The girl the camera couldn't capture

"Why did we hear knocking when there was no one outside..."

Li Xingyang looked bewildered by the security footage.

Xie Peng said, "Are you an idiot? Obviously, someone was playing a prank. They knocked and ran off. Kids do that all the time in my building."

If only that had been the truth.

Last night, Meng Yifan and I had clearly seen a girl standing outside the door.

The camera I had installed in the living room pointed straight at the front door. When the door was open, it could capture the area outside, even the elevator entrance.

So why had it recorded both Meng Yifan and me, but not that girl?

The sight drained the color from both our faces. Our minds seemed to short-circuit, and we didn't dare follow the thought any further.

The next part of the footage should have shown Meng Yifan scolding the girl and talking to her. But since the girl didn't appear on-screen at all, it looked as though he was talking to himself, raging at thin air like a madman.

And I looked even more idiotic, watching him rage at thin air.

At that point, Xie Peng and Li Xingyang also realized something was wrong.

They looked at Meng Yifan, who had gone blank. "Boss, who were you talking to..."

Meng Yifan trembled all over. He opened his mouth, but couldn't get a single word out.

I figured he was scared out of his wits.

I said shakily, "Someone knocked last night. It was a girl. She came knocking the day before yesterday too, saying she was looking for a woman named Li Xiumei. Meng and I both saw her, so why didn't she show up on the recording..."

Xie Peng and Li Xingyang sprang to their feet, staring at us in horror.

Li Xingyang hurried over and pulled open the living room curtains, trying to let some sunlight in.

But the apartment got very little natural light. Even with the curtains open, the whole living room remained dim.

"H-how is that possible!"

"The camera caught both of you. How could it not catch the girl who knocked?"

Neither of them could make sense of it. Perhaps they had already realized something, but didn't dare say it.

And how was I supposed to explain?

I couldn't bring myself to say that word, especially inside the very apartment where it had happened.

What I couldn't understand was this: if someone really had died in this apartment, and that girl was a ghost... could she be the person who had died here?

Could she be Li Xiumei? But why would she be looking for herself?

If she wasn't Li Xiumei, then who exactly was Li Xiumei?

Thinking back to the changes in those shoe prints, something else puzzled me even more. If this apartment really was haunted, had the ghost come in, or had it gone out...

We continued watching the footage.

Just as I'd suspected, both Meng Yifan and I had been sleepwalking. Before going to bed, I'd even locked the master bedroom door from the inside, but the footage showed me unlocking it in my sleep before opening it.

And Meng Yifan and I had sleepwalked at the same time. Just like the previous night, we emerged from the master bedroom at two o'clock sharp.

One after the other, our eyes tightly shut, we walked over and sat on the living room sofa. Then Meng Yifan picked up the remote and turned on the television.

By this point, Meng Yifan had collapsed onto the floor.

Fear no longer seemed a strong enough word to describe what he was feeling.

Xie Peng and Li Xingyang were badly frightened by the sight of us in the footage too.

The atmosphere in the living room grew oppressive. It was utterly silent, and an indescribable sense of wrongness seemed to fill every corner of the apartment.

I stood up, went straight into the master bedroom, and lay spread-eagled on the bed.

Meng Yifan and the others followed me in. Puzzled by what I was doing, they asked what I was up to.

"If something really happened in this apartment, why wasn't there any record of it in the police's internal files?"

I stared at the ceiling and said, "And the police sent people to make inquiries around here, but they didn't find anything either. That leaves only one explanation. Someone died in here, but nobody knew."

After hearing my reasoning, Meng Yifan and the others turned even paler.

Following that line of reasoning meant a murder had once taken place in this apartment, and nobody knew the killer had killed someone here.

"The couple who bought the place kept saying they felt a pair of eyes watching them, but only when they were in the master bedroom. I suspect the room where it happened might have been this one."

The cement shoe prints on the first night had led to the master bedroom.

And the girl who had come looking for Li Xiumei last night had pointed at the master bedroom with her left hand.

All those strange things together left me with no choice but to suspect the problem lay in the master bedroom.

"Second boss, don't scare us..."

The two young men, Xie Peng and Li Xingyang, were already clinging to each other in fear.

Never mind them-I had nearly wet myself after watching the footage.

Getting caught up in something like this was rotten luck.

Meng Yifan walked over and said, "But neither of us seemed to feel anyone watching us..."

I nodded. Meng Yifan had only spent one night here, while I had spent two, and I hadn't felt that sense of being watched the couple had described either.

"But they didn't experience what we did, did they?"

If the couple had sleepwalked every night and had that girl knocking on their door every night too, they would surely have told us already to get us to take the apartment back.

"I also heard the sound of someone plastering a wall with cement."

With things having reached this point, I no longer had any reason to hold back, so I told Meng Yifan.

After hearing it, Meng Yifan was completely stunned.

I said, "If there really is a pair of eyes in this room, where do you think they'd be hidden?"

At my words, Meng Yifan and the others began searching all around, trying to find where those eyes were hidden.

That was also why I'd lain down on the bed. I wanted to recreate the feeling of being watched that the couple had described, then find those eyes.

The ceiling?

Not very likely.

The wall behind the nightstands?

That wasn't very likely either. The other side of that wall was already outside the apartment, and the wall wasn't very thick.

The wall with the window was even less likely. As for the wall facing the bed, the living room was on the other side, with the television mounted on it. It was far too thin to hide anything.

That left only the wall with the wardrobe.

"Have you noticed there's something off about the size of the master bedroom? It's actually the same size as the second bedroom."

I soon spotted what was wrong and immediately pointed it out to Meng Yifan and the others.

People in our line of work didn't necessarily have degrees in architecture, but we all knew something about the structure and layout of homes.

Normally, no matter how big an apartment was, the master bedroom would always be a little bigger than the second bedroom. Otherwise, how would you distinguish between them?

But in this apartment, the second bedroom was already small. The master bedroom should have taken up more space, yet it was absurdly tiny.

No designer in the world would plan it that way, especially since this was a spacious, single-level apartment of over a hundred square meters.

Unless... this master bedroom had originally been bigger.

And someone had deliberately concealed that part of the space.