Joe a magnifying glass to allow closer inspection.
Joe brought the magnifying glass up to his face then raised the record label until the tiny words were enlarged enough for him to decipher them.
"Gypsy." He read aloud. "Deck the halls." The words were repeated six times around the circumference of the label. Joe dropped his arms and returned the record to the platter. "Who was she?" He asked the woman.
"Dunno. She was on a talent show I think." The woman, who Joe thought had aged in the short time he'd been in front of her, said. "Don't know nothing about it." She said, repeating herself.
Joe handed the magnifying glass back to her. As he did so a man much younger than the woman appeared behind the stall and lifted the record player from the table's surface.
"Ma, you know we can't sell these. They're faulty." He said, his accent thick and, Joe surmised, Irish-sounding. Joe watched as the woman’s son lifted the box with ease and placed it in the back of the van. Joe saw, as the man moved to one side to close the door of the van, several other identical boxes within it.
"I bought one." Joe said. "On Sunday."
The man looked at Joe then at his Mother. Joe spotted the tiniest shake of the head from the woman to her son.
"Likely you been robbed then son." The man told him. "None of them work properly. Best ditch it before it causes you 'arm." He warned.
The woman stood and moved towards the front of the van, and out of sight, as the man took over watching the stall. He stood passively looking at the people who were perusing the goods laid out on the table, refusing to acknowledge Joe any further.
"Come on Joe." Carole said, pulling gently at his arm. "Let's go home."
Joe let Carole lead him away. He felt frustrated and curious. 'Was everything he'd experienced with the player really down to something faulty with the box?' He wondered. It didn't make sense to him. He'd seen the strange mist inside and heard the voices. He started to rationalise it.
"Maybe the radio is causing interference with the player. The sounds and voices we heard actually being some kind of broadcast coming through instead of the record content." He said to Carole once they were back in the car and heading home.
"Who knows." Carole said. "Could be anything wrong with it. That's half the trouble of buying electrical stuff from a car boot. You never really know what kind of condition it's in."
They journeyed the rest of the trip in silence as Joe mulled over the events of the days before.
Once home, Joe surfed the internet whilst Carole started watching the news on the television in the lounge. He was looking for information about the recording. He entered "Gypsy Deck the Halls" into the search engine which immediately returned what was proclaimed to be tens of thousands of results.
He scoured each one of the results, hoping for something relevant to the record that was stuck on the player. All he found was information regarding a failed talent-show entrant that had been humiliated by each of the television show's judges and eliminated from the competition on her first appearance. She was only known as "Gypsy." Some of the links detailed that she wasn't happy about the way the judges behaved towards her and had refused, at one point, to leave the stage area where she gave her audition.
There was some brief footage of the audition, which was, Joe thought, truly dreadful. She sang Deck the Halls out of tune and out of time with the backing track. Some comments beneath the footage suggested it was nerves playing a huge part, but this seemed somewhat at odds with the footage before the audition which showed her as being confident and forthright. Some said it was because she was dressed poorly and had a strong accent which didn't suit an audition or the judge's requirements very well. All footage, no matter from what source, cut off immediately after the final judge, of four, had given their comments. Joe tried searching for "Gypsy Deck the Halls Full Version" but the results returned remained the same.
Then he typed "Gypsy Cursed Be Thee" into the white search box that glistened enticingly with Christmas art surrounding it.
The results this time were about the young woman who had "placed a curse on the talent show judges". Joe read some of the results, those especially which looked to be most relevant, keen to learn more. None mentioned the publishing of a record. But all mentioned that following her dismissal, and refusal to leave the stage area, she'd looked directly at each camera and then pointed at each judge in turn and said "Cursed be thee" to each one of the panel. One site suggested the reason there was no footage was because, mysteriously, each camera shut down the moment Gypsy looked at it.
After about an hour of reading and finding the various sites merely repeating that which he'd read before, Joe decided he'd searched enough. Just as he was about to shut down the laptop, he noticed one of the results on the webpage seemed to stand out from the others. He clicked on it.
The page was bland compared to other sites which featured an abundance of advertising that was at best irritating and at worst something that slowed the loading of the page down so much that quite often you were forced to give up looking at the page itself before it had loaded fully.
There were just a few words on the page:
Gypsy – Deck the Halls / Cursed Be Thee – Double A Side
Limited Print Run
Only 666 Pressed
Play in Full
It was the last sentence that was most bewildering.
"Play in full?" Joe asked aloud, to himself.
He plugged the record player back in and switched the power on. The warm glow of the front panel reassured him the box was ready and he gingerly lifted the headshell and dropped the stylus onto the disc.
The music began and the song started. Curiously, the sound of the voice that came forth was nothing like that which Joe had heard before, either on the record itself or on the various clips showing Gypsy's failed audition.
What came out of the speakers was a beautiful, lilting and perfectly in tune rendition of the song. The pace was slower than the song would normally be sung at, the arrangement deliberately slow to allow the vocals to extend themselves and be softer than that which it would have been if at full tempo. The instruments playing along were not intrusive and served merely to complement the dynamic of the voice that was full of range and harmony. Even when the song reached the line "Strike the harp and join the chorus" the sound of harp strings being struck echoed around the room as the single vocal was duplicated into several voices to literally "join the chorus".
As the last line was heard, Joe found himself nodding in time with the music. Something he rarely did with other songs.
"Heedless of the wind and weather..." Rang out and seemed to reach something of a crescendo. As the final "Fa la la la la, la la la la" was uttered by the songstress, the music faded to leave nothing but the beautiful voice of this extraordinary singer. As the last remnant of her vocalisation ended, the stylus lifted from the record and the arm returned to its original starting position. Once there, Joe saw the lights on the front panel fade and extinguish. He lifted the headshell and moved it across the record but the platter remained still. He toggled the switch, but the platter still wouldn't spin and the lights remained extinguished.
Joe checked the power. It was still connected and, on checking the extension cable's indicator, Joe saw it was still live.
He leant into the box again and moved the headshell back and forth as if to entice the player to start. Nothing happened. It appeared, to all intents and purposes, as if the unit was now fully defunct. He placed the arm back in it original position and sighed.
He pulled the power supply from the extension cable and lifted the lid of the box from it's hiding place at the rear. Just as he was pulling it across to close it, he heard a voice. The same voice as that which had sung the Christmas Carol.
"Thank you" It said. Joe dropped the lid which banged noisily against the wooden surround of the box. Joe stepped back. After a moment, he leant forward and listened but no further sound was forthcoming. He lifte
d the lid and pushed it back and forth into its slot to check it wasn't just a rubbing of materials that had caused the sound which he’d interpreted as a voice, but no further sounds came.
He went into the living room, where Carole was still watching the news.
"You won't believe what just happened." He said.
"Shh!" Carole said, her attention on the news programme. Joe stopped from explaining what had occurred just moments before in the kitchen. His attention too was on the breaking news that was being communicated on the television.
The newsreader's voice was distinct and informative.
"...to confirm, all four judges from the talent show have been found dead at their hotel... no cause has yet been determined..."