The Shop

We were antiquing, okay I was driving and my wife was antiquing. I know nothing of Revere Bowls, Depression Glass or Art Deco Frogs. She does, she goes crazy for that kind of stuff. Our marriage had been rocky lately. Plenty of fights and plenty of threats to one another about leaving. We had a chance for the both of us to get away from it all and spend some quality time in the wine country of New York. And of course there was the antiquing. We agreed to leave our cell phones in the trunk as we traveled the back roads using a paper map and hand written directions to find shops that friends had recommended.

“You think, we could just go to this one last place?” She pouted and batted her eyes at me.

About fifteen or maybe thirty minutes later we pulled up to the place. I had been in a lot of antique shops that day and this one was by far the strangest. While she talked with an older woman I did my usual browsing. His hand on my shoulder nearly sent me in to cardiac arrest. I turned and an older man, thin and gaunt smiled at me.

“Bored?”

“A bit.”

“We get that all the time.”

“Let me show you something that may interest you. My special room.”

My wife and the older woman were deep in discussion about Depression Glass.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

He led me downstairs through a maze of corridors, the place hadn't look this big from the outside. “Root cellar.” He said as if he knew what I was thinking. “Everyone asks the same question; how could the basement seem so large? The answer is that the place was built in to the side of a small hill. In the basement are these rooms, old root cellars to store food. It's where I have my things.”

He unlocked an old creaky door and invited me in. The shelves were lined floor to ceiling with very ornate glass jars labeled with thin strips of paper. The metal lids all had a small valve like a faucet attached. On a table next to a chair was a gramophone.

“I see that you are admiring my collection.”

“Yes, but I am not sure what it is. What any of this is.”

He patted the bell of the gramophone, “the wax cylinder recorder was invented by Mr. Edison. This particular portable model was invented by one of his assistants, a deranged little man that wanted to collect sounds.”

“Sounds? Like birds?”

“No, not quite. His goal was to collect and catalog the sound of screams.”

“Screams?”

“He started simply enough by recording the screams of his colleagues and their families. It was all very novel. Then by accident he discovered that he could save the scream in a pressurized glass jar. Something about the airwaves of the scream being compressed. The scream goes around and around the various tubes and ends up in a jar.”

“That’s not physically possible.”

“But here is the proof." He pointed to the walls and walls of jars.

“Shelves of jars?”

“Yes. Pick one.”

I selected a jar from the front.

He hooked up the jar attaching the tubes to the lid, as he did so you could hear the compression wave being released. A dial lit up on the device and without warning a young woman’s scream came roaring out of the bell.

“Damn.”

He looked at the jar. “An actress. A bit overdone. That explains it.”

“This is all fake you have some kind of microchip or electronics wired in.”

“Sir, that suggests that I am a fraud.”

“Okay. Let’s try another. Why do some of them seem to have a colored mist in them?”

“After the scream is stored, the air in the pressurized jar, the physical sounds of the screams turn different colors. His notes are a bit vague on the reasoning, but cloudy or foggy is the scream of an insane man. Clear means the screamer is healthy and normal, blue is the scream from a dismissed lover as they jumped to their deaths. He actually recorded a man as he threw himself off a cliff. Rumor has it that he may have pushed him, but it is only a rumor. Yellow is the scream of a frightened child. The colors go on and on. I have a color chart somewhere.”

“Fascinating. And the labeling what is that?”

“The date, the name of the subject and a code is used to cross reference the information in to a catalog.” He pointed to a massive binder laying open on his desk.

“So how does it work?”

“The subject, the screamer sits in the chair and just screams in to the cone.”

“Easy enough.” I sat down.

“After all these years the collection is short one color.”

“Really? What color is that?”

“Red, believe it or not.”

“Red?”

“Yes, his theory was that red was the scream from a person witnessing the brutal murder of a loved one.”

“Not funny.”

“Not meant to be funny, sir.” He threw back a curtain and my wife sat there tied to a chair. A large man stood behind her and before anything more could be said he pulled out a knife and slit her throat. There was a gurgling sound, she stared at me for a minute with tears in her eyes. I screamed. I howled. Her now severed head fell forward in a waterfall of blood.

They found me walking down some deserted wooded road in my pajamas covered in my wife's blood. I tried to explain what happened, no one believed me, no one. No body or trace of my car or our luggage. Just me covered in blood. There was no trial. I was sent here, to this safe place hidden out of the way. No visitors allowed, just my thoughts, my nightmares, and my screams in the middle of the night.