The airplane’s whining filled the air again. But this time Henry didn’t complain about the headache it brought on. He wanted to be in as bad a mood as possible when Shawn came home. Then he’d teach him all sorts of uses for a Garden Weasel.
Chapter One
I
t was the same dream that had tormented Gus since he was seven. He was lost in the woods, whacking through thick undergrowth with only a sliver of moon to light his way. Shawn had been next to him just a second ago. Now he was gone. Gus wanted to call out for him. Or for help. Or for his mother. But he didn’t dare make a sound.
Something was hunting him. Gus didn’t know what. He couldn’t see it. But he could hear it. Crashing through brush and snapping branches as it plunged towards him. Closer and closer, until Gus could hear its ragged breathing. Feel the hot breath on the back of his neck.
Then Gus did scream. Scream and run, run blindly, barely feeling the low branches flay the flesh from his body, tripping, stumbling, until he saw the chasm opening up beneath him.
This was the worst part of the dream. Gus could see the plunge just ahead of him, the cliff falling off hundreds of feet down to a roaring river far below. There was plenty of time to stop or turn away. But no matter how hard he willed his feet to change direction, they kept pounding inexorably towards the cliff’s edge. He pummeled his thighs, tried to throw himself to the ground, to grab hold of a tree—anything to slow himself down. Nothing worked. His feet kept propelling him forwards. Even as he felt his left foot—it was always the left that went first—take that fatal, final step with only open air beneath it, he could not stop. His right foot followed its mate off the edge, and for one moment Gus was suspended in air.
That’s when he woke up every time.
Every time until now.
Because try as he might to persuade himself that he was only dreaming, Gus knew this time it was different.
This was real.
The branches tearing at his arms, the jagged rocks digging into his feet, the pain in his lungs as he gasped for breath—they were all real. At least it wasn’t night, as it was in the dream, but the thick trees were so dense they nearly blocked out the sun completely. Gus really was in the wilderness, and there was some Thing after him. He could hear its hot, rough breath coming through the forest towards him.
And where was Shawn? He was the one who had talked Gus into taking this descent into hell. He was the one who had said that a little fresh air would be good for them. And yet he was also the one who couldn’t make it through the opening scene of
Cliffhanger
without suddenly realizing he’d forgotten to ask for extra fake butter on his popcorn and running out of the auditorium, not returning until any pretense of a realistic depiction of death in high places had been replaced by that pressing issue of how to find a hundred million in stolen government cash at the top of a mountain.
Shawn had been right by Gus’ side when they first entered this savage place. What happened to him? How had he disappeared? Had the Thing that was chasing Gus gotten him first? When it finally caught up with him, would Gus see shreds of his best friend’s mangled flesh snagged on its gleaming fangs? Or had Shawn simply taken a wrong step and plunged the way Gus did in his dreams? Gus had a vision of Shawn’s broken body sprawled out over a bed of jagged rocks, and for a brief moment envied him the quickness of his death.
This was it, then. The end. The fate that he’d been dreaming about for so many years. It was finally coming true, just as the Oracle or the Norns or the Magic 8 Ball had been trying to tell him since he was a little kid. If he had paid attention to those dreams, if he had followed the warnings, would he be facing his doom today? No doubt he would, Gus knew. He’d read enough Greek tragedies and seen enough
Twilight Zone
episodes to know that trying to avoid your fate only brought you to it faster.
Gus couldn’t run anymore. His breath was coming in shallow gasps, his feet had been numb for so long he might as well have been running through Marshmallow Fluff, and all his muscles were cramping so hard no one would ever be able to straighten out his corpse. And still the Thing was coming through the woods towards him.
He took a deep breath and stepped away from behind the tree that had been holding him up. The creature’s puffing breath had changed to a bellow. The Thing was close. The sound reached a crescendo, and Gus caught his first glimpse of the Beast as it blasted through the brush.
Chapter Two
I
t 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.
Chapter Three
E
llen Svaco didn’t have dripping fangs, her hair wasn’t a nest of hissing vipers. Her arms weren’t pus-filled tentacles.
But the instant she walked through the doors of the beach bungalow that housed Psych’s offices, Gus knew she was a monster. And not just any monster, but the worst kind.
Ellen Svaco was the sort of monster who would call a second-grader up to the blackboard and make him stand there until he correctly spelled the fiendishly difficult name of California’s state capital no matter how many times he had already failed and no matter how many of the other students were laughing at him and no matter that the lunch bell had already rung. Gus had met one such ogre before, and the encounter had scarred him so badly it took many years before he could bring himself to say the word “Sacramento” without a shudder and a stutter.
Like that other creature, Ellen wore her graying hair tied back so tightly it stretched every centimeter of her skin across the contours of her skull. Her shapeless shift looked like it came from the sale rack at the Mormon Fundamentalists’ thrift shop. She could have been forty or four hundred or anywhere in between.
“My name is Ellen Svaco and I’m looking for a detective named Spenser.” She said the name in a tone that made it sound like she was referring to a skunk that had crawled under her house to die. “With an ‘s’ like the poet. At least that’s what I was told.”
Shawn barely glanced up from the newspaper photo of Detective Carlton Lassiter he was busy defacing with a ballpoint pen. “Whoever said that is playing some kind of joke on you,” he said as he added eyeballs to the ends of the springy antennae he’d drawn on Lassiter’s forehead. “There is no ‘s’ in ‘poet.’ ”
Gus saw the skin around the woman’s eyes tighten in irritation and felt his hand shooting up in the air. He tried to stop it before his fingers had cleared the desk, but he had spent so much of his school years saving Shawn from academic selfimmolation that it had become a reflex as impossible to restrain as jerking his leg when the rubber hammer hit his knee or fleeing from a movie theater when they started showing a trailer for any movie where Eddie Murphy played more than two roles.
“Edmund Spenser, author of
The Faerie Queene,
is considered one of the most important Elizabethan poets,” Gus said.
“That’s nice for him,” Shawn said. “But can he fit all one hundred and twenty different colors of Crayons in his mouth at the same time? Because I can.”
That was true, as Shawn had proven only the night before. Gus saw the skin around the woman’s eyes tightening even further. He felt his pre-adolescent terror of any teacher’s disapproval rising in his chest.
“This is Shawn Spencer, and he is a detective,” Gus said. “How can we help you?”
The woman glared at Gus. “I’m having a very hard time believing that you are a walking weapon, the physical incarnation of street justice, and the unstoppable id to Spenser’s superego,” she said.
“It’s amazing how many people have that same problem,” Shawn said. “I told him not to stop shaving his head.”
“I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” Gus said.
“More like blatant misrepresentation,” the woman snapped. “Are you or are you not Hawk?”
“My name is Burton Guster. Most people call me Gus.”
“Which is a kind of hawk,” Shawn said.
“It is not,” Gus said.
“Gus the Hawk. I remember you showed it to me on some flag when you thought you wanted to be a flexitriloquist.”
“First of all, the bird on the flag of the Azores is the Goshawk, not Gus the Hawk,” Gus said. “And a scholar who studies flags is a vexillologist.”