The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  Gracie frowned, her mind spinning, and pointed at his binoculars. “May I?”

  “Sure.” He handed them over.

  She looked through them. It didn’t add anything to what she’d already observed. The shimmer was more pronounced. It appeared hazy, slightly more mirage-like . . . but it was definitely there. It was real.

  She gave the binoculars back to Simmons as a few of the others congregated around them. They seemed as bewildered as he was. She darted a look behind them. Finch had the skycam’s arms clicked into place while Dalton was double-checking the second camera’s harness and settings, both of them keeping an eye on the sighting. She noticed the captain coming out on deck. Two crew members hurried to join him. Gracie turned to the others. “None of you have any idea what we’re looking at here?”

  “I first thought it might be a flare,” one of the other crew members said, “but it’s too big and too bright, and it’s just there, you know? I mean, it’s not moving, is it?”

  The sleek noise of air being whipped around startled them just momentarily. It was a sound they’d heard earlier that day, when Gracie and Dalton had used the small, unmanned remote-controlled helicopter to get some panoramic establishing shots of the ice shelf.

  Dalton shouted, “We’ve got liftoff,” over the whirr of the skycam’s rotor blades.

  They turned to watch it rise. The Draganflyer X6 was an odd-looking but brilliant piece of engineering. It didn’t look anything like a normal helicopter. It was more like a matte-black alien insect, something you’d expect to see in a Terminator movie. It consisted of a small central pod that was the size of a large mango and housed the electronics, gyroscopes, and battery. Three small collapsible arms extended out from it horizontally, at twelve, four, and eight o’clock positions. At the end of each arm was a whisper-quiet, brushless motor, each one driving two parallel sets of molded rotor blades, one above it and another underneath. Any type of camera could be fitted to the rig under its belly. It was all powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, and the whole thing was made of black carbon fiber that was incredibly strong and yet super-light—the Draganflyer weighed less than five pounds, high-definition video camera with a helicopter-to-ground link included. It gave great aerial shots with minimal fuss, and Dalton never traveled anywhere without it.

  Gracie was watching the black contraption rise above the deck and glide away slowly, heading toward the ice shelf, when a female voice yelled out, “Oh my God,” and Gracie saw it too.

  The sighting was changing again.

  It flared up again, then dimmed down from its outward rim inward, shrinking until it was barely a tenth of its original size. It held there for a couple of tantalizing seconds, then slowly flared back to the way it was. And then its surface seemed to ripple, as if it were morphing into something else.

  At first, Gracie wasn’t sure what it was doing, but the second it started changing, something deep within her knotted. The sighting had clearly come alive. It was shapeshifting, twisting into itself, but always within the confines of its original envelope. It was taking on different compositions with alarming speed, all while keeping up its barely noticeable rotation, and they were all perfectly symmetrical, almost as if it were a kaleidoscope, but less angular, more rounded and organic. The patterns it took on melted from one to another continuously at an increasing, dazzling rate, and Gracie wasn’t sure of what they were, but they reminded her of cellular structures. And in that very moment, she felt a deeply unsettling sensation, as if she were staring at the very fabric of life itself.

  The small gathering froze, equally dumbstruck. Gracie glanced over at them. A whole range of emotion was etched across their faces, from awe and wonder to confusion—and fear. None of them was debating what it could be, not anymore. They just stood there, rooted to the deck, eyes fixated on it, their only words brief expressions of their amazement. Two of them—an older man and woman—crossed themselves.

  Gracie saw Dalton check on the fixed camera, making sure it was still capturing the event. He held the skycam’s remote control unit, which was suspended from a neck strap, at waist level, his fingers expertly controlling both joysticks.

  She caught his gaze and moved her mike down. “This is . . . Jesus, Dalton. What’s going on?”

  He looked up at the sighting. “I don’t know, but . . . Either Prince has a new concert tour coming up, or someone’s spiked our coffee with some serious shit.” Dalton could usually see the humor in anything, but right now, he sounded different to Gracie. His tone was drained of all light.

  She heard a few gasps, and someone said, “It’s slowing down.” All eyes strained in nervous unison as the sighting moved to take on a final shape.

  For a second, it felt to Gracie as if her heart had stopped beating. Every pore of her body was crackling with fearful tension as she stared dead ahead at it. Without daring to take her eyes off it, she said, almost to herself, “Jesus.”

  The brighter zones of the sphere were being consumed by a spreading darkness, and it kept going until the sphere’s entire surface looked blackened and coarse, as if it had been carved from a lump of coal.

  Chapter 3

  A ripple of terror spread among the crowd. The apparition had lost all of its splendor. In the blink of an eye, it had gone from being strangely wonderful to sinister and lifeless.

  Finch moved close to Gracie, both of them riveted by the ominous sight.

  “This isn’t good,” he said.

  Gracie didn’t reply. She glanced down at the skycam’s control box. The image on its small, five-inch LCD monitor was very clear, despite the light mist. Dalton had guided it in a wide, slight arc, in order for it not to come between them and the sighting. With the Draganflyer now more than halfway to the shelf, Gracie was able to get more of a sense of scale. The apparition dwarfed the approaching flying camera, like an elephant looming over an ant. It held the dark, lifeless skin it had assumed for a minute or so, bearing down on them with what seemed like a malevolent intent, then it flared up again, burning brightly, only this time, it took on a more distinct shape, defined by the light which was radiating with different strengths. It now looked unquestionably like a three-dimensional sphere, and at its core was a bright ball of light. Around it were four equal rings, running along the sphere’s outer face, evenly spaced. As they weren’t facing the ship head-on but were at a slight angle, they appeared like elongated ovals. The outer shell itself was brightly illuminated too, and rays of light were projecting outward from the core, between the rings, petering out slightly beyond the edge of the sphere. The whole display was hypnotic, especially as it blazed away against the dull, gray backdrop.

  The sight was beyond breathtaking. It electrified the crowd and brought some of them to tears. The couple who had crossed themselves were holding each other close. Gracie could see their lips trembling in silent prayer. Her own body stiffened, and her legs went numb. She felt a confusing surge of euphoria and fear, which seemed echoed in the faces around her.

  “Whoa.” Dalton recoiled.

  Finch was also motionless, gaping at it. “Tell me I’m not really seeing this,” Finch said. “Tell me it’s not really there.”

  “It is,” Gracie confirmed as she just stood there, enthralled. “It absolutely is.”

  She held the mike up and struggled for words as everything around her faded to oblivion, a complete sensorial disconnect from her surroundings, her every thought consumed by the apparition. It was beyond understanding, beyond definition. After a moment, she emerged momentarily from her trance, and faced the camera again.

  “I hope you’re still getting this, Jack, ’cause everyone here is just stunned by this . . . I can’t even begin to describe the sensation out here right now.” Her eyes dropped away for a passing glance at Dalton’s monitor. He was using the joysticks to zoom in on the apparition, which filled the screen with its radiance before he pulled back out.

  She looked out at it again. The skycam was closing in on it. “How far
from it do you think it is?” she asked Dalton.

  “A hundred yards. Maybe less.” His voice had a slight quiver in it as his eyes darted from the monitor to the apparition and back.

  Gracie couldn’t take her eyes off of it. “It’s just magnificent, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a sign,” someone said. It was the woman Gracie had noticed crossing herself. Gracie looked over, and Dalton panned over to her.

  “A sign? Of what?” another answered.

  “I don’t know, but . . . she’s right. Look at it. It’s a sign of . . . something.” It was the older man who was with her. Gracie remembered being introduced to them on her arrival. He was an American named Greg Musgrave, a glaciologist if she remembered correctly. The woman was his wife.

  Musgrave turned to Gracie, waving toward the skycam, jabbing a nervous finger at it. “Don’t send that”—he stammered, struggling with what to call the Draganflyer—“thing any farther. Stop it before it gets too close.”

  “Why?” Dalton sounded incredulous.

  Musgrave raised his voice. “Pull it back. We don’t know what it is.”

  Dalton didn’t take his eyes off his controls. “Exactly,” he shot back, “it can help us figure out what the hell it is.”

  Gracie looked out. The skycam was very close to the apparition. She glanced at Finch, then at Dalton, who seemed determined to see it through.

  “I’m telling you, pull it back,” Musgrave said, moving toward Dalton now, reaching out to grab the remote control console. Dalton’s fingers jerked against the joysticks, making the Draganflyer yaw and pitch wildly, its gyroscopes kicking in to keep it airborne.

  “Hey,” Gracie yelled at him, just as Finch and the captain stepped in to restrain Musgrave.

  “Grace, what the hell’s going on?” Roxberry again, in her ear.

  “Hang on, Jack,” she interjected quickly.

  “Calm down,” the captain snapped at Musgrave. “He’s gonna pull it back before it reaches it,” then, to Dalton, pointedly, “aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Dalton replied flatly. “You know how much that thing cost me?” He checked out the monitor, as did Gracie. The apparition filled the screen. It was grainy, but there was a subtle, undulating shimmer within the image that really gave the impression that it was bubbling with life. Gracie caught the worry in Dalton’s eyes, then looked over at the skycam. The tiny black dot was almost on it.

  “Maybe it’s close enough,” she told Dalton, under her breath.

  Dalton frowned with concentration. “A little closer.”

  “You shouldn’t be messing with it before we know what we’re dealing with,” Musgrave blurted out sharply.

  Dalton ignored him and kept the joystick pressed forward. The skycam glided on, inching its way nearer to the blazing apparition.

  “Dalton,” Finch said, low and discreet. It was getting uncomfortably close for him.

  “I hear you,” he replied. “Just a little bit more.”

  Gracie’s pulse quickened, thumping away in her ears as the skycam sailed ever closer to the apparition. It seemed tantalizingly close now, perhaps fifty feet or less—it was hard to judge the relative distance—when the sign suddenly dimmed right down and disappeared.

  The crowd heaved a collective gasp.

  “You see that? I told you,” Musgrave rasped.

  “You kidding me?” Dalton fired back angrily. “What, you think I scared it?”

  “We don’t know. But it was there for a reason, and now it’s gone.” The scientist put an arm around his wife, and they both turned and stared out into the distance, as if willing it to reappear, dismay clouding their faces.

  “Get real, man,” Dalton shrugged, turning away.

  Over the shelf, the Draganflyer continued on its trajectory unbothered. Nothing showed on its monitor as it buzzed through the air that the apparition had occupied. Dalton slid a glance at Gracie. He looked thoroughly spooked. She’d never seen him react that way, not to anything, and they’d been through some pretty gut-wrenching times together.

  Gracie was just as shaken. She peered out into the grim sky.

  There was no trace of the sign.

  It was as if it had never happened.

  And then, all of a sudden, Gracie felt the world around her darken, felt a momentous weight above her, and looked up to see the apparition right above her, hovering over the ship itself, a massive ball of shimmering light squatting above them, dwarfing the vessel. She flinched as the crowd gasped and recoiled in horror and Dalton pounced on the main camera to try and get it on film. Gracie just stood there, staring up at it in complete bewilderment, her knees trembling, her feet riveted to the wooden planks of the ship’s deck, fear and wonderment battling it out inside her, every hair on her body standing rigid for a brief moment that felt like an eternity—

  —and then all of a sudden, the sign just faded out again, vanishing just as startlingly and as inexplicably as it had appeared.

  Chapter 4

  Bir Hooker, Egypt

  Yusuf Zacharia puffed ruminatively on his sheesha as he watched his opponent pull his hand back from the weathered backgammon board. Nodding wearily to himself, the wiry old taxi driver palmed the dice. Anything less than a double-six meant he would lose the game. He didn’t have high hopes for the toss. The dice weren’t doing him any favors tonight.

  He shook the small ivory cubes vigorously before flinging them across the board, and watched them skitter across its elaborately inlaid surface before they settled into a six and a one. He frowned, turning the fissures that lined his grizzled, leathery face into canyons, and rubbed his mostly bald pate, cursing his luck. To add to his misery, he became aware of a bitter, fruity bite gnawing at the back of his throat. The coals of his waterpipe had cooled down. He’d been so taken by the game and by his miserable run of rolls that he hadn’t noticed. Fresh, red-hot replacements would rekindle the soothing, honey-mint taste that helped lull him into a tranquil sleep every night, but he sensed he might have to forgo that little luxury tonight. It was late.

  He glanced at his watch. It was time to head home. The other customers of the small café—two young tourists, an American couple, he thought, judging by their familiar guidebooks and newspapers—were also getting up to leave. Baseeta, he shrugged to himself. Never mind. There was always tomorrow. He’d be back for a fresh sheesha and another game, God willing.

  He was pushing himself to his feet when something caught his eye, a fleeting image on the TV set that loomed down from a rickety old shelf behind the counter. It was way past the ever-popular soaps’ bedtime. At this hour, here, at the sleepy edge of the Egyptian desert, in the small village of Bir Hooker—haplessly misnamed after a British manager of the Egyptian Salt and Soda Company—and across the entire troubled region, for that matter, TVs would inevitably be tuned to some news program, feeding the endless debates and laments about the sorry state of the Arab world. Mahmood, the café’s jovial owner, tended to favor Al Arabiya over Al Jazeera until, aiming to put forward a more tourist-friendly face, he invested in a satellite dish with a pirated decoder box. Ever since, the screen was locked onto an American news network. Mahmood thought the foreign infusion gave his café more class; Yusuf, on the other hand, didn’t particularly care for the Americans’ never-ending coverage of the recent presidential election there, even though it had been, unusually, keenly watched across the region, a region whose fortunes seemed more and more entwined with the vagaries of that distant country’s leadership. But Yusuf’s resistance to the channel was counterweighed by an unspoken appreciation for its occasional coverage of pouting Hollywood starlets and scantily clad catwalk models.

  Right now, however, his attention was consumed by something entirely different. The screen showed a woman in heavy winter gear reporting from what seemed like one of the poles. In the image behind her, something shone in the sky. Something bizarre and otherworldly, the likes of which he’d never seen before. It was just floating there, blazing over a col
lapsing cliff of ice, and had—oddly, though it was unmistakable—the distinct, manifest shape of a symbol.

  A sign.

  The others also took note of the events on the screen and drew in closer to the counter, excitedly urging Mahmood to turn the sound up. The scene it showed was surreal, unimaginable, only that wasn’t what disturbed Yusuf most. What really troubled him was that he’d seen that sign before.

  His face pinched together with disbelief as he stared at the screen.

  It can’t be.

  He inched forward for a closer look. His mouth dropped by an inch, his skin tingled with trepidation. The camera cut to another angle, and this time, the illuminated symbol took over the whole screen.

  It was the same sign.

  There was no doubt in his mind.

  Unconsciously, his hand rose discreetly to his forehead, and he quietly crossed himself.

  His friends noticed his sudden pallor, but he ignored their questions and, without offering an explanation or a farewell, rushed out of the café. He clambered into his trusted old Toyota Previa and churned its engine to life. The people carrier kicked up a small cloud as it fishtailed onto the dusty, unlit road and disappeared into the night, Yusuf riding the pedal hard, rushing back to the monastery as quickly as he could, muttering the same phrase to himself, over and over and over.

  It can’t be.

  Chapter 5

  Cambridge , Massachusetts

  The crowd caught Vince Bellinger’s eye as he ambled across the mall. They were massed outside the Best Buy, bubbling noisily with excitement, seemingly about something in the shop’s huge window display. Bellinger was more than familiar with the window—it usually housed the latest plasmas and LCDs, including the mammoth sixty-five-incher he’d been fantasizing about for Christmas this year. Covetable, to be sure, but nothing that merited this much attention. Unless it wasn’t the screens themselves, but rather what was on them, that had drawn the crowd.