Grotesque encounter · 3 min read · Set in The Hallam Reading Room ·
The Glass Singer's Room at Hallam
A library assistant at the Hallam Reading Room is asked to shelve a box of old gramophone records, and when she drops the first disc a soprano voice rises from the broken shellac, and the glass in the high windows begins to hum a note that is not a window's own.
Nell Okoro worked the returns desk at the Hallam Reading Room in the afternoons, and her job was usually quiet. Books came back, she checked them against the catalogue, she shelved them in the right bays and went home. She did not expect anything to make a sound.
The box came in on a damp Monday in October, delivered by a man from the county archive who would not stay to sign for it. It was a plain wooden crate stuffed with old gramophone records in brown paper sleeves, seventy or eighty of them, all of them shellac. Each had a handwritten label on the front, the name of a singer and a date from the 1920s. The top one was marked *The Glass Singer, Rehearsal, Hallam Hall, 1929*.
Nell lifted the disc out of its sleeve and held it up to the light. The surface was dark and smooth. A faint dusty rainbow ran across it from the centre. It looked like any other record. She set it down on the reading-room table, meaning to take it to the archive room, and it slipped from her fingers and fell.
It did not break. It landed on its edge and rolled, slowly, to the end of the table, and as it rolled, a voice came out of it.
It was a woman's voice, high and clear, a soprano that climbed through the room like a bird rising from a hedge. It did not sing a song that Nell knew. It sang a phrase, held and turned and let fall, then taken up again in a higher key, the notes sliding into each other with a sweet, aching precision. The reading-room lamps dimmed slightly, as if the sound were drawing power from them. Along the top of the room the tall windows began to hum.
Nell stood very still. The glass in the windows was thick and old, set in lead, and it was singing a single note under the soprano, a deep clear tone that did not belong to any window she had ever heard. The sound rose and fell with the voice, and the panes trembled, and in the reflection of each one she saw a faint figure standing, a tall woman in a long dress, her arms half raised.
The readers at the tables did not look up. They sat quite still, heads bowed over their books, and Nell saw that every one of them was crying, silently, tears running down their faces onto the pages, without wiping them away.
She went to the crate and found the next record. The label said *Rehearsal, Take Two*. She lifted it out and held it, and the voice came again, higher this time, and the glass sang back with it, and Nell felt something in her chest answer, a wish she had not known she had, to hear that voice finish its song.
She put the record down. The voice faltered and stopped, and the windows settled, and the readers lifted their heads and wiped their eyes and went back to their work, puzzled, as if they had woken from a long dream.
The archive has no record of a Glass Singer. The 1929 rehearsal was never performed, the archivist said, when Nell took the box down to her. Hallam Hall was closed the following spring and the building was used as a munitions store. Nobody knows who recorded the discs, or why they were kept.
Nell still works the returns desk. The crate is in the back room now, and she has not played another record. But each afternoon, when the light goes gold in the high windows, she hears the glass begin to hum, very softly, under the sound of the readers' pages turning, and she stands by the desk with her hand on the last of the returns, and waits, because the windows have started to sing a line that she almost remembers, and she is sure, quite sure, that she knows how it ends.