Children of Fear – Episode #6

24 September 1923. The morning arrived without drama, which in its own way felt like its own kind of warning. No one woke to missing possessions. Zahra’s carefully prepared invitation, her ghazal baited with blood and sincerity, had not been taken in the night. Kulou House held its quiet, rain-dim composure, and for a few hours the expedition could pretend it was back to being what it looked like on paper: a scholarly rescue mission heading west.

At breakfast the investigators did what they’d been doing since Peking, only more deliberately. They tried to put the world back in order. Aiko was the one who insisted on a moral line. If the group had bought a porcelain pillow and a cane from Sai Na’s warehouse, and those items resembled what had been stolen, then the least they could do was try to return them. Even if they weren’t the original objects, the attempt would clarify the situation. It would either close a loop or expose a lie. The plan that emerged was practical and neat. First, take the cane with the silver octopus head to Professor Thaddaeus Johnson. Then, go to Mi Han and secure provisions for the journey to Tun-Huang. Finally, drop the pillow at the pilgrim hostel, if it truly belonged there, or at least see whether the staff recognised it.

It was while they were still moving through the hotel’s polished routines that the first real shift of the day happened. The clerk at Kulou House had heard enough, through the walls, through staff gossip, through the careful way foreigners asked questions, to understand what the investigators were doing. He leaned in and spoke quietly in Chinese to Lee, avoiding the open space of the lobby as if words themselves might attract trouble.

What he said had the weight of local certainty. It was a great shame, he implied, and a bad omen, to have grave goods circulating in a respectable house. Sai Na was a wrong one for selling such things. The likely source wasn’t simply theft from travellers or pilgrims. It was the tombs outside the city.

Lee didn’t repeat it immediately. She waited until they were on their way upstairs, away from ears and the soft social pressure of the reception desk. When she did, it landed like a cold stone. The investigators had spent days treating the coins and dolls and “payments” as strange transactions, an economy of the dead bleeding into the living. They hadn’t fully entertained the simplest, ugliest possibility. That some of these objects might literally have been dug up, disturbed, pulled from places where they were meant to remain. If the stolen items were being “paid for” with funerary money, perhaps the money wasn’t symbolic at all. Perhaps it was sourced from graves, real and violated.

They carried that thought to Professor Johnson’s door. The old American answered looking worse for wear, rumpled and sour with the aftertaste of a late night. His earlier indignation had softened into exhaustion, the particular fatigue of a man who has travelled too far and still expects the world to meet him halfway. Aiko presented the cane with the octopus head carefully, as if returning an heirloom. For a moment Johnson stared at it as if it had spoken. Then he shook his head. Too quickly. Too certainly. It was not his cane. His was plain, he insisted. Maple with a simple silver cap. This octopus-headed thing was unfamiliar and, if anything, faintly repellent to him. Yet he didn’t react like a man dodging responsibility. His revulsion felt genuine, and his relief at being spared the object’s strange intimacy was visible. He thanked them anyway, gave them an address in Peking in case his true cane surfaced, and mentioned he intended to leave for the capital the following day.

Aiko kept the octopus cane. It was a small decision with the shape of a larger one beneath it. If the cane was connected to the thefts, discarding it would be careless. If it was unrelated, discarding it might still be dangerous. In a city where objects seemed to carry intention, possession had become a kind of question asked aloud.

When they returned to the lobby, the day took another turn. A man approached with the practiced ease of someone used to inserting himself into other people’s narratives. He was handsome in a way that didn’t look soft. Blond hair, startling blue eyes, the weathered attractiveness of a person who has been hungry and cold and survived it. He introduced himself as Demyan Ilarivich Babanin, a Russian exile, author, translator, and traveller with experience on the Silk Road. He apologised for overhearing part of their breakfast conversation. He offered his services.

There was, at first glance, no need. Between the investigators they already carried a generous assortment of languages and cultural literacy. But Demyan’s offer wasn’t only about translation. It was about routes, networks, and the particular knowledge of someone who had lived as a displaced person, someone who understood what kind of trouble the road could make of you if you travelled without the right voices beside you. After discussion, and a surprisingly reasonable negotiation led through Lee, the group agreed to hire him. They did not bring him along that day, but instructed him to join the expedition at departure the following morning.

Then the investigators did what they’d come to Sian to do in the first place. They went to find Mi Han. The Muslim Quarter held a different rhythm from the foreign-facing streets around Kulou House. The rain softened into mist. People moved with the calm assurance of those who knew exactly where they were going, and exactly what they didn’t want strangers to see. As they walked, Miriam spotted the street urchin Zahra had tracked the day before, the quick-handed child who seemed to appear at the edge of their story like a recurring punctuation mark. Miriam tried to engage her, but the interaction was brief and awkward. Miriam wasn’t used to speaking with children outside a lecture hall context, and the girl slipped away with the fluid confidence of someone who had never needed adult permission to exist. She left behind no answers, only a renewed sense that certain eyes were always nearby.

After asking at shops and doorways, the investigators found Mi Han’s place sandwiched between a bookseller and a carpet shop. A restaurant a few doors down exhaled the aroma of gently steaming dumplings into the street. The shop itself was modest and respectable, exactly the kind of place where business could be done quietly. Mi Han greeted them with the smooth assurance of a man who has already read their names on a telegram. He led them through a richly woven curtain into a comfortably furnished back room where ornate carpets and plump cushions made the world feel briefly soft again.

Tea was summoned with a shout into the shop. Mi Han asked, politely and directly, what they wanted and how he could be of service. They explained Professor Wang’s request, their destination, and their urgency. Mi Han nodded as if confirming a schedule he’d already built in his head. His son, Mi Hu, brought the tea, and Aiko, who had a gift for finding the human heart of logistical systems, spent much of the day trying to get to know him. It was clear quickly that Mi Hu would be leading the caravan hands on the road. If the expedition was to survive beyond the reach of General Wu’s escort, relationships mattered as much as supplies.

Lee handled the negotiation. She did it credibly, carefully, with the hard competence of someone used to bargaining in a world where politeness hides sharp edges. The Mexican silver dollars Professor Wang had provided dwindled steadily into necessities: porters, ponies, mappas, the ubiquitous two-wheeled carts used for everything imaginable, a cook, and enough provisions to get them across the country to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. By the time the tea had cooled and been replaced, the caravan was real. Departure was set for dawn at the West Gate.

Somewhere in the middle of these practicalities, the investigators made a quiet decision about the porcelain pillow. The more they turned it over in their hands, the less they believed it matched the pilgrim hostel’s stolen item. Returning it would not restore anyone’s peace. It would only muddy the waters. They chose to keep it and later hand it to the Midnight Society for examination, one more piece of evidence carried west, one more object with a story that refused to sit still.

By evening, the investigators felt they had reached a dead end in their Sian investigation. They had heard the stories, seen the coins, bought the likely fenced goods, followed a child into the understructure of a temple, and still they had no perpetrator to point at. Only pattern. Only implication. Only the gnawing sense that the city had been testing them.

And then the night reminded them that the pattern was not finished. Marcy woke to the sound of movement in her room, soft, close, undeniably present. She struck the lamp immediately. Light filled the space, and there was no one there. The air held the faint aftertaste of someone’s passage, like disturbed dust. Then her eyes settled on the foot of the bed. A two-foot terracotta doll stood there, crude in its way, yet placed with a precision that felt intentional. A substitution. An answer to something she hadn’t yet realised had been asked.

Marcy heard a scuffing noise behind the curtain and reacted with the blunt practicality of a person who has decided fear doesn’t get a vote. She grabbed the doll and threw it out the window. For a moment it fell through rain like a thrown accusation. Then it hit stone and shattered into pieces below.

Marcy returned to bed without telling anyone. In the morning, the investigators would still leave Sian with a caravan and a plan. They would still chase Langdon Warner’s urgent telegram westward into the desert and the caves. But something else had shifted in that room. Whether Marcy named it or not, the message was clear.

The thefts in Sian weren’t random. They weren’t opportunistic. They were targeted, sentimental, and deliberate, and the city had finally taken something from the expedition that could not be bought back from a warehouse.

It had taken what mattered. It had taken away their chance to find an answer to the mystery in Sian. The road beckoned.

Who’s Who in the Midnight Society Expedition