In 2020, I was asked to write a short Christmas ghost story for a podcast called Hallowed Histories. The following year, I wrote a further four tales and combined them with the earlier piece into a slim volume called (imaginatively) “Ghost Stories for Christmas.” Some people said some very nice things, and so in 2022 I followed it up with a novella entitled “The Festive Symphony”, and, in 2023, with another volume containing two more novellas and a short story. “DBL645 (Mono)” was the short story in that 2023 book (“In the Bleak Midwinter: More Ghost Stories for Christmas”). I thought it would be nice to put the story on my blog so that people can pass half an hour or so and/or use it as a sampler for the “Ghost Stories for Christmas series.” Enjoy – and be careful of records with white labels!
Shane
*
DBL645 (Mono)
It was the first that time that Gareth Grisham had gone to a record fair since the covid pandemic, and he would have been the first one to admit that he was disappointed.
It wasn’t what was on offer that was a problem, or that there were less sellers. In fact, there were probably more sellers squeezed into the small hall than normal. No, it was the fact that there had been three periods of lockdown, and many of the dealers seemed to have not taken that opportunity to go through their stock to get rid of the rubbish and the damaged, and, even worse, they still hadn’t sorted their stock into genre or some other form of sensible order. Buyers were, instead, meant to wade through a dozen boxes or more of LPs at each stall in order to see if there was something they might be interested in among them.
At one stall, he asked the seller:
“Is there any jazz or classical here?”
“Don’t know mate,” the reply came. “You’ll have to look through.”
Gareth had started, but it was a painful process filing through each and every record. He looked at the seller, and thought he was about forty, maybe forty-five.
“Yes,” Gareth muttered to himself, “wait until you get to seventy-five, and then you’ll realise how much pain you get in your arthritic fingers by wading through a dozen boxes of records because the seller couldn’t be bothered to sort them out – not to mention how your knees will ache because you’ve been standing in one spot.”
He limped along to the next seller. There wasn’t much hope of finding what he wanted there either, but he thought he would ask anyway.
“Do you have any classical or jazz?” he asked.
“No, mate,” came the reply.
Everyone called him “mate” at a record fair.
Gareth thanked him and started to move towards the next stall.
“Actually, there is just one record,” the seller shouted after him. Gareth stopped and turned back. “I don’t know much about it. It’s not really my area, as you might have gathered. It’s this one.”
The man reached beneath the table and produced a record. It was LP size, and in a plain white paper sleeve.
“It’s a test pressing,” the man said. “White label. But I don’t know what’s on it. Some concerto, or something, I reckon.”
He pronounced the word “concert-oo.”
Gareth took the record from the man. Yes, it most definitely appeared to be a test pressing. A single-sided one. But there was no indication of what music the record contained. The only information was the record number, handwritten on the label: “DBL645 (mono).”
Gareth was interested. He didn’t know why, but he was. Perhaps it was because he didn’t recognise the prefix “DBL.” Did it simply mean that the record was part of a double set? That might make sense, but he wasn’t convinced. No, the record was something of a mystery, and Gareth quite liked mysteries.
He took the record out of its paper sleeve, and held it up to the light. It appeared to be in excellent condition. Barely played, if at all.
“And you really have no idea what’s on it?” he asked the seller.
“Not at all, mate.”
Gareth sighed. He wasn’t particularly keen on spending money on something when he didn’t know what he was buying. It was probably throwing money away on tat. Gareth had bought a lot of tat at record fairs.
“How much?” he asked.
“A tenner to you, mate.”
The seller looked almost excited at the thought that someone was interested in the record. Had business really been that slow? Gareth thought there were more people browsing than normal. He looked down at the record, and then handed it back to the seller.
“I’m curious,” he said, “but I can’t spend ten pounds on something when I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry.”
“A fiver, then, mate.”
Gareth felt a shiver run through him. There was something about the way the man said it. Almost like he was desperate to get rid of the record. There was a vibe of “please, I want to be shot of it.” Why would that be? Gareth shivered again. Something was wrong, and yet he reached into his trouser pocket and produced a five-pound note.
“OK,” he said.
He handed the money over, and put the record in his bag.
“Thank you,” he said, and then walked away.
Gareth gave a cursory glance at the remaining stalls, but resigned himself to the idea that he wasn’t going to bag a significant amount of records. He was better off sticking to charity shops. Charity shops had been the source of some of Gareth’s most interesting finds over the years.
By the time he left the hall, it had started snowing. The weather forecast had threatened snow, but Gareth had assumed that it was going to be a false alarm. So often, Norfolk seemed to miss the weather that the rest of the country had. Not this time, it seemed, for the snow was coming down quite heavily, and the sky appeared to promise much more of it to come. Gareth decided that staying in the city for lunch would probably not be a good idea under the circumstances. Norwich so often ground to a half after an inch of snow, and he didn’t want to be stranded. He was too old for such shenanigans.
As he started the walk to his bus stop, he wondered how long the buses would be running for. He hoped it would be long enough to get him home. That was all that he was really interested in. The snow was already laying on the pavement, and he didn’t like it one bit.
Ten minutes later, he reached the bus stop, but his heart sank when he saw the extended queue of people waiting there. He wondered if it meant that the previous bus hadn’t turned up, or just that everyone else had the same idea that he did: to get home as quickly as possible. The other bus stops on the street were quite crowded, too. It was hardly surprising, for the snow was even heavier now. Gareth realised that he wouldn’t have wanted to be driving in those kinds of conditions.
He looked down the road, willing his bus to turn the corner and come towards him. Instead, a black cab turned into the road. Gareth hadn’t taken a cab in years. If truth be told, he didn’t like spending money on them. They were too damned expensive. Even so, he didn’t hesitate to put his arm out to signal for the taxi to stop for him. He didn’t have much hope that it would do so, and assumed that it was already taken. He felt a huge relief when it pulled into the side of the road in front of him.
Gareth opened the door.
“Thank you so much for stopping,” he said, as he got in. “I didn’t think I was going to be lucky waiting for a bus.”
“It’s coming down pretty heavy,” the driver said, turning around and smiling. “Where are you going, Sir?”
Sir. Gareth was much happier being called “Sir” than “mate,” as he had been at the record fair.
“I’m in Brandley,” he said.
“OK. Brandley it is,” the driver said. “Let’s hope the snow hasn’t already cut off those country roads.”
“Yes,” Gareth replied. “Let’s hope.”
He put on his seat belt, and got himself comfortable for the ride home.
The journey was a slow one, not because the roads were impassable, but because the visibility was so limited due to the snow coming down.
“It looks like it’s set in for the day,” the driver said.
“Yes, rather a surprise, really. Normally we escape the worst.”
As they worked their way through the city traffic, Gareth looked down at the bag beside him.
“And to think I got caught in this weather for the sake of one measly record,” he thought to himself. “It had better be worth it.”
He pulled the record out of the bag, and looked at it again.
“You got something nice there?” the driver asked him.
“To be honest, I have no idea,” Gareth told him. “It’s a bit of a mystery as to what it is.”
The truth of it was that he was rather looking forward to switching on his computer and doing a search for the record number that was written in pen on the white label. He had been a researcher for a television company many years earlier, and, once researching got in the blood, it was difficult to get rid of it.
“It’s probably nothing of interest,” he said. “But it was cheap enough to be worth a punt, as they say.”
“I hope so for your sake,” said the driver. “After all, it’s going to cost you a fortune to get it home, I’m sorry to say.”
Gareth looked up at the meter in the front of the car. Ten pounds already, and they were only just on the outskirts of the city. Another five or six miles yet. It wouldn’t have cost him anything on the bus with his bus pass. Still, it couldn’t be helped.
“If it was a CD, I could have played it for you on the way home,” the driver said, with a laugh.
“If it was a CD, I wouldn’t have bought it,” Gareth thought.
Gareth didn’t approve of compact discs, and he didn’t even really know what streaming was. And he didn’t want to. He was too old to make changes to his listening habits at his age.
The journey home would normally have taken about twenty minutes, but that day it took nearer an hour. The cost was horrendous, but he paid it happily, just relieved to have got home at all. He climbed out of the black cab, and wished the driver a safe drive back.
“Thank you,” the driver said. “I’ll be glad to get home tonight, that’s for sure.”
Gareth walked rather gingerly down the footpath to his bungalow. Already, the paths were slippery. They would be even worse after the children had made a slide out of them. They never thought about old people like him – but, he admitted to himself, neither did he when he was their age. Each generation was the same in that regard.
He unlocked the front door, and went inside, pulling off his shoes in the hallway so that he didn’t bring the snow into the house. He took off his coat, and put his feet into his slippers. Then, he picked up his bag with the record in it, and went through into the kitchen, putting it down on the table.
He switched the kettle on, and went through into his study and switched on his laptop computer. It was pretty ancient, and took a long while to boot up, but it was just fine for what he needed. When the old thing finally packed up, then he’d get himself a new one. Not before.
Back in the kitchen, he poured the water from the kettle into the teapot and put a tea cosy over the top. He knew that he was old-fashioned, but tea made in a mug just never tasted the same. It was a bit too late for him to change such things now.
With his cup of tea in one hand and the record in the other, he went back into his study. He had no idea why he called it a study, really. It was little more than a box room with the computer desk and a couple of bookcases with mostly reference books in them. There wasn’t space for anything else.
He sat down at the computer, and brought up Google.
“I wonder what we ever used to do without Google,” he thought to himself. “Used libraries, I suppose.”
He typed the record number into the search box.
DBL645.
When the search results appeared on the screen, he wasn’t surprised to see that there was no mention of a record. He moved on to the next page, but there was nothing there, either. Gareth typed “DBL645” into the search bar again, and this time added the word “record.” Again, there was nothing.
He could have kept trying, but, deep down, he knew that it really wasn’t worth the effort. There was no such record. He had known that from the start. Gareth knew that left only a couple of possibilities. Firstly, it could have been a private pressing – maybe even a basic copy of a radio broadcast, perhaps. Classical music was broadcast on the radio all of the while, and, back in the day, there were many “private pressings” of such performances – “private pressing” being another term for “bootleg,” but it made collectors feel better about themselves. The other option was that this was a test pressing of a record that simply never got issued – but if that was the case, it was from a label that Gareth had never heard of, as the prefix “DBL” meant nothing to him, and there wasn’t much about the classical records world that he didn’t know.
He took a sip of his tea, and then looked down at the record in front of him.
“I guess the only thing to do is to play you,” he said.
He got up and took the record and the cup of tea into the lounge. He put the tea down on the coffee table and placed the record on the turntable.
Just as Gareth was about to place the stylus at the beginning of the record, he shivered, as if “someone had walked over his grave,” as the old saying went. He didn’t think much of it, assuming it was just that he had got cold after being out in the snow. It took a long while for an old body like his to get warm again. He made a mental note to himself to take more notice of the weather forecast next time.
He looked across the room and out of the window. The snow was coming down heavier than ever now. Gareth had a horrible feeling that it was going to last all day, and he was likely to be stuck in his bungalow for half the week. Still, it wasn’t often that there were heavy snowfalls these days, and he told himself to count his blessings for that.
Gareth looked down at the spinning record in front of him, took a deep breath, and placed the stylus at the beginning of the first track. He waited, almost excited at finding out what music was actually on it.
At first, there was nothing, just pops and crackles that told Gareth that the record hadn’t been played in quite a while, and dust and grime had got into the grooves. It clearly needed a damned good clean. Well, that could wait. There would be plenty of time for that if he was going to be snowed in.
For a moment, Gareth wondered if there was any music on the disc at all. Other than the crackles, he heard nothing…but then, after maybe ten or twenty seconds, he realised that something else was coming out of the speakers. It was just a long, low note, but, oddly, he couldn’t quite work out what instrument was playing it. Was it just a single organ note? If so, it was weirdly recorded. Or perhaps it was a double bass. Gareth was annoyed with himself for not being able to work it out. He wondered if his hearing was as good as it used to be. Then, voices could be heard. Bass voices. There were no words that he could decipher. It was more like a chant of some kind. After another ten or twenty seconds, they were joined by another group of women’s voices. Sopranos. Or were they boy trebles? It was so hard to tell. No wonder why the record was never released; it was recorded so badly. The engineer or the producer clearly had no clue as to what they were doing. It was a mess.
Out of nowhere, there came what Gareth could only describe as a piercing cry – almost a scream of pain coming through the speakers. He stepped back from the record player, somewhat in shock at what he had heard. Surely that wasn’t music? It definitely sounded like someone being hurt.
As he stepped away from the turntable, there was a loud thud on the window. Startled, he went to the window and saw that a bird had hit it. The poor thing was lying on the ground outside, clearly dazed and in pain. He drew the curtains and turned away from the window quickly. There was nothing he could do about the bird. He wasn’t going outside in the snow to either rescue it or put it out of its misery.
The sound coming from the record was filling the room. There were more voices now, but still seemingly no words. There were other noises, too. It sounded like people moving around, but there were also scratching sounds, almost as if there was a mouse or rat trapped within the record itself. Gareth put this strange thought out of his head quickly. It was simply a live recording, and people were moving around. A squeaky floorboard on the stage, perhaps. Nothing more than that.
And then there came another cry. This time there was no mistaking it. It was a scream. Someone on the record was being hurt. Gareth rushed over, and removed the stylus from the record. He had no idea what he had bought. Perhaps some kind of modern performance art. That might explain it. In truth, he didn’t care what it was. He simply didn’t want to hear any more. It was giving him the creeps, and Gareth never got the creeps.
He was thankful that he had only spent a fiver on the record. It was quite possible that it was worth considerably more than that – but only to someone who knew what was actually on it. He took the record off the turntable and put it back in its sleeve. He filed it at the end of the shelves on which stood his substantial record collection.
“Leave it there,” he thought, “where it can’t do anyone any harm.”
What had made him think that? How could a record do him (or anyone else) any harm? The idea was ludicrous, he knew that – and yet, when he sat down on the sofa to drink his tea, he couldn’t stop his gaze from settling on the record that was barely visible on the far side of the room. He chastised himself for being a stupid old fool, but got up and took the record through into the study, where he couldn’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Returning to the sofa, he picked up the remote control for the television, and switched it on. Gareth started flicking through the channels, moaning to himself that there wasn’t much more of worth on television now than when there were only three channels. Half of them seemed to be showing slushy romantic Christmas films that he had absolutely no interest in.
In the end, he settled on BBC2, which was showing Laura. He hadn’t seen that film for years. It didn’t stop him from remembering a lot of it, though. That’s the problem with a mystery film that has such a big twist halfway through – you always remembered the twist so you couldn’t fully enjoy the film again. Still, he knew it was a good movie, and that he would soon get engrossed in it, and it would take his mind off that awful record.
The next thing he knew, the end credits were rolling. He had fallen asleep. It was often the same. He was always falling asleep when he didn’t want to – and then couldn’t sleep when he was meant to. The wonders of growing old.
Gareth got up off the sofa and made his way over to the window, where the curtains were still drawn from when the bird had hit the window. He pulled the curtains apart so that he could peer out.
Everywhere was white – the sky, the ground, the trees, the plants. He really was going to be snowed in, just as he used to be when he was a child. Those kinds of snowfalls didn’t come around much anymore.
Gareth thought it might be a good idea to have an early supper, in case the electricity went off. He moved away from the window and started to walk through into the kitchen, but stopped in his tracks when he saw that the record he had bought earlier in the day was on the coffee table. He stared at it for a moment, wondering whether he had brought it back into the lounge himself, but he knew he had not. The only option was that he had walked in his sleep, but he had never knowingly done that before. However, there was no other rational explanation – and, right now, he was desperate for a rational explanation. He didn’t want to spook himself.
“I’m putting you back in the study,” he said, as he picked up the record.
He placed the record down on the computer desk in the study, and then sat down at his laptop once more. He realised that he could go on one of the internet forums dedicated to collecting records, and ask if there was anyone out there who knew something about the what he had bought. He went to the website he was thinking of and started typing. When he had finished, he posted the message and then copied the text, and pasted it into a thread on classical music on the Steve Hoffman forums as well. There was always someone on there who knew the answer to every query.
Gareth was tempted to stay seated at the laptop, in case someone who was already online could give him an answer straight away, but he decided against it. He’d come back in a few hours and check for a reply.
He left the laptop switched on, and went through into the kitchen. He was feeling surprisingly tired, and decided that he would make do with some soup for tea. He had some bread rolls in the cupboard that he had bought the day before, and thought the soup would give him a good opportunity to finish them up.
Gareth found the tin of soup he was looking for, opened the can, poured the contents into a saucepan and put it on the cooker. Ten minutes, and his supper would be ready.
While he waited for the soup to heat up, Gareth watched the snow out of the kitchen window. There were no curtains, as the curtain track had broken a few weeks before, and he needed someone to put a new one up. He was too old to be getting up on stepladders. He didn’t like not having curtains up, though – especially in the winter months. It made everything seem so bleak. The kitchen looked out over the fields behind the house, but all he could see was the grey sky and the snow slowly making its way down to the ground.
He crossed the kitchen to stir his soup, but stopped in his tracks when he saw that the record was once again on the kitchen table.
Gareth felt his pulse quicken. He most definitely had not moved the record this time, but was also well aware that it couldn’t move itself. The damned thing was giving him the willies. If it wasn’t snowing so hard, he’d have taken it outside and put it in the bin, where it couldn’t do any harm.
But what had made him think that a record could do him harm? The idea was ridiculous.
“Oh well, if you’re that keen on being in the kitchen, I’ll leave you in here,” he said out loud, to the record.
Once over the initial shock of what had happened, he started stirring his soup, and then took down the bread rolls from the cupboard and buttered them. He’d sort the record out after he’d eaten.
He took his supper through into the living room, and switched the television on, knowing full well that he was not likely to approve of what was on during a Saturday evening. He found a Beethoven concert being broadcast on BBC4, and settled down to watch it. Was this the first piano concerto or the second one? He never could remember which was which. Wasn’t the second one actually written before the first one, or was that another composer entirely?
He was halfway through his soup when he picked up the first of the bread rolls and took a bite. Something tasted wrong.
He looked down at the roll in front of him. It was green with mould, and he spat out the bread in horror. What was going on? It wasn’t like that when he took it out of the cupboard and buttered it. He tried to remember if he had swallowed some of it, but couldn’t. He hoped not.
Now, there was a noise in the kitchen. The sound of something moving. Gareth put the tray with his supper down on the coffee table, and got up from his chair and walked through into the kitchen. The record that he had left on the table was now nowhere to be seen. For a moment, Gareth was somewhat relieved at the idea of it having disappeared, but then realised that it was likely to have just moved – a strange thought to have about an inanimate object.
He was beginning to feel rather ill, and so made his way back into the living room. His supper was still on the coffee table, and the rolls were as they had been when he had taken them out of the cupboard. There was not a sign of mould on them. Had he fallen asleep and dreamed it? He was rather tired given everything that had happened during the day, but he knew he had not been dreaming. Besides, that didn’t account for the record moving about by itself.
As he stood there, staring at what was left of his supper, he heard something move behind him. Footsteps. Gareth was sure that it was footsteps. He spun around quickly – perhaps a little too quickly, as he felt more than a little woozy – but there was no-one in the kitchen.
Now, the same noise was coming from the hallway near the study. He walked down there, and opened the study door, only to see a glimpse of something. What was it? It wasn’t a man, he was sure of that, but he had only caught sight of…whatever it was…for a second before…before it disappeared into the wall.
No, he was mistaken. He had to be. He was seeing things, perhaps coming down with a virus of some sort. That would be why he had hallucinated about the bread. But he didn’t feel ill. Besides, the record was now beside the laptop, and Gareth knew that he hadn’t put it there. He had left it on the kitchen table.
Gareth sat down at the laptop, and logged into the forums that he had posted in a little while earlier. There were no replies.
“I think I’m going to bury you when the snow has cleared,” Gareth muttered to the record.
He got up, and washed his supper things before making himself a pot of tea and sitting down to try to find something else to watch on the television. He had left the record in the study, and had shut the door. If it moved, it would have to go through a solid door to get out. Gareth was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen.
The Beethoven concert he had been watching had given way to a repeat of a Proms concert featuring the National Youth Orchestra. Gareth had seen it before, but he was happy to watch it again. He rather enjoyed the youngsters giving their all on the Royal Albert Hall stage, and clearly enjoying themselves. Now that things were returning to something approaching normality after covid, perhaps he might make a trip to London to see them in the next Proms season. He could treat himself and stay overnight in a hotel, and maybe even visit the Victoria and Albert Museum the next day. It had been a long time since he had gone there. Yes, that would be on his to-do list for next year.
The orchestra finished their rather glorious performance of Ravel’s La Valse, and Gareth waited to see what the inevitable encore would be. The National Youth Orchestra normally had something fun up their sleeves for the encore. But Gareth didn’t recognise the piece. Not at first, at least. The camera had focussed on a lone double bass player, playing a long low note. But something was wrong. The close-up of the player got tighter and tighter, and then, looking directly into the camera, the double bass player smiled. Not a normal, happy smile, but something that looked like what Gareth could only think of as “evil.”
And then it began.
The musicians started playing what he had heard on the record he had bought. The camera angles were distorted in such a way that some of the faces looked as if they were melting.
Gareth used the remote control to turn off the television. Sweat was pouring down his face, despite the fact that he had been cold just several minutes earlier. He knew that it was panic. Or was this a heart attack? No, he was sure that it was not. It was just caused by the record.
He sat in his armchair doing the breathing exercises his GP had taught him a number of years earlier. He was beginning to calm down, and his chest felt less tight, until the record started playing behind him on the hi-fi. It was impossible, he knew. He had left the record in the study, behind a closed door. And yet, despite that, he was well aware that it had somehow found its way on to the turntable and was playing by itself.
Unsteadily, he got up and walked towards the turntable, which was, indeed spinning. The stylus was on the record, and it was playing. The noise coming from the speakers was hideous, a strangely revolting sound that was, he thought, not natural in any way.
As he staggered over to the turntable, and snatched the stylus off the record, he saw a figure moving through the kitchen. As before, it was just a fleeting glance. But he saw it better this time. It looked vaguely human, about Gareth’s size and build, and yet something told him that it wasn’t human.
Gareth was frightened, really frightened. He took the record from the turntable. The only thing he could do was to take it outside and bury it. He would get a spade from the shed, providing the shed door could be opened with all of the snow up against it. Deep down, he knew that burying it in the snow made no sense. It would be waiting for him when the snow eventually melted, but he pushed that thought aside. He just needed it out of the house.
He stumbled to the back door almost in a trance, looking out for the mysterious figure he had seen. As he opened the back door, the snow that had accumulated against it over the previous few hours fell into the hallway, but Gareth didn’t care. He would sort that out later.
Still in his slippers, and without even getting a coat, he made his way down through the snow to the shed at the bottom of the garden. He was aware that he wasn’t thinking straight, but he almost felt compelled to do what he was doing. It was as if someone was controlling him, as if he was hypnotised. His mind briefly brought up images of the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Thanks to the direction of the wind, the shed door didn’t have as much snow against it as Gareth had feared. He pulled at the door, and it opened with surprising ease. He got the spade and then dragged it behind him further down the garden. He wanted to bury the record as far away from the house as he could. He put the disc on the ground, and then smashed the spade into it.
Damaging the record seemed to break the spell that he had been under, and he realised he hadn’t bothered to put a coat on and was outside in his slippers. Gareth knew that staying outside in the snow without a coat and gloves would be a stupid thing to do, and so he left the record and the spade in the snow and walked back towards the house, chastising himself for being so stupid.
The back door was shut. Gareth didn’t remember shutting it behind him when he came out. In fact, he was sure that he hadn’t. He turned the handle and pushed, expecting the door to give way as it should, but it remained shut fast. He knew for sure that he hadn’t locked it. He pushed again, throwing all of his weight against the door, but it wouldn’t budge.
Panicking, Gareth wondered if he could clamber inside if he broke the kitchen window. He wasn’t sure he could do it. His legs and arms didn’t have the strength in them that they used to have.
Even from outside, he could hear the record playing on the turntable, despite the fact that he knew that it had been left at the bottom of the garden.
Gareth feared at that moment that he was going to die. If he tried to make it to his next-door neighbour’s house, he knew that, somehow, he wouldn’t get there. Something would stop him. And here he was, outside in the snow, with slippers on and no coat. He was sure that this was down to the effects of the record. He felt once more that he had been hypnotised.
He looked again at the kitchen window, wondering how he could break it and scramble inside. There was an old metal watering can a few feet away from him. He picked it up and started hitting the window with it, in the hope that, eventually, the glass would break. He had been hitting the window with it for a couple of minutes when one of the panes of glass cracked. Gareth thought that it was his chance.
He started working on the cracked pane, and managed to push the glass out, although he still didn’t know how he was going to get in through the window. He would need something to stand on to give him a chance of getting inside, but there was nothing close by that he could use. Perhaps there was something in the shed, but he didn’t have the energy to get there or to pull whatever he found back to the house. With the snow now about six inches deep, each footstep felt like a mile.
“Let me in, you bastard!” he shouted through the kitchen window to whatever was inside and waiting for him.
Gareth watched in horror as the figure he had previously only glimpsed walked into the kitchen. It looked human, about five feet ten inches tall. It had a slim build, and a mop of rather unruly grey hair. It smiled at him and waved its bony fingers. Gareth stepped back, not knowing what to do. The figure he was looking at…was himself.
How could he be inside when he was standing out in the snow? Was he hallucinating? Gareth didn’t think so.
The falling snow was covering his face, and he attempted to wipe it away, but, as he raised his arms, he realised that his hands were numb. He could barely feel them at all. It was hardly surprising given the weather. He tried to rub them together to get some feeling back in them.
His doppelganger watched him from the kitchen, and laughed when Gareth realised that he couldn’t feel his hands…because they were no longer there. It wasn’t as if they had been cut off, they had simply faded away.
Gareth watched in horror as his arms also began to disappear, starting from his wrists and moving up towards his shoulders. It wasn’t, he realised, that they couldn’t be seen. He wasn’t turning into The Invisible Man; he was simply being erased.
He fell to the ground as the same process began with his feet. As they vanished in front of his eyes, he wanted to scream, but couldn’t. His mouth was gone, too.
The only sounds he could hear was the laughter of his doppelganger and the sound of the record playing.
Epilogue
Post made by “Neil 1975” on the Classical Collectors Forum, 9.15pm, December 20th.
Hey Gareth. Not seen you posting on here for a long while. It’s good to see you back!
I’m guessing the record you mention that you picked up at the fair yesterday is some kind of joke.
There was a rumour on the internet about a record with that number about ten years ago. Utter nonsense, of course, but it was said that, when played, the record summoned some kind of evil spirit. Ridiculous, right? The weird thing is that some very well-known collectors believed it.
The spirit was said to manifest itself as a double of the owner of the record, and then was thought to “replace” them in some way. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” type of thing. It was said that the “DBL” in the record number was a reference to this “double.” I’m not sure what the “456” is meant to represent. But, as I say, a couple of well-respected people believed the tale, which I find odd.
I know you won’t let anything of that nature bother you, but let me know what’s actually on the record, as I’m curious to find out. I bet if you put it on eBay, there’ll be someone out there willing to pay a good sum for it. You know what people can be like with rumoured haunted objects. Or perhaps you could put the audio on YouTube. You might become an internet sensation!
Anyway, that’s all I know about it – or have heard about it, I should say. Let me know how you get on with the record. It’s good to hear from you again.
Have a good Christmas, mate.
The Ghost Stories for Christmas series can be found on all Amazon sites, including:
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CHXWM4KS?binding=kindle_edition&qid=1709850021&sr=8-1&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin
and USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHXWM4KS?binding=kindle_edition&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_aps_series_rwt_tkin&qid=1709850090&sr=8-1
Beyond Boundaries 