The Only Ones by Aaron Starmer Read Free Book Online Page B

enough,” she said with a sly smile. “I don’t know. Maybe it means something. A fresh beginning.”
    Henry snorted, as if he couldn’t care less, and Darla let out a quick, jabbing laugh. They left Martin standing alone at the front door.
    In almost every room of Martin’s new home, there were shelves full of books. In the garage, there were tools, covered in a thin film of dust. In the kitchen, there were canned goods stocking the cupboards. What Martin found most intriguing, however, was in the basement.
    The basement consisted of one scanty low-ceilinged room with brick walls and a concrete floor. Candles in glass vases decorated ledges, and trunks, and wooden crates. A Ping-Pong table, with a stack of boxes on it, was pushed into the corner. From the pictures on the boxes, Martin could see they held kits for model cars and boats and trains. Against one wall was a grimy plaid sofa with a woven wool blanket hanging over its arm. On a coffee table, in front of the sofa, was a miniature house, cut in half to show its innards.
    It was a dollhouse, or that was what Martin assumed. Only it didn’t look like the dollhouses he had imagined. The rooms inside weren’t reproductions of kitchens or bedrooms or parlors. They were all the same room, decorated in the same way, over and over, three floors of three, nine rooms in all. They had minuscule candles in glass vases, baby Ping-Pong tables pushed into their corners, grimy toy sofas. They were shrunken duplicates of the room Martin was standing in now. The only difference was that in every room except for one, there was a single glass bottle on the coffee table rather than a shrunken dollhouse. In that odd room out, the coffee table was empty.
    Martin still had the bottle Kelvin had given him. Gingerly, he eased his fingers over the toy furniture and set it in its rightful place on the tiny table.
    Martin slept in a giant bed on the top floor of the house, and he woke when the sun angled through an octagonal window just above the headboard. Downstairs, he opened a can of beans and then went out to the back porch and ate them for breakfast as he watched the creek. He had expected Darla or Henry or someone to stop by, but after a couple of hours and no visitors, he slipped on some shoes and headed to the front door to go for a walk.
    Two large plastic jugs, each filled to the top with water, were waiting on the front step. A note sandwiched between the jugs read:
    To get you started—Trent
    In the distance, a boy pedaled a bicycle down the street, towing behind him a small red wagon filled with more jugs. Martin couldn’t catch up with the bike, so he opted to walk in the opposite direction, toward the town square.
    The next person he came upon was a lanky girl with cropped blond hair and a tight outfit made from synthetic fabrics. She was jogging at a steady clip, heading straight for Martin.
    As she approached, Martin waved. “Top of the morning,” he said.
    Maybe that wasn’t the thing to say in this neck of the woods, because the girl didn’t slow her pace. As she blew by him, she raised four fingers.
    “Four miles to go,” she grunted.
    Four miles to go? Figuring out local phrases was sure to be a chore, Martin thought, but there was no point in stressing over these things. Martin was the new guy, and it was the new guy’s job to make mistakes, to learn. So he simply chose to move on.
    He paused only when the yellow house from the night before came into view. Nigel wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but there was a collection of animals grazing and lounging in the yard. There were chickens and goats and cats and a few other creatures that Martin couldn’t figure out. He wondered why they weren’t scurrying off, as animals tended to do in the wild.
    In the corner of the yard, a group of dogs were collected around a giant replica of an ice cream cone. It was at least eight feet tall, the sheen of it indicating fiberglass construction. The cone had a waffle-print