Voodoo Holmes Stories

burning, like the waving of life from afar. I come closer and see that it is full of people waiting for it to go on. The engine is apparently well stoked with burning coals, letting off steam in a shrill whistle as I climb through the window, ignoring the stares of other passengers as I sit down on an empty seat next to them. It looks as if the waiting period had not only allowed the train to fill up with passengers but has also wakened them. They seem very much alive in their impatience of wanting to move on.
    I know that this is the most difficult time of all. I would very much like to look for a black-clad young woman among them. Instead, I stare straight ahead of me, kind of like Baker did before I sat down before her. Maybe she was trying to ignore me then and whatever happened wouldn't have happened. Maybe if she had never spoken to me, the breach would have healed and the connection between the worlds of the living and the dead healed up.
    Maybe what I am doing now will achieve the same end as long as I manage not to divert my look from the old scraped wood over the seat opposite me.
    It is very hard, though, considering that a person has sat down on this very seat, a sudden flash of darkness, and the intoxicating smell of a young, handsome woman in a black dress saying: „Hello Mr. Watson, it is me. Baker.“
     
     
    Morse Code For The Dying
     
     
    It is always a good idea to choose your friends according to your habits. So it was fortuitous that the lady I was courting was a dancer in a late night vaudeville establishment. Her obligations ended around three o'clock in the morning when I tired of my excursions. Together, we returned to her flat, a two-room-affair under the roof of an old, imperious building overlooking Hancock park. Almost staggering from fatigue, we held onto each other like inebriated folk, a natural intimacy. We went to bed with hardly word, and as I pressed myself against the lean lusciousness of her body, I felt her brief convulsions as she entered sleep. One would have supposed that a person swinging her legs all evening would go about this quietly from shere exhaustion. Instead, she unconsciously kicked and bucked like a horse, and indeed, there was something beautiful and wild about her of an Arabian stallion. Still, one expects a woman like her, demure and sensitive, to be a soft sleeper, passing from wakefulness to oblivion quietly and then seeming almost dead in her state of relaxation. The kind of woman who doesn't snore. And indeed, once she was fast asleep, then there was the stillness about her of an early morning sea, calm and without the tiniest wave all the way from here to the horizon.
    Jonathan Swift has made it known in his "Gulliver's Travels" that people can be judged by the extent of how they manage to behave like horses. So there is one class of man who understands dignity and elegance and lives accordingly, while another, well ... doesn't. The dancer in my arms obviously belonged to the first category. Nature had made her fine. Fine-limbed and sweet-natured. I found it all the more astonishing that she would enter the realm of darkness like someone terrified. Well, it is no easy matter running from life as we do whenever we fall asleep. After all, sleep is the brother of Death, as Shakespeare expressed it, but the analogy is crooked because Death and sleep are essentially the same, the only difference being that Death is eternal sleep. And sleep not only of the mind, but also of the body.
    One night, I noticed that the dancer's convulsions and her little kicks had a pattern. In my mind, I saw a blank paper upon which her movements imprinted a kind of score like for an orchestra. There was „Dah!“, of course.
    And then „DAH – dah!“ als well as „Dah – DAH!“
    In my mind, it looked like this:
     
    !
     
    ! - .
     
    . - !
     
    Next, there were twin combinations:
    !!
     
    and
     
    ..
     
    These were convulsions the body performed as a whole. In symphonic language, this would be called a tutti. I labelled this kind of movement X. Sometimes, however, it was only an arm or a leg kicking. In order to visualize these patterns, I numbered them.
     
    Right arm: 1
    Left arm: 2
    Right leg: 3
    Left leg: 4.
     
    The first night I observed her, the dancer struck out the following pattern:
     
    X!!
    X.
    1!
    (Pause)
    X!
    (Pause)
    3..
    (Sleep)
     
    The second night, I read the following:
     
    X!!
    2.
    X!!
    3!
    (Pause)
    3.
    (Sleep)
     
    The third