The Etoiles
I’d always thought the Etoiles were just dead trees, up until the day I saw one come alive.
I’m sure you know the kind I mean. They aren’t uncommon. Old trees so overgrown with ivy or morning glory vine that you can’t see the tree inside any more.
I only call them Etoiles because that’s a name that came into my head when I looked at them and it seemed to fit, somehow. Otherwise I don’t think they really have a name.
You always see them standing perfectly still in the backs of parking lots, and in the dark places behind the silent houses at the far end of the street. They lean against splintering power lines, and over the rusted swing sets in the unused playgrounds. Anywhere old and unkempt they’ll be. Big or small.
I had never seen one move, until that day; the day I was walking home with some of my friends. It was a Friday, and the weekend welcomed us with a sickly warm and clouded afternoon that rumbled softly in the distance. The gum trees shivered in the shadow of an oncoming storm, and we smelt it in the thick and humid air. We walked home very slowly that day. The thunder spoke to us; “Hurry home, or you’ll be wet”, but we didn’t hurry home. Summer had arrived, it smudged the sunsets with purple and grey, and it filled the grass with tiny thorns, and the air with cicada song. Dogs cried at sirens, or at the silence.
In those summers, I swear, every Friday it would storm, and that became an essential start to the weekend. The storms washed off the dark stain of school so we could enter the wide freedom of the weekend new and fresh, like hatched tadpoles.
And that’s why we walked so slowly home that day, like every Friday; so we could stay out on the street, together a little longer, waiting for the storm to come. And so our uniforms could get soaking wet from those heavy raindrops, when they did finally begin to fall. And we would run, laughing and skipping, through the sheets of warm rain until it had sunk through our shirts and to our skin. Because then I would have a reason to strip off, as soon as I got home, and shower in the deep, blue darkness, with no lights on, while the flashes of the storm illuminated the world outside the little bathroom windows. I would wrap myself in my big warm towel and lie in my bed; dampening my pillow cover with my wet hair, waiting for the smoke alarm to announce that dinner was ready.
If I was lucky, the raindrops would drum on the roof all night, and the thunder’s deep secretive rumblings would stay with me, murmuring, until I fell asleep.
These Friday rituals were what made summer feel real to me. A weekend without a storm like that — without my friends running past me, splashing in the growing puddles — wouldn’t seem as though it had happened at all. Just a blue-sky day-dream that wanders by without even saying hello. And the dark stain of school would remain, hanging over us, until we returned on Monday.
But that stormy Friday when we saw the Etoile come alive: that changed the tone of our Friday rituals forever.
That Friday we walked on, very slowly, to our homes like we always did; harnessing any abnormality on the long, wide suburban roads as a distraction to buy us more time.
We kicked at loose stones and crooked, rusty bottle-caps that jangled across the tarmac. We kicked at them with short stabbing kicks, and then chased them, slowly but deliberately, to wherever their ambling trajectories would end, even if that meant going backwards, or to the side, just so we could kick at them again.
We were just about to pass where the Etoile on that street had been standing for as long as we remembered; tall, dark and strange beside an old septic tank.
I remember thinking about it at that moment, just before we passed the tank. In the back of my mind, the shadow of the Etoile seemed to fall over my thoughts inexplicably.
Then the wind picked up and the Juniper trees leaned with it, and the fire bushes rattled their deep red leaves and the gum trees started dropping their loose ones, diving down through the thick air to litter the road.
And then down the rain came, dotting the tar with circles, slowly colouring the concrete into a darker shade of grey. And the gutters by the footpath widened their mouths, ready to drink it all in. The rain grew heavier, flattening the wind, and I caught a movement in the corner of my eye in the dark green shadows near the septic tank. I turned to see the Etoile twisting its huge leafy body. In the darkening rainfall, its head turned like an owl’s to look at me. Two glowing eyes like torches shone from deep within its cloak. It pulled its tangled limbs from the sea of vines spread out around it, every leaf bouncing and shaking, struck by heavy raindrops. The creature lurched forward with a wet crash of branches, its bright eyes burning at me.
I screamed to my friends. The rain was blossoming down. We were already soaked to the skin. My friends had taken off their shoes and socks, and were jumping through the puddles that raced along the side of the high kerb.
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Their laughter and giggles curdled instantly to screams and we all took off. Some grabbed their shoes and socks while the others ran ahead barefoot. Adrenalin poured into us as we sprinted down that long wide road.
After running a few blocks, I turned my head to see it, standing in the middle of the road where we had left it, in the rain, its two glowing eyes still fixed on me.
I tore my gaze away from it, and ran to catch up with my friends.
We each ran straight to our homes, stripped off our dripping clothes and showered, this time with the lights very much on, as the thunder roared outside in the thick, seething storm.
When I told the story to my parents, all they did was nod elusively and told me never to play near them, especially when it was storming. I didn’t sleep that night. The rain drummed on the roof until early dawn, but for the first time in my life, I wished it would stop.
On Saturday morning, my friends and I rode our bikes down to the septic tank to see if the Etoile was still there. But it had gone, and so had all the others from the neighbourhood. They had all uprooted in the night and migrated from our suburb, wandering far away. We looked for them, but they had really disappeared, even the stubby one next to the soccer field, and the thin wispy one outside Mrs Whitehead’s sun room window.
That was the same night that old Mr Riley from the far end of my street disappeared too, without a single trace. Someone found his house empty with the TV still on and a pie burning in the oven.
“Kooky old Mr Riley,” I heard the neighbours saying; “If anyone would vanish in the middle of the night it would be him. Every time I passed his garden I would hear him talking to himself about the queerest things”. “I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner — he’ll wash up in a storm drain, any day now”. But he never washed up in a storm drain, and he never came home. I heard they demolished his house because the timber beams had rotted through, and beneath the floor and inside the walls, morning glory vines had grown into a thick net.
My friends and I had meetings by the septic tank after that weekend, discussing the Etoiles, and the disappearance of old Mr Riley. We seemed to be the only ones who thought they were connected. The terror of that Friday afternoon was burned in our minds, and we were bent on solving the mystery. But we didn’t find anything in the library books we borrowed, or the tracks we thought we found in the scrub near Hospital Hill. We started getting sick of meeting at the septic tank, because it smelt so awful.
My school teacher told me that the Etoiles would come back the following summer, and she was right. All except two of them returned to their old places, except for two that I know of that never came back. I wondered what might have happened to that missing pair. I wondered where the Etoiles went, why they left at all, and what they were. My teacher only said: “We’ll get to that later,” but of course we never did.
Once, when I was travelling on a train, I saw a group of three or four Etoiles wandering together through an empty field. Their tall, dark, lanky silhouettes cut into the overcast sky. I pressed my face to the glass of the window and whispered, “Where are you going?”, but my breath fogged up the glass and in a moment we sped past them.
I see them standing, tall, crooked, leafy statues, along the highways.
Once, I parked my car in an emergency stop near a big one. The highway was perfectly silent so I went out to look close up. I wanted to see the beast’s insides, so I pulled some of the vines away, and I shook the lifeless branches. I expected it to suddenly turn towards me with its bright, burning eyes, lift me off the ground and eat me whole. This is what I expected, and therefore almost what I yearned for. But it didn’t happen, and all I saw inside were loose vines and the rotting layers of a dead tree trunk.
Rumours come to me sometimes of strange lonely people vanishing without a trace from their houses in the middle of a stormy night. Those stories reawaken some deep feeling snagged in the back of my mind, and one night that strange feeling kept growing, like a sponge soaking up too much water.
I woke to a deep crash of thunder to hear rain pounding the roof above me. I had a strong feeling that there was an Etoile right outside my window, calling to me silently. I’m sure I saw torchlight illuminating the fuzzy edges of my curtain. But when I rose from my bed and pulled the curtains aside, there was nothing but sheets of rain and shadows. That feeling, dark and unsettling, drained from me like an emptying sink. I went back to sleep.
I would never tell anyone now that I’ve seen one come alive and stare at me with its glowing eyes. Or that I think I hear the beasts calling to me in the middle of the night. I push all those thoughts to the back of my mind.
Through my years I have asked many people about the etoiles, but they all just shrug elusively and shoulder off the questions as my parents once did when I was so much younger. Stay away from them, especially when it’s storming is all they ever said.
And I wish so very much that now I’ve grown, I could offer something more to you, but in truth I cannot. So stay away from them, especially when it’s storming.
The Etoiles is a story I wrote in my teens and eventually illustrated and published in my book ‘Lonely Beasts’
