Meng Yifan was dead to the world when my call jolted him awake.
"Second Boss, do you even know what time it is? Don't you sleep?" he mumbled, his voice thick with drowsiness.
"Get over here—now. Something's wrong, I'm in trouble!" I practically yelled into the phone.
The second the words left my mouth, I heard the distinct sound of Meng Yifan springing out of bed.
"Yifan, what are you doing…?" A woman's lazy voice drifted over the line right after—it was Meng Yifan's girlfriend.
"Go back to sleep. My brother's in trouble, I gotta rush over there right now," he shot back, no trace of sleep left in his tone.
A moment later, I heard the thud of his footsteps as he bolted down the stairs in a hurry.
Judging by the sound, he hadn't even bothered to change out of his slippers.
"Meng, don't hang up. I'm kinda scared…" My voice trembled a little as I spoke.
"I'm on my way, just hold tight!" he replied firmly.
Keeping the call connected made me feel a little safer, like I wasn't all alone out here in the dark.
To be honest, I'd never considered myself a coward—not until last night, anyway.
Everything that had happened was just… weird, in a way that defied all logic and explanation.
If I'd somehow wandered from the master bedroom to the living room in my sleep, and even turned on the TV without realizing it, I could've chalked it up to sleepwalking—even though I'd never sleepwalked a day in my life.
But the cement on the floor? How the hell was I supposed to explain that?
There was no rational explanation for it. None at all.
About twenty minutes later, the headlights of a car cut through the darkness, and Meng Yifan pulled up beside me.
"What the hell happened? Did you actually see a ghost or something?" He shot me a worried look, slamming the car door shut behind him as he jogged over.
I spilled everything—the midnight knock, the girl in black with the red heels, waking up on the sofa, the TV left on, and those damn cement footprints that had vanished into thin air.
When I finished, Meng Yifan stood there rooted to the spot, staring at me with his mouth hanging open. He leaned against a nearby tree, looking completely dumbfounded for a solid minute.
"Bro… you're not messing with me, are you?" he finally managed to say.
"Does it look like I'm messing with you?" I shot back, my voice cracking with frustration. "I ran out of that house barefoot, for God's sake! I didn't even grab my laptop on the way out!"
Meng Yifan could see how shaken I was—how truly terrified I was. There was no faking the fear in my eyes.
Still, he wasn't fully convinced. He eyed me skeptically. "Okay, I'll buy the midnight knocker, and I'll even buy that you might've sleepwalked to the sofa and turned on the TV. But the cement footprints? Are you sure you didn't imagine them? Maybe you were half-asleep and saw things?"
"I swear on my life I didn't imagine them!" I almost shouted. "The living room was dark, yeah, but the TV was on—it cast enough light for me to see every single detail clearly! I wasn't hallucinating!"
"Fine then. Let's go back and check it out," Meng Yifan said, locking his car. He grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the residential complex.
Truth be told, I didn't want to go back there—not one bit. The sky was still pitch-black, and the thought of stepping foot inside that house again made my blood run cold.
But I had to prove I wasn't crazy. I had to show him what I'd seen.
It didn't take long for us to make our way back upstairs to the apartment.
But the second we stepped into the living room, my jaw dropped. I stood there frozen, staring at the floor in disbelief.
The spotless, gleaming hardwood floor stared back at me. There wasn't a single trace of cement anywhere—not a smudge, not a puddle, not even a faint stain. The bizarre footprints I'd seen so clearly just an hour ago were gone. Vanished without a trace.
Meng Yifan turned to me, his expression a mix of exasperation and disbelief. "Alright, genius. Where are these footprints you were going on about? I don't see jack squat."
I pointed frantically at the exact spot where the footprints had been, my voice rising in panic. "Right there! That's where they were! There were dozens of them, I saw them crystal clear! How could they just… disappear?"
Had someone snuck in while I was gone and cleaned everything up? It was possible—I'd been so scared that I'd forgotten to close the front door when I ran out.
"Are you kidding me? You dragged me out of bed at this ungodly hour for this?" Meng Yifan threw his hands up in frustration. "I swear, you've lost your mind!"
"I'm not lying! I swear to God I'm not!" I insisted, practically begging him to believe me. "If I'm making this up, may I never have kids and watch my whole family thrive without me! Happy now?"
Seeing how desperate I was, Meng Yifan's skepticism faded a little. He frowned, thinking it over for a second. Then his eyes lit up.
"Wait a minute. Let's check the security footage. The cameras don't lie—they'll show us everything that happened in the house last night."
I didn't waste another second arguing. I pulled out my laptop and booted it up, quickly pulling up the camera feeds. I rewound the footage to exactly eleven o'clock last night—the time I'd headed to the master bedroom to sleep.
The cameras confirmed the first part of my story without a hitch: the girl in black had shown up right at midnight, knocking insistently on the door. That part was 100% real, no question about it.
And honestly, on its own, that part wasn't even that weird. A wrong address, a confused stranger—totally explainable.
But then I cranked the playback speed up to 20x, fast-forwarding through the hours of the night.
And that's when we saw it—the moment that made both of our blood run cold, the moment that turned everything we thought we knew upside down.