The Call of the Mild
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Acknowledgements
About the Author
SILENT KILLER
Shawn hadn’t moved. He was staring back towards the snack bar, looking for the vanished mime. “There was something wrong with that mime,” Shawn said.
“By definition,” Gus said.
“No, something else,” Shawn said, still looking back where they’d last seen the mime. “Something I noticed but didn’t register until after we left.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then Gus spoke quietly. “You mean like he had a gun pointed at my head?”
“I think I would have noticed that a little quicker,” Shawn said. “No, it was—”
“Shawn!”
“Yes?”
“The mime has a gun pointed at my head.”
Shawn turned back to his partner. The mime stood in front of Gus, his white-gloved hand leveling a gleaming pistol at Gus’ forehead.
“Please,” the mime said. “Don’t make me kill you.”
THE PSYCH SERIES
Call of the Mild
Mind Over Magic
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read
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For Rufus R. and the woman who loves him
Prologue
1988
Henry Spencer’s head was about to split in two. Part of it was due to the horrible high-pitched whine coming from the backyard. But mostly it was caused by the even more horrible low-pitched whining from the woman on the other end of the phone line. She’d started complaining the second he picked up, and she hadn’t stopped to take a breath in five minutes.
Finally there was a pause in her tirade. Maybe she needed air. Maybe she’d keeled over from a stroke. Henry didn’t care. He saw his opportunity and he seized it.
“You want to sue, I’ll see you in court, lady!”
He slammed down the phone receiver, then picked it up and slammed it down again. It didn’t help. His head still throbbed.
This wasn’t the first time Henry had been threatened with a lawsuit. Half the creeps he’d arrested in all his years on the Santa Barbara police force had screamed police brutality and vowed to take him to court.
But it was the first time he’d been threatened with a lawsuit because of something his son had done. Or, rather, not done.
Henry massaged his pounding skull, then shouted, “Shawn!” There was no answer, of course. And the whining kept getting louder.
Henry stalked through the kitchen and and flung open the screen door. Shawn was standing in the middle of the lawn, a radio-control box in his hand.
“Watch out!” Shawn said.
“I’m not the one who—” Henry’s sentence was cut off as a model airplane crashed into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him.
“Well, that’s just great,” Shawn said, flipping a switch on the control box. “You killed it.”
“Then half my work is done.” Henry pulled air into his lungs, then picked up the airplane and looked it over. It was a nice model, finely detailed. These things weren’t cheap. “Where did you get this?”
“I bought it,” Shawn said.
“With what money?”
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“Money I earned,” Shawn said.
“Would that be money you earned taking care of Mrs. Calloway’s garden?” Henry said.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because she just called,” Henry said. “Apparently she paid you in advance for your work, and now all her flowers are dead because you never showed up to take care of them. She wants to sue you.”
“Good luck to her,” Shawn said. “It’s not like I have any assets, thanks to a medieval allowance policy around here.”
Shawn turned the control box upside down and banged on the bottom. The plane in Henry’s hand gave a cough and a shake, and the propeller kicked over. Henry grabbed it and held it in place until the toy stopped struggling.
“Maybe I should have said she wants to sue me,” Henry said. “But the lawsuit isn’t the important part. Hell, if she was stupid enough to pay you in advance, she shouldn’t be allowed to own plants anyway. But you said you’d take care of her garden and you killed it.”
“It was a weasel,” Shawn said.
“Oh, that’s good,” Henry said. “You took care of her flowers, but a weasel destroyed them.”
“I’m not talking about a rodent,” Shawn said. He walked over to his father and tried to pry the plane out of his hands. Henry didn’t let go. “I’m saying I didn’t lie. I told her I would take care of her plants to the best of my ability. Well, this was the best of my ability. That’s a weasel.”
Henry stared at his son, wondering as he had so many times before exactly what he had done in a previous life to deserve this. “You want to go into court and explain this weasel to a judge?”
“It’s the truth,” Shawn said.
“A weasel is not a legal defense,” Henry said. “If anything, it’s going to make a judge really angry. He’ll find a way to put you in juvie just for smarting off to him.”
Henry was pleased to see that Shawn actually looked a little nervous. “What should I do?”
“I only see one way out of this,” Henry said. “And that’s another weasel.”
“But you just said—”
Henry held up a hand to cut him off. “It’s a very special weasel, guaranteed to get you out of trouble. But you have to promise to do exactly what I say, or it’s not going to work.”
“What is it?” Shawn said suspiciously.
“Promise first.”
Shawn struggled to find a way around the requirement. Then he smiled. “I promise.”
“Right. Because I am an idiot. You have to tell me exactly what you’re promising, or it’s no deal.”
Shawn’s smile vanished. “I promise to do exactly what you say.”
“Good call, son.” Putting down the plane, Henry led Shawn to the garage and threw open the door. He poked around in his tools and came out with a long pole topped with three sets of rotating tines. “There you go.”
He thrust the tool out to Shawn, who took a step back. “I thought you said you had a weasel for me.”
“I do,” Henry said. “This is the Garden Weasel. I want you to use it to dig up Mrs. Calloway’s garden, and then I want you to replace everything that died. Is that clear?”
Shawn thought this over for a long time. Then he broke out into a grin. “Yes, sir!”
Shawn took the Garden Weasel and ran down the driveway. Henry looked after him, wondering what had just happened. He had laid down the law for Shawn, and Shawn had agreed to it. Why had he seemed so triumphant? What had Henry missed?
Inches away from Henry’s feet, the airplane’s propeller kicked twice, then started to spin. The plane taxied down the driveway. Henry dove for it, but it took off and rose out of his reach.
And then Henry knew. Shawn hadn’t agreed to do the work. Shawn hadn’t agreed to do any work. He had simply acknowledged the clarity of his father’s demands. It was another one of Shawn’s weasels.
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
It 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 dee
p 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
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.