The Eucalyptus Coats

At twenty-five, I still wake in a cold sweat, my fingers clawing at the air for a softness that isn’t there. It’s the memory of that summer in the hill station of Kodaikanal that does this to me, the summer I turned twelve and the world peeled back its skin to show me what writhed beneath. My father, a government surveyor, had been posted to a cluster of identical bungalows reserved for civil servants, each one a clone of the next, set in a grove of eucalyptus trees. I remember the first time I saw them—those trees with their bark hanging in long, ragged strips, like bandages peeling off a wound that never healed. The local children called them the ‘ghost gums,’ and I understood why. Even at noon, the grove felt dim, the leaves whispering secrets in a language that scraped the inside of my ears.

My brother, Daniel, two years older, thought it was an adventure. We’d explore the paths that twisted between the trees, our footsteps muffled by the carpet of fallen leaves and gray bark. But I always felt watched. It wasn’t the ordinary unease of a child in the dark; it was a certainty that something was there, just beyond my peripheral vision, mimicking the movement of the trunks. The wind made the high branches creak, and sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of a shape that was too tall, too thin, and then it would vanish. Daniel laughed and called me a scaredy-cat, but I saw the way his eyes darted, too.

The first sign of real wrongness came on a Sunday, when our mother sent us to the estate’s common laundry room to fetch a forgotten basket. The room was a concrete box at the far edge of the grove, its door swollen with damp. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of mildew and something else—a sweet, cloying odor, like rotting fruit. The basket lay in the corner, but as I reached for it, I saw a small pile of what looked like shredded bark in the shape of a small cocoon. It was almost like a nest, but the inside was lined with a silky, gray substance that shimmered in the weak light. Daniel poked it with a stick, and it broke open, releasing a puff of fine, gray dust. He coughed and waved it away, but I lingered, feeling an unexplainable pull. I looked closer and saw something like a tiny, desiccated hand—a finger, maybe, with a nail that was slightly too long. I didn’t tell Daniel. I couldn’t.

That night, the dreams began. I saw the eucalyptus trees, but they weren’t trees anymore; they were bodies, upright, with bark-like skin peeling back to reveal wet, raw flesh. Their limbs twisted into branches, and from their mouths—or what would be mouths—came a low, droning hum that matched the vibration of the blood in my veins. I woke gasping, and when I looked out the window, I saw a figure in the grove. It was tall, impossibly tall, with arms that hung to its knees, and its head was tilted as if listening. It was covered in a gray, peeling coat that looked like the bark of the eucalyptus. I blinked, and it was gone.

Over the next weeks, the grove began to change. The trees seemed to lean closer to the house, their branches scratching the roof during the night. The air grew heavier, more humid, and the mist that rolled in every evening clung to us like a second skin. My mother complained of headaches, and my father, who used to stroll in the grove after dinner, now walked with quickened steps. Daniel started to have nightmares too, but he wouldn’t say about what. The only sound that came from his room was a series of wet, clicking noises that I tried to block out with a pillow.

Then came the night of the new moon. The power went out in the colony, and we sat in the living room with candles, which threw dancing shadows that seemed to have a life of their own. My father told us to stay put while he went for the generator. He didn’t come back for an hour, and when he did, his face was ashen. He wouldn’t say what had happened, but that night, I heard him in the bathroom, scrubbing his hands raw, muttering to himself. I crept to the window and saw that the eucalyptus grove was alive with flickering lights—not the warm glow of lanterns, but a cold, blue luminescence that pulsed like a heartbeat.

I couldn’t stay inside any longer. I slipped out the back door, barefoot, drawn by a curiosity that was stronger than my fear. The grove was carpeted with the same blue light, which emanated from the trees themselves, oozing from the torn bark. As I walked deeper, I saw that the trees were not trees at all, but beings that had been transformed, their bark actually skin that flaked and regrew in a continuous cycle. Their roots were feet, their branches arms that reached skyward in a silent plea. They were trapped, frozen in an agony I could only sense. And in the center of the grove, there was a large, gnarled tree that pulsed with a dark, rhythmic throb. Its bark was smooth and white, like flesh, and its trunk had a split that looked like an eye, closed.

I approached, and the ground beneath my feet gave way, revealing a hollow filled with those same silky, gray cocoons, but larger, some as big as a child. They were hatching. I could see movement inside, a fingernail pressing from within, a crease of a mouth. The tree’s eye opened, and it was a deep, liquid black, and it fixed on me with a terrible hunger. I tried to run, but my legs were heavy, and the air was thick as syrup. I felt a sensation of cold hands on my shoulders, and a voice, not in my ears but in my skull, whispered, ‘You see us now. You will not forget.’

I woke up on the floor of my room the next morning, with no memory of how I got back. The whole grove had been burned down the previous night, my father had done it, he confessed to my mother, but no one believed him. He said he had found a pile of gray husks in the middle of the grove, and they were moving. He poured kerosene and lit a match.

We moved away the next week. I never saw the grove again, but the fear stayed with me. I am twenty-five now, and I still fear the dark, and I still fear the color red—not just any red, but the deep crimson that I saw in the center of those cocoons, which I realize now were not cocoons but wombs. And I still see the eucalyptus trees everywhere, in every vertical shadow, in every peeling layer of paint. I know they are out there, waiting, and one day, they will find me again, and this time, I won’t wake up.