Above the steeples, the sky had turned pale, and the weak sun was immersing everything in a yellow glow. Like a scene from the looking glass of a harbinger of ill omen, the animals seemed restless, and the children fell silent. Sam wandered aimlessly through veils of silk and cotton, hung from somewhere he could not determine. Even when he raised his eyes and looked up, he could not see any anchor point for the whipping fabric, no railing, no thread and no wooden supports. It was as if they were hung from an invisible hook in the air, stirred by a wind that only he could feel.
Nobody else who passed him on the street seemed to be subjected to the dusty gusts carrying desert sand. Their frocks and the hems of their long skirts were only moved by the movement of their legs when they walked, none by the wind that drowned his breath every now and then and tossed his wild dark hair into his face. His throat was dry and his stomach burned from days without food. He was heading for the well in the middle of the town square where all the citizens gathered for market days and to catch up on news from the past week.
“God, I hate Sundays here,” Sam mumbled inadvertently. “I hate those crowds. I should have come two days ago when it was quieter.”
“Why didn't you?” he heard Nina ask from his left shoulder.
“Because I was not thirsty then, Nina. There is no use coming here to drink when you are not thirsty,” he explained. “People will find no water in the well until they need it, didn't you know?”
“I did not. Sorry. But it is strange, don’t you think?” she remarked.
“What?” he frowned as the whipping sand grains stung his eyes and dried his tear ducts.
“That everyone else can drink from the well, except you,” she replied.
“How so? Why would you say that?” Sam snapped defensively. “No-one can drink until they are parched. There is no water.”
“There is no water for you. For others there is plenty,” she chuckled.
It infuriated Sam that Nina was so nonchalant about his suffering. To add to the blow, she continued to rouse his fury. “Maybe it is because you do not belong here, Sam. You are always interfering with things and end up drawing the shortest straw, which is fine, had you not been such an insufferable whiner.”
“Listen! You have…,” he started his retort, only to find that Nina was gone from his side. “Nina! Nina! Vanishing will not win you this argument!”
By now Sam had reached the salt-weathered well, pushed and shoved by the people congregated there. Nobody else wanted to drink, but they all stood like a wall to block off the gaping hole where Sam could hear the splashing water in the dark below.
“Excuse me,” he muttered as he pushed them out of the way one by one to peek over the edge. Deep inside the well, the water was dark blue, even in the blackness of the depth. The light from above refracted in glittering white stars on the rippling surface as Sam was yearning for a mouthful.
“Please, can you give me a drink?” he asked no-one in particular. “Please! I am so bloody thirsty! The water is right there, and yet I cannot reach it.”
Sam stretched out his arm as far as he could, but with every inch his arm won forward, the water seemed to recede deeper keeping the distance, eventually lying farther down than before.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he shouted furiously. “Are you kidding me?” He recovered his stance and looked around the strangers who were still unperturbed by the incessant sandstorm and its dry onslaught. “I need a rope. Does anybody have a rope?”
The sky grew lighter. Sam looked up at the burst of light that shot from the sun, barely disturbing the perfect roundness of the star.
“A solar flare,” he mumbled perplexedly. “No wonder I’m so bloody hot and thirsty. How can you people not feel the unbearable heat?”
His throat was so dry that it refused his last two words and they came out as nothing but whispered grunts. Sam hoped that the raging sun would not dry up the well, at least not until he had had a drink. From the darkness of his desperation, he resorted to violence. If nobody paid attention to a polite man, perhaps they would take note of his plight if he was acting out.
Wildly throwing urns and breaking pottery as he went, Sam screamed out for a cup and a rope; anything that could help him get the water. In his gut, the lack of liquid felt like acid. Sam felt his entire torso course with burning pain as if every organ in his body had been sunburned to blisters. He fell to his knees, keening like a banshee in the throes of agony, gripping the loose yellow sand in his clawing fingers as the acid spurted up into his throat.
He grabbed their ankles, but they only kicked carelessly at his arm without paying much attention to him. Sam wailed in pain. Through narrowed eyes, somehow still pelted by the sand, he looked up at the sky. There was no sun, no clouds. All he could see was a dome of glass from horizon to horizon. All the people with him stood in awe of the dome, frozen in fascination before a loud clap blinded them all — all but Sam.
A wave of invisible death pulsed from the sky under the dome and turned all the other citizens to ash.
“Jesus, no!” Sam cried at the sight of their horrific demise. He wanted to take his hands off his eyes, but they would not move. “Let my hands go! Let me be blind! Let me be blind!”
‘Three…’
‘Two…’
‘One.’
Another clap like the pulse of destruction echoed in Sam’s ears as his eyes shot open. His heart raced uncontrollably as he surveyed his surroundings with widened eyes filled with terror. Under his head was a thin pillow and his hands were gently restrained, testing the strength of the light rope.
“Great, now I have a rope,” Sam noted when he looked at his wrists.
“I suppose the call for a rope was your subconscious mind recalling the restraints,” the doctor speculated.
“No, I needed a rope to get water from a well,” Sam countered the theory as the psychologist freed his hands.
“I know. You were telling me everything as you went, Mr. Cleave.”
Dr. Simon Helberg was a forty-year veteran of the sciences, with a particular affinity for the mind and its trickery. Parapsychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience and oddly enough a special inkling for Extra Sensory Perception floated the old man’s boat. Thought by most to be a quack and a shame to the science community, Dr. Helberg did not allow his tainted reputation to faze his work in any way. An anti-social scholar and reclusive theorist, Helberg thrived only on information and practice of theories typically perceived as myth.
“Sam, why do you think you did not die in the pulse, while all the others did? What was it that set you apart from the others?” he asked Sam, sitting down on the coffee table in front of the couch where the journalist was still lying down.
Sam gave him a borderline juvenile scoff. “Well, it is rather obvious, isn't it? They were all of a similar race, culture, and country. I was a complete outsider.”
“Yes, Sam, but that should not exempt you from suffering an atmospheric catastrophe, should it?” Dr. Helberg reasoned. Like a wise old owl, the overweight, bald man stared at Sam with his huge pale blue eyes. His glasses rested so far down his nasal bridge that Sam felt compelled to shove them back up before they would fall off the tip of the doctor's nose. But he kept his urges restrained to consider the points laid out by the old man.
“Aye, I know,” he admitted. Sam's large dark eyes scanned the floor as his mind searched for a plausible answer. “I reckon it was because it was my vision, and those people were merely extras in the scene. They were part of the story I was watching,” he frowned, unsure of his own theory.
“That makes sense, I suppose. However, they were there for a reason. Otherwise you wouldn't have seen anybody else there. Perhaps you needed them to understand the effects of the death pulse,” the doctor suggested.