Midnight Records: The Soul-Leading Incense

Yanxi Town lay along a river of the same name. The river was not wide; its water held the color of green cloth left to steep for half a month—thick, and shining with the whole town's reflection sunk inside it. The townsfolk lived by the water and feared it. On the eve of the Zhongyuan Festival each year, every household set a water lantern adrift at the river steps; when the oil burned out, they reckoned the things below had eaten their fill, and the year's owed debts of the drowned were settled.

Shen He kept an incense shop called Shiyi, at the end of the blue-stone lane. Three generations of his family had done one thing only: blending incense. Chenxiang, sandalwood, jiangzhen, lingling, mugwort, cypress seed, cangzhu, baizhi—each ground to fine powder, bound with elm-bark paste, pressed into incense seals or rolled into sticks. The townsfolk came to him for funeral rites, for honoring gods and ghosts, for driving off mountain miasma. Three sticks to show respect; an even number was ill-omened; a stick snapped mid-burning was a "broken-head incense," meant to hasten the death of the living—Shen He had heard this since childhood and never dared jest about it.

The year the Zhongyuan drew near, the rains came strange and heavy. The river rose three times, and each time it fell back, a few more tangles of waterweed clung to the steps, like hands reaching up from below and drawing away again. Whispers began in the town: the things in the water had not eaten their fill this year, and meant to come ashore for more. Shen He would not take up such talk. He only set aside two extra jars of his soul-calming incense. That incense was his family's secret, the recipe written in an old manual passed down from his master, using jiangzhen matched with lingling, the best for quelling fright. He showed the manual to no one; when even Headman Wei came asking, he pleaded that the paper was too old and brittle, that a breath of wind would scatter it.

Headman Wei was the town's man of standing, keeper of the river boats and the dock taxes, and keeper of the townsfolk's tongues as well. That year he had built a new stilted house by the river, its corridors hung with red lanterns, saying he would hold a land-and-water rite for the Zhongyuan, inviting the things in the river to share in the good cheer. Behind his back the townsfolk curled their lips; none believed he truly honored the gods, they only thought he meant to levy another fee on the festival. Shen He thought so too, but he never crossed Headman Wei. A incense blender's trade depended on the town's incense money, and one word from Wei could shut his shop.

Aqiao reached Yanxi on the seventh day before the Zhongyuan. She was a woman from outside, a blue cloth bundle on her back, a bronze bell clenched in her hand—the peddler's bell of her brother Ayan. Ayan had been a wandering peddler who passed through Yanxi about this time last year, saying he would go into the hills to buy mountain goods, and never came home. The family had asked after him; the Yanxi side only shook their heads, saying they had never seen such a man. Aqiao would not believe it. She came searching house by house, asking at the river steps, asking at Headman Wei's stilted house, and got not one straight answer. The way the townsfolk looked at her was the way they looked at a living person who ought not to have come.

She found the Shiyi shop last, at dusk. The rain had just stopped; the blue-stone lane breathed a damp earth smell mixed with the incense seeping from Shen He's shop. Aqiao stepped through the door and saw a lean, tall man bent over his bench pressing incense seals, with seven or eight small bronze censers ranged on the table, each breathing a thin blue smoke from its mouth. She set the bell on the counter and said, "My brother Ayan was lost in your town around last Zhongyuan. I want to ask him one thing—is he dead or alive?"

Shen He did not lift his head. His knuckles pressed the incense mold; he finished the last stroke slowly before he said, "To ask the dead, you need the soul-leading incense. But that incense is not for just anyone to burn." Aqiao said, "I only want the truth. If he lives, I'll see him; if he's dead, I'll see his body." Shen He looked up at her, then at the bell—around its body was wound a faded red cord, bright where some hand had gripped it long. He sighed and put the bell away in the counter.

"The soul-leading incense is the most venomous blend there is," he said, and lit an oil lamp; its shadow swung across a wall thick with incense ash. "Ordinary incense draws the burner's own thoughts. The soul-leading incense draws the dead's grievances. To burn it you must have something that belonged to the dead. Once lit, the smoke follows the warmth of that thing, and lays out before your eyes, just as it was, the last sight the person ever saw. But once the smoke takes shape, it is not only you who see it—it sees you. It sees the living face, learns the road, and follows that road back."

Aqiao shivered, yet would not leave. "Then burn it," she said. "I have brought the bell; it was his." Shen He shook his head. "Burn the soul-leading incense and what is sealed in this shop will wake. Did you think all this soul-calming incense around me is here for show?" Aqiao faltered. "What is sealed in the shop?" Shen He did not answer. He only brightened the lamp, and in that light the ash-shadows on the wall seemed a shade deeper than before.

At last he told her. Three years past, also at the Zhongyuan, his wife Suniang had slipped into the swollen river while washing clothes at the steps; when they pulled her out she was already cold. Shen He would not believe it. One night he secretly burned the soul-leading incense, hoping for one more look at Suniang. The smoke did float up her face, quiet and calm, watching him as she had in life. He reached to touch it; the smoke scattered, and when it gathered again the face was still Suniang's, but the eyes were empty, and the mouth curved in a smile he had never seen. From that night on, he saw that face in his censer every night—sometimes Suniang, sometimes those drowned in Yanxi long before: the fisherman's son, the widow across the river, a passing stranger with no name left behind. They layered into one human-shaped wisp of smoke. The old folk of the town called this the Incense Fiend—the grievance of the drowned, unable to find a substitute, clung to the incense smoke, and waited only for someone to burn the soul-leading incense, that it might follow the road of smoke and seize a living body, to take its own place returning to the water.

"So after that I burned only the soul-calming incense, to hold it down," Shen He said, and pointed at the censers around the room. "Three years it has been quiet. Burn this one furnace of soul-leading incense and three years' work is undone. It wakes, and the first it wants is not me—it is the road I led you by, and your living face." Aqiao's palms were wet with sweat, yet she set her teeth. "My brother is still down there waiting for me to ask. Master Shen, burn it. Whatever comes, I bear it."

At midnight the rain fell again. Shen He closed the shop door and set the largest censer in the middle of the hall. He spread the soul-leading incense powder in it, took out Ayan's bell, tied it with red cord, and hung it above the censer's mouth. "When the incense burns, the smoke will first circle the bell three times—that is the recognizing of its master. When it has, close your eyes and ask what you will. But one thing—whatever you see, make no sound, reach for nothing, spill no living breath for the smoke to eat. When the bell stops of itself, the incense is spent." Aqiao nodded and knelt before the censer.

Shen He struck the fire. The powder met flame and rose in a strange sweetness, not the clean bitter of common incense but as if many people's breath had been crushed and warmed. The smoke did circle the bronze bell three times; the bell gave no sound, yet the smoke grew thicker and slowly pressed out, above the censer's mouth, the face of a young man—square-jawed, a mole between the brows—Ayan indeed. Aqiao's throat clenched; she nearly cried out. The Ayan in the smoke moved his lips as if speaking, but she could not hear. The next moment the smoke drew back and pulled out a stretch of the river steps: blue stone, red lanterns, a man in a short jacket pinioning Ayan's arm from behind and forcing him into the water. Ayan struggled; the bell fell on the stone; the man stepped on it and kicked it into the river. The scene flickered—to the corridor of Headman Wei's stilted house, Wei with his hands behind his back, saying something flat, and the man nodding.

Aqiao went cold through. So what Ayan had stumbled on that day was Headman Wei's men sinking a body to hide a murder—a debtor who could not repay Wei's usury had been held under the river, and Ayan, happening to see, became another living witness to be silenced. But before this truth could settle in her heart, the smoke at the censer's mouth trembled; Ayan's face was wiped away from behind, and in its place came a woman's face: soft brows and eyes, but empty, the mouth curved in the smile Shen He had spoken of.

Suniang. No—the Incense Fiend. It had come out.

The smoke condensed in the hall into a half-transparent human shape, feet not touching ground, and slowly turned toward Aqiao. Shen He stepped to the censer and pressed a hand to its rim. "Back!" he cried. The Fiend paid no heed; it tilted its head slightly, as if sniffing the living scent on Aqiao's face. All the soul-calming incense in the room dimmed at once, and from that human-shaped smoke rose a second face, then a third—the fisherman's son, the widow across the river, the nameless passerby—face upon face, all the wronged souls drowned in Yanxi, now borrowing the Fiend's body to turn their empty eyes on her together.

"The seal is broken," Shen He's voice shook. "It knows you." Aqiao tried to retreat, but her feet had taken root. The Fiend drifted half a step forward; the temperature in the hall dropped sharply, yet the soul-leading incense in the censer burned the faster, sweet to the point of sickening. Shen He suddenly recalled a line in his master's manual: once the Incense Fiend emerges, the soul-leading incense cannot recall it; it must be fed with the blender's own life-bound manual as fuel, and only when that is wholly burned does it return. He turned to look at the old manual enshrined on the god-shelf—passed from his master to him, the root of life holding every secret recipe of the Shiyi shop.

Just then the shop door was kicked open. Headman Wei stood in the rain with a lantern, two guards behind him. He had come to silence Aqiao—this outside woman had asked too much and reached the river steps. But one glance at the human-shaped smoke in the hall drained the blood from his face. The Fiend turned its head slowly; among the drowned faces layered on its body was one Wei himself had held under the river—that face floated to the front, smoke weeping from its empty eyes, as if laughing at him.

"Headman Wei," Shen He ground out between his teeth, "the bodies you sank have come today to claim their master." Wei stepped back; the lantern fell and its flame scattered. The Fiend no longer looked at Aqiao; it drifted toward Wei, and the faces on its body turned, one by one, to the man who had killed them. The guards tried to pull Wei away, but the smoke had already wound about his feet, cold to the marrow. He could make no sound, only opened his mouth wide, his face going blue as those he had once held under the water had gone.

Shen He did not hesitate. He seized the old manual from the god-shelf and, against the fire leaping from the censer, set it alight. The paper curled at once; the inked characters one by one melted into the smoke. The Fiend gave a cry not of any human throat; all the smoke in the room surged, the faces twisted and tore in the smoke, and at last a single force dragged them all, pouring toward the river. Wei was wrapped in that smoke; his footing emptied, as if a hand had pushed him from behind, and he fell straight out the door and rolled down the slope of the blue-stone lane, and was silent.

When the soul-leading incense burned out, dawn was near. The bronze censer lay cold in a floor of ash; the old manual was a pinch of black dust. Shen He slumped on the ground, staring at the empty god-shelf—a lifetime's craft, gone to ash in one night. Aqiao knelt before the censer, clutching the bronze bell she had lost and found again—when the Fiend withdrew, the bell had been borne up from the river and dropped back into her palm; the red cord was still there, only soaked through, carrying the river's fishy smell.

Afterward the town only said Headman Wei had fled with the money in the night; the guards said he had missed his footing on the slope and fallen into the river and was gone. No one looked deeper. Shen He closed the Shiyi shop, shouldered an empty bundle, and went downstream along the river, never to return to Yanxi. Aqiao wrote home that her brother was indeed dead, dead at the river steps of Yanxi, and told her mother not to wait.

That Zhongyuan night, the water lanterns at Yanxi's steps were more numerous than any year, a river of waking eyes from afar. Some said they saw many faces floating in the lantern-light, but by the next day no one spoke of it. The incense blender was gone, the Fiend had gone with the river, and the townsfolk lived on as before—only no one dared, at midnight, to burn that most venomous incense.

Midnight Records note: Incense can lead the soul, and can also keep the fiend. Shen He burned a lifetime of recipes to send that wisp of smoke back into the water, yet what he could not send away was the bell in Aqiao's palm. She went home and set the bell beneath her window, and never dared burn so much as a thread of incense. Only on windless nights a wisp of the very finest smoke will drift of itself from the bell's body, circling the red cord, carrying the smell of Yanxi's river, and lingering long. She knows it is not Ayan—it is the road the Fiend marked. Once you have called, something always remembers, in your place.