The Sign

by Raymond Khoury

  They walked down the hall in silence, the sheer magnitude of the discussion sinking in. As they reached the stairwell, Gracie noticed Dalton looking particularly adrift.

  “What?” she asked.

  He stopped, hesitated, then said, “What if that Bible-thumping nut back there is right?”

  She shook her head. “There’s got to be a better explanation for it.”

  “What if there isn’t?”

  Gracie mulled the question for a moment. “Well, if that’s the case, if it’s really God,” she said somberly, “then for someone who had me totally convinced He didn’t exist, He sure picked one hell of a moment to show Himself.”

  Chapter 9

  Wadi Natrun, Egypt

  Labored breaths and sluggish footfalls tarnished the stillness of the mountain as the three men trudged up the steep slope. Every step, every scattered rock and rolling pebble echoed, the small sounds amplified by the harsh, lifeless dryness of the hills around them. The moon had been conspicuously absent that night, and despite the fading array of stars overhead, the early dawn light and the chilling solitude weighed heavily on them.

  Yusuf had driven straight to the monastery from the café. Like many other devout Coptic Christians, the taxi driver donated as much as he could afford to the monastery, delivering free fruit and vegetables from his brother’s stall at the market and helping out with various odd jobs. He’d been doing that for as long as he could remember, and knew the monastery like the back of his hand. Which was why he’d been to the cave, delivering supplies every few weeks to the recluse who was its sole inhabitant, and why he’d seen what was inside it.

  Muttering the most profuse of apologies, he’d startled the monk he knew best, a young man with alert gray-green eyes and a gregarious demeanor by the name of Brother Ameen, out of a deep sleep with his startling news. Ameen knew Yusuf well enough to take him at his word and, driven by the old taxi driver’s urgent tone, he’d then led him to the cell of the monastery’s abbot, Father Kyrillos. The abbot listened, and reluctantly agreed to accompany them back to the café at that ungodly hour.

  The monastery’s amenities, unsurprisingly, didn’t include a media room, and so they’d all watched the footage on the TV at the café. It had thoroughly shocked the monks. And although they were both certain that Yusuf was right, they had to be absolutely sure.

  And that couldn’t wait.

  Yusuf had driven them straight back to the monastery, where they’d counted down the hours anxiously. Then at dawn, he drove them six miles out, to the edge of the desert, where the barren, desolate crags rose out of the sand. From there, the three men had climbed for over an hour, pausing once for a sip of water from a leather gourd that the young monk had brought along.

  The trek up wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. The steep, uneven slope of the mountain—a barren moonscape of loose, crumbling rocks—was treacherous and hard enough to navigate by daylight, let alone like this, in near-darkness, with nothing more than the anemic beams of cheap flashlights to guide them up the slope that was still bathed in shadow. It also wasn’t a path they knew well at all. Visits to the caves were a rare event. Access to the desolate area was, as a matter of principle, fiercely discouraged out of respect for the occasional, driven soul who elected to retreat into its harsh seclusion. They reached the small doorway that led into the cave. A simple wooden door guarded its entrance, held shut by an old, rusted latch. A small timber window, fashioned from a natural opening in the rock, sat beside it. The abbot, a surprisingly fit man with penetrating yet kind eyes, dark, weathered skin, and a salt-and-pepper, square-cut beard that jutted out from the embroidered hood of his black cassock, shone his flashlight briefly into the window and peered in, then retreated a step, hesitating for a moment. He turned to Ameen, unsure of whether or not to proceed. The younger monk shrugged. He wasn’t sure either.

  The abbot’s expression darkened with resigned determination. His hand shaking more from nerves than from the cold, he gave the door a soft, hesitant knock. A moment passed, with no answer. He glanced at his companions again and gave the door another rap. Again, there was no reply.

  “Wait here,” he told them. “Maybe he can’t hear us.”

  “You’re going in?” Ameen asked.

  “Yes. Just keep quiet. I don’t want to cause him any distress.”

  Ameen and Yusuf nodded.

  The abbot steeled himself, gently lifted the latch, and pushed the door open.

  The interior of the cave was oppressively dark and bone-chillingly cold. It was a natural cavern shaped out of limestone, and the chamber the abbot now stood in—the first of three—was surprisingly large. It was empty, save for a few pieces of simple, handcrafted furnishings: a rudimentary armchair, a low table facing it, and a couple of stools. Beside the window was a writing table and a chair. The abbot aimed his flashlight toward it. The table had a lined notebook on it, a fountain pen lying across its open pages. A small stack of similar notebooks, looking well thumbed, sat on a ledge by the window.

  His mind flashed to the notebooks. To the frenzied, dense writing that filled their pages, pages he’d only glimpsed, pages he’d never been offered to read. To how it had all started, several months earlier, unexpectedly.

  To how they’d found him.

  And to the miraculous—the word suddenly took on a wholly different ring—way he’d come to them.

  The abbot shook the thoughts away and turned. That could all wait.

  He lowered the beam toward the ground and stood motionless for a moment, listening intently. He heard nothing. He took slow, hesitant steps deeper into the cave until he reached a small nook that housed a narrow bed.

  It was empty.

  The abbot spun around, shining his flashlight across the cave walls, his pulse rocketing ahead.

  “Father Jerome?” he called out, his voice tremulous, the words echoing emptily through the chamber.

  No answer.

  Perplexed, he retreated back into the main chamber, and turned to face the wall.

  His hand shook with a slight tremble as he raised the flashlight, lighting up the wall that curved gently into the cavern’s dome-like roof. With his heart pounding in his ears, he surveyed its surface, the flashlight’s beam lighting it up from the cave’s entrance all the way back to its deepest recess.

  The markings were just as he remembered them.

  One symbol, painstakingly painted onto the smooth rock face using some kind of white paint, repeated over and over and over, covering every available inch inside the cave.

  A clearly recognizable symbol.

  The same symbol he had just seen on television, in the skies over Antarctica.

  Yusuf was right.

  And he’d been right to come to them.

  Without taking his eyes off the markings, the abbot slowly dropped to his knees and, making no sound, began to pray.

  Chapter 10

  Perched on the crest of the barren mountain, high above the caves, Father Jerome contemplated the majestic landscape spread out before him. The sun was crawling out from behind the mountains, backlighting their undulating crowns and tinting the sky with a soft, golden-pink hue.

  The thin, old man with the wire-rimmed glasses, the white, buzz-cut hair, and the dishdasha robe spent most of his mornings and evenings up here. Although the climb up the rocky, crumbling terrain had been harsh on his frail body, he needed the escape from the crushing solitude and the oppressive confines of the cave. And once he was up there, he discovered, the mountain presented him with a reward he hadn’t anticipated, a reward far beyond the awe-inspiring magnificence of God’s creation.

  He still didn’t know what had brought him there, what had drawn him to this place. He wasn’t the first to come to this valley to serve his faith and to glorify his God. Many before him had done the same, over hundreds of years. Other men like him, men of deep religious faith, who had felt the same divine presence when confronted with the purity and the power of the vast, empty wilderne
ss that stretched up and down the valley. But much as he thought about it, in those endless nights in the cave, he still couldn’t explain the calling that had led him to walk away from the orphanage—an orphanage he had only just opened, several hundred miles south, just over the border with Sudan—and wander into the desert, unprepared and alone. Perhaps there was no explanation. Perhaps it was just that, a calling, one from a higher power, one that he couldn’t not heed.

  And yet, somehow . . . it scared him.

  When he thought about it, he knew it shouldn’t. It was a grace from God, a blessing. He had been shown a route, a journey, and even if he didn’t understand it or know where it would lead, it was still a great honor for him to be the recipient of that grace. And yet . . .

  The nights scared him most. The loneliness in the cave was, at times, crippling. He sometimes arose in a cold sweat, woken up by the howl of the wind, or by the yelps of wild dogs roaming the barren hills. It was in those moments that he was most acutely aware of his extreme isolation. The mountain was a fearsome place. Few could survive it. The early ascetics, the hermit monks who retreated from humanity and lived in the caves long before him, went there to get closer to God, believing that the only path to enlightenment, the only way to get to know God, was through such isolation. Up on the craggy, bare mountain, they could avoid temptation, they could free themselves from all vestiges of earthly desire, and concentrate on the one thing that could bring them closer to God: prayer. But for those who had lived it, the mountain was also a battleground. They were there to pray for us, believing that we were all constantly under assault by demons, no one more so than the hermits themselves, who also believed that the more they prayed, the more they were threatened by the forces of evil they were battling on our behalf.

  If he’d been asked about it before coming to this mountain, Father Jerome would have said he disagreed with that rather bleak view of the world. But now, after living in the confines of the cave for months, after going through the hell and torment of solitary reflection, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  Still, he had to forge ahead. He had to embrace the challenges before him and not resist them.

  It was his calling.

  The days were better. When he wasn’t up on the mountain, he spent them either in quiet contemplation, in prayer, or writing. And that was something else he didn’t understand, something else that troubled him.

  The writing.

  There seemed to be no end to the words, to the thoughts and ideas and images—that image, in particular—that flooded his mind. And when the inspiration came—the divine inspiration, he realized, both exhilarating and scary at the same time—he couldn’t write down the words fast enough. And yet, somehow, he wasn’t sure where they were coming from. His mind was thinking them, his hand was writing them down, and yet it was as if they were originating elsewhere and flowing through him, as if he were a vessel, a conduit for a higher being or a greater intellect. Which, again, was a grace. For the words were, undeniably, beautiful, even if they didn’t necessarily concord with his own personal experience within the Church.

  He drank in the view and its sea of haloed crests before closing his eyes and tilting his head slightly upward, clearing his mind and preparing himself for what he knew was coming. And moments later, as it did unfailingly, it began. A torrent of words that flowed into his ears, as clearly as if someone were kneeling right beside him and whispering to him.

  He beamed inwardly, locked in concentration, the warmth of the rising sun caressing his face, and drank in the words that were, as with each previous moment of revelation, simply wondrous.

  Chapter 11

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Snowflakes dusted the dimly lit sidewalk as Bellinger climbed out of the cab outside the small bar on Emerson, a quiet, narrow street in South Boston.

  It was late, and the chill bit into him fiercely. The run-up to Christmas was usually cold, but this was shaping up to be a particularly harsh winter. As he turned to duck into the bar, he slammed into a woman who emerged from the shadows. She pulled back, all flustered, holding up her hands which had come up defensively, and apologized, her clipped words explaining that she was trying to grab the cab before it drove off. She hurriedly sidestepped around him and called out to the driver, and Bellinger managed a fleeting glimpse of her face, soft and attractive, nestling between a bounce of shoulder-length auburn hair and the upturned collar of her coat. It was an awkward moment. Beyond the thin veil of snow and the darkness, he was in a fog of his own, and before he could spew out any clumsy words, she’d hopped into the cab and it was pulling away.

  He stood there for a moment, watching it recede and disappear around a corner, then snapped away from the distraction and headed into the bar.

  Matt Sherwood had chosen the place. It was a typical, low-key Southie bar. Cheap beer, dim lighting, twenty-five-cent wings, and darts. Some token Christmas decorations scattered around, cheap stuff made in China using paper-thin plastic and colored foil. The place was busy, but not mobbed, which was good. The conversation Bellinger needed to have was one he’d prefer to keep as private as possible.

  He paused by the door, taking stock of the place, and realized—oddly—that he was subconsciously scanning for some unseen threat, which surprised him. He wasn’t the paranoid type. He chided himself and tried to quash his unease, but as he made his way deeper into the bar, looking for Matt, the paranoid feeling was stubbornly clinging on.

  The place had a mismatched cast of topers. Cliques of young, well-dressed professionals were toasting the night away in small, loud circles, in sharp contrast to the lone, sullen mopes who sat perched on their bar stools like narcoleptic vultures, staring into their tumblers through vapid eyes. The music—eighties rock, a bit tinny, coming out of a jukebox in a far corner of the bar—was just the right side of loud, which was good. They’d be able to talk without worrying about being overheard. Which, again, Bellinger realized, wasn’t something he normally thought about.

  He also didn’t normally have sweat droplets popping up on his forehead when he visited bars. Especially not in Boston. In December. With snow falling outside.

  He spotted Matt sitting in a corner booth. As he wove his way through the pockets of drinkers to join him, his cell phone rang. He paused long enough to pull it out of his pocket and check it. It was Jabba. He decided to ignore the call, stuffed the phone back into his pocket, and joined Matt.

  Even hunched over his drink, Matt Sherwood’s hulking stature was hard to miss. The man was six-foot-four, a full head taller than Bellinger. He hadn’t changed much in the two years since Bellinger had last seen him. He still had the same brooding presence, the same angular face, the same close-cropped dark hair, the same quietly intense eyes that surveyed and took note without giving much away. If anything, any changes Bellinger thought he detected, minor though they were, were for the better. Which was inevitable, given the circumstances. He’d last seen him around the time of Danny’s funeral. Matt and his kid brother had been close, Danny’s death sudden and unexpected, the family rocked by an even bigger—and far worse—tragedy to befall its sons this time.

  Which made dredging it up all the more difficult.

  As Bellinger slipped onto the bench without bothering to take his coat off, Matt acknowledged him with a nod. “What’s going on?”

  Bellinger remembered that about him. Laconic, to-the-point. A man who didn’t pussyfoot around, which was understandable. Time was something Matt Sherwood appreciated deeply. He’d had enough of it taken away from him already.

  Bellinger found a half smile. “It’s good to see you. How are you?”

  “Just terrific. I’ve got orders coming out of my ears, what with all this bonus money floating around.” He cocked his head to one side and gave Bellinger a knowing, sardonic look. “What’s going on, Vince? It’s way past both our bedtimes, isn’t it? You said we needed to talk.”

  “I know, and I’m glad you could make it. It’s just that . . .”
Bellinger hesitated. It was a tough subject to broach. “I was thinking about Danny.”

  Matt’s eyes stayed on Bellinger for a moment, then he looked away, across the bar, before turning back. “What about Danny?”

  “Well, last time I saw you, after the funeral . . . it was all so sudden, and we never really got a chance to talk about it. About what happened to him.”

  Matt seemed to study Bellinger. “He died in a helicopter crash. You know that. Not much more to tell.”

  “I know, but . . . what else do you know about it? What did they tell you?”

  From Matt’s dubious look, it was obvious he could see through Bellinger’s tangential, circumspect approach. “Why are you asking me this, Vince? Why now?”

  “Just . . . look, just bear with me a little here. What did they tell you? How did it happen?”

  Matt shrugged. “The chopper came down off the coast of Namibia. Mechanical failure. They said it was probably due to a sandstorm they’d had out there, but they couldn’t be sure. The wreck was never recovered.”

  “Why not?”

  “There was no point. It was a private charter, and what was left of it was scattered all over the ocean floor. Not very deep there, I’m told. But the currents are tough. There’s a reason they call the area ‘the gates of hell.’ ”

  Bellinger looked confused. “What about the bodies?”

  Matt winced slightly. The memory was clearly a painful one. “They were never recovered.”

  “Why not?”

  His voice rose a notch. “The area’s swarming with sharks, and if they don’t get you, the riptides will. It’s the goddamn Skeleton Coast. There was nothing to recover.”

  “So you—”

  “That’s right, there was nothing to bury,” Matt flared. He was angry now, his patience depleted. “The casket was empty, Vince. I know, it was ridiculous, we cremated an empty box and wasted some decent wood, but we had to do it that way. It helped give my dad some closure. Now are you gonna tell me why we’re really here?”