towards the turntable arm again, but again it moved away from him, towards the centre. Once more, the sound they heard was replaced. This time, it was barely audible. Joe thought it sounded like a soft sobbing. Then there was the sound of dripping. It was the sound of something thicker than water, something almost syrupy, hitting a hard surface like a stone floor. Joe thought it sounded like blood hitting porcelain. Then, quite suddenly, came another scream which lasted just a second before it was extinguished.
The only sound that emanated from the groove of the record and the stylus upon it now was, Joe thought, the actual sound of the silence recorded and the rubbing sound of the stylus as the groove moved beneath it.
"Breathing." Carole said.
"What?" Joe said.
"It's someone's breathing." Carole clarified. Joe lent forward towards the box.
"Jesus. You're right." He said, recognising the pattern of breath coming from the recording.
Then there was a distinct voice. Deep, resonant and seeming with purpose, it echoed around the kitchen.
"You are..." It said, before the stylus slid across the record again and hit the dead wax area, the runout area of the disc, and lifted from the surface. The arm returned to its original position and, upon doing so, the platter stopped rotating.
"Wow." Joe said after they'd sat in silence for a moment.
"I don't like it." Carole said.
"Don't like it?" Joe repeated. "Don't like what?"
"It sounded evil."
"Probably a recording of a play. Something from Shakespeare no doubt. Will make sense once I get the counterbalance set right and it plays through properly." Joe suggested.
"Didn't sound like acting to me. Sounded like a snuff recording." Carole said as she rubbed at her upper arms and shivered.
"You do know snuff isn't real, right?" Joe said, trying to calm his wife's nerves.
"Tell that to the parents of those kids Brady and Hindley murdered. Brady made tape recordings as he and that witch tortured those children. I heard some of them when I was in the force."
"Yeah, I know. But they didn't make records out of them, did they?" Joe reasoned.
"I suppose not." Carole replied. She rubbed at her arms again. "I'm going for a shower." She said and left Joe alone in the kitchen with the record box.
"Well, you need a little TLC but I think you'll be just fine." Joe said. He realised after he'd said it that Carole might have thought he was talking about her but his comment was aimed at the box.
He pulled the lid across the top and pushed the button on the back to "OFF". The lights on the front panel remained lit for a moment then gradually faded and went out as the power ebbed from the unit.
He started preparing the breakfast that Carole hadn't.
Carole returned from her shower and they ate breakfast whilst poring over the Sunday papers. Joe liked to complete the crossword and other word puzzles whilst Carole caught up on celebrity gossip.
"You want to do anything today?" Joe asked. "We could take a walk out somewhere this afternoon. It's not raining. Yet."
"Yeah. Could do. Shall we see this afternoon?" Carole replied. She knew that Joe wanted to play with his new toy but the sounds she'd heard from it had unsettled her. "If you're going to play with that thing, can you use another record?" She asked him.
"Yeah. Sure." He replied. "That really unnerved you, didn't it?" He asked.
"A bit. Yeah. Don't know why. Seemed to go straight through me." Carole replied.
"Have to dig out my old LP's." Joe said gleefully. "Mind you, some of them might be worse than the record on there!" He laughed. Carole smiled weakly.
"So long as it's not Status Quo, it's fine." She said. Joe laughed again.
"Somethin' 'bout you baby I like." He sang tunelessly at his wife before giggling again. Carole let her eyeballs rise to the top of their sockets as she sighed and took the paper and magazine she had been reading from the table and moved herself into the lounge, allowing the door to close gently behind her.
After clearing the breakfast things, and the remainder of newspapers, supplements and magazines from the kitchen table, Joe retrieved a large and heavy box from the garage. He placed it carefully on the kitchen table and pulled the tape that secured the flaps covering the top of the box away to enable entrance to that which was within.
He pulled an album from the contents of the box.
"Typical." He said, as he saw it was 12 Gold Bars by Status Quo, one of their "Best of..." albums. He slid it back inside and continued thumbing through the LP's that were stored vertically within the box.
After a few more examinations of the covers within, he found one that suited his needs. He pulled ABBA's The Visitors from the box. Joe felt this was probably their best album. And, curiously, they saved the best until last it seemed, it being their eighth and final album.
Joe lifted the lid of the record player unit and slid it gently into its storage space. He removed the ABBA LP record from its outer cover and inner slipcase and placed it onto the spindle, not enjoying the grating sound as the surface of the modern and much thinner LP met the thicker one that was already in situ there.
He lifted the headshell and moved the arm across the outer rim of the record's surface as it started rotating. He released it when it was above the channelling groove and watched as it dropped smoothly onto the record's surface. When the stylus came into contact, the record stopped rotating. The turntable's platter continued to rotate beneath and the sound of the thick record that was adhered to the platter's surface grating against the downturned side of the ABBA record, as it moved in a circular direction beneath it, caused Joe to gasp in horror. He quickly reached in and lifted the headshell and stylus from the record and watched as the ABBA record slowly started rotating again.
Joe pushed the arm back into its resting place and the platter stopped spinning. He adjusted the counterbalance at the opposite end of the arm to the stylus and tried playing the ABBA record again. Each time and after each adjustment, when the stylus hit the record, it stopped spinning. Worried at the damage the thicker grooves may have been doing to the finer grooves in the thinner ABBA record, as one surface ran against the other making a sound like rustling leaves being swept from a patio, Joe gave up trying to make the stylus so light that it would allow the record to spin.
He removed the ABBA record from the platter and examined the surface for any signs of damage. Fortunately, there seemed to have been no scratches or other marks due to the rubbing of the two wax surfaces. He returned the ABBA record to its slipcase and in turn its cover and placed it to one side on the table.
"Have to get that thing off. Either that or get another rubber platter." Joe said aloud to himself. He tried grabbing at the edges of the thick record that was in place, but found he couldn't attain any significant grip. Even the entire platter wouldn't lift more than a few millimetres up or down, the suspension allowing only a minor movement which enabled zero leverage.
Joe tried pushing and pulling the record horizontally, to reduce the adhesive that was holding it in place, only to slip and gash his index finger in the process on the sharp edge of the record. Blood dripped from his finger and fell against the side of the platter and onto the record's surface before he could lift it to his mouth and suck at the wound.
He grabbed a kitchen towel and wiped at his finger checking that the bleeding had ebbed. Once he was confident it had, he returned his attention to the record player to wipe the blood from the turntable area. Curiously, the blood that had splashed onto the side of the platter was gone. Joe figured it must have dripped down into the insides of the turntable. He carefully ran the towel across the surface of the record, from the centre outwards, to mop up the blood he'd seen land on and sink into the record's groove. He knew, once congealed and hardened, any blood on the surface would disrupt the sound and possibly damage the stylus. Styli weren't cheap these days, given the relative absence of use of record players. People preferred their
access to a million songs on a phone or MP3 player, or streamed live from "the cloud". Even CDs, of which Joe had several hundred, were starting to become less of a commodity.
When he lifted the towel, there was just a tiny speck of red upon it. Joe couldn't be sure that it wasn't from his hand so folded the towel over to a clean section which he ran across the record's surface again. No blood appeared on it. He grabbed his glasses and, pushing them onto his face as he leant forward, peered closely at the record. The surface looked clean. The grooves looked clean. For its suspected age, it was in remarkably good condition.
"Weird." He said aloud to himself.
"What's weird?" Carole's voice said behind him, startling him.
"Jesus! You scared the hell out of me." He said, raising his injured hand to his forehead as if to calm himself down.
"Joe, your hand..." Carole said, aghast. Joe pulled it down so he could see it. It was covered in blood, half-dried and mottled against his skin.
"Oh, it's okay." He said. "Just a small scratch. Obviously started weeping again." He moved to the kitchen sink and washed the blood-soaked hand under the cold tap, turning his hand this way and that to assist the flow of water in running the dried red fluid from it. Once it was cleaned, he wiped it being careful not to reopen the wound, about half-an-inch long, that ran along the centre of his fingerprint on his index finger. Carole pulled apart the wrapping to a