"I guess it won't hurt us if we're not the ones who it's mad at" I said. "You guys probably don't even have to close your eyes, you can't see it anyway!" I took a deep breath and readied myself. "Okay, I'll close my eyes, you guys walk forward and pull me with you."

"Xiao Yong, no!" Zhao Jie said. "It's too dangerous! Did you forget how crazy the little baby ghost got? If it weren't for Master Ge, we'd probably be dead!"

"I mean you're not wrong." I told him. "It would be pretty terrible if this guy tried to jump into one of us."

I took another deep breath. "Why don't you guys go? I'll stay here and see what I can do about him." I closed my eyes and traced my hands into a Taoist rite. Breathing in through my nose I started the process of inviting my spirit friend.

Zhao Jie saw what I was doing and grabbed the others, pulling them away from me. "Step back! He's using Taosim!" He said with awe.

My eyes still closed, I felt the shadow man step back from me as well. I dared a peek, not interrupting the incantation and saw him standing across the road. The dark figure's head was cocked to the side as if he was watching me curiously.

I finished the familiar incantation and called out the words, "Spirits, hear me! In the name of the Grand Supreme Elderly Lord, I command you! Appear!"

The familiar warmth and weight settled into my head. I felt the presence of my contracted spirit and its deep voice rumbled through my body. "This is no amulet crafting, I see. Have you summoned me to destroy this black spirit?"

My new companion must have sensed my hesitation because he began to rumble a deep laughter. "No! You may be more powerful than it, but I don't want to ruin his reincarnation! Help me frighten this shadow spirit away. We need to scare him off so we can get home!" I said out loud.

A flash of green light filled my eyes and the warmth pulsed inside of me. The deep laughter rolled on until it finally said, "Fine. You're such a generous boy." It held out the word boy until I could feel it shivering in my teeth. My body then moved on its own accord. Guided by the spirit within me, I took three grand steps towards the black shadow ghost. It hesitated, and then stepped back in shivering motions.

The spirit spoke through me in a voice that didn't belong to me. "Clown, if you want to keep flickering in this world then you'll stay far away from us!"

The black shadow gave a final shutter and then disappeared, leaving behind nothing but the fallen snow. I clenched mental hands around the presence in my mind and squeezed, whispering to it in my head to stay incase the shadow man returned.

I turned, forcing my own will back into my legs, and called to Zhao Jie, "It's gone, let's move!"

The party shuffled forwards and I felt my grasp on the spirit inside of me waiver. Not wanting to loose another stream of energy, I focused on the words 'thank you' and muttered the incantation to send it away. Without protest, the warmth and energy filling me flooded upwards like a spout had grown from my head. The strength in my legs flooded away and I stumbled forwards.

Shang Haoming caught me and held me upright. "Phew! Are you getting the hang of that?" He asked in a jolly tone.

"I'm up to twenty minutes now!" I said, feeling the toll weigh down on me. "Now come on, we gotta get home."

We walked in silence to You Xiaoqing's house. A sense of pride seemed to be emanating from each of the boys in the group. "We saved the girl." I thought with a smile. "Ku Tou's never gonna let this one go."

We split up at Zhao Jie's house. He and Ku Tou bunked together, while Shang Haoming came to my house. My parents wouldn't mind. When we were getting ready for bed, Shang Haoming pelted me with questions about the ghost.

"What does he look like? Is he powerful? Was he going to try to eat us?"

"I don't know." I said flatly. "And I hope we don't have to find out."

The next week passed quietly. Nobody saw or heard from the ghost and I started to think the whole thing was over. We might have scared it away for good, but that's never the way things work, is it? On the ninth day, a senior student that everybody called Ping Di ran into something on the road to the school.

The boy was walking down the path when nature's call hit him and he veered to the nearest ditch to take a leak. He went to the side of the road, oblivious of what had been there only two weeks before and unzipped his fly.

As the stream hit the snow and forged a yellow tunnel into it, an inhuman voice called out, "That is my skin! My skin!"

The steam billowing from the yellowing snow burst into a cloud that blackened in front of the boy. With a scream, the cloud shaped into a black figure that stretched out towards the flow of piss. The boy let out a terrified screech and fell backwards, darkening his pants in an attempt to get away. Without pausing to tuck himself back in, Ping Di scrambled backwards and rushed to the school.

I'll never forget the uproar of laughter that followed Ping Di's dash into the building. He burst through the door, exposed and drenched from the waist down, screaming about monstrous shadows of yellow snow.

When I finally got to him after class he was less than willing to talk about it.

"What did you see?" I asked him in the hallway. He turned on me with knuckles raised.

Almost screaming, he cried, "Which class are you from? Why are you even asking? You just want to laugh at me!" He raised his fist and cocked it back.

I held up my hands and backed away a step. "No, no, no! You don't get it! I've seen it too!"

Ping Di brightened at once, dropping his hands and slapping them on his legs. "Did you pee on it too?"

I did my best to quell the smile that threatened. "No my friends and I ran into it over a week ago. It was singing and dancing in the road. I tried to tell everyone, but no one would believe me."

Ping Di leaned down and adjusted his glasses. "It was you! I remember people talking about how you were making up ghost stories! You were right! There really is a ghost!"

He retold his story, including details that the rumors hadn't included. "It made a sound like laughter down an empty hallway and sang at in me in some weird language!"

"That's the one all right." I frowned. "It's back."

Two days later another girl in the school reported hearing something outside the school building. She told everyone who would listen about a shadow that was singing by the window. She was found crying in the bathroom, babbling about a dancing shadow. People listened, students and teachers alike, but no one claimed to hear or see anything outside.

In no time the school administration began reprimanding anyone who was caught telling ghost stories. Our morning message included warnings that detention would be served out to anyone 'intentionally spreading hysteria'.

Two days after the morning message propaganda, parents started coming to the school and demanding that a religious expert be brought in to 'cleanse the grounds' or they'd withdraw their children from classes.

Zhao Jie and I overheard a very heated phone call in the office one day.

"No, of course our curriculum doesn't include the supernatural!" Our head teacher whispered into the receiver. "Look, we cannot allow a religious performance on school grounds. The Education Bureau would go ballistic if they found out we were subjecting the students to prayer meetings and the like! This is an academic institution-" He paused for a moment and held the phone away from his ear. The muffled voice on the other end seemed to be screaming at him. "No! It will not be happening. Good day madam!"

Over the next month, sightings increased substantially. The shadow spirit was always said to have been by the ditch on the road to school, or nearby the school buildings between the dormitory and the gymnasium.

I kept an ear out for any stories that seemed plausible. "They can't all be real." I told Zhao Jie during lunch. "One boy said the ghost popped up in the toilet and asked him for a tissue!" I laughed.

"I heard one kid say it was all bloody and hideous," Ku Tou added, "That's not what you saw right?" I shook my head.

"Na, it was just a shadow figure. Ghosts can't just change their looks any time they want. Those kids have to be making it up for fun." I said.

The reports continued streaming in until one day someone new arrived. We were chatting in the hallway when an old man walked around the corner into the front office. He had gray hair and looked vaguely familiar.

"Who is that?" I asked Shang Haoming.

"I dunno," He said with a grin. "Maybe there's a new master in town!"