Burn the Fire

Jack Morane didn't believe in the afterlife until the woman hired him to find a dead man who was still very much alive.

She was beautiful in the way that California women are beautiful—carefully constructed, meticulously maintained, and ultimately untouchable. Her name was Diane. She had dark eyes and a voice like cigarette smoke and a checkbook that didn't seem to notice how fast it emptied.

"I'm looking for a man named Callahan," she said. "Old Man Callahan. He used to live on a rocky island off Monterey. Nobody goes there anymore. The Coast Guard stopped patrolling in '98. I need to know if he's still there."

"Search the internet," Jack said.

"I did. Nothing. He's a ghost."

"Everyone's a ghost in California."

But Jack took the case. Not for Diane—that would've been a different story—but because of what she said next: "He's the one who lights the sun."

Jack had heard variations of that phrase a thousand times in this town. Drunk businessmen. Junkies. Rich women on valium. But he drove out to Monterey anyway, rented a boat, and sailed past the breakwater into water so clear he could see the reef three dozen feet below.

The island was smaller than he expected. A lighthouse, a cottage, a rusted outboard motor, and a eastern cove where two oil barrels sat stacked like sentinels. Everything was exactly as Diane had described it. Everything except Callahan himself.

The cottage had no lock. Inside, the walls were covered in journals—hundreds of them, stacked from floor to ceiling, all bound in the same dark leather. Jack opened the nearest one. The first entry was dated 1931. The last entry, in a handwriting that had deteriorated from precise script to frantic scrawl, read:

"The oil won't last forever. The wick is wearing thin. I've been here 38,291 days. I can feel the sun pulling at me, like gravity. It knows I'm tired. It knows I want to rest. But if I stop, just for one morning, the world goes dark. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't—"

The entry ended mid-sentence.

Jack spent three days on the island, searching every drawer, every cabinet, every crack in the stone walls. He found Callahan's clothes—folded neatly in a cedar chest, size large, frayed at the cuffs. He found a pocket watch that had stopped at 4:15. He found a photograph of a woman with dark eyes and a voice like cigarette smoke.

On the fourth morning, Jack took the oil barrels to the eastern cove at 3:45 AM. The sea was glass. The sky was starless. He poured the oil along a groove he hadn't noticed before—a groove worn smooth by decades of use—and struck a match.

The flame caught.

And Jack felt it: a warmth that had nothing to do with heat, pulling at him like gravity. He looked at his hands in the morning light and saw them beginning to shimmer, translucent as sea glass.

He drove back to the mainland and found Diane at a bar on Cannery Row. She was older now than when he'd first seen her, the careful construction showing cracks at the edges.

"You found him?" she asked.

"No," Jack said. "I became him."

Diane closed her eyes. "I tried to stop him, you know. Your predecessor. He came to my apartment in San Francisco and begged me not to hire you. He said if you took the job, you'd never leave. I told him you would. I told him everyone leaves eventually."

She opened her eyes. They were full of salt water.

"But he was right, wasn't he?"

Jack looked at his hands. They were translucent now. He could see the bar through them, the wood grain visible like a photograph developed in reverse.

"Yeah," he said. "He was right."

He walked out of the bar and didn't go back to his office. He drove north, to a place where the ocean met the rocks and the fog never quite lifted, and he started walking. He knew the island would call him. The oil barrels were waiting. The wick was wearing thin. And when the sun needed lighting, it didn't matter that Jack Morane was already beginning to fade.

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