The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  And then, higher up the hillside, the darker world closed in. The man and the dog trod silently into the silence of the fir forest.

  Nothing much moved there, but a few stray sheep. And even the sheep were different in the fir forest. They stood quite still as the man and the dog went by, staring in a pop-eyed, manic way, quivering with tension, staring and staring like mad, humourless women. Clearly the dog was puzzled by them. There was a big black sheep which appeared round a bend in the track, to sneeze loudly and stamp its feet, sudden explosive sounds which were amplified somehow by the prickling shadows of the plantation. Phoebe strained on her leash, recoiling at first but then tugging towards the sheep and triggering her dangerous snarl. The black sheep had a patch of pure white above each eye. And it was these false eyes, like empty, staring sockets, which followed the man and his dog as they hurried along the track, as they felt the bristling sides of the forest forever closing in on them. From time to time, in this place of darkness peopled by a flock of moody mad women, the air was ripe with the stink of decomposing meat. Somewhere in the gloom, it seemed that something had crawled away to die and now was being dismantled by the silently working teeth of the maggots. The smell arose like a vapour exhaled by the earth itself, and then it was gone again, as if Andrew had imagined it, as though the stink were conjured in the darkest recesses of his own mind, to appear and disappear like a memory. It was difficult for him to restrain the dog as she pulled him rapidly upwards and onwards to the clearer air of the mountain. Suddenly the plantation stopped. There was a barbed-wire fence, rusted and broken in many places, and the man and his dog emerged from the forest to find themselves beneath the sheer cliffs of a great crater. There were no more trees.

  Andrew and Phoebe stood at the bottom of a gigantic bowl which a glacier had gouged from the mountainside many thousands of years before Andrew had struck Jennifer in his moment of humiliation. The rocks rose sheer around them, glistening black slabs on which nothing could grow but a patina of moss. On a fine day, when the man and the dog burst thankfully from the stale blanket of the forest, they could peer upwards and imagine they saw the ridge of the mountain. It was never entirely clear. Twists of mist had caught on the highest crags and had blurred their definition. But when Andrew and Phoebe climbed to the crater on an afternoon of drizzle, when even the forest twitched like the coat of a mangy old hound, the rim of their bowl was obscured by a boiling broth of cloud. The crater became a cauldron which overflowed with steam. Somewhere around the shrouded cliffs, a raven circled and croaked, and when it passed close overhead its wingbeats were the regular pantings of some exhausted beast. The clacking of jackdaws echoed from the sides of the crater. These sounds and the moaning of the wind were funnelled around and around the mountainsides, they were joined by the bilious cries of the sheep in the forest and by the perpetual whispers of water: for the crater was the source of all the streams and drains and ditches which cut through the plantation and ran more gracefully among the woodland below. It gathered every droplet from the snagging clouds and sucked them into its steep-sided bowl, until the walls of the crater were coursing with water which was soaked up by the sponge of the mountain. The man and the dog stood silently and were wreathed by the lowering mists, they waited respectfully in the desolate place of water and rock, sensing that it was appropriate to be still in the bowl of the crater. Andrew, listening to the raven and to the diminishing thuds of his own blood, was tired but exhilarated after the rapid climb through the plantation. Phoebe let her mouth fall open and her tongue loll out. She thought back to the big black sheep and the way it had followed her with its eyeless sockets. Her nostrils still tingled with the lingering scents of the forest, the clammy shadows and their hidden repositories of putrefaction.

  And then they were aware of another sound, a sound which was so much a part of that empty place that it registered slowly, gradually, as though the slabs of the rocks and the seething white mists had produced the sound themselves and were reluctant to let it go . . . The baying of hounds . . . It was like the wind at first, it blurred with the wind and was part of it, until it swelled and grew into a sound of its own and was unmistakable. The first time they were there and they heard it, both Andrew and Phoebe were afraid. Together they stared around them, cut off by the plantation from the open world of air and light and sunshine. They were in the crater, with a smothering of cloud pressed on them, surrounded by walls of rock and the inescapable murmurings of water. A single howl untangled itself from the movements of the wind, it was joined by another and then another until the winds and the water were simply an accompaniment to the overwhelming music of the hounds. The crater took up the sound, echoing it from wall to wall and amplifying it, and soon the crater was the bell of an enormous trumpet which rang out its fanfare to the sky above. The mountain was struck like a gong by the baying of the hounds.

  Andrew pulled Phoebe with him across the marshy ground, the man wading carelessly through the quag while the dog sprang from one clump of tough grass to another. They pressed on, with the silent forest below them, with the reverberating cliffs above. Ahead of them, looming through the drizzle, there were buildings and a large muddy area enclosed by a high wire fence, wooden sheds from which the cries of the hounds were coming. Andrew stopped. Phoebe waited, standing delicately on a green boulder. She was cowed by the proximity of so many dogs, and she tucked her tail tightly between her legs so that its plume disappeared among the long fur of her belly. Her ears drooped. She looked up at Andrew with her most beseeching expression. ‘All right, Phoebe, we’re not staying. Let’s just have a closer look,’ and he led her reluctantly nearer to the sheds. It was raining harder, no longer a drizzle but a driving, drenching mist which flattened Andrew’s curls into a golden helmet, tight and cold on his skull. His glasses quivered with globules of water. He wiped them with his fingers, and he could see a figure moving quickly from shed to shed, appearing and disappearing from one building to another, carrying a bucket in each hand. Someone was feeding the hounds, someone they greeted with their chorus of howls. The figure emerged from one shed, completely shrouded with a rainproof green coat, the hood enveloping the head, a shining green figure which went purposefully around the compound in the submarine gloom. Andrew raised his arm, wondering if the figure would lift its head and see him and the dog against the background of the drowned crater. And the figure paused, just long enough to put down one bucket and to hold up a hand for a second before vanishing once more from sight.

  *

  In this way, Andrew Pinkney and his dog, Phoebe, spent the first week of their stay in Wales. They went for hours, morning and afternoon, through the woodland glades around the cottage. The steep sides of the hill which were clad so beautifully that autumn by a covering of deciduous trees, predominantly by the graceful shade of the silver birch, repaid more thorough exploration. The ground was very steep, but the man and the dog scrambled among the trees, the man often falling on his hands and knees in the aromatic carpet of leaves. And he found what he could easily have missed if he had stayed on the beaten tracks, that the hillsides were riddled with shallow caves, mere slits and hollows in the rocks in most cases, but there were some which he and Phoebe could penetrate for a few yards. They had been used by the sheep, as shelter, so the floors of the caves were trodden bare and were covered with droppings. Hidden high up among the tallest branches of the silver birch, Andrew sat with Phoebe in a particular vantage point, the best and deepest of the caves, from which he could gaze across the top of his cottage and for miles down the valley. He imagined the cave used by a hermit, in the days when the remote fastnesses of Wales were more popular with the religious recluse than with solicitors from Sussex, for he found in the cave that he was quite aloof from the valley below and was completely hidden. He went there often, to his hermit’s cell, to sit and think of what he had done to bring him to Wales . . . And to think of what he had not done, what he had not been able to do, what had provoked the derision of the woman . . . Thi
s troubled him more than the fact that he had knocked her unconscious. After all, he knew from his legal studies that such outbursts of violence were commonplace. What was the name of the case, almost analogous to his own? What was it? Ah yes, every law student remembered it with a chuckle because of the inappropriateness of the appellant’s name: Bedder versus the Director of Public Prosecutions, sometime back in the fifties. Bedder! The man had found himself incapable of consummating his business deal with a prostitute he had hired, on account of his sexual impotence, and had been so enraged and humiliated by the woman’s laughter that he promptly stabbed her to death. What was the judgment? Bedder had tried to plead that he had been provoked by the prostitute’s jeering, that his impotence rendered him uncommonly vulnerable to such ridicule; he had appealed to the DPP that the charge should be reduced from murder to manslaughter. No such luck. The appeal was dismissed and Bedder was hanged. Andrew brooded on the case. Jennifer’s laughter at his failure had provoked his uncontrollable violence, and now he was banished for it. Thinking of Bedder, he tried to brood less. Both he and Jennifer had escaped lightly in comparison, if there was a comparison to be made. At least they were both still alive, only angry and bruised.

  He pondered the notion of his impotence, until he sprang again from his cell to walk and walk with Phoebe, to dispel the thought by trudging endlessly through the woodlands. And, in spite of the melancholy darkness of the fir forest, they pursued those shadowy tracks as well, in the sunshine of a splendid autumn and as it deteriorated into mists and drizzle. There was something magnetic in the gloom of the plantation which drew the man to it almost every day. Higher and faster they climbed, the dog tugging remorselessly on her lead, with the bristles of the black trees closing in on them. Slap-slap-slap went the wellington boots on Andrew’s calves, and that was often the only sound in the forest. Phoebe’s feet were noiseless on the grass and needles, there was her rasping breath as she strained against the collar, and then there was always the sudden appearance of that black sheep, the maddest woman of all the flock, which materialised like a shadow from the shadows of the trees, detaching itself from the darkness. It would stand quite still on the track ahead of them, utterly black, fixing the man and the dog with the only whiteness of its fleece, those staring blank sockets which had never been eyes. With a sneeze and a stamp, the sheep was gone. It melted back into the forest, while the man was left to wonder if he had imagined it there in the increasing gloom of late afternoon, while the dog switched on her chain-saw snarl. Faster and higher they climbed, pausing to adjust their nostrils to the pervasive stench of death which assailed them from some dank corner, accelerating as they sensed the open air above, until the forest lay silently behind them. It was only then, when they emerged into the crater of rocks, that they caught the baying of the hounds. And several times Andrew saw the green figure going from shed to shed of the kennels with its buckets, and he was able to elicit a wave as he stood some distance away with the reluctant Phoebe.

  More often than not, Andrew would return to the cottage laden with firewood. He became used to taking the bow-saw with him on their walks, for there were always broken and fallen branches to be cut. Most of the available timber was in the deciduous woodland. He found a silver birch which had recently come down; its roots had never dug deeply into the earth because of the rocks, but had splayed in all directions around the tree trunk, only inches beneath the soil, clawing desperately for a grip. When the winds came, the weight of the trunk and its nodding branches had been too much on the sloping roots, and the tree had toppled. The roots protruded like a great plate of soil radiating from the base of the tree. Andrew had soon sawed right through the thickest part of the trunk. Although he was unaccustomed to heavy exercise, more used to his wills and conveyances in the office, he was strong and big and his weight behind the saw made short work of the slender birch. Through the rest of an afternoon, while Phoebe watched him and waited impatiently for the man to take her walking, Andrew moved from branch to branch until the tree was cut into sizes he could fetch with the wheel­barrow. There were ancient dead trees too, still upright. Uneasily aware that Jennifer would not approve, he tested the sturdiness of such trees by leaning on them, and if they groaned and teetered sufficiently he would exert more weight until they came crashing down. ‘Even dead and rotten trees are invaluable to the ecology, you know . . .’ he could imagine Jennifer saying in her prim librarian’s voice, ‘they provide shelter and food for countless thousands of useful insects, which, in their turn, are food for countless birds and . . .’ Andrew pushed, while Phoebe watched, and gradually the little stone outhouse was stacked with logs for the fire. To supplement this, he contacted the local coalman, recommended by his employer. Andrew observed through his binoculars as the coalman approached from the road: it was a Land-rover which heaved its way to the river bridge, a man in wellington boots who got out to open the gates. Clearly the coalman knew what to expect and had come properly booted for the overflowing river. His vehicle lurched up the track, four times the man stopped to open and close the gates, and when he arrived at the cottage he was appropriately irritable. Andrew beamed at him, pushing back the wave of flopping blond hair from his forehead. ‘You made it then? Quite a track, isn’t it!’ The man went slowly about his job, muttering to himself in Welsh. Andrew wondered whether it was a good idea to offer some help in manhandling the sacks from the back of the vehicle, especially as he was somewhat bigger than the coalman, but he did not. Wanting to be genial, he added a few more pounds to the cost of the coal, which the man was tipping against the side of the woodshed, and he pressed the extra coins into the coalman’s blackened hand. ‘I wonder if you can tell me what this means,’ he said cheerily, as much to be friendly as genuinely curious, and he gestured towards the sign on the front of the cottage. ‘How do you pronounce it? Clogwyn Ceiliog? Something like that?’ He was delighted to see that he had improved the man’s humour by asking, because the sooty little Welshman first grinned an unnaturally dazzling grin and then broke into peals of high-pitched laughter. But he jumped into his Land-rover and drove away, still laughing, without offering a translation.

  The woodshed filled up, Andrew and Phoebe searched the hillsides for dead and fallen trees. The trunk of a recently up-ended larch would ooze and grip the blade of the saw, until sometimes the man would have to resort to brute force to free it; then he would wrench on the limb of the tree until it splintered, until a long white wound appeared from which the saw could be extricated. Cutting the trunk of a dead rowan was like cutting a French loaf with a breadknife, the blade went easily through and shed the dry crumbs of sawdust on the ground. He wanted to gather as much fuel as he could before the weather worsened, and he was satisfied to see the walls of the woodshed gradually hidden by the stacks of logs. Indeed, with the open fire lit in the evenings, he could make the cottage warm, arranging a bed of coal and laying his timber on it, happy to see the fruits of his afternoon labours burst into flames. But unquestionably the cottage was damp. He would recommend most strongly to his employer, when he returned to Sussex, that some drastic structural work be done on the building before it deteriorated beyond repair. The place had only been used as a summer retreat, never in the autumn or winter months. From time to time, someone had slapped a coat of whitewash on the walls inside and outside, and that was all the maintenance it had received. Blooming through the whitewash, in every room, were the mouldy green blossoms of damp. From the floors upwards, these areas of moisture spread and crept like the lichen which grew on the woodland trees. Somehow, the warmer the living-room became, as Andrew banked up the fire each evening, the more clearly the bruises of green stood out against the whitened walls. Condensation trickled down the windows into the rotted paintwork of the sills, the walls themselves oozed vapour like the cold stale air of a crypt, and Andrew thought he could see the gossamer mists of water floating around him. He was not too concerned: it was not his property, he and the dog were there for a matter of weeks. He built up
a comfortable fug in the living-room and sat in front of the fire, with Phoebe curled on his lap like a blanket, uninterested in the condition of the old cottage as long as he and Phoebe could stay warm and dry for a