A mother had awoken in the middle of the night. Her bedroom was completely dark. She blindly felt around her nightstand for her phone. She picked it up and the bright light emitting from the device illuminated the room with a soft glow.
The time on her cell phone read “2:20”. She sighed. She had awoken as early as 1 AM the past few nights; the cause was likely to be the strange dreams she'd been having. Although tonight, she had no such dreams and she thought this a little strange. She shifted in her bed uncomfortably. Something didn't feel right about the room. It was as if the walls and windows were watching her move, as if they were silently judging her harshly, giving her a verdict that she didn't deserve.
She eventually drifted back off to sleep and had a pleasant rest… That is, until she awoke to the sound of screaming. It appeared to be coming from the alarm clock next to her. She didn't even know why she had it. It didn't display the time because it was broken, and its only other function was that it could act as a radio.
She groaned. Sometimes the alarm clock would turn on by itself, tuning to a station at random. She thought that it must have been the local horror station, which she didn't enjoy very often. It was old fashioned, made to seem like you were listening to radio from a century ago. She flipped the switch on the alarm clock and the screaming ceased. She checked the time on her phone again. “3:32” “Dammit…” She whispered. She had to get up early to go to a job interview she had just scored from the local paper, and she couldn't afford to be late the first day.
She fell asleep again almost immediately. She awoke at 5:00 as she had set the alarm on her phone, (Again, she only uses the radio function on the actual alarm clock.) She quickly got up and started buttoning up a shirt she had chosen for the interview. She turned around, looking at the bed that she had just gotten out of...when she realized something that made her eyes widen and her hands shake in horror.
The alarm clock was on the floor before she went to bed. She knocked it off and forgot to pick it back up.
The thing she had heard in the middle of the night, and had flipped the switch on, was in fact an intercom she used to communicate with her child.