A knock at midnight

I opened the front door to the apartment.

Once the lights came on, lavish furnishings filled my view.

With over a hundred square meters of space, even I was a little envious.

The apartment had a great layout, neat and square. It was quiet both day and night, with hardly any noise.

Its only drawback was the lack of natural light, which was also why apartments in this building were a little cheaper than those in the others.

I put on a pair of disposable slippers and installed the cameras first, one in every room.

After I finished setting them up, the feeds from every room appeared on my laptop.

With the preparations done, I had nothing else to do.

Bored out of my mind, I searched online for why someone might "always feel a pair of eyes watching them at home."

The search actually turned up quite a bit.

Some people said that the "feeling of being watched" wasn't your imagination. Something really was watching you, but it existed in a different dimension, so you couldn't see it, while it could see you.

People with a strong sixth sense could feel that they were being watched.

And the "something" they were talking about was a ghost.

The people online made it all sound convincing. They also said that if you really felt you were being watched, someone must have died in the apartment-and died violently, at that.

So, once the midnight hour had passed, you absolutely must not go outside or open the door, or something would happen.

After reading those explanations, I just laughed them off.

If I'd read them as a kid, I would have believed them, then embellished the whole thing when I told Meng Yifan.

But I was an adult now. Why would I believe that nonsense?

I closed the webpage and played a few rounds of a game. At around eleven, I decided to go to sleep in the master bedroom.

I slept well and had no trouble sleeping in unfamiliar beds. Within minutes of lying down, I was asleep.

I had no idea how long I'd slept when, through my grogginess, I heard knocking.

For a sound sleeper like me, once I was asleep, I couldn't be bothered with any noise. When I was a kid, my dad came home from a night shift without his keys and knocked all night, but I never opened the door. When I finally let him in the next morning, he gave me a beating before taking me to school.

But tonight, the knocking was loud as fuck, and it wouldn't stop, as though whoever it was would keep knocking until dawn if I didn't answer.

In the end, I climbed out of bed and went to open the door, thoroughly pissed off.

"Who is it? It's the middle of the night. Forgot your keys?"

I called out without thinking.

Then I froze.

It suddenly hit me that this wasn't my rented apartment. This was someone else's home. Besides, my apartment had one bedroom and a living room, and I lived there alone.

Who would be knocking at this hour?

When nobody outside answered, I hurried over and looked through the peephole.

A young woman stood outside, dressed entirely in black and wearing red high heels. She was very pretty, too.

I was about to open the door and ask who she wanted, but for some reason, the warning I'd read online suddenly came back to me: never open the door after the midnight hour...

The midnight hour ran from eleven at night to one in the morning. I remembered it had been eleven when I went into the master bedroom, which meant that time had already passed.

My right hand was already on the doorknob, but suddenly, I didn't dare open it...

Not that I believed in that stuff. It was just that a guy away from home had to look out for his safety.

I quickly called through the door again. "Who are you? Who are you looking for?"

This time, the young woman answered. "I'm looking for Li Xiumei. Is Li Xiumei home?"

Her voice was icy, without the slightest hint of an apology for waking me up.

Who the hell was Li Xiumei?

The current owner's surname wasn't Li, and neither was his wife's. I even remembered the surnames of the couple who'd sold the place, and neither of them was a Li.

Even if Li Xiumei was a relative or friend of the current owner, I couldn't exactly call him in the middle of the night to ask.

Besides, I wanted to get back to sleep, so I replied, "You've got the wrong place. There's no Li Xiumei here."

There was silence outside again.

I quickly looked through the peephole once more. The woman still hadn't left. She hadn't even moved, and she kept staring at the door.

I admit her behavior scared me. I felt like there was something wrong with her head. I'd told her she had the wrong place, so why wouldn't she leave?

I went back to the master bedroom, grabbed my phone and cigarettes, then spent over ten minutes on the toilet.

After taking a shit, I checked the peephole again and saw that she had gone.

"What kind of lunatic comes around in the middle of the night...?"

I breathed a sigh of relief and returned to the master bedroom to get back to sleep.

Although I was mostly awake by then, I still fell asleep shortly after lying down.

I slept soundly through the rest of the night. Nobody woke me again.

This time, I slept for a long while, until my full bladder finally woke me. I still didn't want to get up, though, and as I lay half asleep, I heard another sound.

It wasn't knocking. It sounded like a television.

But there was no TV in the master bedroom, only in the living room. Why could I hear it?

And the bed in the master bedroom was hard, but whatever I was lying on now felt soft, as though I was on the living room sofa.

I jolted upright, instantly wide awake.

I realized I wasn't in the master bedroom at all. I was lying on the living room sofa, and the TV was on.

My eyes widened as confusion and terror hit me almost simultaneously. I clearly remembered falling asleep in the master bedroom, and I hadn't turned on the TV once. Who had switched it on?

How had I ended up sleeping in the living room?

In the glow of the television, I noticed several patches of wet cement on the floor. They looked like marks left by shoes. I say "looked like" because the prints were strange: a dot at the back and a pointed shape at the front, as though they'd been made by high heels.

I followed the trail with my eyes and saw that it led all the way to the master bedroom doorway.

The bedroom door stood wide open, and the prints vanished at the threshold.

The rows of footprints made my scalp prickle. Without another thought, I grabbed my phone, threw open the front door, and rushed out without even putting on my shoes, racing downstairs like a madman.

I ran out of Block Three and kept running until I was outside the apartment complex. Only then did I collapse onto the ground, gasping for breath.

What the hell were those footprints?

I'd been sleeping perfectly well in the master bedroom. Who had moved me into the living room?

I suddenly remembered the woman who'd knocked last night. She'd been wearing high heels-a pair of red high heels!

Could she... have sneaked inside while I was asleep and switched on the TV?

Had she left those wet footprints, too?

But even if she'd done all of that, how had she moved me into the living room?

That whole series of strange events left me frightened.

Whether it was a ghost or a person behind it, I didn't dare go back to that apartment alone.

I hurriedly called Meng Yifan on my phone to ask for help.