By Mark T Holcombe
The air in Mong Kok hung heavy with an unnatural stillness, the usual cacophony of street vendors and hurried footsteps muted by an oppressive humidity. Mong Kok had the kind of heat that coats your teeth. Neon ran in wet ribbons down Nathan Road, and Detective Inspector Aaron Chen moved through it with a paper cup of bitter tea and a headache he could not name. He had spent the day walking a case that made no procedural sense: three disappearances, no ransom notes, no bodies, only bedrooms lined with small vinyl figures grinning like they knew the punchline.
It began subtly, whispers in dimly lit back alleys of Causeway Bay about strange, unsettling “chase figures” appearing in blind boxes—Labubus with unsettlingly vacant, obsidian eyes or too many teeth, their usual playful grins twisted into something predatory. Collectors, usually eager to show off their rare finds, spoke of these figures in hushed tones, some even claiming they hummed with a low, inaudible thrum.
One victim, a young woman named Mei Ling, had posted excitedly about acquiring a rare, custom- painted Labubu. Her last message, a garbled voice note sent to her brother, spoke of “the doll’s eyes… they see… they show me…” before dissolving into a choked gasp.
Chen found himself drawn into the labyrinthine world of underground toy markets, past neon signs that bled into the perpetually damp pavement. He interviewed distraught parents, frantic friends, and increasingly paranoid collectors. They all spoke of a growing obsession, a need to acquire more, to complete a “set” that felt less like a collection and more like a compulsion.
He paused at the curb outside a toy stall where blind boxes were stacked to the awning. The boxes wore a smiling creature with pointed ears and wet, obsidian eyes. “LABUBU”, the logo said. “Collect them all.”
Chen did not notice he had stopped breathing until the stall owner coughed. He took a step closer. Every box showed a different colorway, but the eyes were always the same void-black. He had seen them a week earlier in his sister Mia’s apartment, on shelves that she arranged by palette and release date. She had asked him to help carry a second flatpack bookcase. She had laughed when he asked how many toys qualified as too many. He remembered that laugh now and found it hard to swallow. Mia had not returned his messages for two days.
“Looking for a chase?” the vendor asked. “A what?”
“Rare figure. People chase them.”
“I am looking for my sister,” Chen said. He held up a photo. The vendor glanced, shook his head, and gestured toward Portland Street.
“Ask Mr. Lau,” the man said. “He knows everything. He sells from the back.”
His investigations led him to an ancient, crumbling tong lau building in Sheung Wan, rumored to house a reclusive antique dealer specializing in esoteric curios. The back was a corridor of damp concrete that turned twice and ended at a steel door with paint worn to a thumb-smudged gray. Chen knocked with the edge of his fist. A slot slid open. Two eyes, red-veined and irritable, took him in.
“Shop is closed.” “Police.”
“So is the shop.”
“Mr. Lau, open the door.”
Keys chattered. The door swung inward on oil-starved hinges. The air smelled like nylon, dust, old incense, and something faintly sweet, as if a candy had dissolved into mildew. Inside, pegboard walls were covered with clear packets of parts and charms: plastic hands, tiny ears, a mess of keychains, and rows upon rows of vinyl heads in pastel and nightshade hues. In the center, Mr. Lau sat behind a glass counter that displayed resin miniatures like saints in a reliquary. The dealer, a skeletal man with eyes like polished jade, offered Chen another cup of bitter tea. Around them, shelves teemed with artifacts
—jade carvings of impossible geometries, scrolls covered in forgotten scripts, and, unsettlingly, dozens of Labubu dolls, their smiles unwavering, watching.
“You know about these dolls,” Chen said.
“I know about many things,” Lau answered, not looking up. “Do you know about what you are asking?”
“I know my sister is missing.”
That made Lau look up. “Sit,” he said, and slid a stool forward with his foot.
Chen stayed standing. The stool was occupied by a beige cat that might have been alive or taxidermied. It blinked, solved the question, and continued not caring.
“I have been a dealer since before Mong Kok became a mall,” Lau said. “Men used to line up for bootleg tapes. Now they queue for drops. Same hunger. Different packaging.”
Chen nodded toward the Labubu figures that craned from every shelf. “These are not just packaging.” “No,” Lau said. He opened the case and lifted out a figure with two hands, as if it were fragile glass. “This one is Midnight Lagoon. Release was a small run. People waited eight hours on Argyle Street because they believed its smile would mean something to them. They were not wrong.”
The figure’s face was perfect candy. Its eyes were polished pits. When Lau placed it on the glass, the lights in the shop gave each eye a single point of white. The pupils did not move, yet the feeling that something behind them looked back was immediate and disquieting.
“My sister collected these,” Chen said. “She started last year. It was harmless.”
“Harmless,” Lau repeated, with a softness that contained no agreement. “Would you watch something with me, Inspector? A small experiment. If you see nothing, we go our separate ways. If you see what I
see, you will stop thinking about harmless.”
Chen should have said no. He should have picked up his radio, called a uniform to canvass, set up pings and cross-checks, all the steps that make the mind feel busy when the heart is afraid. He thought of Mia arranging her shelves by color, like a gradient of weather. He said yes.
Lau took out a cracked brass compass from a drawer. The needle jittered, found north, then trembled in place. He set the Midnight Lagoon figure next to it, a palm’s width away, and the needle twitched off north by a degree. When he slid the figure closer, the needle drifted more. At two fingers’ distance it spun once and settled pointing at the toy.
“Magnets,” Chen said.
“You can test the shell,” Lau answered. “No metal. Resin and vinyl only. Watch this.”
He lifted a small incense cone from a saucer, lit it, and cupped the ember till a thin blue smoke rose. He placed the cone behind the figure. The smoke climbed, then bent in a curve toward the toy, as if pulled by an invisible fan. It clung to the smiling mouth, then vanished.
Chen leaned closer. The air around the figure felt wrong, like the prelude to a typhoon, a pressure you register in your jaw.
“It breathes?” He hated how his voice made it a question. “It hungers,” Lau said.
“The earliest pieces were playful, copies of copies of old folk images. Something changed two winters ago. A designer posted a sketch that was too perfect. The community said it had captured the spirit. They did not ask which spirit. “The artist,” Lau continued, “opened a door. The blind boxes… they are not random. They are invitations. And the ‘chase figures’…” His gaze flickered to a Labubu on a high shelf, its fangs impossibly long, its eyes swirling with what looked like miniature nebulae. “They are the harbingers, the fragments of the entities themselves, seeking hosts. The artist, Kasing Lung… he merely glimpsed what was always there, lurking just beyond the veil.”
Lau took a second figure from the case, this one in chalk-white with faint gold speckles. He set it beside the first. The compass needle quivered between them, indecisive, then settled in a trembling midpoint. In the dim of the shop, the two glossy mouths seemed to share a wet reflection, as if one light moved between them. Chen felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Hong Kong humidity. He stared at the doll.
“Do you hear that?” Lau asked. He turned off the wall fan. The shop entered a deeper silence made of many small silences. At first there was only the hiss of Argyle Street through the thin walls. Then Chen noticed an extra note, a low, steady thrum under the room like the core of a refrigerator. It vibrated in his teeth.
Lau opened a drawer and set three sewing needles on the counter. He placed one in front of each figure and left one by the compass. The needles did not move. He exhaled slow, and the needles trembled, then edged toward the figures, a millimeter at a time, like fish noticing a current.
“Cheap parlor trick,” Chen said. He was still listening to the thrum. It was louder now, or his mind had
found the shape of it and could name it.
“Name your trick,” Lau said, and lifted the entire counter mat. The needles remained, moving with deliberate reluctance. The compass ticked. The smoke from the spent cone did not rise. It leaned into the air between the dolls, then disappeared again.
Lau looked not triumphant, not afraid, but tired. “I tried to keep the ratios low,” he said. “I told customers to stop at one. You cannot say that to a collector. It is an insult to their religion.”
“My sister,” Chen said, and the name he did not say pressed against his teeth. Mia. “What colorway does she favor?”
“Blue. Anything marine.”
“Then she joined the tide. They built a ring last week in a warehouse by the waterfront. Distribution is easier if you do it like a club. They call it an activation. You will dismiss that word. You should not.” Chen left with Lau’s directions and the compass that still shook as if remembering the room. Along Nathan Road, the crowd had thickened. Young men in street-wear posed with shopping bags. A girl sat on a curb, opening blind boxes with tremoring hands. Every time she found what she wanted, she held it to her cheek as if memorizing its temperature.
He called Mia again. The call rang and rang, then shunted to a mailbox that had never recorded a greeting. He walked faster.
The warehouse at the waterfront was a long box with windows in rows like missing teeth. He smelled river and rust and something sugary. The sliding door had been rolled up and leaned on a dented trash bin. Inside, the room was a map of pallets and cables, with a cleared space at the center sharp as a stage. The people around that space had collected themselves into a ring without admitting it. In their hands, the same faces. The same smiles. The same blind intimacy with a mouth that ate smoke.
Chen’s first stupid hope broke. Mia was there. She stood barefoot on a pallet, shoes neatly lined beside The Ring, as if this were a dojo and not a hobby turned wound. Her hair was tied in a knot. Her face had a closed focus he recognized from exams. He stepped forward. A hand touched his arm.
“Please,” a woman said, and he could not place her age. “Not during the alignment.” “This is my sister.”
“We are almost complete,” she said. Her eyes were clear and ordinary. That was the worst part. The ring was twenty feet across. On the concrete, someone had chalked a low circle, not occultic,
more like a child’s hula hoop. The participants set the figures along that line. Each doll faced inward. In the fluorescent glare, the figures’ eyes held the room like wells. Chen counted and lost count. The air inside the circle shimmered, not visibly at first, but by how the hairs on his arms forgot how to lie flat. The low thrum from Lau’s shop was here, amplified, as if the warehouse itself had become a throat singing one note. Somewhere water banged in a pipe.
Lau had said to watch the smoke. There was no incense here, just dust and river air, but Chen saw the same behavior in the halo of motes above the ring. The dust drifted, then bent in, then vanished. The circle ate it.
He stepped across the chalk. The woman at his arm did not stop him. Nobody did. He wanted to believe that meant something, like permission, or a test he could pass by refusing. He walked until the inner pressure found his joints. There was an animal instinct here, an old one that told the body to kneel before storms or mountains or temples. He did not kneel. He kept moving, slow, as if walking into a heavy pool.
“Mia,” he said. His voice came back to him broken down into smaller pieces.
She looked up. For a second he saw the sister who had asked him to carry a bookcase, who had texted him photos of her shelves arranged by the color of a rainy day. Then he saw how far her pupils had dilated. He saw the sheen of sweat that made her face a mask. She smiled, but it was the smile people wear before vomiting, polite and doomed.
“Aaron,” she said. “You cannot be in the circle. It is calibrated.” “This is not you.”
“This is me,” she said. “This is the most me I have been. It knows where the missing parts go.” “What is it?”
“Look,” she said, and pointed.
He looked because there was nowhere else to look. The center of the ring was not empty. It held a mosaic so dense and small that the mind first read it as a gray cloud. Then it shifted, and he saw thousands of little faces arranged at strange angles, smiling, smiling, smiling. Not the dolls. Not copies. Something beneath copies. The circle of plastic heads around the chalk line were eyes, not as metaphor but as function, peering in, showing their sight to whatever was in the middle. The air pulse deepened. He became aware of his heart as a member of a choir.
“Do you feel it,” Mia asked, “how it fixes the angles.”
“You need to step out,” he said. He reached for her hand. Her fingers were hot and slick. She did not pull away, but she did not move. Around them the others were murmuring, not words, just little sounds of relief, like a room full of sleepers who have found the cool side of the pillow.
The mosaic changed again. It was not an image. It was a suggestion of an image, like the shape of a fish seen from the corner of the eye at the exact moment the sea decides it will be dangerous today. He understood that he was not the one looking. The circle was looking through him. The smile that had seemed generic now had specificity. It wore his sister’s laugh. It wore his own childhood memory of a tin robot that wound on a key and fell off a table and broke. He felt the old guilt. He felt the forgiveness that followed it. He hated the way the forgiveness made the room brighter.
Behind him, a small object clicked against concrete. Every head in the ring lifted. A security guard had stepped into the doorway, called by a neighbor. He held a flashlight that made a cone of clean-white in the dirty air. The beam hit the ring. The dust in the beam did not fall. It flowed toward the center and disappeared.
“You cannot be here,” the guard said.
A figure in the ring turned to him and smiled, a human smile that was all apology. The guard lowered
the light. He lowered it because it felt rude not to. He backed away. The door made a bass note as it met the jamb. The room reclaimed the dark.
“Enough,” Chen said. He pulled Mia. She came a step, then stopped as if her heel had snagged on a nail. The circular pressure bit into his knees. He thought of dragging her out, of throwing two cheap dolls against a wall, of a hundred actions the world of badges and radios offered. The ring did not care about those actions. The ring had other vectors.
Mr. Lau had said the mind needs proof. Chen had it now, more proof than he wanted. The circle was not metaphor. It was a lens and a mouth. It collected faces. It collected attention. It ate the difference between what people purchased and what they worshiped.
He took a breath that tasted like pennies. He did the only thing he could do that the ring had not accounted for. He stepped backward. He stepped one foot at a time out of the chalk, out of the pressure, out of the smell of melted sugar, out until the fluorescent lights became only bad lighting and not a climate. He did it because he understood he could not unmake this with a gesture. He did it because he would need to come back with fire codes and utility maps and the sort of patient, grinding bureaucratic violence that collapses dangerous clubs without speaking their name. He did it because he knew he could still carry his sister’s shoes.
He bent and picked them up. They were white sneakers, the laces double-knotted. He held them as if they were still warm. He said to Mia, quietly, the way he said things to her when they were children and their mother slept light, “I am not leaving you.”
“I know,” she said, and he felt that she meant it, and he felt that the circle meant it, too, and that the circle’s meaning was not his.
Outside, night lay over the water like oil. A barge moved, a rectangle of dim light with a deeper shadow riding within it. He heard gulls argue. He smelled river rot and diesel. He stood with the shoes as the low thrum continued behind him, a single note that would never peak, because peaking would be an ending and this thing had no interest in endings.
His phone buzzed. It was Mr. Lau. “You saw,” Lau said.
“Yes.”
“Then you know what must be done.”
“I know what I can do,” Chen said. “It may not be enough.”
“It will not be enough,” Lau said, and the honesty felt like the only kindness available. “But people like you keep the lines. We need lines. Even when they are imaginary.”
“I am going to shut them down,” Chen said. “Not the entity. The warehouse. The ring. I can make it slow to find a new space. I can disrupt the habit.”
Lau was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, Chen could hear the shop fan in the background and the old cat purring, a higher, kinder frequency than the warehouse tone.
“Do you remember the first thing you wanted to collect?”
“A tin robot,” Chen said, before the memory decided to stay hidden. “I broke it. I was six. I cried so hard I worried I would never breathe again.”
“And did you learn to breathe again?” “Yes.”
“Then start there,” Lau said. “Teach people to breathe without a toy. Sometimes it is enough.”
The line clicked. Chen stood at the dock railing and watched the barge become another light in a city of lights. The shoes were heavy after a while. He shifted them to his other hand. He was not a philosopher or a priest. He was a man in a humid city with a badge, a sister, and a conflict he could not summarize in a report. He walked back toward Nathan Road, toward paperwork and phone calls and a kind of quiet lobbying that took years and never felt brave.
He passed the stall with the blind boxes. A girl held a new figure up to the neon, checking the paint lines, confirming it was right, perfect, complete. The smile on its face did not change, but the light on its eyes did, and in that moving dot of white, he saw a single, ordinary thing he could carry out of the night. He took out his phone and, without looking away from the city’s glow, began to dial the fire inspector he trusted most.
Behind him, far enough to be mistaken for a ship’s motor, the thrum kept time with the tide. In front of him, on Nathan Road, a line of people shifted forward one step, and then one step more. The neon bled into the perpetually damp pavement. Somewhere a mop smeared a shop floor clean, and the water carried a curl of incense ash into the drain, where something that loved small smiles and steady patterns met it and opened its mouth, and the ash was gone.