They were out in the yard waiting, the man-killers. Her sleeping mind never divulged to her what kind of curse the camp was under, but the thorn creatures were waiting because of it.
The camp itself varied little from her grandmother's fine upstate home -- a little white farmhouse on the border between the rural town and the wilder woodlands. Inside, her dream self glanced around a dining room and salon grown cozy and refined with the accumulated china and knickknacks of decades. Lacy curtains and velvety blue drapes framed a wide, bay window and sliding doors that opened onto a ground-level, wooden deck. There, her eyes gave up roving, fear compelling them to stare at the creatures.
Inexplicably, the word "snakehead" flashed across her unconsciousness, the result of too many news articles, ecological essays, and monster movies raving about how the invasive, fanged fish could breathe air and crawl overland. After she had awoken, the association seemed comically wrong. But the misapplied name added the correct feeling of menace to the clearly vegetative stalkers.
There were three that she could see through the sliding doors, resembling alligators in their shapes and movements, except with bodies formed out of bramble. Each had a distinct kind of thorn sprouting from its stick-like limbs: one had short, curvy rose thorns, another long, straight cactus spikes. All of them had a stem-green coloring that blended fairly well with the back lawn, but their sharp skins stood out plainly from the grass and gave them away. As she watched, the snakehead thorns slithered closer to the deck stairs, setting up an ambush. Anything that ventured down those steps would find itself snared in thorny jaws and drowned by an aggressive wave of plant life.
Even after daylight had called her away from the hunters, she caught herself looking askance at every tree and bush she passed on her way to work.
