Ghost in a Gramophone

Flash Fiction

You must never speak in the presence of a gramophone. In some gramophones there live ghosts, and ghosts love to eavesdrop. A gramophone with a ghost living inside is a dangerous thing indeed. For then it is neither a spirit nor a machine, but a creature with a soul hiding amongst gears and springs. It knows how to make noise, but also how to capture it.

A gramophone ghost only comes alive in the deep hours of the night, when untroubled souls are all asleep. At first you may not hear its voice, so soft its whisper can be. It is a coldness lost beneath the warm crackle of the fireplace and the solemn ticking of the grandfather clock. But if you listen, you will hear.

Click of gears, hiss of static. Breathing wood and metal. A gramophone ghost never speaks to anyone. It only inhales and exhales, quiet and low. It is a patient soul, content to sit and listen. That is all it knows how to do anymore.

Gramophone ghosts are at their happiest when you play records on their turntables. A crackling sigh of pleasure slips out from beneath the brassy blare of an old ragtime song. But you had best take the record off the table as soon as the song is done. If you leave it spinning, you may hear noises not meant for living ears. Shrill, distant voices and cruel laughter, warped by the scratches on the record. They cut in and out, stuttering. From the room below your feet rises the echo of voices raised in merry song. But the same warping and stuttering mars them, though they sound so real. Do not look for them — they are the voices of people long dead.

Was it a party? A wedding? A holiday? A flash of memory from life or just sounds caught by a spirit's keen ear? It doesn't matter. The voices fall silent when you lift the needle, cut off as a life is cut off by a knife in the back. The room is silent for only a moment, before the fire's crackle and the clock's tick rush back in to fill the void.

But it was not silent in that void. You could still hear the hiss of a needle running along an empty turntable. You can still hear it now, though its murmur is faint. The ghost is still listening, still waiting. Perhaps it no longer remembers what it is waiting for. But if you speak to it now, it may remember what you say. It may capture your voice and play it back through that grainy haze, on some faraway night when it finds another soul to listen to its songs of the past.

And that is why you must never speak in the presence of a gramophone.