Picture a young woman, maybe college age. She is living alone, and for school decides to buy a mini-cassette recorder so she can tape lectures. She plays around with it, making sure she knows how to use it… and as she’s doing this she gets a phone call and answers it, inadvertantly leaving the tape running. She forgets all about it after the call’s over, and falls asleep.
In the morning she sees the recorder and realizes she left it running… picks it and and rewinds it, then hits play… for no particular reason, just to hear herself sleeping, she figures.
And just before the tape runs out, she hears a voice say, “Is she asleep?” and another reply, “I’ll check.”
For some reason, this scenario has been running through my head. It is extremely bizaare, like the beginning of a story that I have no idea how to finish.
Thanks Bricker! I’m home alone, getting ready for bed, and I decide to check the board one last time. Now I’m completely creeped out and will have to sleep with the lights on.
Incidentally, I have recorded myself sleeping before. I have been told that I snore a little and wanted to see if it was true. I don’t remember how long the tape was but I got bored after the first few minutes and stopped listening. Now I’m wondering if I should’ve skipped to the end.
Hehehe creepy, but interesting. Well, since she’s still alive, they obviously didn’t want to kill her. Perhaps they took something from her. I doubt it was a common burglar because they would work alone I would think and wouldn’t want to make much noise like that. It sounds more like a prank of some kind or they’re stealing some very specific from her for a specific purpose. You could turn it into a mystery. Sorry, that’s just the writer in me running wild
When are you going to realize being normal isn’t necessarily a good thing?
Now everybody, just calm down. We always check tape decks/videocameras for tape before we start, but only after we take polaroids of the room so we can put everything back the way it was. - MC
I think with the right treatment it could be worked up into a fairly strong short story as it stands. The danger is that any exposition of what was actually happening would detract from the initial creepyness.
