The Blue Screen Wake

I thought I knew what it was like to fear the dark, but that was before I moved into the apartment on Maple Street. The room was cramped, with the bed pushed into one corner and my desk, bearing my old desktop computer, in the opposite. It was a hand-me-down from my uncle, a bulky tower with a CRT monitor that hummed like a dying wasp. The first night, I shut it down properly, watching the screen shrink to a bright point of light and vanish. I fell asleep to the sound of rain against the window. At 3:23 AM, I woke to a pale blue glow. The monitor was on, a solid blue rectangle in the darkness. The power button on the tower was lit, but I distinctly remembered switching it off. I chalked it up to a faulty power strip, so I hit the switch on that, too, and went back to bed. The next night, the same thing. Blue light. 3:23. I started leaving the power strip on, but the computer off. Still, the monitor would flicker to life on its own.

I told my roommate, Sam, who laughed and called it a quirk. But he couldn’t explain why the computer would boot fully, the hard drive grinding through the startup chime, my login screen glowing in the dark. He suggested I check for malware, so I ran a full scan. Nothing. I changed my password to something impossible to guess, a string of random characters I had to write down. The next night, I woke at 3:23, and there was my desktop, all my icons in perfect order, my browser open to a site I had never visited. It was a blog titled ‘The Silent Hour’, and the only post was a single sentence: ‘You’re not alone in the dark.’

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the draft. I started leaving the laptop in hibernation instead of shutting down, hoping that would stop the ritual. It didn’t matter. At 3:23, the screen would ignite, the system would wake from its deep sleep, and I would find my files rearranged, my folders renamed. Once, I found a new text document on the desktop, titled ‘wake_up.doc’. Inside, it read: ‘Stop ignoring me. I see you when you sleep.’

I began to dread the hour. I would lie in bed, wide awake, watching the clock on my nightstand tick closer to 3:23. The night the laptop woke me with the sound of a video playing, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The screen showed a grainy, black-and-white recording of a bedroom, and in the corner, a shadowy figure was hunched over a desk. The figure’s head slowly turned, and even though the face was fuzzy, I felt it was looking right at me. I slammed the lid shut, but the audio continued, a high-pitched whine that grew into a whisper: ‘You can’t close me out.’

I yanked the power cord, but the laptop stayed on, the screen glowing brighter. In a panic, I grabbed a towel and doused it with water, but the electronics sizzled and sparked, and the machine went dark. For the first time in weeks, I slept through the night.

The next morning, Sam was shaking me awake. ‘Dude, your laptop is fried. I found it in the bathroom sink.’ He held up the sodden wreck. The screen was cracked, waterlogged. I was relieved. The entity, whatever it was, was gone.

But that night, at 3:23, I heard a low hum from the corner of my room. My old desktop computer, which I had unplugged and put in the closet, was humming. I opened the closet door, and the monitor was on, glowing blue. On the screen was a single word: ‘Wake.’

I moved out the next week. I couldn’t take it. I told my landlord there was a mold issue, but it was the fear I carried with me. In my new apartment, I have no electronics in my room. I sleep with the lights on. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear a faint hum, and I see a blue glow from under the door. And I know that not even distance can keep the wakeful ones away.