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.”