The Only Ones Read Online Free PDF Page B

if he was headed in the right direction. Signs told him it was ten miles to this place, and twenty miles to that place, two hundred miles to some other place. But not a single sign mentioned Xibalba.
    The closest he found was the sign he ultimately chose to follow. It marked a trail. It was small, rectangular, and brown and decorated with a simple silhouette of two people, both carrying walking sticks and wearing backpacks. In the bottom corner of the sign, someone had placed a sticker. It was the same picture as on George’s Jolly Roger: a skull, crisscrossing bones, a background of black.
    “It can’t be a coincidence,” Martin whispered to the skull as he stepped off the road and onto the dirt.
    It was rougher going. The trail carved its way through damp, mossy forests, over thickly wooded mountains, and along the shores of dark, still lakes. There were plants and animals Martin had never seen, and he would sit next to his campfire at night imagining what else might be out there. Were things like dragons and horses and duck-billed platypuses real, or were they just fanciful embellishments in the books he had read? Could he hike this trail for years, around the entire circumference of the earth? Would it ever lead to Xibalba?
    Martin spent his thirteenth birthday at a campsite in theforest. Memories of other birthdays consumed him. His eleventh birthday still haunted. The sight of the skiff, appearing like a ghost on the sea, was something he would never shake. He had seen inside. He knew his father wasn’t there. All he could make out was that branch. Yet the reason he swam after it was to check if something else might be there too, hidden in the crook of the bow. A gift. Another birthday memory.
    It was from when Martin had turned eight.
    There had been no celebration, only a simple dinner and an evening spent by the fire. Just before heading off to bed, his father had handed Martin a small round alarm clock with two bells that stuck up from the top like ears.
    “It doesn’t work, but I want you to have it,” his father said.
    “It’s a clock,” Martin said, and held it in his lap and stared at the two hands. The big hand was stuck just past the four, the small hand just past the twelve.
    “It’s the moment I learned you were born,” his father told him. “I received a call. In my excitement, I knocked the clock off a nightstand, and it stopped. It was the happiest moment of my life.”
    His father rarely said things like that, so Martin cherished the gift, and he took extra-special care of it. He wrapped it in a piece of silk and kept it in the dresser next to his bed. On most days, he would take it out and clean its glass face and shine its bells. His father told him that he must never fix it. He wanted it frozen on that moment.
    On the day his father set out to find the final piece to the machine, Martin pulled the alarm clock from the drawer. He wasn’t worried that his father wouldn’t come back, but inthe book of stories about men traveling to other planets, there were always scenes in which the space travelers were presented gifts. Martin had never given his father a gift. Then again, Martin’s father had never left on a journey.
    So as his father prepared the skiff, Martin handed him the clock. “For good luck,” Martin said.
    In the stories, the men who received the gifts would always say things like “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a jiff,” and then they would cluck their tongues and snap their fingers and graciously hand the items back. That was what Martin hoped would happen. Instead, his father cupped the clock in his hands and looked at it as if it were the most precious thing on earth.
    “Thank you,” he said quietly. “By giving me this, a part of you will always be with me.” Then he carefully placed the clock in a tackle box at the stern of the boat.
    “I just wanted to make you happy,” Martin said.
    “You did,” his father said. “More than you could imagine.”
    He