Blake had been obsessively tinkering with the audio tape that Sarah had provided—playing it forward and backward, second by second.
Finally, when Blake turned the volume to its highest level, he managed to hear a man's voice amidst the static.
"I don't want to die. I still have a wife and child. Someone help me... tell my wife and daughter that I love them."
The voice was so mournful and despairing that anyone who heard it would shudder involuntarily.
After repeated experimentation by Regulus Blake, the director, and the special effects team, they finally reproduced the audio. The result was so unsettling that no one ever wanted to hear it again.
Blake became certain that Sarah had indeed come into contact with something beyond human comprehension. He placed the tape recorder in the living room.
At dawn, Mrs. Blake and Sarah sat together in the living room, preparing to have a conversation about Sarah's unusual behavior.
Blake also came up from the basement. Seeing the tense silence between mother and daughter, he pressed the button on the recorder in the living room.
With a few adjustments, the tape began to play the man's desperate voice.
Mrs. Blake was stunned, while Sarah wore an expression of calm inevitability.
"You see, Mom? This is what I've been talking about. Those ghosts are always around me."
Blake nodded in agreement.
"Mrs. Blake, your daughter doesn't need a psychiatrist. She's not mentally ill. What she needs is your understanding."
Blake whispered gently into Mrs. Blake's ear, only to receive a furious glare in return.
It seemed his words had frightened her, and Blake had no choice but to apologize and step aside, retreating to the corner of the room.
For this scene, Regulus Blake had previously discussed the approach with the director. They chose to shoot it from an intentionally misleading perspective—namely, from Blake's point of view. But from Mrs. Blake's perspective, what she saw was far more unbelievable than anything Sarah had described.
Mother and daughter got into the car again, but this time they were headed to a grave—the grave of Sarah's deceased father.
"Mom, is today Dad's death anniversary?"
Sarah continued working on her test sheets in the car. Her thick stack of answer sheets quickly filled with neat responses under her pen.
"Today isn't your father's death anniversary. After he passed away three years ago, I tried hard to forget him and live a normal life again. But for the past three years, I've missed him constantly… yet I never once brought you to visit his grave."
Mrs. Blake covered her mouth and began to cry as she parked the car, not stopping until the cars behind them started honking furiously due to the traffic light change.
Sarah no longer remembered what her father looked like. All the family photos had long been put away by Mrs. Blake. Only one photo remained in her mother's bedroom—and Sarah had never been allowed to look at it.
"Dad, what did you look like?"
Sarah set down her pen and murmured to herself.
"Mom, I heard that people don't change after they die. So… Dad should still look the same, right?"
Sarah suddenly turned to ask Mrs. Blake. The question caught her mother off guard.
"Maybe that's true. After death, people retain the appearance they had at that time. That's probably why ghosts look so frightening—they appear just as they did when they died, and that's never a pleasant sight."
Mrs. Blake thought of her poor husband and didn't see anything wrong with her answer.
"Maybe some people don't even realize they're dead, so they appear just as they were in life."
Sarah suddenly turned to look out the window, then closed her eyes. Gathering her courage, she looked again.
"Mom… there was a traffic accident up ahead. A lot of people died."
Sarah's words shocked Mrs. Blake. And sure enough, the traffic ahead was heavily congested.
In Sarah's eyes, a crowd of tragically deceased souls were moving in different directions, as if searching for the road back home.
Then, a woman in a long red dress appeared. She was wielding a dagger, cutting down the ghosts and forcing them to die a second time. Her actions triggered a wave of outrage from the surrounding spirits, who began to swarm her.
Sarah stared in stunned disbelief. How could someone kill ghosts?
After eliminating the nearby spirits, the woman in the red dress spotted Sarah inside the car.
"Hey! Don't be afraid. Are you all alone here?"
The woman in red seemed to completely ignore everyone else in the surrounding vehicles—as if she could see only Sarah.
She even opened the car door, ready to carry off the abandoned girl sitting inside.
Mrs. Black suddenly noticed that the car door had opened, yet Sarah, sitting on the other side, hadn't touched it.
"What just happened, Sarah?"
Mrs. Black anxiously asked her daughter.
"Mom! Didn't you see it?"
Sarah was visibly nervous. The woman in the red dress standing before her—her mother couldn't see her. And from the look in the woman's eyes, it seemed as if Sarah was the only person she could see.
"Sweetheart, who are you talking to?"
The woman in red looked toward the front seats—there was nothing, no one. None of the nearby cars had people in them either. The road was littered with bodies.
"I have to stay in the car. I'm not going anywhere."
Sarah was a little confused but still made the wise choice to stay inside the car.
"All right, then. This world seems to have changed. Keep yourself safe."
The woman in red had no way of convincing Sarah otherwise. After all, she couldn't drag along a child who refused to follow her. She stepped out of the vehicle, shut the door, and gave Sarah a reassuring, encouraging look before heading off in another direction, eliminating every ghost in her path.
Mrs. Black first saw the car door open on its own, then her daughter appeared to be talking to someone she couldn't see, then rejecting that person—and finally, the car door shut by itself. The entire sequence was inexplicable.
Mrs. Black had never trusted her daughter this much before, but Sarah had been experiencing increasingly strange phenomena.
"Sarah! Tell me what just happened. I believe you. Just tell me, and I'll help you figure it out."
Mrs. Black had never imagined that one day she would place such complete trust in her daughter. Even if it sounded like nonsense, she was determined to make sense of it all.
What followed was a silent exchange. Inside the car, mother and daughter appeared to be speaking. Sarah kept explaining, and Mrs. Black listened and analyzed everything she said.
"Some people die, but don't realize they're dead—or they don't feel it. So they appear just as they did in life. That woman in the red dress must have been like that. You can see her, which means she can see you. But she can't see any other living people. And she thinks the other ghosts are monsters—so she kills them."
Mrs. Black racked her brain to explain what Sarah had experienced, trying to make it all sound reasonable—so reasonable that even she could hardly believe it. But she knew she had to do this, because these bizarre explanations might just be the truth.
Thanks to the efforts of the traffic police, the vehicle detoured around the accident scene. The sight was horrifying—many had died, and even more were injured. Amid the chaos, a flash of red stood out. The woman in the red dress was now being placed into a body bag.
Mrs. Black and Sarah both saw her.
"Mom! That's the woman in the red dress from earlier!"
Sarah shut her eyes, unable to bear the tragic sight of the dead. But she had come to a new understanding about ghosts.
To some ghosts, the world looks completely different. They believe they're still alive and interpret the world through their own perceptions.
Mrs. Black didn't say much after that. She simply drove to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
With a bouquet of fresh flowers in hand, Mrs. Black and Sarah stood before a gravestone.
"This can't be! Black was just the tenant living in our basement!"
Sarah saw the photo on the gravestone and suddenly shouted. The man in the photo looked exactly like the "Mr. Black" who had always been around.
"Sarah! He's your father. He never left us. The basement was originally his study."
Mrs. Black burst into tears and hugged her daughter tightly. She hadn't realized that for the past three years, her husband's spirit had been by their side all along—she had never truly been alone.
Back home, Black was tidying up the room. As a tenant, it was the only thing he could do.
"Hey, Black, we're home!"
Sarah greeted him as she and Mrs. Black stepped inside.
"We're home, Black!"
Mrs. Black smiled and looked in the direction her daughter was facing, offering a warm greeting.
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