Suddenly, instead of music, there was a crackling in her earphones. Clara stopped to fumble around and see what had gone wrong. Before she could do much, the crackling was replaced by a voice. "Hello, Clara," it said. Terribly unoriginal.
*switching story lines?*
"I have a message for you." Clara waited, anticipating a threat or something else of the sinister kind, wondering how the hell this got on to her player. But, there was nothing. Just about two minutes of silence, and then her player [Fred?] switched to the next song. Clara gave it a sarcastic look, realized she was acting like Harmony would, then wore a grin which gradually shifted into a mystified expression.
*
Clara sat idly, staring into her teacup, then suddenly got up, hesitated, and then moved Harmony out of the way and sat down by her computer, got to her music, and started looking for something."What are you doing?" Harmony asked, and received no reply.
"Hey. Hey. Flowerpot."
Clara continued to ignore her, but stopped scrolling. [Fred] contained three songs with the title "unknown". Slowly, Clara moved her mouse over the first.
Cli-click.
"There's a little church-yard, just along the way. Used to be Lambeth's finest array, of tom-"
Cli-click.
"Clara, really." Harmony was getting impatient."
Soft piano music floated through the speakers, and Clara remained silent. She held her breath, and clicked on the third song.
A moment of silence. Then - "Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage-"
Clara breathed out, and turned it off. She turned to look at Harmony, who had been waiting for a while with her face portraying dozens of questions. Clara laughed lightly, then said "Fine. I'll tell you. Something kind of weird happened last week.."
*
Clara wondered what to do. She stared at the walls for a bit, then the ceiling, then she remembered that she had [Fred] with her, which cheered her up at once. she dug around in her bag until she found him. Clara wondered what she'd like to listen to, couldn't think of anything, so she switched to the list of Artists and scrolled down quickly, hoping something would jump out at her. Something did, but subtly - just enough to make her subconscious make a connection. It then tried nagging her about it, albeit unsuccessfully. She might have stopped for half a second, she might not have. In the end she settled for 'Manic Street Preachers'.
*
Clara eyed [Fred], the odd name of the song, and cautiously clicked play.
"Clara, really," said Harmony's voice, and she spun, but no one was there. No Harmony.
then she nearly smacked herself in the face as she realized that the song had come from [Fred]. That was the conversation she'd had with Harmony the day before. It had somehow been recorded.. It was almost as if whoever had done this was mockingly screwing with her attempts of finding out what it all was. Actually, no, this person was definitely mocking her.
"And it can't be Thomas or something?"
"Nah, he's smart, and he can be sneaky, but not nearly sneaky enough fo-" Click.
And again, there were a couple minutes of silence, then [Fred] switched to a random song.
