Wake Up

Chapter 5

"Pixel, are you there?" Stephanie waved at the camera on her friend's front door. The lens swiveled towards her and Pixel's voice crackled out.

"Hey, Stephanie. Woah, you look beat. What's up?"

Stephanie brushed some hair out of her face. The oppressive heat kept rising each passing day. It frizzed her hair and made her sweat coat her arms in a sticky peppering. The camera picked up the shadows under Stephanie's eyes too, heavy and dark.

Pixel kept his house cool and dry for his computers and Stephanie shivered as she stepped inside. Once she was settled on the couch she told Pixel everything.

"A guy who ruins dreams? Sounds like your circuits are fried, Stephanie," Pixel said.

"He doesn't just ruin them," Stephanie insisted, "he comes after you! It's like the things he does really happened when you wake up."

"You've got some abnormal data," Pixel allowed, "but the heat's playing tricks on you. My computers do all sorts of crazy stuff when they overheat too."

"You really think that I and Ziggy and Trixie are all dreaming about the same guy because of the heat? Come on, Pixel!"

"Stingy hasn't dreamed about this guy, has he?" Pixel asked. Stephanie frowned.

"I don't know. After the other day he won't come out of his house or even answer the door! He won't answer the phone either. I'm worried he saw that guy and..."

"And what? He's only in your dreams. He's like a computer program. When the program's not running, he's not there. It's not like he's real or something, or he'd be there when you're awake too, right?"

"That's kind of what I wanted to ask you about," Stephanie said. "Trixie pulled this mean joke on Ziggy the other night but she says she only did it in her dream. Do any of your cameras have footage from that night?"

"You want to prove Trixie did it?" Pixel asked.

"Trixie," Stephanie said, "or someone else... maybe you could see if anything else weird has been going on the past few nights too. Would you, please?"

"If it'll help you sleep better," Pixel shrugged, "but it's going to take some time. I'll let you know what I find tomorrow."

"Thank you Pixel!" Stephanie jumped up from the couch. "I'm going to try Stingy again. I'm getting worried about him."

Stephanie ran back outside. The door was only open a few seconds but it let in a humid gust of air like a sickly exhale before the A/C unit dried the room. Pixel shook his head at his friend's crazy ideas. Still, he would honor her request. He sat down and got to work.

Pixel dedicated every monitor to reviewing the footage. Even with so many screens to go over every camera at the same time it kept him busy for the rest of the afternoon and into the night. He was used to staying up late playing games but focusing all of his attention on watching hours and hours of recordings was far more tedious.

The streets of LazyTown remained largely unchanged, black and empty throughout the footage, only the time stamps assuring Pixel that the feeds were playing. Nothing out of the ordinary came up during the night Stephanie first had her nightmare. It was equally uneventful the night that Ziggy claimed to have a nightmare too. Pixel rested his chin in his hand as the glow from the monitors glazed over his eyes in repetitive and unremarkable frames for hours on end.

It wasn't until he was a couple hours into the feeds from the night Trixie had supposedly had her nightmare that Pixel saw anything of interest. The camera overlooking the street to Ziggy's house had been as boring as all the others until suddenly a shape appeared in the far corner of the monitor. Somebody had been taking a midnight stroll, and it was captured on tape.

The shadow was much taller than Trixie. It looked like a man but was too dark to make out defining features. Pixel typed rapidly on his keyboard, trying to improve the resolution and zoom in. He paused the footage just as the man crossed in front of the camera. Was this the guy Stephanie was talking about?

Pixel leaned in and wiped some sweat away from his forehead. His computers thrummed around him and filled the air with a faint electrical smell. The warmth from all of the machines made his eyes heavy and he squinted to focus on the image.

The figure frozen on screen raised his arm and waved. Pixel blinked and checked the time stamp. It was still paused. He stared as the man resumed walking through the frozen scenery, coming closer to the camera with every step.

All across the room the other monitors flashed with pops and sizzles, abruptly erratic in their performance. The various camera feeds broke down into twitchy fragments and artifacts that Pixel couldn't correct or close no matter how he banged on his keyboard. The electrical odor intensified as his computers chugged to process the corrupted video files, raising the temperature a few more stifling degrees.

With a pop every monitor blinked out in unison before coming back online again. On every screen the man's face filled the frame, staring at Pixel with a toothy sneer.

"Found your footage, Gizmo-Guy? I found you..."

The man raised his hand towards the lens, reaching for Pixel. On every screen his hand traced the glass of the monitors before passing through into the bedroom. His ferocious grin stretched on dozens of identical faces as the horde of him crawled out of all the monitors simultaneously, piling in and reaching all their spindly arms and crooked fingers for Pixel.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP—

Pixel threw his arms over his head and tumbled out of his chair. The alarm he'd set for himself rang in his ears as he stared around his room. All of the monitors flickered and sputtered with junk data, glitched out beyond recognition. Except for one, its static image smirking back at him.