Mystery of the Amber Room

Chapter 8

Sam and Nina had no idea how to respond to the doctor's question. With all the things they had witnessed during their adventures together, they had to concede that inexplicable phenomena existed. Although most of what they had experienced could be chalked up to abstruse physics and undiscovered scientific principles, they were open to other explanations as well.

“Why do you ask?” Sam asked.

“I need to be sure that neither you nor the lady here will not see me as some superstitious idiot at what I am about to tell you,” the young physician admitted. His eyes darted back and forth between them. He was deadly serious, but he was uncertain about trusting the strangers enough to explain such an apparently far-fetched theory to them.

“We are very open-minded when it comes to such things, doctor,” Nina assured him. “You can tell us. Honestly, we have seen some weird stuff ourselves. There is very little than can still surprise Sam and me.”

“Ditto,” Sam added with a juvenile chuckle.

The doctor took a moment to figure out how to convey his theory to Sam. His face betrayed his unease. Clearing his throat, he shared what he thought Sam had to know.

“The people in the village you visited had a very strange encounter a few hundred years ago. It is an account that had been passed on verbally through the ages, so I am not sure how much of the original story is left in today's legend,” he conveyed. “They tell of a gem stone that was picked up by a young boy and brought to the village to give the chief. But because the stone looked so unusual the elders thought it to be the eye of a god, so they covered it in fear of being watched. Long story short, everyone in the village died three days later because they had blinded the god and he poured out his wrath on them.”

“And you think my eye problem has something to do with that story?” Sam frowned.

“Look, I know it sounds crazy. Believe me, I know how it sounds, but hear me out,” the young man insisted. “What I think is a little bit less medical and leaning more towards the… um… the kind of…”

“Weird side?” Nina asked. Her skepticism seeped through her tone.

“Wait now,” Sam said. “Go on. What does it have to do with my sight?”

“I think something happened to you up there, Mr. Cleave; something you cannot remember,” the doctor speculated. “I'll tell you why. Because this tribe's forefathers blinded a god, only a man harboring a god would go blind in their village.”

Overwhelming silence enveloped the three, while Sam and Nina stared at the doctor with the most unintelligible looks he had ever seen. He had no idea how to clarify what he was trying to say, specifically because it was so utterly ludicrous and quixotic.

“In other words,” Nina slowly started to make sure she got it right, “you mean to tell us that you believe the old wives tale, right? So, this has nothing to do with a solution. You just wanted to let us know that you buy into this crazy shit.”

“Nina,” Sam frowned, not too pleased that she was so snappy.

“Sam, the guy is practically telling you that you have a god inside you. Now, I am all for ego and can even handle a bit of narcissism here and there, but for Christ's sake, you cannot possibly believe this bullshit!” she admonished him. “My God, that is like saying if you have an earache in the Amazon Basin you are part unicorn.”

The foreign woman's ridiculing was too much and too rude, forcing the young doctor to reveal his course of diagnosis. Facing Sam, he turned his back on Nina to ignore her in return for her disregard of his intelligence. “Look, I know how this sounds. But you, Mr. Cleave, have conducted an alarming amount of concentrated heat through your organon visus in a short amount of time and although it should have made your head explode, it left you with only mild damage to your lens and retina!”

He glanced at Nina. “That was the basis of my diagnostic conclusion. Do with it what you will, but that is just a little too weird to dismiss as anything but supernatural.”

Sam was dumbstruck.

“So that is the reason of my crazy vision,” Sam said to himself.

“The excessive heat caused minor cataracts, but those can be removed by any ophthalmologist once you return home,” the doctor said.

Remarkably, Nina was the one who prompted him to elaborate on the other side of his diagnosis. With more respect and curiosity in her tone of voice, Nina asked the doctor about Sam's vision problem from an esoteric perspective. At first reluctant to entertain her query, he agreed to give Nina his take on the peculiarity of what had happened.

“All I can say is that Mr. Cleave’s eyes suffered a temperature similar to that of lightning and came off with minimal damage. That alone is unnerving. But when you know the villagers' stories, such as I do, you remember things, especially things like an angry blind god that killed the entire village with sky fire,” the doctor recounted.

“Lightning,” Nina said. “So that's why they insisted that Sam was dead while his eyes were rolled back into his skull. Doctor, he was having a seizure when I found him.”

“Are you sure it was not just a byproduct of the electrical current?” the doctor asked.

Nina shrugged, “Could be.”

“I remember none of that. When I woke up, I only remember being hot, half blind and extremely confused,” Sam admitted with a very perplexed frown on his forehead. “I know even less now than I did before you told me all this stuff, doc.”

“None of this was supposed to be a solution to your problem, Mr. Cleave. But this was nothing short of a miracle, so I at least owed you a bit more insight as to what might be happening to you,” the young man told them. “Look, I don't know what caused this ancient…” he looked at the skeptical lady with Sam, not wanting to provoke her derision again. “I don't know what mysterious anomaly caused you to cross the rivers of the gods, Mr. Cleave, but if I were you, I would keep it a secret while seeking the help of a witchdoctor or a shaman.”

Sam laughed. Nina did not find it at all funny, but she held her tongue about the more unsettling things she had seen Sam do when she had found him.

“So, I am possessed by an ancient god? Oh, sweet Jesus!” Sam guffawed.

The doctor and Nina exchanged looks, having a silent accord between them.

“You have to remember, Sam, that in ancient time, forces of nature that can be explained by science today were referred to as gods. I think that is what the doctor is trying to make clear here. Call it what you will, but there is no doubt that something extremely bizarre is happening to you. First the visions, and now this,” Nina clarified.

“I know, love,” Sam appeased her, with a chuckle. “I know. It just sounds so fucking crazy. Almost as crazy as time travel or man-made wormholes, you know?” Now he looked bitter and broken through his smile.

The doctor gave Nina a frown at Sam's mentions of time travel, but she only shook her head dismissively and waved it off. As much as the physician believed in the weird and wonderful, she could hardly explain to him that his male patient had suffered a nightmarish few months as involuntary captain of a teleporting Nazi ship that defied all laws of physics just a while back. Some things were just not meant to be shared.

“Well, doctor, thank you so much for the medical — and mystic — help,” Nina smiled. “Ultimately you have been of far greater help than you will ever know.”

“Thanks, Miss Gould,” the young doctor smiled, “for finally believing me. You are both welcome. Please take care, okay?”

“Aye, we are tougher than a hooker’s…”

“Sam!” Nina interrupted him. “I think you need some rest.” She raised an eyebrow at the amusement of both men who were laughing it off as they said their goodbyes and left the doctor's office.

Late in the evening, after well-deserved showers and tending to their respective injuries, the two Scots went to bed. In the dark, they listened to the rush of the nearby ocean, when Sam pulled Nina closer.

“Sam! No!” she protested.

“What did I do?” he asked.

“My arm! I cannot lie on my side, remember? It is burning like hell and it feel as if the bone is rattling around in the socket,” she complained.

He was quiet for a bit as she recovered her spot on the bed with effort.

“You can still lie on your back, right?” he flirted playfully.

“Aye,” Nina replied, “but my arm is bound over my tits, so, sorry Jack.”

“Only your boobs, right? The rest is fair game?” he teased.

Nina scoffed, but what Sam did not know was that she was smiling in the dark. After a brief pause, his tone was far more serious but relaxed.

“Nina, what was I doing when you found me?” he asked.

“I told you,” she shielded.

“No, you gave me the synopsis,” he refuted her answer. “I saw how you held back at the hospital when you told the doctor in what state you found me. Come on, I might be daft and silly sometimes, but I am still the world's best investigative journalist. I have gotten through insurgent deadlocks in Kazakhstan and followed a lead to a terrorist organization hideout in the heated wars of Bogota, baby. I know body language, and I know when sources are holding out on me.”

She sighed. “How would knowing the details profit you at all? We still don’t know what is going on with you. Hell, we don’t even know what happened to you the day you disappeared on board the DKM Geheimnis. I am really not sure how much more far-fetched shit you can handle, Sam.”

“I understand that. I do, but this concerns me, so I have to know. No, I am entitled to know,” he argued. “You have to tell me so that I have the whole picture, love. Then I can put two and two together, see? Only then will I know what to do. If there is one thing I have learned as a journalist, it is that half of the information…no, even 99 % of the information is sometimes not sufficient to implicate a culprit. Every detail is necessary; every fact has to be assessed before drawing a conclusion.”

“Okay, okay, already,” she interrupted him. “I get it. I just don't want you to deal with too much so soon after you came back, understand? You have been through so much and miraculously braved all of it against all odds, honey. All I am trying to do is to spare you some of the bad shit until you are better equipped to deal with it.”

Sam laid his head on Nina's shapely stomach, starting her into a fit of giggles. He could not lay his head on her chest because of the sling, so he wrapped his arm around her hip and slipped his hand under the small of her back. She smelled like roses and felt like satin. He felt Nina's free hand rest on his thick dark hair as she held him there and she began to speak.

For over twenty minutes Sam listened to Nina recount the whole incident, not sparing any details. When she told him about the native man and the strange voice Sam had spoken words in an obscure language in, she could feel his fingertips twitching on her skin. Apart from that, Sam handled the tale of his frightening condition pretty well, but neither of them slept until the sun came up.