I.
Into the well the three men fell. At the bottom of the well, they died.
Did they, or didn’t they? Was it, or wasn’t it?
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Long ago, in a dry valley surrounded by green hills flanked by greener mountains, a spring bubbled up in the shade of a fig tree.
The spring gurgled and sang and spurted out just enough water to irrigate the tree. Just enough for songbirds to frolic in, for travelers to water their animals, clean their clothes, fill a flask. The air around the spring was cool and clean. In this place, a person could breathe deeply, smell green leaves and the fresh essence of water irrigating the earth. In this place, a person could live.
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Two of the men survived the fall, but no one heard their cries. Some said they ate each other alive.
Did they, or didn’t they?
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Long ago, twice a year, a nomad family from the coastal plain visited a spring in the blue-ish shade of a fig tree in a dry valley that may have once been a river. They visited the spring twice a year, every year, between their travels to and from the mountains. Eventually, the family decided to stay in the valley, close to the mountains but not in them, because the mountains were full of jinn with prickly pears in their mouths and flames bursting from their skin, and the desert plain they came from was a hard place to live, with no shade and little water and harsh winds.
Near the spring in the valley, the family dug a well. Around the spring, they built a small fountain, where travelers and pilgrims would come to wash the grime of travel from their feet and faces and necks. At first, the people who came to the spring and its well were passing through, like the nomad family used to do. Or they came to visit the fig tree, which was said to have sprung from the body of a saint. The family fed the travelers and pilgrims, let them pitch their tents, and brought them water from the well to drink, wash up, and water their livestock. The well’s water was sweet and crisp and cold, with a mineral scent. Some of the travelers chose to stay.
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Into the well the three men fell in the dark, humid night.
Who pushed them? No one knows.
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Long ago, in a dry valley, near a spring, a deep, echoey well appeared. A family of water jinns with liquid skin settled in the well, beckoning unsuspecting travelers.
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Who pushed the three men into the well? Who laughed as they fell? Their faces, when their neighbors pulled them out of the well, were slashed bloody. Their backs and shoulders, too.
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Long ago, in a dry valley, around a well, a town sprang up. The first paths through town were donkey paths, cutting a straight swath for half a mile, then veering left or right or slithering in and out like a snake, because donkeys hated snakes and if they saw one, they jolted, dashing and wending frenziedly out of danger. If the donkey saw a mountain cat, it bolted. The path dead-ended where the wild creature had been, and a new, perpendicular path began.
You might not believe donkeys created the pattern of streets we see today. A donkey’s hoofprints don’t magically become packed dirt or cobblestones or asphalt. But roads begin under the feet of beasts. Donkeys brought wood and clay and stone for houses. They carried the wares of merchants. The first houses in the town, set right on the streets, were one-room red clay structures that later were painted bright white, and even later repainted pink and green and blue and decorated with murals of flowers and gazelles and a gurgling spring. Later still, the paint peeled and the murals were hard to make out if you hadn’t seen them every day since you were young, no taller than a donkey’s knee.
When the town first sprang up, the well was small and round with a bronze crown and a small bucket attached to a rope. As people came to this place and the town grew, they knocked down the old well structure and replaced it with something better and more efficient. They deepened and widened the well and built a larger square brick structure around it and a system of pulleys tugged by camels or donkeys to draw up a deep trough of water all at once. They said, “There’s no such thing as jinns, or if they exist, they don’t live among people.” Townspeople poo-pooed anyone who retold their grandparents’ stories about a jinn family living in the well.
The streets near the well were the best area of the city to live in. People in neighborhoods farther from the well had to cart their water over the bumpy, lumpy streets to their homes, hoping and praying the water wouldn’t slosh over and seep into the ground. Then plumbing came to the town, and beasts of burden were put out of work, and stories of jinn came back, not because people believed in them, but because they wanted to scare little children into obedience. Mothers told their children that a tribe of jinn had moved from the mountains to the well to quench the flame of their skin. The mamas let their little ones look over the edge of the abandoned well. The bottom of the well was dark as a monster’s pupils, and the little ones believed the mamas were not lying about the jinn, that they knew something true a child simply couldn’t imagine or fathom.
Over the years the neighborhood grew and the town grew, and urban planners from the city swung into town to plan streets. The town’s richest families built blocks of flats and auto shops and convenience stores and restaurants and places of worship, and the municipality tucked a few small green parks between buildings. The town became an oasis for people who wanted a better life than toiling in the mountains growing dates and oranges and tending goats and chickens. The neighborhood became packed with people who couldn’t afford to live in the parts of town with more parks and smoother streets.
The well that was once the center of town hid on the outskirts of a blighted neighborhood and even mothers stopped talking about it. People forgot exactly where it was, but they’d heard rumors of it from their grandparents.
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Who pushed the three men into the well?
She smelled like oud and fennel. She asked the men for a kiss. Her eyes flashed as she pushed them with her raised forearms. Her sickle hands clinked like castanets.
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II.
Khaled Khaled had believed the well was an urban legend, but here it was, tucked behind the structure that had once held Nader’s repair shop. On a tip about Nader’s murder, the TV reporter arrived at the well on a summer evening, in the TV station’s white van, with his cameraman and sound guy. The three colleagues hadn’t given up on the story in the year since it first broke, talking to people throughout the neighborhood, grilling the police chief and mayor at Town Hall, documenting the destruction of the places where Nader and two earlier victims—males—had been killed in what had to be connected incidents.
Khaled’s teen daughter, Zubaydah, wondered why he was so obsessed.
“It’s only three deaths,” she said. “Out of thousands of people who live here.”
Khaled believed sincerely that every life mattered; everyone, including the dead, deserved justice. When he received the anonymous text telling him to come to the well to learn a secret town government and Nader’s family wanted to hide at all costs, he showed up in under ten minutes.
Nader had a secret, the text said. Only I know what it was.
Khaled didn’t fear the well. He didn’t believe in jinn or monsters or supernatural beings or things that go bump in the night. He believed in what he could see and verify. He’d grown up in town and his grandmother had been a virologist who moved from the city and gave up her profession to marry a small-town baker because her sweet tooth was stronger than her thirst for knowledge—or so Khaled’s grandfather claimed. His grandmother never talked about the past. She made Khaled Khaled believe in bacteria—and by extension, other tiny creatures—by swabbing his cheek with a toothpick, smearing his saliva on a glass slide, and jamming his eye into a microscope. He saw the creatures swimming and reached his hand to try to grab one, but of course he could not.
His grandmother had no inkling he would die of a noncommunicable disease: broken neck by being pushed into a deep, dark well.
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III.
The well was in a dense neighborhood, surrounded on all sides by blocks of flats. The security checkpoint that had replaced Nader’s demolished shop was around the corner. Khaled assured the camera and sound guys the police would come running if anything weird happened.
“Should we tell them we’re here? Get an escort?”
“Our subject won’t spill the beans if we have a police escort. Get out! What kind of journalist would suggest such a thing.”
“Why do they want to meet here?” the sound guy asked. He was the best listener of the three of them, and Khaled envied his ability to come up with just the right question. He could have been a reporter, but he deferred to Khaled.
“To be close to the site of the murder?” Khaled hoped the informant would not be spooked by the camera. What could anyone expect from the town’s best and only investigative reporter? He would show up with his crew. He would get the scoop.
Khaled didn’t fear the well, but there was something a bit spooky about the air around it. As though the well were a black hole, sucking away the light that emanated from the street lamps that lined the streets surrounding them. Take four steps from the buildings where lives went on, and you were steeped in darkness.
“It feels hotter and more humid here,” the camera man said. “They say the spring dried up, and the well did too, and a jinn that takes the form of a snake took residence.”
Khaled Khaled punched the guy in the arm. They’d been through a lot together in their fifteen years at the town and surrounding area’s only television station, covered fires that killed entire families, a locust infestation to end all locust infestations, the migration of families from the countryside into town, and away from town into the city, and, of course, the murders. In his early years as a reporter, Khaled had dreamt of moving to the city, to a bigger TV station, to a place where there was more than one station and other reporters to compete against for scoops. He’d given the dreams up to give his daughter a small-town childhood: quiet, safe, filled with nosey relatives and neighbors. He hoped she’d never chafe under this place’s smalltown habits. He had realized lately that he loved it here, where his grandparents were buried, where people trusted his nose for news, his truth telling, his commitment to fairness. Where they watched out for him and his daughter.
The three men stepped closer to the well, Khaled with nonchalance and his crew as though they were approaching the mouth of a lion.
“Let’s film,” he said, walking backward as he talked. He trusted his guys would tell him when to stop. They would not let him fall.
“This is a bad idea,” the sound guy said.
A thunder-like rumble emanated from the shaft, getting louder and closer till Khaled clapped his hands over his ears.
“Are you getting this?” he shouted at the sound guy.
Khaled couldn’t make out what the sound guy was mouthing. “HELP ME?” “SHE’S REAL?” “IT’S HERE?” “WHAT THE HELL?”
Blood streamed from the crewmembers’ ears. Their eyes bugged, their shoulders slumped, and their equipment fell from their hands. The earth shook violently and the bricks of the structure around the well loudly crumbled.
Khaled turned to face the well.
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IV.
Her black hair pooled like silk, over her shoulder and down to her knees. Her teeth flashed white and canine. She smelled like oud and fennel and apples. She asked him for a kiss. His muscles tensed and he froze, paralyzed by her smile. He couldn’t see her hands.
Her eyes sparked as she grabbed his shoulders. Pain shot through him, something sharp tore into his shoulders, the skin of his face. She was pawing at him. He couldn’t push her away.
She shoved him into the well with the pads of her palms. Her sickle fingers clinked against each other. Hands grasped at him as he fell. He fell for a long time. The sky above him was full of stars.
His colleagues cried out, fell past him, thudded to the bottom of the well. No, that couldn’t be possible, unless he were suspended in air.
He was. He was suspended mid-well, defying gravity. He reached out but the sides were too far to touch. He fell, so quickly. His heart flew into his throat, and he slammed into the damp ground, and in an instant his neck had snapped. Just before his consciousness snuffed out forever, her voice came from above:
No one gets out alive.
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Eman Quotah is the author of the novel Bride of the Sea, winner of the Arab American Book Award for Fiction. Her next book, a horror novel, is forthcoming in the UK in August 2025.