Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  It was getting dark outside and quieter. You could hear the waves crashing against the beach. Actually, they weren’t crashing, just kind of washing in from the bay, sort of nice. The wind had picked up a little. I started to walk, heading east toward Youghall Beach where I had seen that girl.

  There was no one around. No one except her.

  I caught sight of her in the distance, standing on the beach near where I’d seen her before, looking out over the water again. I could just tell it was her. It was something in the way she stood, with her arms across her front, her feet set wide apart, almost as if in defiance of something or protecting herself. She had a way about her even from a great distance. I could see that long curly black hair hanging down her back. I kept walking toward her thinking that she would see me when I got to maybe within a hundred metres, since there was no one else on the beach, but I got within about fifty without her looking over. Then I was just twenty away and still no reaction, then I was close enough that I could talk to her in a normal voice, but I didn’t say anything. Neither did she.

  She kept staring out over the water. It was almost black now, or at least grey, with the sun having just set over the horizon behind us. It was time for me to be getting back but I couldn’t move, and something inside me was also telling me, maybe from all those lectures that Dad had inflicted on me, that I shouldn’t leave this girl here all alone.

  “Are you all right?” I finally asked.

  She didn’t respond for a moment and then turned and looked at me. Her eyes seemed to shine, gazing out from above her high cheekbones.

  “Dylan Maples,” she said.

  Okay, I must be dreaming. This was another Alice. An even better one. Here was this strange girl of Chaleur Bay, like some sort of quiet goddess who had never really acknowledged my existence and certainly never addressed me, and the first thing she uttered was my name. She said it beautifully and clearly. I had never heard it said like that before. It made me feel proud, which was something I hadn’t felt for a while. It also emboldened me to say something else.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “You told me.”

  “I know, but you weren’t listening.”

  She smiled.

  “You don’t know a lot about girls, do you?”

  She had an amazing way of talking, as if every word were pronounced carefully and each one had a little on it, as they say in baseball, some sort of spirit attached to it, some sort of slight caress of the words. She had an accent. Not a big one, just a lilt. I could swear it was French, Quebecois, and yet it wasn’t.

  “I…I guess not,” was all I could muster. A follow-up lame thing to say! I had to get something else out and fast. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  I knew what she meant. Exactly what she meant. And it felt really cool.

  “Not exactly nothing, though,” I said.

  She smiled. “No. I am looking. Searching.”

  That made a lot of sense too.

  “Could you tell me your name?”

  Man, what a rear end I am. Does anybody ever ask a question like that? And in that way? To a girl? An interesting one? It was like something the idiot says in a movie, the nerd, or just simply the guy that no girl in her right mind would give a second glance. Except to laugh at.

  But she smiled again.

  “Antonine,” she said. “Antonine Marie Clay.”

  Wow. It was a magical name, said magically. I expected my alarm clock to go off at any second, Mom yelling at me to get up from downstairs in our house in Moore Park.

  Instead, a ball of fire appeared out over the water.

  Antonine turned her head as if a cannon had gone off. It was as though she had eyes, or ears, in the back of her head. I wondered how she could have spotted it. Perhaps the glow had entered her peripheral vision. I also wondered how she could see something that was obviously a figment of my imagination, for this was not a tiny spark like something made by a firefly—it was illuminating part of the bay way out there.

  She stared at it and for a few seconds all I could do was look at her watching it, so intense was her attention. It was as if some force had turned her head and locked her vision onto this bizarre illusion of fire.

  Then it started to move. It advanced across Chaleur Bay at the rate a sailboat would move. In fact, it even looked a little bit like one. A big, fiery sailboat. As I examined it, it appeared even more so. It made the soles of my feet tingle.

  Then Antonine screamed, and it was bloodcurdling. I had never heard anyone do that. It was worse than anything a girl had to do in any movie. Antonine glanced at me in the middle of her scream and then began to run away into the darkness, off the beach, and out of sight. I could hear her footsteps pounding in the distance, even her heavy breathing, little shrieks coming from her, saying something that I couldn’t understand. Something in some sort of French.

  Then everything was silent, except for a whooshing sound, like a wind sound but more than that. It was like something in the wind. I turned back to the bay. The ball of fire was still there, moving faster now. And it looked even more like a ship! It seemed as though it was made of layers of flames piled high—a hull and sails above it. Something was definitely out there, on fire!

  In seconds, however, it was gone, racing away in the opposite direction.

  Then I was alone and scared. I actually ran back to Bill and Bonnie’s place.

  Mom was waiting for me at the door. The back door.

  “Found your escape route, Houdini,” she said, “where were you?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Explanation, please.”

  “I was on the beach.”

  “It’s dark out.”

  “Correct.”

  She sighed. “You do realize that it’s dinnertime and it’s on the table waiting for us now. Waiting for you, to put it bluntly.” Wow, I thought, I somehow hadn’t been worrying about food. “You are going out there and apologizing. March.”

  I didn’t have much choice and I can muster a pretty good apology face when I have to—kind of a looking-down-at-my-shoes kind of thing, soft voice, really sincere sounding. The Bill and Bonnie Show bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

  Dinner wasn’t much better for conversation than “late lunch.” I found myself actually counting as I ate. One through ten, then one through fifty, then one through one hundred. It didn’t help; the meal went on and on and on. The food was okay, some sort of fish (“local stuff,” said Bill, “everything is local here, very important”), and tons more vegetables, all of them barely cooked, since that’s what adults think is cool. Even the green beans were crunchy. Bonnie actually did a sort of “presentation” thing too, making every plate look like an art installation of food.

  All a bit much, it seemed to me.

  Bill was droning on again about his opinions and this young politician came up once more. He seemed obsessed with him, and kept apologizing for liking him, but definitely siding with him.

  “He thinks our immigration levels are too high, and possibly he states his case a little too strongly sometimes. I’m all for bringing new folks into the country, but maybe the change should be a bit more gradual. We have such a lovely community here now, you know, the mixture of Acadians and the Indigenous people and English. I love it.”

  “Do you speak French?” I asked him. It just came right out of me. One of those “id” things again, I guess. I knew the answer.

  “No,” he said with a slightly forced smile, “but I’d like to.”

  Then get your butt in gear and learn, Mr. Bill, I felt like saying, but I really didn’t want to pursue this—or anything else, to be honest—with this guy. I went back to counting. He pursued me a few times though, offering advice in that way that adults have, pretending they aren’t offering advice at all. He complimented me on things i
n my personality that didn’t really exist, like how hardworking he felt I likely was, and how different I was from other kids. Translation? “You need to work hard like I do, like my generation did, not like you lazy dirtbags do, and you had better not be anything like the rest of your lot or you aren’t going anywhere in life.”

  “I definitely believe in change,” said Bill at the head of the table, “I’m a new-ways kind of guy, always been about that, but sometimes the old ways are the better ways.”

  Spoken like an old guy, I thought.

  Thank God that one didn’t come shooting out of my mouth.

  I hung in there for a long time, well after we had finished the fruit bowl of dessert. I even gave my confinement a few more beats after that before I asked to be excused in an incredibly polite voice.

  “I’m awfully tired. I think I’ll turn in for the night,” I said.

  Turn in struck me as a suitably outdated phrase for the Bill and Bonnie Show. I thought they might appreciate it. Mom gave me a bit of a look, but then smiled when Bonnie commented on my manners and let me go.

  As I passed the big picture window, I looked out and saw the slate-dark sea. I could hear the wind and the waves.

  “Folks around here say that’s the way the water looks the day before a storm,” I heard Bonnie say behind me.

  5

  The Legend

  “I’m going to go down to the beach, Mom, is that okay? It really is nice down there.”

  We had just finished breakfast of granola and yogurt. I think Mom was hoping that I would hang out with her, Dad, and our hosts for a while. She started to open her mouth to say no.

  “Of course,” said Bonnie.

  Compliment the hosts on their beach and get what you want. Nice move, Dylan Maples.

  At least he was good for something.

  “Uh, not for long, and don’t stray too far. Don’t go deep-sea diving or anything,” said Mom, “We are all heading out for a drive in about an hour.” She looked out the big picture window. “It actually doesn’t seem like such a great day for the beach anyway.”

  She was right. It wasn’t raining or anything, or even cold, it was just kind of grey and there was a breeze blowing in from the water, as if it was announcing that something was on the way. The beach wasn’t very crowded, just the odd old couple out for a walk.

  I headed for Youghall.

  She was there again, but this time she seemed different. She wasn’t staring out at the sea. She was walking along it toward me, really toward me this time.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” I replied cleverly.

  “No school today, one of those professional development days for the teachers, so I came here, hoping you would show up.”

  Really? You did? At least, I felt like saying that. My heart started thumping. I couldn’t talk.

  “I owe you an explanation,” she said, filling in the silence.

  “Oh, you mean for the blood-curdling shriek and the sprint in the opposite direction?” Somehow I got that out, despite the fact that I was breathing heavily and hoping it didn’t show.

  She laughed. That was an amazing start. Given that I was useless around girls these days, and that this one was a bit older than me and incredibly interesting, I felt like I was some sort of male god when she did that. Well, as male god as it is possible for me to think of myself being, which isn’t very male god.

  “Let’s sit down,” she said. We walked over to a log and sat together. My right leg was about a metre from hers, maybe about three-quarters of a metre, perhaps seventy centimetres. She had jeans on again and a different T-shirt. Now she seemed like she was about twenty-one or something, but I knew that wasn’t true. My leg, next to hers, appeared awfully scrawny, even though it was longer. Her leg looked kind of soft and smooth, right through the pant leg.

  “I turned sixteen a while ago,” she said, almost as if she had read my mind.

  You look like it, and more, I wanted to say, and then lay a lie on her, tell her I was sixteen too, even though that birthday was still a couple of months away for me.

  She kept talking, thank God. I didn’t want her to guess my age, since she might figure I was about twelve…a five foot, eight inch twelve year old with pontoons for feet.

  “So, don’t go thinking I’m just a scared little kid when I tell you this.”

  “I would never think that,” I said and then wondered if that was the right thing to say, but she smiled at it too. Yes! Going well so far.

  “I was upset last night. Not just because of what we saw, but because of what it means to me.”

  I glanced toward the bay. “What did we see?”

  She laughed again. I had the feeling that she wasn’t a laugher. It struck me that she was a serious sort and rather smart. She just had that way about her. So, making her laugh was probably a good thing. It might even mean that I was impressing her. I’d seen lots of headlines in women’s magazines about female celebrities saying that what they wanted in a guy was “a sense of humour.” That seemed a bit weird to me. Didn’t looks come first or at least a pretty close second? Wasn’t that the truth? Or was that really shallow? I wasn’t sure if Antonine interested me because of her appearance or what. I just knew I wanted to be near her.

  “We saw the ghost ship.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It was amazing,” she continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. “We saw the burning ghost ship of Chaleur Bay. It is famous. Many people have seen it. I saw it one other time, long ago.” She stopped for a second, looked very serious, and stared out over the water. “It freaked me out yesterday not just because it appeared, which is bad enough, but because I had this weird feeling I was going to see it last night. That is why I was down at the water in the first place. It isn’t the sort of thing you should be able to predict, though. I knew the skies and the wind were changing and that people say it sometimes comes in that sort of weather.”

  Okay, I thought, I have met the girl from my dreams and she is insane.

  “It wasn’t a ghost ship,” I said.

  That was a mistake. She turned and glared at me. Her green eyes lit up. It was kind of cool, actually, she looked amazing, but I knew I’d stepped in it.

  “You’re a jerk,” she said.

  “I know,” I said immediately. Another “id” thing, but at least it was honest. She had basically said what I was thinking, what I had been thinking for a year or so now. It had a strange effect on her, though. It softened her eyes immediately.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No, no, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s awfully Canadian of you, Dylan, but let me talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “I understand that it’s a bit much to swallow when someone just up and starts talking about seeing a ghost. I get it, and to be honest, I am not really saying that it was definitely that. What we saw might have been some sort of natural phenomenon.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what some people say it is.”

  “I saw a ball of fire out on the water. At least, I think I did. Is that what you saw?”

  “Didn’t it seem like more than that?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “The thing about a ghost, Dylan, is that usually just one person sees it, and then either keeps quiet about it or tries to convince others it exists. Two of us saw that thing last night and in the past there have often been more than two witnesses at a time.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “Tell me what you mean by ‘natural phenomenon.’”

  “Uh, some people—researchers and scientists—who can’t deny that people have seen fire out on the bay here moving across it like a ship, say it has to be caused by something in the water or a weird effect of the light out there. Apparently, some of these experts say it might be phosphore
scence in the water, whatever that is. Others have theorized it might be something called St. Elmo’s fire, which is a real thing, a natural phenomenon, but it has to do with lightning striking some sort of high surface, like a tower or a building, which there obviously are none of out on the bay. And there was no lightning last night anyway.” She paused, and looked at me. “People study this thing, Dylan, and yet everyone seems to have a different explanation. It hasn’t been seen very often, maybe every few years or so people report it, but don’t you think it’s freaky that more than one person can see it at once? Crowds of people have actually observed it.”

  “Crowds?” I was thinking of taking back my theory that nothing weird happens in New Brunswick.

  “Yes. More than once.”

  “Really?”

  “And it’s pretty freaky, too, that you and I saw it, just happened to, the first time I met you.”

  There was silence again.

  “So, what are you saying? If there are so many explanations, which one is right?”

  “What I said: it’s a ship from the past, on fire.”

  I didn’t say anything. I thought that was wisest.

  “At least…that’s what people say. Think about it again and tell me the truth: did it look at all like that to you?”

  I couldn’t actually remember now, not clearly anyway. It had sort of messed with my mind, and I realized I had convinced myself it wasn’t real, that I had simply seen a light on the water and I may have even made that up. That’s how much Antonine’s reaction had freaked me out. There had to have been some sort of illumination out there, though. Or I was crazy…or she was. I focused on the memory and could see the object again. It had certainly looked like it was sailing over the water. I didn’t want to concentrate on it for long. It was just too weird.