Children of Fear – Episode #4

23 September 1923.The gate’s echo was still in the investigators’ bones when Sian closed around them. Rain hissed on brick. Steam lifted from cookshops. Lanterns tilted in the wind like watchful eyes, and the city seemed to breathe in bells and coal smoke. Mi Han’s runner, quick, unremarkable, and certain of every turn, pulled them off the main artery and through lanes the colour of wet coins until a signboard painted with a red drum hung into the street like a punctuation mark.

Kulou House kept a cool, shadowed court where rain threaded from the eaves in beaded strings. Inside, the reception counter was rubbed to a dark shine and an abacus ticked like an insect trying to escape. Before anyone could properly shake the road from their clothes, a voice cut through the lobby. Educated American, tight with travel-weariness and entitlement, speaking as if the building owed him an apology.

The source of it was hard to miss. The man had the look of someone who’d kept his standards through dust storms and disappointment. Late fifties or early sixties, silver hair disciplined by comb and willpower, a linen suit that remembered better weather, spectacles riding low on a hawkish nose. One hand gripped a battered leather folio swollen with papers and cable copies; the other stabbed a precise, irritated circle in the air as he addressed the clerk. The investigators didn’t catch every detail, rooms promised, crates in transit, someone in Peking who would be hearing about this, but the mood was unmistakable. The lobby tilted toward him the way rooms do around men used to being heard.

Lee Xie Liling, Aiko Tanaka, and Marcy Holmes drifted close enough to listen without seeming to. The clerk’s apology was practiced. The American’s patience was not. His name emerged in crisp, clipped syllables: Professor Thaddaeus Johnson, Oriental Literature, Miskatonic University. His complaint, however, was strangely domestic for a man carrying himself like an expedition leader. When he’d risen that morning, his walking cane, normally resting on the back of his chair, had vanished.

The concierge insisted, with smiling certainty, that the cane must simply be mislaid. Kulou House had excellent security. The staff were above reproach. Everything would be done. Everything would be found. Aiko, watching the man rather than the words, noted something tight and guarded in Johnson’s manner. The professor was embarrassed, certainly, but there was also a carefulness, as if he was editing his own story in real time.

Aiko introduced herself with respect and the kind of formal ease that kept doors open. Marcy, as ever, tried to take the whole conversation by the lapels. She asked whether Johnson was part of “the expedition,” and when he looked puzzled, she clarified: Langdon Warner’s.

Johnson wasn’t just unaware, he was genuinely surprised. Warner’s name meant nothing to his immediate plans. He explained, with stiff pride, that he was on sabbatical, travelling through China to study the writings of the wandering monks Hiuen-Tsiang and Fa Hsien. Certain texts and copies, he believed, were held in the temples and pagodas of Sian. He spoke of scholarship the way some men spoke of duty. A thing that justified discomfort and demanded deference. Yet even as he explained himself, his eyes kept flicking toward the doorway to the hotel bar, as if the answer to his missing cane might be waiting under a glass.

While that conversation played out in the lobby, An Jinqiang sat slightly apart, still and watchful, as if he preferred to keep the whole room in his peripheral vision. He received Hsu Te-Ch’uan, the sergeant attached to General Wu’s soldiers, and the message was simple: departure back to Peking in the morning for them. The same confirmation came from the two drivers hired through Professor Wang, men who looked as if they’d been born behind a wheel. The west was not waiting for anyone’s comfort. They would have to find a new convoy for the next part of their journey.

Aiko stepped away from Marcy and Lee’s orbit and did what she had quickly become good at, tending to the expedition’s skeleton of paperwork. She gathered the investigators’ documents and took them to the concierge, Mr. Chien, alongside An. If the group was going to be in Sian for even a night, it made sense to know what kind of city they’d arrived in, and whether this missing cane was a curiosity or a symptom.

Mr. Chien, in the way of respectable men protecting respectable establishments, denied that Kulou House had any trouble with petty theft. Yet the denial had hairline cracks. The professor’s loss, he admitted, was not the first he’d heard of. Friends working at other guest houses in the city had mentioned similar incidents. Guests “losing” or “mislaying” items. Not valuables. Never jewellery, never cash. Always something personal. Something sentimental. Something that mattered in a way thieves usually didn’t have time to care about.

If the investigators appeared interested, and they did, Chien suggested they speak to a friend of his, Li Chun, a night porter at the pilgrim hostel near Sian’s western gate. Chien didn’t claim certainty, but his tone carried the unmistakable weight of a man passing along a rumour he believed and didn’t want attached to his name.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s gaze kept returning to the bar like a compass needle. He suggested to Lee and Marcy that they go there for a drink, and perhaps check whether he’d mislaid his cane the previous evening. It was a small, human request, and it would have been easy to dismiss. Yet the professor’s embarrassment was sincere, and his insistence had the brittle edge of grief. The cane, he admitted after a few drinks loosened him, had been a gift from his late wife. He wasn’t merely inconvenienced. He felt unmoored.

The bar obliged him with cocktails and a dim warmth that made the rain outside feel more distant. Johnson drank more than was wise for a man his age and temperament. Somewhere between the second and third glass, he confessed that he had been tipsy the night before, “more than a little,” he said, as if confessing a moral lapse rather than a lapse of judgment. He was sure he’d taken his cane back to his room. He was sure. Yet the night had slid strangely in his memory, fuelled by drink and the uneasy weather that had stalked the convoy all the way to Sian.

And then he offered the detail that made the investigators’ attention sharpen. He’d had a dream. In it, he sat in his room and watched a group of little people, no taller than the chair in his room, he insisted with an academic’s exactness, juggle his toiletries and dance around with his cane. The image was ridiculous on its face, the kind of thing alcohol and fatigue stitched together. Yet it landed too neatly beside the other oddities they’d already collected: the lotus mark in Chengchow, the feeling of being watched on the road, the thefts of sentimental objects. Lee and Marcy agreed, half-heartedly, perhaps, but still, to help him recover the cane.

Once Johnson retired to his room, the investigators chose to follow the thread Mr. Chien had offered. If Sian was experiencing a rash of these peculiar losses, it was better to understand them now than to discover, too late, that something personal had been taken from one of their own.

An Jinqiang arranged transport with brisk efficiency. He hired a carriage for the women, Aiko, Miriam, Lee, and Marcy, while taking a rickshaw himself. He claimed it was practical, that the rickshaw would move faster through the lanes, but the choice also gave him space to speak privately with someone local. The driver, flattered by polite conversation and the easy weight of An’s presence, loosened quickly. A bit of charm and well-placed curiosity revealed the kind of place people went when they wanted to disappear into vice: the Den of the Sleeping Buddha, in the northern quarter, where dodgy types drank and played mahjong under a haze of smoke and plausible deniability.

It was a useful lead. An Jinqiang did not immediately share it.

The pilgrim hostel itself sat behind the western gate in a traditional Chinese building that had aged into slight disrepair, faded paint, cracked walls, a dignity that had learned to endure without being restored. Not rundown, exactly. Just tired. A man in a porter’s uniform stood outside smoking, the ember of his cigarette bright in the wet dusk. He looked up when the carriage arrived, and when Lee and Marcy offered Mr. Chien’s name, his face softened into recognition.

Li Chun was, if nothing else, willing to talk. He asked first whether the investigators had noticed the street children in Sian. There were many, he explained. Child thieves, beggars, runners, the invisible machinery of a crowded city. He couldn’t be sure it was one of them, but he described an incident from the night before, when an old porcelain pillow had vanished from one of the hostel’s guests.

It was an odd target for theft, Li said. The pillow had little monetary value. It was exquisitely painted, yes, but cracked in places and clearly old. Yet the guest had been devastated. The pillow had travelled with him since childhood. He couldn’t sleep comfortably without it. Searches had turned up nothing. The old man left the city the previous day, bitter and disappointed, and Li’s story should have ended there.

But as he spoke, Lee noticed something else in him – unease. Not simple worry about petty crime. Something sharper.

Pressed gently, Li admitted what he hadn’t wanted to say up front. He had seen a “child” in the alley behind the hostel that night, only around two feet tall. Yet it hadn’t moved like a toddler. Its movements had been too fluent, too deliberate. And it had been dressed remarkably well for a street child. Neat, expensive, wrong.

Around them, down the lane and half-hidden by rain, actual street children moved in clusters, watching with the open interest of kids who knew how to read adults. An, rejoining the group after his rickshaw ride, pointed out one of the boys with a mark on his neck, something that looked like a gang tattoo, or at least the city’s version of one.

Li Chun finished his cigarette, seemed ready to retreat back into his duties, then paused as if remembering something he wished he hadn’t. He glanced around, lowered his voice, and produced a tiny round coin, terracotta, no bigger than a third of an inch, with a square hole at its centre. He explained that it had been left in place of the stolen pillow, a substitution rather than a simple theft. Li had hidden it from guests and employers alike. He didn’t want to tarnish the hostel’s reputation with talk of curses.

The coin, he said, resembled a pan liang, ancient half-tael currency, except it was wrong in multiple ways. Too small. Made of clay rather than bronze. It had the dry, brittle feel of something that was never meant to be handled by the living. Miriam, hearing the description, recognised the shape from funerary practice: spirit money, ming ch’ien, objects buried with the dead. Things meant to be spent in the other world. It was considered a curse to deal in them.

The investigators stood on the hostel steps with the rain whispering off the eaves, the coin heavy in the mind even if it weighed almost nothing in the hand. The city behind them felt suddenly layered. The respectable inns, the scholarly texts, the soldiers and their papers, and beneath it all a smaller, stranger economy moving through alleys and dreams, taking what it wanted and leaving funerary tokens behind.

Miriam added one more piece as they tried to make sense of it. Long ago, she recalled, Sian had been home to a community of performing little people. The thought landed with the subtle chill of a door opening a fraction wider. It didn’t explain the cane. It didn’t explain the coin. It didn’t explain the strangely fluent “child” in fine clothes. But it gave the investigators something they didn’t have before. A way to imagine the impossible without dismissing it.

They were supposed to meet Mi Han and make arrangements to travel west. The expedition’s true purpose, Tun-Huang, the Thousand Buddha Caves, Langdon Warner’s urgent telegram, still pulled at them like gravity.

Yet Sian had offered a different problem, smaller on paper and somehow more intimate. A pattern of sentimental objects vanishing, replaced by tokens meant for the dead. A professor’s cane, a traveller’s porcelain pillow, and a “child” that didn’t move like any child should.

On the steps of the pilgrim hostel, the investigators reached the familiar fork that always appears at the edge of the uncanny. They could chase An’s lead to the Den of the Sleeping Buddha. They could try to speak to the street children and learn who marked whom and why. Or they could turn back to Kulou House, sleep, and leave at first light, carrying their questions west, pretending the city’s small thefts were not their concern.

The rain kept falling either way, steady and patient, as if Sian had all the time in the world.