the snow was gone, but the woods were thicker with mud than ever.
They call it mud season around here
, Darla had informed him in one of her recent notes. Henry trudged in front, his hands awkwardly out to his sides, shaking as if they needed to hold on to something. That he didn’t seem surprised by the appearance of the woman, presumably the only woman on earth, bothered Martin.

“How do you know where she’s going?” Martin asked.

“ ’Cause I been watchin’ her,” Henry said.

“From where?”

Henry pointed through the bud-dressed branches to the rock face of Alcatraz, where the Ring of Penance was located. “Cell block six.”

“Oh,” Martin replied guiltily. He hadn’t thought about Henry in weeks. Pity was something he had lavished on himself, not on the boy who spent his nights in a tent above the tree line on a mountain.

“Darla brought me my scope,” Henry explained. “I promised to keep an eye on you.”

“Has that woman been in the hospital all along?”

“Don’t know.” Henry picked up a thin dead branch and
began twirling it like a sword. “Noticed her a few days ago. She comes and goes.”

“Did you tell Darla?” Martin asked.

“I ain’t the mornin’ paper,” Henry said. “I watch. All I do.”

Martin’s windpipe ached, but he had to count himself as lucky, and he could thank only one person for that luck. “You save people too. You saved me.”

“I came down to see what was doin’,” Henry mumbled. “Right place at the right time.”

“Thank you just the same.”

Henry lifted the branch and pointed straight ahead. “Save your thank-yous. You’re the one who’s gotta go in there.”

Fifty yards in the distance was the ledge and the opening to the mine shaft. Martin had never approached it from this direction, and it puzzled him that of all the places, this was where the woman would come.

“Are you sure that’s where she is?” he asked.

“The hospital and the mine,” Henry said. “Only places she goes.”

“And you want me to go in alone?”

Henry shrugged and flicked the branch to the side. “I don’t want you to do nothin’. I’m not goin’ in that place is all I’m sayin’.”

Even if he was curious about this woman’s identity, Henry certainly had done more than his part. It was up to Martin now.

“I don’t have a torch,” Martin said, staring at the oppressive blackness of the hole.

Henry smiled smugly, dug into his pocket, and removed
a bundle of cloth. He handed it to Martin. “Borrowed it from Felix a while back. He ain’t missing it now.”

It was one of Felix’s headbands, and wrapped inside was a series of his firefly lightbulbs.

“Okay,” Martin said, looking them over with suspicion. The lightbulbs weren’t glowing at all.

“They may be old, but they still work. All you do is shake ’em and that’ll fire ’em up,” Henry explained. “Pretty cool, actually.” Without giving Martin a chance to do it himself, Henry grasped Martin’s wrist and shook it. Within a few seconds, light was sprouting from the cracks between Martin’s fingers.

It was foolhardy, dangerous at best. To chase a person who just tried to murder you? Into a mine shaft? For what? For Martin, it was answers. It had been over two and a half years since the Day, and there hadn’t been a single adult spotted anywhere. Not by the kids of Xibalba, in any case. Now there was one in the hospital, in the mine shaft. Surely she knew something, and she was willing to strangle to keep her secrets. People strangled for a reason. There were plenty of complicated books dedicated to complicated people strangling for complicated reasons. Martin had read them.

So as he made his way through the darkness, he held in both hands a knife that Henry had loaned him. The firefly lightbulbs worked better than expected. The shell of light surrounded his head and allowed him to see three to four yards in all directions.

Choices were nonexistent. The mine shaft was full of switchbacks, but no forks. It led forward and down, like a long winding ramp into the center of the earth. The walls were flat in most places, but in a few, it seemed as though the
rock had been scooped out with a giant spoon, leaving patches of smooth craters. Wooden braces framed the tunnel, but plenty of those had cracked and broken from lack of maintenance. At Martin’s feet was a railroad track, its ties rotted from all the puddles.

He didn’t feel safe at all, and he thought of turning back and rejoining Henry, who was waiting outside. The woman would have to come out sometime, and he would confront her then. It was the smart thing to do, but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. By opening Kelvin’s journals, he had opened himself to the idea that if the machine wasn’t the answer, maybe something else was. Maybe this mine was.

When Martin had met Kelvin, he had thought he had come across a boy as different from him as possible. Yet from that point on, he had followed in Kelvin’s footsteps. From the woods, to Kelvin’s house, to Nigel’s side, where suggestions could be whispered into his ear. From a liar, to a de facto leader of Xibalba, to an outcast—a lost and repentant failure. From the hospital room to right here in the veins of this mine. He would stop the cycle now. He wouldn’t leave until he had some answers and could return to Xibalba with something more than empty proclamations. It had taken him a while to realize that he didn’t owe the kids salvation. He owed them truth.

Cries reached Martin in echoed flutters. He was getting close. The air was warmer here than outside, and it was dead still, but not stifling. He filled his lungs to the brim. Around the next bend, the puddles at his feet turned from brown to black, and Martin saw what Kelvin must have seen during his last frantic moments in the mine. A mound of dirt and stone formed a wall that blocked the tunnel.

“This is a grave,” Lane had told him.

But there was light coming from the grave. At the top of the mound was a hole, dug by hand presumably, and through the hole came a soft shaft of light and the sound of the woman crying. Martin kept moving. He placed the knife handle in his mouth and used his hands to pull himself up to the hole. It was just big enough for him to fit through.

Working through it was harder than he’d expected, and in an attempt to wiggle himself forward, he struck his head against a stone and the firefly lightbulbs shattered. Tiny cuts in his forehead let loose with blood. The only available light was coming from the other side. Turning back was hardly an option now.

A cavern was on the other side, a massive room the size of Xibalba’s church. As Martin pulled himself from the hole, he tumbled down to the floor. Dirty water splashed into his face and mixed with his blood, and the liquid that wasn’t absorbed by his headband ran down his cheeks. He scanned the room for other exits, but there were none. There was only the woman, sitting next to a pile of backpacks, their contents strewn on the floor around her. She held her wrist up to her chin and the light from her digital watch illuminated her face.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

“Martin Maple,” Martin said as he found his feet. The knife was at the ready.

“Are you the boy from my room?”

Martin hesitated to answer. He thought about what lying might get him. “Yes,” he finally said.

“There was someone with you.”

Martin took a few steps toward her and saw that clothing and toys and trinkets had been removed from the backpacks. “Henry was with me,” he told her. “I’m alone now.

She lifted a T-shirt to her face and wiped away some tears. “Are you here to kill me, Martin Maple?”

“No,” Martin said softly. “I’m here to bring you back. If you lead the way out, I’ll explain everything.”

“Will Kitten be there?”

“I’m sure we can find your kitten,” Martin told her. He would have offered her anything if it had meant they could return to the surface.

“Someone brought these bags, but no one showed up,” she whimpered. “This was supposed to be the meeting place if we got lost, for me and Daddy and Kitten. All of us, together for once …”

As her voice faded out, she closed her eyes. For Martin, it was like watching his father when he would drift off to sleep in his chair next to their wood-burning stove. It was peaceful but undeniably sad, because it was always something of a surrender.

“I showed up,” Martin told her, his voice filling the emptiness.

X
ibalba’s two exiles followed the only woman in the world toward town. Henry held the knife now, because as he was quick to point out, “Island boys can only bait hooks.” He also squawked questions at the woman.

“So what’s your name?”

“Puddin’ Tain,” she said, giggling. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

“Whatever, lady,” Henry said.

It was odd. A few hours before, she was psychotic, and now she was playful—bubbly, even. Her jaunty stride was verging on a skip.