Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Glen Sorrow ·
The Choir That Needs an Empty Valley
The singing in Glen Sorrow is heard only on nights the register shows nobody staying, and the register is never wrong a day in advance.
- status: folklore
Glen Sorrow first, since that is the name that stops visitors on the road in. It is a surveyor's mistake, and the mistake is older than anyone who could be scolded for it. The old word they bent into sorrow meant nothing you would weep at. Meant, as near as the glen can put it, the counting out — the way you count out lamps at closing time, or names at a door. So the glen was mislabelled once and has kept the label the way some places keep an appointment. The glen is not sad. The glen is numerate.
Here is the tale as the glen holds it. On nights when the valley holds nobody — no camper on the site, no guest at the inn, no pack down at the bothy, no car drawn onto the flat by the bridge — there is singing. In parts, they say. Four parts at the least, and underneath the four a bass given to the hill itself, though the hill has never claimed it. It is not a haunting, or none that anyone here has taken the trouble to be frightened of. It is a working sound, tuned, unhurried, kept under the weather. The singing is a count. Rooms, tents, lamps lit when there were lamps; and when the valley is empty there is nothing left to count but the valley, so the choir holds that figure long, the way you hold the last number at the foot of a column.
The rule of it is the rule you were given: the choir is audible only when the valley holds no visitors. On a full night you could stand in the middle of the glen and hear, at the most, a number of small doubts. Duncan Lamb at the inn has heard the singing twice in his life, both times locking up late on a night already promised to nobody. He describes intervals, not words. He says you do not so much hear it as find that the silence has been arranged.
Now the register, which is the part the glen asks you to take on trust. Agnes Rattray kept the occupancy book at the site, as her mother kept it, as the woman before her; I keep it now. Every bed, every tent, every lamp is entered nightly, and the page for each coming day is ruled and headed the evening before. The glen's rule, which nobody downstream of the book has ever needed to correct, is that the register is always accurate the day before. Tomorrow's names stand on tomorrow's page already, filled in fair; tomorrow they are merely correct. The habit I learned off Agnes is to read the coming page at dusk. If it carries names, the day will be as full as it says. If it carries nothing — nil, ruled clean, the glen shut to the world for a night — then that night belongs to the choir, and we put no lamp in the top window, and we go early to our beds so as not to be counted on the hour by anything with a tune.
And the day-before is exact, to the head, as bookmen say. Visitors ask why one night each season is never let at the inn. Because the page says nil, and the page is never wrong the day before. What anyone might think about the day itself is not collected, here or anywhere.
So the tale today is held by me, at the site window, with the pen that has ruled that dusk page three register-keepers back. On nights it says nil I set no bell, and twice in my time, on an empty valley with the gate chain counted and the lamp cold, I have heard from the top window a sound like many voices settling a total. I enter none of it. The book deals in who is here, and it is never wrong. What the glen hands you instead of an answer, with the pen, as it was handed to Agnes and to her mother: who is filling tomorrow's page a day ahead of tomorrow — the register, the valley, or the choir?