The Call of the Mild

Chapter Two

It was as black as tar, and its skin was as shiny hard as a massive beetle’s. One bright eye in the middle of its face blasted light at Gus.

Gus crouched down in a fighting stance, trying to understand what he was seeing. What was this Thing coming for him? He had expected a bear, or a dire wolf, or even a sabertoothed tiger. But this was long and low, stretching back for what seemed to be thirty feet. And most disturbingly of all, it bore a rider. This wasn’t a wild Thing at all, but a beast of war, trained for combat and for killing. No wonder that in all the times he’d dreamed this moment, Gus had never seen what was chasing him. The image would have been too frightening not to wake him up.

And yet, there was a familiar aspect to the creature. Somewhere beneath all the panic signals his brain was trumpeting out to his nervous system, Gus’ rational mind was running through a catalog of images, trying to connect one to the Thing that was rushing towards him blasting steam out of an infernal blowhole.

There was no time for that, however. The creature was almost on him. Gus crouched down and prepared to leap away from the hideous black teeth that tore along right above the steel rails.

Rails? Gus thought, but before he could use that final image to solve the puzzle, a hand grabbed his shoulder and yanked him off his feet. Gus fell sideways, staggering to keep his balance, and the monster roared on.

“Dude, if I’d known you wanted to ride the little train so bad, I would have bought you a ticket.”

Gus felt his heart rate slow to near-fatal tachycardia as he turned to see Shawn, body unbroken and flesh unsnagged. If he shared any of Gus’ terror he was hiding it behind the brick of pink popcorn he was trying to cram into his mouth.

“Train?” As the word left Gus’ mouth, the image flashed in his head, and he realized that the Thing that had terrified him so completely was not a creature after all. The rest of reality rushed into his mind like the passenger cars following the locomotive.

The wilderness Gus and Shawn were standing in was actually the Camellia Forest, part of a large public garden. The trees towering above him were some of the thirty-four thousand plants in the seven hundred camellia varieties that had been spread out over twenty acres of prime suburban landscape outside Pasadena. Just past the steel tracks Gus could see the bright colors of the International Rosarium glinting in the sunlight, and beyond that the rest of the one hundred and fifty acres of park.

“Yes, Gus, it was a choo-choo,” Shawn said. “More precisely, it was the Descanso Gardens Enchanted Railroad, a one-eighth-scale replica of an actual train, and a major highlight for the young and young at heart, according to the garden’s brochure. What did you think it was?”

“I knew it was a train,” Gus said as reality replaced the fantasy landscape that his dream-induced panic had instilled in him. “I was waiting to hop a boxcar.”

“I can see why you’d want to do that,” Shawn said. “The three-dollar ticket price does seem steep for a five-minute ride, and it’s not like they have a dining car. Although this pink popcorn they sell at the snack bar goes a long way towards making up for that.”

Shawn held out the remaining piece of pink brick to Gus, who broke off a chunk and nibbled at it sullenly.

“We’re on a case,” Gus said. “You were handling the officials. I wanted to speak to the denizens of the demimonde, to see if they had any insight on the subject.”

“So you thought you’d hop a freight, gain the confidence of the local hobo community, see if they’d open up to you?”

“Exactly,” Gus said, finally feeling the terror draining out of his muscles.

“That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “Except, of course, for the fact that the boxcars on this train are so small the three-year-olds ride on top. But maybe there was a mouse inside who could have given you the inside squeak.”

“You can laugh if you want, but I was pursuing every possible lead to try to recover our client’s property. What were you doing?”

“Nothing as clever as riding the really, really little rails,” Shawn said. “I was checking out the lost-and-found department.”

“I’m sure that was useful,” Gus said.

“Compared to straddling a miniature railroad waiting to be struck down by some forest-dwelling monster, maybe not.”

Gus glared at him, then grabbed another chunk of the pink popcorn. “Fine. I took a wrong turn on the nature trail. The sun was too hot. I left my water bottle in the car. I guess I got a little dehydrated, and from there disorientation is only moments away. I didn’t want to take this stupid case to start with.”

That was true, but it didn’t have anything to do with Gus’ fear of the wilderness. It had to do with his fear of monsters.

In the years since they’d established Santa Barbara’s premier psychic-detective agency, Shawn and Gus had caught murderers, blackmailers, grave robbers, serial killers, oil well bandits, and seal slayers, and Gus had stared them all down with a quick grin and a clever retort-at least in his memory he did.

But there had been a handful of cases when they had had gone up against ghosts, dinosaurs, and mummies, and those were the ones that still kept Gus up at night. Even though they all turned out to be fakes, the idea of fighting slavering supernatural beasts from beyond hell was simply something Gus preferred to leave to others.

There was only one thing he dreaded more than the idea of going up against monsters.

And that was working for one.