Nocturnes

by T. R. Stingley

  “So I did go with them…following along behind them, feeling my difference weigh upon me like gravity with each heavy step. Passing the corners, each one another opportunity for escape. But suddenly there we were and Clara was actually inviting me into her home—me, the bloodthirsty killer—and I stepped across her threshold to a new life.

  “Over the course of the next week I would return at nightfall and sit with her as she kept vigil over her sister’s labored dreams. We became close, conversing as I had never had the occasion to converse with a woman. She was so kind and warm, so much like the benevolent sun that it was often painful to look at her. And even as her sister lay dying in the next room, Clara was able to reach out through her own loss and salvage the part of me that had been in such mortal peril only a few weeks before.

  “Can you comprehend, Isaac, how long it had been since someone had cared for me? And how unworthy I felt? Let me make it clear; Clara never learned of my secret. Yet her feminine intuition informed her well of my differences. I suppose it was her faith that assured her of my innate goodness, and that one day all would be revealed. When her sister succumbed, it was me who she turned to for solace. Our nights were fused. And they were the loveliest nights in a time so lovely, and so brief in its effulgence, that even after all I have endured I am forever grateful to have known…and to have loved…her.”

  They finished their beers in silence. Walking, pausing to take in the crush and the flow of the people around them on Decatur Street. The hawkers were out in force, pimping t-shirts and overblown Mardi Gras beads. Music flooded the air like a monsoon. But both their minds were on a love affair….each on his own. A love affair swept away by time’s relentless tides but still felt as keenly as an arrow sent just now into the cavities of the heart.

  Julian willed himself to continue, taking little joy in the thought of the chapter yet to come.

  “Even in my previous life, I could not have hoped for a woman like Clara to love me. As my feelings for her became entangled in my reality, a sense of hopelessness set in. Surely, nothing but tragedy could come of it. Like all lovers, I wanted this love to last forever. But I alone had proof of that improbability.

  “It was during this time that I began to feed exclusively on the sick and the dying. Whatever could be done to improve my bond with humanity, I was willing to attempt. I would become a better man for Clara…a man she could love for all time…”

  He laughed. A poisonous, cynical sound choked off as soon as it started.

  “I loved her. But I was seeing that things were nearly as bad now as they had been before I met her. Now I had something entirely foreign to deal with. Hope.”

  He glanced at Isaac and his next sentence was almost a whisper. “Love demands a profound courage…but I suspect you know this. This may be the one of the reasons why modern relationships are not grounded in permanent commitment. No one believes in forever anymore…

  “It was insanity for me to harbor any hope that this might be a thing that could carry us both through all the sadness and loss of the world. I was to learn how little love has to do with what we think of as happiness. In the meantime, I hadn’t kissed, or even held her body against mine, yet. Then, one night, as we were walking along a moonlit path in Hyde Park, an occasion happened…one that caused my heart to flood its long-arid banks. We had just climbed over a small rise in the path when, out of nowhere, two snow-white Arabian stallions came charging along the lane directly at us. They thundered past us, close enough to touch. I pulled Clara aside into a narrow stand of black poplars. Moments later, two drunken barristers, still in their powdered wigs, came stumbling along in pursuit of their horses, cursing and yelling at one another. ‘You damned fool! I told you to mind that branch! And what swashbuckling-fantasy were you attempting when you decided to leap onto my mount, you bloody sot?’

  “Clara had never been so close, so warm that she seared my heart, branding it forever her own. In our private glade, my arms remained protectively around her. Even though the danger had passed, neither of us had moved. Then, breathlessly, she took my hand and placed it between her breasts, and whispered, ‘Can you feel how frightened I was?’

  “I could feel her heart trembling like a winter bird beneath my hand. I could hear her blood singing. For just a moment I had to fight back a hunger I had neglected so as to spend my nights with her. My very soul cried out for nourishment. A nourishment much more satisfying than blood. With centuries of longing, I kissed her. Her need seemed to be as infinite as my own. My hands fumbled at her hips, which were moving with a passion that I allowed to consume me. She raised the folds of her skirt, and my hands followed. The ties on her bodice seemed to unravel on their own, allowing me access to the bounty of her bosom. I suckled there first, her turgid points of pleasure swelling beneath my ravenous attention. And then I suckled her everywhere. Every single nerve ending, every pearl of her pleasure…I tasted them all. It was a new kind of satiated hunger. When I finally melded my body into hers, for that glorious moment that it lasted, I felt the almost violent release of all my loss.

  “For the next several days we sampled love’s myriad pleasures. And for the first time in my life I knew the deep satisfaction of ‘romance’. We did all of the silly things that new lovers do. One morning, pre-dawn, after a long and glorious night of sensuality, I drew a hot bath, lit candles around the clawfoot tub, and poured a bottle of Champagne into the bubbly depths. This surprised her until I explained that the warm water would open her pores, and her body would ‘consume’ the heady beverage through a million eager orifices. And while we sipped on a second bottle, I caressed her thick, dark hair into a luxurious lather. I sent the soft edges of my tongue into her ear and nibbled gently along her lobes. I teased my self with the pulse along her throat, turning my hunger into an erotic meditation. “How is that bubble-buzz, my love?” Her oohs and ahhs were sweet music to my heart. It was the single, most satisfying night of my long life.

  “And now my decision was made. I would tell her everything. She would understand. I would never subject her to the nightmare of the vampire’s existence. But I would love her through all the years of her mortality. First, I would prepare my words carefully. This was not a casual bit of news I would be offering. The passion of those nights needed a calm tempering. Our love affair had caught fire. A month later, after much procrastination, I informed her that I had been called away from London for several days, a fortnight. But that I had important matters to share with her upon my return. She embraced me eagerly, and wished me Godspeed.

  “I took the coach to Dover and spent several nights in contemplation. I thought it all through…what to say and how to say it. I anticipated her possible reactions. And on my final night in Dover, I went into the chapel there.

  “Yes, Isaac. I know you have been curious since you saw me in the doorway of the cathedral this evening, and hearing my comments about observing Joan in her element in church and chapel. I can go wherever I wish, so long as it is under the cover of night. It is the sun that I cannot tolerate, not churches. In fact, I spend a great deal of time in church. My hours of worship just happen to be a little different.”

  They had wandered back beside the river. The flow of the dark currents seemed to be an inspiration, a source of energy that Julian took some solace from.

  “I prayed. I actually prayed for the first time since Agincourt. I prayed for a miracle. I asked the so-called loving God to allow me the salvation of love. To grant me, if not mortality, then at least the chance for mortal peace. I prayed for the sunlight colors with Clara…for maybe, perhaps, a family. Such folly. I returned to London the next evening, still clinging to my embryonic hope. To my eternal horror, I had been betrayed. The city was sealed. The puzzling death that had claimed Clara’s sister was nothing less than the second coming of the Black Death. The plague. It was ravaging London. I had been gone for two weeks but it might as well have been a century. I exerted some per
suasion and was allowed to enter the city. Bodies burned in the streets among the revelry of the damned. The populace was strangely, dangerously calm. They had turned on one another, using one another, fulfilling long-stifled fantasies of violence and sexuality. I hurried to Clara’s home and found her there behind locked doors, lying peacefully upon the bed we had only just begun to share. Lying there waiting for me. Her body was still warm. But I was too late.

  One heart-heavy tear ran down Julian’s face and dropped off his chin onto the sidewalk. Isaac found the distillation of tears, time, and space astonishing.

  “Ahhhh. The pain of it still burns like white embers. I had implored the Heavens incessantly for an authentic experience of love. And it had been given to me…only to be snatched from my arms before I could even fully embrace it. How does a man reconcile this?”

  Isaac took Julian by the arm and looked into his eyes. Not with sympathy, but with the kind of understanding that comes only from experience. He knew that, despite his own feelings, the story needed to find its conclusion. “The rest, Julian. Tell me the rest.”

  The vampire inhaled deeply of the night air.

  “It was the most striking rebuttal to my prayers. I had tasted, oh so briefly, that peculiar tenderness that aches so fiercely for itself. Centuries of time and the innocent renewal of generations have come and gone. But the salt-pinched moments I shared with Clara were the high water mark of my life. And that is why I felt such deep hatred toward the God who had mocked me. Yes, I go to church. But for centuries I have gone only because I have nowhere else to go.”

  The sudden realization struck a chord with Isaac. Julian was right. There was nothing left for him in this world. No respite from the cycle of night and blood. How many prayers had the vampire cast out into the echoing silence of that cathedral, and places like it? How much time had he spent just waiting, longing for some reply that had never come?

  A deep and abiding silence settled over them once more. Julian’s story had become a kind of song, a piece of music, the notes and the pauses all creating the rarest melody. Isaac could only hang his head. So they did share love’s tragedy. The loss of the one most beloved. The loss that can never be healed, only endured.

  Julian spoke hoarsely and interrupted Isaac’s train of thought.

  “Hell is a hope all its own. Return to your hotel, Isaac. I will come for you tomorrow night.”

  He started off, turned abruptly and spoke once more. Then he was gone, leaving his words to linger on the air behind him.

  “Pray for me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Later that night, as he stared up at the shadow-patterned ceiling, Isaac replayed the vampire’s story in his head. He could hear the cracking pain in Julian’s voice, like the razing of old, haunted rooms, as he had discussed Clara’s untimely death.

  It was clear that grief followed after life like a shadow. A broken heart could never truly mend. It was destined for internment with the bones and dust of our mortal losses; even then, it might lie there, in the quiet decay of the tomb, its sorrowful energies reverberating, crying out into the dark, hollow void. This haunting energy, Isaac deduced, is what we have come to know as ghosts.

  Evan Connor had once compared that suffering loss to a kind of mining operation…like a great, leviathan machine, tunneling deep into the secret, sorrowed recesses, gouging away at the diamond-coal vitality of a heart. Once the machine of loss had moved on, leaving a quarry pit of ache for the essence that had been taken, the deeper, wider trench was ready…ready only then for the new jewel of eternal love.

  Julian still carried that terrible soul-yearning for his Clara, just as he did for his Lessa. Isaac was willing to concede that the vampire had shown him something about the infinite nature of love. But hate had an infinity of its own. And in the absence of the comforting warmth of love, hate could fill in quite nicely with a sustaining flame of its own.

  Isaac’s thoughts drifted back to Auschwitz, and to his friend, Patrik. Patrik had embraced and tended the coals of his own searing hatred for the Nazis. It had kept him alive as their other friends had perished, one by one. Patrik’s German was fluent and flawless, and he taunted the sluggish ignorance of the guards by confounding them with their own language. His subtle and incessant insults were delivered in such a way that they could never be quite certain that was what they were. They came to respect Patrik’s rapier tongue, even keeping their distance from him when at all possible.

  The intensity of Patrik’s hatred radiated like a stoked furnace. And it helped stabilize the roller coaster of despair that Isaac was prone to each day. For the first seven months, Isaac had no word of Lessa’s fate. Then, one of the guards struck up a friendship with Patrik. It was one of the camp’s many paradoxes. The two men of opposite realities would spend hours over a chess board. It was through the favors of that friendship that Isaac finally learned Lessa had survived her initial processing.

  The news had caused an unsavory reaction in Isaac’s character. He became a kind of lackey, scurrying to perform trivial favors for his captors at every opportunity. To Isaac’s way of thinking, if he could somehow make himself valuable to the Nazis, perhaps if a critical moment of uncertainty should arise over the question of Lessa’s fate, his actions might have a favorable influence. It was the same fantasy-fueled mindset that had driven his insanity in the ghetto. And Patrik was incensed. He approached Isaac one night after the camp had bedded down.

  “What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish with all these circus-monkey antics? If Lessa could see the way you grovel and lick at these fascists’ boots she would weep great tears of shame.”

  “I don’t care, Patrik. I’m doing it for her. Perhaps someone will pull some strings in her favor if it should be necessary…”

  “Isaac, my friend, you have not yet come to terms with what these people are, and why we are here. You were in denial in the ghetto and you remain so here in the midst of our extinction. All of your subservience will not stay a single hand from falling on our people. Far better for you to become anonymous than to stand out with your eager compliance. Come on, Isaac. You are too smart for these dangerous games!”

  But Isaac could not—would not—agree. His humility was expendable. He would sacrifice any and all for the slimmest possibility of benefitting his wife. His friendship with Patrik suffered. The two surviving members of their Warsaw fraternity became estranged.

  It seemed that Isaac was destined to play the ill-fated role of the misinformed, vague-hunched gambler who would wager all, time after time, only to come up just short. He never guessed at how his failed bids would tear even further at the tatters of his remaining faith. But fifty years later he could lie in the dark with the accumulated baggage of his regrets and look back clearly along the path of his failures. It was too late to amend his hatred. Julian had come along after many years of ill-defined, randomly-targeted resentment. And he supplied Isaac with a tangible object for it, just as Patrik had once had his.

  He suspected that the vampire already knew this. Why else would he have gone into such intimate details of his past if not to try to solicit empathy? He had purposefully divulged the most pitiful aspects of his life. But Isaac could only feel the sort of leniency that one might offer the hungry children of some Third World backwater…nothing too taxing on the heart. His was a convenient sympathy that could easily be over-ridden for the deeper gratification of his hatred.

  He only hoped he could conceal the true depth of his feelings. It was one thing for the vampire to guess at Isaac’s distaste, but if Julian were to comprehend Isaac’s hatred, Isaac might find himself in a situation that could only end poorly. He still felt little fear at the prospect of death. But he was certainly able to choose wisely between the two options.

  He turned his thoughts to Lessa, and finally drifted off to sleep with her voice humming a nocturne to his dreams.

  At eight o’clock the foll
owing evening, Isaac responded to the knock at his door with some dread. Julian was there, and he wore a grim expression. He also wore the clothes of a man accustomed to physical, if not emotional, comfort. Linen trousers rolled once at the cuff, revealing canvas shoes laced twice by black laces. His shirt was white broadcloth, rolled as well, revealing massive forearms, and a wrist adorned with a precision timepiece with a Swiss name.

  They didn’t speak, but wandered the streets for an hour, absorbing the fluid energies of the Quarter. At the base of the equine statue in Jackson Square a group of young people passed a bottle of muscadine among themselves. Julian smiled at them as they passed and one of the women offered the bottle. He accepted graciously and drank with a healthy thirst. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar, and playing it well. The night was warm, sexy, and alive with stars.

  Isaac was taken aback. Julian handed the bottle to the old man and Isaac drank in spite of himself. He had the sensation that he was being played like a familiar instrument. Julian looked at him carefully and asked, “Are you ready to talk? Are you ready to remove some stones from the quarry?”

  Ah. So he was, indeed, understood. He nodded and followed Julian for a block up Royal and into a modest cafe. Isaac glanced back over his shoulder at the kids in the square. He was certain there was a woman in that group who loved lullabies.

  Julian ordered raw oysters and Dixie beer for them both, and they talked briefly of sports and music and food. Once again, it was an oddly normal conversation. Until Isaac asked how it was that Julian seemed to enjoy “normal food” like oysters and salads, etc. Julian replied that his appetite for such things was genuine. Food was enjoyable. But only human blood could provide the necessary sustenance. Then, gradually, Julian began to steer the subject matter to fate, to purpose, and to the evolution—or lack thereof—of the human species.

  Now Isaac was certain that the vampire was fully aware of his revulsion. Julian was intentionally leading the conversation. He wanted to make a point or two.