All was peaceful as day broke on Sunday. Warm, morning sunlight filtered into the room through the blinds at the windows. It illuminated a tidy room with beige carpeted floors. Birds sang cheerfully outside in the trees surrounding the house. The room itself contained a bed, a nightstand, a dresser, and a desk. The items on top of the desk were well organized around the centerpiece, which was an open laptop that displayed a screensaver of gold ribbons that twirled and wound around the black backdrop. Atop the tall dresser was a single, white alarm clock, which was plugged into the wall at an outlet that had been placed at approximately waist height.
In the bed in the center of the room lay a figure who was no more than a large lump in the blanket. Save for her feet, which where resting on top of the headboard, she was completely immersed in her gold comforter, laying with her head pointing toward the foot of the bed. She made no sound as she lay beneath the thick covering, her chest rising and falling steadily.
Across the room, on her dresser, the digital display of the clock changed to show the time as eight a.m. A high pitched, squawking voice eminated from the clock.
"Wheeee-whee-whee-wheeeeeee!"
Her legs, which had been limply resting with her feet on the headboard, suddenly stiffened. After another moment of the continuously repeating 'wheeee-whee-whee-wheeeeee!', she began to flail about under the blanket, unable to free herself from its confines. Muffled curses indicated her dislike at having woken in such a position. After a full minute of struggling, she finally freed herself of the blanket and leapt to her feet, standing on the matress, a pillow clutched in her hand. Her eyes were wild as she searched for the source of the annoying voice. Upon locating her alarm clock, she scowled.
With a battle cry, she launched the pillow at the alarm clock with the precision of someone who is quite used to hurling pillows at unsuspecting objects or people when angered. The pillow struck the clock with a thump, knocking it off the tall dresser.
"Wheeee-whee-wh-" the sound was effectively cut off as the clock's cord was torn from the wall by the momentum of the fall.
Emily glared at the clock that now lay on the ground, her eye twitching. Muttering to herself, she climbed down from her perch on the bed and shuffled to the door, obviously in a very sour mood at having been woken up so early. She threw open her door and stuck her head out.
The house in which she was staying was large. It stood at three stories, including an attic, which had been renovated into an apartment for the landlady. Emily and two other girls were renting rooms in the house for an almost suspiciously small rate They were expected to buy their own food, but sometimes, the landlady completely ignored this rule and bought food for them herself. She did, however, let them pay their parts of the utilities bill and a small housing fee.
All three girls were roomed on the second floor. The floor itself was divided into two bathrooms and four bedrooms, all of which had doors that faced toward the center of the house. In the middle of the second floor, was a large open space that was mostly taken up by a railed off rectangular hole, which allowed those on the second floor to communicate with those on the first floor without having to go down the stairs. The stairs themselves sat at the east side of the hole and led down to the first level. Another set of stairs was connected to the west wall, leading up to the attic. The area from the railing of the hole to the wall was about three feet on each side, allowing one to walk along comfortably in order to reach the bedrooms. The hole itself was nearly six feet in width and ten in length.
Emily's blue eyes combed the upper floor of the house suspiciously, checking for signs of either Amber or the landlady, both of whom were prime suspects for setting her alarm to such an annoying sound. Directly across the open space from her room was Jade's room. Emily knew Jade was not of the personality to set up the alarm clock and therefore shifted her attention to Amber's room, which sat on the east wall, directly behind the stairs. Her eyes narrowed.
Amber was calm and usually quiet, which meant few expected her to do such childish things as set Emily's alarm clock to an annoying sound. However, those who knew her well, knew that it was exactly the kind of thing she would do. In all likelyhood, she was repaying Emily for some prank that had been pulled so long ago that it had been all but forgotten. That was Amber's style. She would wait until her victim was lulled into thinking that she had forgotten the offense, and was thereby caught in a false sense of security, which, in Emily's case, took all of two weeks. Then, she would procure her vengance. It was never anything destructive or dangerous. It was always things that were, while annoying, truely harmless. There would be no proof that she had been the cause of the incident, and there would never be any way to get back at her.
The landlady was suspect because she would sometimes do things to the girls just for the fun of it. She would find it hillarious that Emily had been woken by the voice of the annoying pig from the Geico commercial, especially since Emily had announced that she hated the little creature as soon as she laid eyes on it.
The root of the problem, though, was that there were four young women of similar age sharing a house. Due to the camaraderie between them, childish pranks were a normal occurrence. Jade had just turned twenty six months earlier. Amber was the youngest, having had her nineteenth birthday not long ago. Emily herself would be turning twenty three in October. The landlady was the eldest at twenty six. She was a pretty woman of Japanese heritage. She bore the name Nemu Miakage, and was always fun to have around. The story she had told the girls was that she had inherited the house from a family member and decided to rent it out to those in need of a place to live. Emily, Jade, and Amber had happened to be her first three customers. There were no others. The girls suspected that Nemu had decided that three was enough and was not even considering the other applications, simply due to the handful they turned out to be. Despite a large downstairs that held two more bedrooms as well as a kitchen, living room, dining room, and entertainment room, and a basement that was divided into yet another pair of bedrooms, the girls had remained quite alone for over a year.
Emily shook her head. No, Nemu was not the one who had pulled the alarm clock trick. She never got up before eight thirty on Sunday. Seeing as the clock had not been set the night before, it had to have been set while Emily was sleeping. It was a well known fact that Amber was an avid reader who stayed up late into the night reading classic literature. It would have been the perfect time for her to do the deed.
Scowling at Amber's closed door, and knowing that, at the present moment, she had no means of retaliation, she tromped downstairs to make herself some breakfast.
