Nocturnes by T. R. Stingley

sort of bonding with the old woman, and that after reading of her death in the obituaries, he had connected it with their encounter on the path.
    “It was really just a strange series of coincidences that led me to you. Call it dumb, and very bad, luck.”
    “Hm,” Julian looked unimpressed. “I hardly believe in coincidence. Tell me then, what were you thinking about when I arrived? Was it the fear of dying that brought tears to your eyes?”
    Isaac shifted in his seat. He had no desire to divulge the details of his personal pain. But it was out of his hands.
    “I was thinking of the last time I saw my wife.”
    Julian could see that the response had been wrenched from him. He could sense a strength that he would not have guessed at in the dark warehouse in St. Louis. He wondered where it came from.
    “And when, and where, was that?” He asked without emotion.
    “1943. Auschwitz.”
    The stranger responded with the slightest wincing of the eyes. He reached across the table and took Isaac’s wrist, turned it over and gazed at the tattoo. Then he turned to the bar and motioned with a raised hand.
    Moments later, a very old bottle of Cognac arrived. Julian poured generously into Isaac’s glass, then two fingers into his own. He stared at Isaac with a precise observation.
    “The Cognac is pre-phylloxera, very old. There is precious little of it left in this world. As the vines of Europe were being laid to waste by the grape-plague, it took the grafting of American vines (which, ironically, had caused the issue in the first place) to salvage the vineyards of the Old World. But we shall miss this old Cognac when it is gone.” He raised his glass to Isaac’s. “So let us enjoy the past. It becomes more precious with the disappointments of time.”
    Isaac raised the amber fluid to his nose and inhaled deeply. Oh yes. This was a rare treasure. And there was that odd sensation again. He could appreciate the artistry and the significance of the wine and want to linger over it. There was a certain implication there, but it flitted away from him. Julian wasn’t finished singing its praises.
    “This brandy is older than you. Taken with loving care from the nurturing womb of the barrel and allowed to spill like a dreamy jinni into the bottle. As that transference was taking place, hundreds and thousands of young men from dozens of countries were crawling forward on their muddied bellies. Crawling wormlike over the decomposing bodies of their comrades, under the razor wire, around the mines, through the ooze and the slime and the rotting death of the First World War. The newspapers referred to it as ‘Trench Warfare.’ The soldiers referred to it as Hell.” With that, Julian took a mouthful of the amber liquid, inhaled over it, swallowed and exhaled slowly as Isaac’s brow furrowed in pain. “This century has been even more brutal than all before it. As man evolves technologically, to the point where all life now lives in the shadow of an existential threat, he regresses in his humanity. I have witnessed that regression for some six hundred years.”
    He arched his eyebrows and watched Isaac’s response with that same vague smile. Isaac swallowed hard. This man was obviously quite insane. But at the instant the thought entered his mind, it was swept effortlessly aside by a profound sense of the truth. Julian drank blood because he was a vampire.
    Julian’s eyes remained on Isaac’s face as he continued to add to the surrealism of the moment.
    “There is a great deal of sorrow within you. That is the death I sensed that night. But it is balanced by something I haven’t quite identified…”
    Isaac suddenly interrupted him with the question that he had been carrying for weeks.
    “How could you have known that all of your victims were dying?”
    “Your two questions are connected, Mr. Bloom. You asked why it was necessary to kill the old woman. And you wonder how I knew that they were dying. Finish your drink. There