Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  “I…I see Bomber sometimes, too.” I didn’t tell her how vivid it was and that he talked to me when I was really down, or about Grandpa’s ghost, or the one I’d seen in Newfoundland, because I didn’t want her to think I was really nuts.

  She smiled. Then she sighed. “I don’t get along too well with other kids in my school, at least I haven’t recently. I have always felt different. I have a few friends, but no one close, so keeping my dad, my best friend, in my heart, is pretty important.”

  Wow, I thought, how could this person not have many friends?

  “No boyfriend?” I asked. Man, my mouth had been out of control lately. I seemed to be saying any crap that came into my head. Do any guys ever come up to girls and just ask them if they have a boyfriend?

  “No,” she said, and she blushed a little.

  “That’s hard to believe,” I said. I had no idea who was talking. It certainly wasn’t Dylan Maples or me. It was some guy from the movies or something, who I was imitating. Somehow, I just felt compelled to say these things to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, very quietly. “But I don’t have a lot of time for boys. Schoolwork is what matters to me. Both Mom and Dad drilled that into me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “top marks in the school, right?”

  “That’s right.” She looked proud, not an ounce of embarrassment. I thought that was very cool too. I could not help again reflecting on how I had let my marks slip lately. I made a little vow to do better.

  We didn’t say anything more for a while. We were both looking out over the water toward the horizon where we had encountered that illusion, that ball of fire. I wondered why I had seen it. Was I that upset about things? Had I desperately wanted to see what Antonine had seen?

  “I’ve been struggling for a while now,” I whispered. I had stopped thinking that it wasn’t me talking. It was Dylan Maples and me, one and the same. “It’s almost gotten to be like social anxiety or something. I spend a lot of time in my room. And I’m not the nicest person these days, pretty cynical, I guess. We came out here so I could get away from things.”

  “And you met me,” she smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “And you saw the burning ghost ship of Chaleur Bay…twice. You and I saw it together.” She didn’t have to say anything else. I remembered the legend about intertwined fates.

  “Antonine…I know I said we should check out the ghost ship more and I know we saw something, both nights, something weird, but I really find it hard to believe that it was anything other than an illusion of some sort, or just a fire on the water.”

  I knew I wasn’t being honest with her. When she’d been lying dazed on the boat the other night, I knew I’d seen an actual ship on fire and a burning woman too. I had heard her screaming. I just didn’t want to admit it. I think I was desperate not to.

  “I told you what Dad and I saw when we were close to it. You can laugh at me if you want,” she said.

  “No,” I replied instantly, “I…I believe you. I…have a confession.” I took a deep breath. “I saw something in detail as well, the night we chased after it…after you hit your head…it looked like a woman on fire at the front of a ship too.” I sighed. “I just haven’t been able to tell you.”

  Her eyes had been defiant. Now they softened.

  “Thank you for telling me now.”

  “I think we need to try to figure this out, Antonine, somehow.”

  “Would you do that with me?”

  I felt like saying I would do anything with her, but I just nodded. Her eyes grew a little misty again. She reached a hand toward her throat and pulled out the pendant on the necklace she was wearing. I had noticed the small glittering silver chain before, which hung down under her T-shirt. I saw now that the pendant was a small silver cross. She reached behind her neck and pretended to take the whole necklace off.

  “My father gave this to me,” she said so quietly that I could barely hear her. “I could never part with it. But somehow, I want you to have it too.”

  She reached over, her face up very close to mine, smelling like lavender or something, and pretended to put the invisible necklace around my neck and fasten it.

  It was funny. I could feel it hanging there.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t ever take it off.”

  I swallowed. Even Alice had never offered me anything like this.

  12

  Investigation

  Antonine suggested we go to the Bathurst Public Library first. Her mom worked there and was familiar with all the resources. She knew there was a whole collection about the burning ghost ship, though she had never been able to bring herself to go through it. The only problem was that the library was in downtown Bathurst, a long way from Youghall Beach. I was wondering if Mom would drive us. But if we did that, I’d have to explain what we were doing.

  “Let’s walk,” said Antonine, “the library is open late today.”

  “Walk?” I said. “How far is it?”

  She was already on her feet.

  “About an hour and a half.”

  “An hour and a half!” I realized that earlier I had actually considered walking all the way to her house, which was even farther, but that was when I was missing her and the trek was just a possibility.

  “Yes, city boy. I walk out here lots of times.”

  “Even when you could take the bus or ride your bike?”

  “Or take the subway?”

  We started walking.

  It was surprising how little time it seemed to take. Maybe it had something to do with the company. We just talked up a storm as we strolled along, as if we had known each other since we were kids. She quizzed me about living in Toronto and had all sorts of weird ideas about it as if it were a gigantic, scary place.

  “Aren’t there lots of murders there, like all the time?”

  “Uh…it’s a very big city so sometimes bad things happen and they get a lot of attention, but I’ve never heard of a single murder anywhere near where I live, ever, in history. I don’t think I’ve even heard of a fist fight nearby.”

  “Really? Ever?” She paused. “There was actually a sort of bad fight between some of our neighbours last week. It got kind of physical. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well, I’ve read that, statistically, Toronto is one of the safest places in all of Canada. I bet it is even safer than Bathurst, per pop.”

  I didn’t know if that was true, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “People here always say that Toronto isn’t very friendly.”

  That was something I had heard lots of others say during the trips we’d taken around Canada.

  “That’s not even remotely true. Have any of those people ever lived in Toronto? If they haven’t, then what are they basing their opinions on? People in my city are as nice as any place I have ever been.”

  As I defended my hometown, I realized how lucky I was to live in such a big, interesting place where I felt safe. It also made me think about how people judge places and other people by appearances and stories they hear.

  “That’s a good point,” said Antonine. “I should know better than to listen to that sort of thing. I’d like to visit you sometime.”

  Well, my friend, I would love it if you did, I thought, but I didn’t let that one out of my mouth.

  She told me more about her life, too. At first, it sounded kind of bleak, mostly because she just talked about the last few months, but once we got into her whole life in Bathurst, you could tell she was proud of where she lived, too.

  “This whole area is just so beautiful, and mostly really friendly. The countryside and the water, the bay, just get inside you. It’s neat that it’s a tourist destination for lots of Canadians, a place where people want to come. I’m really going to miss it when I go to France.”

  That stopped our conversa
tion for a few minutes, but it didn’t take us long to get going again. Our whole chat cheered up both of us. It occurred to me that lately I had been thinking of my entire life as if it was just the last year.

  We talked about things on social media, too, but that didn’t go very far because she hardly knew anything about it. I had forgotten that she didn’t have a phone. You just kind of assume all other kids have them.

  “I like movies, though,” she offered.

  “So do I.”

  “My favourites are old ones like Gone With the Wind and Notting Hill; anything ancient that’s good. Mom and I like to watch them together at home.”

  Didn’t know those ones.

  “How about Star Wars?”

  I’m not sure why I said that because I’m not particularly caught up in that whole franchise. I suppose I was just clutching at straws to find something we both might have seen.

  “I’m not a big fan,” she said after a bit of a pause, “I’m not really into science fiction stuff. I have seen some of them though and my favourite part is when they talk about the Force. I love the Force. To me, it is the most interesting thing about those films.”

  “I think that, too,” I said, and it was true. We smiled at each other.

  We passed by the gorgeous golf course that was at the edge of the bay and then turned onto a busy street with big-box stores and fast-food restaurants, and walked along there until we came to the bridge that was stretched over the water and into the main part of old Bathurst. To our left, we could see Youghall Beach in the distance and Chaleur Bay beyond it.

  It didn’t take us long to get from there to the library, which was downtown in a big modern brick building that was apparently built the year they had the Canada Winter Games here. It was relatively new and therefore stuck out on the street.

  It was a nice, bright space inside and Antonine knew everyone, saying hello in both French and English—it was so cool hearing her speak another language so easily—until we reached her mother’s desk where the two of them really lit up to see each other and hugged.

  “I guess I didn’t introduce you properly to my mom before,” said Antonine, turning to me. “Well, this is her, Madame Clay, children’s librarian.”

  “Eve,” said her mother, reaching out to me and taking my hand in both of hers. “Welcome to Bathurst, Acadia, and New Brunswick.” She had an amazing French accent that made her words sound like parts of a song. “What are you two up to?”

  “Doing some research,” said Antonine.

  “Really? About what?”

  “The ghost ship.”

  For a second I wondered why she revealed what we were doing, but then remembered that her father had never told her mother about that night long ago.

  “Oh, fascinating!” said Eve. “That’s a great subject for a visitor! Makes us seem a little less boring here in Baie-des-chaleurs. You know, I never saw the ship. Lived here my whole life and never saw it once. Maybe that makes me unique.”

  “You are unique, Mom.”

  “That could mean a lot of things, my little one.”

  They laughed.

  “Dylan gave up a trip to Campbellton and a lobster supper to hang out with me.”

  “Well,” said Eve, “we can’t have that. Lobster dinner at our house when you guys are done! I’ll make a call and get some fresh.”

  The Library had a mile of information about the burning ghost ship of Chaleur Bay in the local history section.

  We made our way into that area and found what we were looking for on shelves that dominated part of the room, all sorts of things on the walls too, almost like advertisements. There were drawings and paintings of it on fire, laminated copies of newspaper articles that reported sightings, and even a photograph of a beer bottle from the region with the ghost ship sailing across the label.

  We thought we would start out by investigating the different theories about the origins of the legend, the historical origins. What exactly was this ship and why was it in the bay?

  “You know that stuff I told you on the beach?” said Antonine. “That’s just what I’ve heard. We all know something about the phantom around here. The details about it, though, that’s just scared me too much.”

  Now, however, she (and I) were ready to get into it. We went through books, newspaper articles, essays, and even doctoral theses and things from scientific journals. Some of it was hard to understand so we didn’t exactly read every word, but by the time we were done, about an hour or so later, we had a pretty good picture of what we were dealing with.

  There were a million theories about the ship. I stopped counting when I got past twenty. Probably the most popular one, which was even in a City of Bathurst tourism package with a burning ship logo on it, told the story that Antonine had given me in a sentence or two back on the beach. The details were fascinating: the bad guy was a Portuguese dude named Gaspar Corte-Real, a shady trader who tried to rip off the Mi’kmaq with trinkets and things in exchange for furs. He came here about 1501, sailing his three-masted ship into Chaleur Bay, grabbing some Mi’kmaw folks, and stealing them back to Europe to sell them into slavery. When he returned to New Brunswick a little later—which to me took a boatload of stones—the Mi’kmaq were ready for him. They boarded his ship, killed all his men, tied Gaspar to a rock, and waited until the tide came in and drowned him. They may have even had their lunch while they watched.

  Now, I am not saying that was a nice thing, but man, he deserved it. Apparently, the story goes—and it was told in about fifty different ways in these library papers—Gaspar’s brother, Miguel, came looking for him two years later and found his ship still anchored in the bay. But the Mi’kmaq were ready for him, too, and burned his vessel, along with him and everyone in it. Now, of course, it haunts the bay, on fire, sailors climbing the rigging and running along the decks to escape the flames.

  Another great story in the collection had to do with a pirate named Captain Craig—you think he could have come up with a better handle than that, maybe like Captain Ugly-Beard or something—who captured two Mi’kmaw women in Chaleur Bay and intended to have his way with them, but an Acadian man helped them escape. Craig’s craft was then shipwrecked, he and all his men died, and that very night it was seen shooting across the water, on fire. Wow, that was pretty cool.

  There was also a story about the ship having taken part in the Battle of Restigouche in 1760, the very battle I was supposed to look into with Mom and Dad and the Bill and Bonnie Show in Campbellton. That conflict happened up the coast from Bathurst. In it, the British defeated the French, Acadians, and Mi’kmaq in one of the last battles to decide whether North America would become English or French.

  There was a legend about a bride who was kidnapped and attacked by marauding sailors, whose souls now haunt the waters here in a floating inferno; and another about a couple of women being killed by buccaneers, who put a spell on their murderers, saying “may you burn on the bay forever,” or something like that.

  It was all wild stuff. There were patterns to it, too. Most of the stories dealt with ships from about 1500 to the late 1700s and many had to do with nefarious things done to Indigenous people, and often Indigenous women.

  I kept thinking about what I had seen out there on the bay…a woman on fire at the bow of an ancient ship. I told myself it had to be my imagination.

  Another thing that was common in the stories was location. Though these apparitions have been seen all the way up and down Chaleur Bay and the area from Caraquet in the south up to Campbellton in the north, most were observed pretty close to Bathurst and a number appeared off Youghall Beach. Some of them were on Heron Island, a bit more than half an hour up the coast, a short distance into the bay. Old settlers there used to say they had seen legless sailors with terrible burns near their houses. That was a pretty sick image, too.

  It occurred to me that when Antonine and
I had seen the ship, both times it had been to the north in the bay and moving up the shoreline in the direction of Heron Island.

  The sheer amount of sightings was amazing and didn’t fit into the normal profile of ghost appearances. As Antonine had said, phantoms usually appear to one person at a time, not to groups, but a high percentage of these sightings seemed to be viewed by more than one person, sometimes really large gatherings. One time it appeared in the middle of summer when Youghall Beach was crowded and everyone just stood there watching it! A mayor of Bathurst saw it twice and even took a picture. It was from far away though and didn’t tell you much, just a light on the horizon.

  “Imagine,” I said to Antonine, “if someone could take a really good photograph of it. That would be spectacular and I bet it would make the person who snapped it a celebrity and probably rich.” There was certainly nothing like that in the collection.

  We moved on to the last part of our investigation, the scientific explanations. I was anxious to get to them, so everything could be explained and Antonine could stop worrying about this illusion and we could get onto just being friends…or more.

  There were tons of explanations and many by experts with all sorts of fancy titles: doctors of various sciences, professors, and reputable journalists. Some dude from Harvard Medical School even chimed in. They wrote articles and papers about how the visual of a burning ship was caused by gases escaping from undersea fissures, or from rotting vegetation or marine life. Some speculated it was St. Elmo’s fire—the “natural phenomenon” Antonine had mentioned—and others were sure it had to do with atmospheric conditions.