I noticed it first because I'm a light sleeper. The television is in the living room and my bedroom door is open and the light change, when it happens, is enough. A shift in the dark. A blue-gray flicker.
I checked the clock the first night: 3:00 AM exactly. I got up and turned the television off. I stood there for a moment, barefoot on the cold floor, feeling the particular irrationality of being awake at 3 AM, and I went back to bed.
The second night: 3:00 AM. The third night: 3:00 AM.
The television was turning on by itself at 3 AM every night. I checked the power settings. I checked the sleep timer — there was no sleep timer set, and in any case a sleep timer turns the television off, not on. I unplugged it overnight and plugged it back in in the morning. That night, at 3:00 AM, it turned on.
The static bothered me more than the malfunction. My television shouldn't be able to display static — it's a digital tuner, and digital signals either resolve or they don't, there's no in-between, there's no snow. But what was on the screen was analog-style static: the full-frame noise, the flickering grain. A channel that should not exist.
I started filming it on my phone.
The fifth night — I had the footage, I was reviewing it the next day — I saw the shape for the first time. It's there from the beginning of the recording, but I missed it in the dark because the room was dark and my eyes weren't adjusted. In the footage: in the upper left quadrant of the static, slightly darker than the surrounding noise, a shape.
Roughly human in outline.
I told myself: pareidolia. Humans find human shapes in random noise — it's an evolved bias, there's literature on it. I told myself: random noise will sometimes cluster into shapes and the mind will connect them.
I kept filming.
By the second week the shape was larger, or closer — I couldn't tell which. By the third week it was centered. By the fourth week I could make out what appeared to be — and I am writing this carefully because I want to be precise — the suggestion of a face. Not a legible face. A region where, within the noise, the features of a face might plausibly be resolving.
My brother watched the footage from weeks one through four in sequence and said: "Something is moving toward the camera."
I had not told him what I thought I was seeing.
Week five: the shape was large enough that it filled most of the frame. The face-region was more defined. I watched the television live that night — turned on the light, sat in my living room at 3 AM, watched the static. I could see it with my naked eye. I could see that it was looking at the camera. At the screen. At me.
I could see that it was pressing against something.
Like something on the other side of glass, pressing its face against the glass to see in.
I moved the television into the garage. I disconnected the power cord and unplugged the coaxial cable and moved the entire unit into the garage and closed the door.
That night, at 3 AM, the television in my bedroom turned on. I do not own a television in my bedroom. I have never owned a television in my bedroom. There is no coaxial outlet in my bedroom. The wall where the light was coming from contains only drywall and insulation.
In the center of the wall, in the static that should not be there, the shape was pressing.
It had found a different screen.