Keep Off The Grass

Adam woke to see the clouds tumbling silently overhead. Usually he loved to watch their mute passage through the sky, this morning was alarmingly different; something unusual had robbed him of the thought that he might lay there and enjoy it. 

It was cold, he was outside and unable to remember how he’d got there. The ground underneath him felt hard and sharp in places. 

Glancing down, sight confirmed what he daren’t believe were possible, feeling at his chest and legs at disbelief of the evidence provided by his own eyes, panic set in, he was naked. 

“Awake are ye?” The voice came from some way away, Adam feared that it was addressing him. 

He deftly flipped himself over, trying to preserve whatever modesty remained. Somehow the ground refused to relinquish a small patch of head hair, this was ripped from his scalp mid-flip. 

The grass underneath him was not grass at all. Someone had gone to great lengths to ensure that it resembled the manicured lawn beyond its edge, at least in colour. That was where the similarities stopped. 

The not-grass was made of tiny plastic teeth, each of which had a small hook at its apex, almost like those plastic fabric fasteners. 

Adam chanced a gaze out along the spiky surface, it stretched perhaps a further twenty feet in front of him before the lawn began proper. The not-grass circled both the lawn and a large manor house some distance away. 

A figure marched from the house; its gait set a determined shadow across the lawn, like a sundial declaring it ‘Adam-o’clock’.  

The figure was wearing a wax jacket which was perhaps a size too big for it, one arm held a bundled something, the hand itself concealed under too long a sleeve, the other cradled a shotgun, bent double and hung from the crook of the elbow. 

As figure got closer Adam saw only mild annoyance on the man’s face. 

“Been out partying have ye, messin’ with the locals?” The man threw the bundle in Adam’s direction, to his relief it partly unfurled mid-flight to reveal a pair of chinos and a white t-shirt. 

“Mebbe you got bit, don’t ‘spose you remember nothin’ mind. Get dressed and bugger off.”

The man turned to leave, mumbling as he left. “Bloody werewolves, sick to death of ‘em.”