Chapter 44

Ning Shu and her roommates called up the pen spirit again.

“Pen spirit, pen spirit, if you’d keep our bond, draw a circle on the page.”

This time Yi Qiu only had to say it once. The pen spirit came, and the pen began drawing circles on the paper of its own accord.

Ning Shu said, loud and clear, “Since you’ve kept yourself quiet lately, I’ll help you this once. What do you want me to do?”

“Ningning,” Yi Qiu said, “you can’t ask it like that.”

“How, then?”

Yang Qing explained. “You have to lead it a step at a time. It can’t talk. It can only answer yes or no.”

“Why not just let it into my body,” Ning Shu said. “Then it can tell us straight out.”

At that, the pen shot over to no and started circling furiously.

The pen spirit did not want Ning Shu’s body. It didn’t dare.

“It got into Fang Ruoyun last time,” Yi Qiu said.

Ning Shu wasn’t Fang Ruoyun. The pen spirit could have borrowed all the courage in the world and it still wouldn’t have gone near her.

“Questions it is, then.”

Yi Qiu thought, and put the first one. “Were you a student at this school, when you were alive?”

The pen moved slowly to yes and circled.

Yi Qiu drew a breath. “If you’re a boy, choose yes. A girl, choose no.”

The pen went to no and circled.

“You lived in this dormitory block?” Ning Shu asked.

Yes.

“You’re trapped here?”

Yes.

“You want me to get you out?”

Yes.

Something seemed to click for Yi Qiu, and she blurted it out. “You’re the girl from the year above, the one who was walled in on the fourth floor and never got out?”

The pen flew to yes and circled and circled!

The four of them looked at each other. So that was it.

She was the one who had slipped out of the block in the middle of the night to meet her boyfriend, and a ghost had walled her in, and she had been stuck on the fourth floor and couldn’t get off it, until her mind gave way and she went off the building.

None of them had thought the story was actually true.

She had been trapped on the fourth floor ever since. Not even her soul had got out.

No wonder only the girls on the fourth floor heard the footsteps at night, and the third and fifth heard nothing.

Just then the candle’s warm yellow light went out. A second later it lit again, and the flame was a cold blue, and the whole room went chill.

Ning Shu was the first on her feet, and opened the door.

The corridor lights, which should have been warm, had gone a cold black and white too.

And at the far end of the corridor stood a girl in a red dress and high heels, waist-length hair tied back, a pretty clip in it. Dressed the way a girl dresses to go and meet someone.

Yi Qiu and the others came out of the room behind Ning Shu, keeping her between them and the girl in red.

Yi Qiu’s teeth were chattering. “Is that... is that her?”

It must be. The girl who had dressed up so carefully to meet her boyfriend that night, and had been shut on the fourth floor forever.

The girl in red glanced back at them. Her face, mercifully, was still a face, nothing strange or twisted to frighten anyone. At that hour of the night, that was something.

Ning Shu checked the time. One in the morning, exactly.

The girl in red ran for the stairs, heading down, trying to leave.

Yi Qiu and the others followed. They wanted to know.

They were frightened, but with Ning Shu there it was a good deal easier.

The four of them stood at the top of the stairs and watched the girl come down from the floor above and hurry on down. A few dozen seconds later she came down from the fifth floor again, running for the third...

Round and round, over and over, more times than anyone could count.

Her face was all terror, and she was gasping, and every time she saw the big 4 on the fourth-floor corridor her eyes filled with fear and despair that had no bottom to it.

“What is she doing?” Yi Qiu whispered.

“Going through it all again,” Ning Shu murmured. “Exactly as it happened.”

That was how she had run back then, lap after lap on a staircase that never ended, for who knew how long, until her mind broke and she jumped.

The next time the girl came down from the fifth floor, Ning Shu stepped forward, caught hold of her, and shook her head.

Then she took out the bottle she had been saving and threw its contents across the top of the stairs.

Every light in the stairwell went out at once, and they were in the dark.

The girls grabbed fistfuls of Ning Shu’s clothes, teeth rattling.

Two minutes later a light overhead flickered and came on.

Then the rest of the stairwell lights came up one after another.

Ning Shu let out a long breath. “The wall is broken. You can go now.”

This time the girl in red walked towards the third floor, and at the turn of the stairs she looked back at Ning Shu and mouthed two words. Thank you.

They waited a few minutes. She didn’t come down from the fifth floor again.

The wall was broken. She was gone.

Back in the room, clearing up after the pen spirit, Fang Ruoyun asked, “Why does a ghost wall someone in, though?”

“You’ve forgotten,” Ning Shu said. “The hill behind the school is an old burial ground. Little ghosts who can’t find their way home come out and play tricks on people. There’s no real danger in it, they only frighten you. When it happened to her, if she had just waited for daylight instead of jumping, the wall would have come down on its own and she’d have been fine.”

Yi Qiu nodded. “So if it ever happens to us, the main thing is not to panic.”

“Will it happen again?”

“Not after tonight,” Ning Shu said. “Now that’s been thrown down there, those little ghosts won’t dare come out and make trouble.”

The next morning, every girl who came down past the fourth floor did it with her nose covered.

“Who on earth pees in the girls’ block in the middle of the night?”

“It stinks!”

“I know! What kind of pervert does that?”

When classes ended Lu Zheng came looking for Ning Shu with a face like thunder.

She was doing her homework. He simply hauled her out.

“You threw that... in the girls’ block?”

She had been about to be annoyed, but when she heard what he was asking she couldn’t help laughing, and patted him on the shoulder. “Nobody knows it was yours. Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Using your precious contribution to break a ghost wall that’s had someone stuck in it for years. It wasn’t anything bad.”

“You still can’t throw it around the girls’ dormitory!” Lu Zheng was faintly red. It wasn’t hard to imagine what he’d gone through when he found out.

He was Jiangcheng Number One’s untouchable cold idol.

“Sorry.” Ning Shu stuck her tongue out, a little sheepish. “Look at it this way. You’ve cleared every little ghost out of the girls’ block. There won’t be another haunting for years. That’s a real good deed to your name.”

Lu Zheng looked at her for a long moment, and then said, grudgingly, “Only you, Ning Shu. Anyone else would be dead.”

“I’ve still got homework,” Ning Shu said. “I’m going.”

Two days later a middle-aged man Ning Shu had never seen came to the school to find her.

“I’m Jiang Xiaoxiao’s father.”

Jiang Xiaoxiao was the girl who had gone off the building.

“Hello, sir. Did you need something from me?”

She couldn’t think how the girl’s father had found her.

He looked at her and said, “The night before last my daughter came to me in a dream. She told me all of it. She’s gone now, to where she should be.”

He wiped the corners of his eyes. “So I came today, to say thank you.”

Ning Shu saw the cheque in his hand. She hadn’t done it for money. She had done it to get some sleep at night, which in its way had been doing herself a favour.

But he insisted, and she couldn’t put him off, so she took it.

It was for fifty thousand, and all of it went into the card. Since buying the flat the card had been empty, but bit by bit the money was building up again.

Lu Zheng knew she was saving, and suggested she might put some of it to work.

She was walking off dinner on the edge of the playing field at sunset when he turned up from wherever it was he turned up from. She walked faster. He caught up.

“If you want to invest it, and if you trust me...”

“I don’t.”

“...”

“So it’s all sitting in a bank?”

“Yes.”

“Whose card?”

“My aunt’s.”

“Idiot.”

“Hey.”

Lu Zheng had one hand in his pocket, head tilted slightly. “Trust nobody but yourself.”

“That’s my aunt.”

“Relatives most of all.”

Ning Shu stopped and looked at him. “We’re not the same.”

His family was far more tangled than hers. Branch after branch of Lus ran the great sprawl of the Lu Group between them, every one of them blood relations, and they fought each other to the death all the same.

In the first life, Lu Zheng had come out on top of all of them, gathered every share in the group into his own hands and dealt them out again as he pleased, the whole thing his to command, and he had got there one step at a time over other people’s bodies.

Trusting anyone did not come easily to him.

Ning Shu wasn’t like that. She had family: her grandmother, her aunt and uncle, Gouwa. People she would never, ever suspect.

“No, we’re not the same,” Lu Zheng agreed, and then turned it. “Of course, the one other person in the world you can trust, apart from yourself, is me.”

Ning Shu’s lip curled.

“Leave the money with me and I’ll pick the products for you. I can’t promise how much it’ll grow, but it’ll beat the bank rate by a mile, and it’ll be a lot safer than your aunt’s card.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you.” Ning Shu smiled. “Trust you over my aunt? There’s nothing wrong with my head.”

Lu Zheng stretched his arms and said, offhand, “One, I’m rich, and that little pile of yours isn’t worth my noticing. Two, your money’s mine anyway.”

Unbelievable.

“How did my money turn into yours?”

The sun slipped all at once behind the hills.

Ning Shu waved a hand over her shoulder without waiting for an answer, and didn’t look back.