The Golden-Eyed Enigma
Can you solve the mystery of the turtle?
Photo* & Text all rights reserved © Saint-Lazare, 2025.
My kid always had a visual imagination, which I fancied to call a magic eye. From an early age, he could find things in the most innocuous shapes, such as an angel in a cloud, or a face in the peeling paint of a wooden door lintel. So, when he pointed out the car window and said, “Look, Dad, that branch looks like a turtle,” I slowed down to admire his latest poetic find. The pebbles of the dirt road crunched under the tires, and I located a shadow, long and winding like a turtle's neck, that stood out against the gold of the summer morning, amplified by the river that ran parallel to the road. This shadow stood out among those of other vegetation, and when the car reached its location, we both leaned over to observe it better.
Only it was not a branch, it was a turtle.
“Oh boy!” exclaimed Morris, “It's odd to have left a turtle sculpture here, don't you think, Dad?”
Bewildered, I looked around us. I knew exactly where we were, but suddenly this thing put everything into perspective. The heat was raising clouds of flies on the track, wedged between two fields, one of them occupied by a small herd of indolent cows. The first asphalt road was just a few dozen meters away, spanning the narrow river over a bridge with a rusty railing. To be honest, road was a big word for foreign tourists like us, more like a vermicelli, joining two picturesque and tiny villages in the countryside. We were in the middle of nowhere. This object was out of place. Trying to rationalize, I offered a hypothesis.
“Maybe it's a local fishing spot, fella, and one of them wanted to personalize it with some humor.”
Yet something about my conjecture rang hollow. It was the fact that this was not some goofy plastic thing you would find in a junkyard. It was realistic. Realistic in an uncanny way.
Without even consulting each other, Morris and I got out of the car and approached it at a slow pace. A little breeze rose from the water, along with the pleasant scent of the damp roots of the trees that lined it. The thing stood on a rock about twenty centimeters high, in the middle of wild grasses, including nettles, overhanging the river by a good meter. It was nothing like the turtles Morris had admired in vivariums when he was younger. This thing was the length of my arm, neck up, mouth open, staring at us in an eerie immobility. Eerie because it seemed unnaturally genuine.
“Daddy, do you think she's real?” he murmured.
I did not answer, because goose bumps had formed on my arms when my brain had come to the same conclusion. The texture of the shell. The fine lines on the legs and neck. And that eye. A shiny black iris, at the center of a wide golden pupil, coiled in an orbit reminiscent of a snake's molt, with a finesse and dry clarity that was vaguely nauseating. This thing was a real animal. But it exuded death, contrasting sardonically with the jovial air given by its beak, open on a dry tongue.
“Don't touch her, boy, she's dead,” I said quickly, in a low voice.
I do not know why I said that, because I could see he had no intention of petting it. Morris drew his arms closer to his body with a mixture of disgust and sadness. And why murmuring? That thing certainly could not hear us anymore. But something about it forced us to restrain ourselves. Those golden eyes staring back at us.
Trying to keep a cool head, I detached myself from them to examine the beast more closely. I realized that its legs were not those of a land tortoise. It had flippers. A sea turtle, in the middle of the countryside, in Central Europe, it just did not make sense. It certainly had not died there, and certainly not in that position. This beast had been carefully preserved. But what kind of eccentric had deposited a taxidermy in such an incongruous place? I pulled my phone out of my pocket and took a photo.
“Come on, let's go home,” I said to Morris in what I hoped was a lighter tone. “Aren't you hungry after that hike?”
Personally, this thing had put me off my appetite, but the shade had given way to an aggressive sun, and something inside me wanted to put miles between it and me. My kid, more versatile, climbed back in the car with enthusiasm at the idea of devouring food.
The meal finished, I opened my computer to do some research. Our incongruous find obsessed me. Comparing my photo with the Google results, I identified it. It was a Loggerhead, an animal classified as vulnerable, and therefore forbidden for sale and taxidermy. The few examples I could find on auction sites dated back to the early twentieth century at best, rather pricey. One of them could have been the twin sister of the one by the river, with its expression of ecstasy, throat offered. Except that the golden eye seemed less mocking, less haunting. That whole shit was freaky.
Morris entered the room and handed me the phone. “Mom wants to talk to you.” I lifted the device to my ear and watched my son return to his drawings as my ex-wife's voice rumbled in my eardrum.
"What's this about a stuffed turtle? You're not making him smoke pot, are you? He's only thirteen!"
“Who do you think I am?” I snarled. "It's a real thing we saw, a taxidermy, something weird."
"Seriously, you were supposed to take him to historic places! He's going to have nightmares, he's always had a thing about dead animals, you know that!"
I held back an ironic laugh. No, I did not know. Because Morris had never been afraid of anything. It was I who had suffered from a phobia of dead animals, and the fact that she had forgotten about it after fifteen years of marriage stuck in my craw. This anecdote was beginning to take on unpleasant proportions, and I decided to laugh it off and forget it. My son and I were going to enjoy our vacation. And so we did. Morris had a blast at the châteaux, we gorged ourselves on sorbets and pastries, and I watched my son run through the vineyards breathlessly while I tasted the local wines.
Two days later, we were returning from an excursion on the road that intersected the river when Morris asked me to slow down to catch a glimpse of the turtle.
"That disgusting thing, are you sure?" I grinned comically.
"Come on, Dad, please!"
Keeping my smile fixed on my face, I turned the wheel to get onto the dirt road. The car stalled in front of the rock as my foot skidded off the brake. Smile gone. There was no mistaking it. The turtle had disappeared.
Once again, we stepped out of the car with the caution and silence of tomb explorers. The bare rock seemed to sneer.
"Someone must have stolen it," I offered, in a faint voice.
"No, look, Dad, there are tracks, as if she'd gone back to the river!"
I was about to lecture him for his stupidity, annoyed by this twist in the crazy sea turtle story. However, when my gaze fell on the grass separating the stone from the river, I had to admit there was something disturbing. The vegetation had been flattened, forming a curved trail. As if something moderately heavy had descended from the rock and dragged itself to the water without the aid of legs. With flippers. With a flat belly. Except this something was DEAD.
I heard myself explain to Morris that this beast, had it still been alive, could not have survived far from the sea bed, out of salt water, out of water at all, and that it certainly would not have stopped on a burning rock to daydream motionless in front of us for long minutes, before setting off again to cool off in a more than shallow stream.
But my voice seemed distant compared to the deafening flood of thoughts filling my skull. Obviously, someone had taken it. But why pretend to leave traces that made it look like it was alive? Was some local farmer having fun making pranks on moronic tourists? Was there a camera hidden somewhere, filming us without our knowledge? And if so, how could one know we would come to see it again? Had I been observed taking the photo? Had the object's semi-illegality panicked its owner, fearing that I might alert the local authorities or publish a viral post on social networks?
And why the hell having put such an object in this remote location in the first place? Did it belong to a private treasure hunt? Was it an occult symbol for initiates of a secret society or a cult? But then AGAIN, why not just remove it, why the staging of its escape?
My inner voice rolled like thunder between my ears, the theories overlapping each other, pounding like heavy raindrops on a metal roof. Dad? Or was it the rhythm in my temples that was accelerating? Could this thing be haunted? Dad. I felt water trickling down my back. There were now two rocks, and the river became fuzzy. Did zombie turtles exist? OH MY GOD! The golden eyes! They invaded my field of vision in a flash, a violent close-up that inflicted a piercing pain in my skull. They could see me. They dug into my soul with their spark of malice… Dad! Everything went white, then dark. Only the outline of my son, bent toward me, remained for an instant in my retina. Then, nothing.
“Mum? I think Dad got a sunstroke! How do I call emergency services here???”
⚠️WRITING CHALLENGE ALERT⚠️
This story is based on true facts, and, to this day, the mystery remains unsolved. So, inventive a.k.a. twisted minds of Substack, I challenge you.
Can you try to imagine what the deal is with the golden-eyed turtle, and write a short story about it? You can elaborate on the theories of the narrator, create the backstory of the turtle, a sequel of my short story, an independent tale with the same object, etc. Horror, fantasy, magic realism, comedy, poetry, literary fiction, crime story; pick your poison. You can write anything you want as long as you expand on this bizarre incident, and link your post back to mine with an explanation on the origin of the story. No deadline.
So, get freaky, share, and tag me.
* If you want to use the picture, just credit me.
Check the entries of the challenge below ⬇️
They took up the challenge of the Golden-Eyed Enigma:
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Unsettling!
So creepy! I can't wait to read what people come up with.