The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  Behind the bar, the woman summoned another weary smile. ‘You’ve got to be careful around here, with a dog,’ she said, over the girl’s giggles. ‘With all the sheep around. Is yours all right with them?’

  Andrew hesitated. Both boy and girl drained their glasses, as though suddenly overwhelmed by thirst. The girl glanced away. The boy stared straight at Andrew, waiting for his answer, but then spoke before Andrew did. ‘Good idea to keep it on a lead, all the time. No such thing as a dog what won’t chase a sheep. They can’t help it. But round here there’s people with guns what’ll shoot on sight if they see a loose dog . . .’

  ‘She’s not so bad, so far,’ said Andrew carefully. ‘I’ll keep a good eye on her. We go up through the plantation usually and hardly ever see any sheep at all in there. But we’ve never got as far as a farm. We never go much further than that sort of crater at the top of the forest. Where did you see us?’ he asked the girl.

  ‘You seen me too,’ she answered. ‘At the kennels. I’m up there feeding the hounds every afternoon.’ She looked coolly at him and went on. ‘Seen you up there waving at me, like somebody lost. With that sort of dog as well. We might be coming down past your place tomorrow, got to run a couple of hounds round the forest and get them sorted out. And then we’ll be out hunting soon, right the way past your cottage . . . What’s it called? Something about a cockerel, isn’t it? Clogwyn Ceiliog . . . ?’

  This reduced the boy to a state of hysterical giggling. The woman refilled their glasses, while the spaniel stood up from the fire and started gnawing frantically at its threadbare rump. Andrew managed to join in with the laughter.

  ‘Cockerel Cottage!’ he proclaimed. ‘The best-known spelling mistake in the valley! Hey, I’ll get these . . .’ and he took out his wallet again. ‘What’s that? Two pints of lager, and another pint for me, please. Are you having anything?’

  The woman declined, turning her attention to the spaniel as it chewed more fur from its coat. It settled down as the boy stopped laughing and the woman put the glasses on the bar.

  ‘Cheers. I’m Andrew Pinkney.’ This announcement amused the boy once more, who went out of the bar, wiping his face with the fingers of an oily hand.

  ‘Cheers,’ the girl said, raising her glass. ‘I’m Shân, and that idiot’s my brother, Huw. Hope you enjoy your stay in Cockerel Cottage.’ She was quite pretty then, holding up the glass towards the light, with an open smile and an ordinary face which relaxed as soon as her brother had gone. She sipped her drink. ‘Hang on to your dog if you see me coming with the hounds tomorrow. Personally, I couldn’t care less about the sheep, the stupid things, but Huw’s a bit trigger-happy. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Andrew. ‘Thanks for the warning.’ And they exchanged a glance over the rims of their glasses which seemed to seal their understanding.

  The boy returned and applied himself to the drink, without acknowledging Andrew. There were a few moments’ silence, as though there was something sacred in the sharing of beer, as though Andrew and the two teenagers were sealing a kind of pact. The brother and sister sat closer together and spoke in Welsh. Andrew made some small talk with the landlady, who was English too, who had moved to Wales from Cheltenham eight years before. She had been to Newhaven, she remarked, as everyone did whenever Andrew mentioned the name of the town, to catch the ferry to Dieppe. So the conversation ran its usual course: seasickness, cheap wine, the threat of rabies and the quarantine of animals, soccer hooligans on Channel crossings . . . until Newhaven had had much more coverage than it deserved. ‘And have you had a good season with the hotel?’ Andrew enquired. Having asked the question, he paid little attention to the woman’s answer, but peered over the top of his drink at the girl. She was a child, certainly no more than sixteen. She must have just finished school in Caernarfon, at the end of last term maybe, and now she was the kennel-maid for the local hunt. Andrew watched her drinking, saw the tip of her tongue go deeply into the lager, saw her run it pinkly around her lips after every mouthful. He swallowed hard. She was listening to her brother, nodding in agreement and sometimes smiling. Then she laughed, a bark like Phoebe’s barking, sudden and high, and they both looked over at Andrew. Andrew smiled back at them, and the girl reddened once more. Her tongue appeared, pointed and pink like a sea-anemone, and then disappeared between her tiny teeth. ‘It’ll be very quiet now,’ the woman was saying, ‘right through to Christmas. There should be a few more in here tomorrow night though . . . We’re having a bit of a party for Hallowe’en. Coming for that?’

  Andrew tugged his gaze away from the girl. The mention of a party silenced the two youngsters, who looked around at the woman. ‘You two will be here, won’t you?’ she said to them. ‘Hallowe’en’s tomorrow night, 31st October. Were you here last time?’

  The boy nodded, but the girl simply grinned and answered, ‘Too young, me . . . not allowed to things like that. Anyway, I’m frightened of witches and ghosts and things.’ Her brother guffawed at this, spilling some of his lager on the girl’s jeans. Andrew watched the stain grow across her thigh. She just laughed, showing her wet teeth, while the woman went on, ‘There’ll be a bit of soup later on, and the beer will be cheaper too. Maybe a few people will dress up a bit, make it more fun.’

  The brother and sister were getting ready to leave. Still giggling, they left the stools and moved towards the door. ‘Thank you, Mrs Stone,’ the girl called across the room, ignoring the renewed efforts of the spaniel to gnaw away more of its fur. ‘Maybe see you tomorrow.’ She seemed even younger now, in her big boots and tight jeans, immersing herself in a green waterproof coat which came down almost to her ankles. Pulling up the hood, so that now she was hidden except for the childlike smiles of her face, she said to Andrew, ‘Do you recognise me now? See you at the party tomorrow . . .’ and together they went out. There was another outburst of laughter, both of them engulfed with mirth, followed by the boy’s raucous imitation of a cockerel’s crowing. More peals of hilarity, the churning of a reluctant engine and the sounds of their van crunching down the gravelled drive . . .

  Andrew went home too, or rather, he returned to the cottage whose name was the source of so much amusement in and around the village. The rain had stopped. He followed the yellow torchlight, a wavering pool on the ground in front of him, flashing it occasionally on the slow moving waters of the river. The darkness of the fields was heavy and dense around him. The floodlights on the hotel went out and left a bottomless black hole where the building had been, leaving the entire valley blanketed under the weight of the night. Andrew paused and urinated into the bracken. His torch was the only light, there was not another single pinprick to be seen, and he shone it on the glistening toe-caps of his boots and into the wet grass. The hillsides with their covering of woodland, the oppressive mantle of the fir forests, then the steeper slabs of rock which rose up to the mountain ridges . . . they all merged into the dark skies, where not a star could pierce the clouds. Andrew turned off the torch. It was then a darkness like no other darkness he had ever seen (and here he felt that he really could see it, a positive phenomenon rather than the mere absence of light), as though the valley had been flooded with one enormous liquid shadow. And he, Andrew Pinkney, possessed the only antidote, he felt the power and responsibility of holding the torch in his hand. But when he switched it on, he realised how puny his little light was, when everywhere he looked there was only the heavy black oil of night. He continued walking. Here and there, a sheep stood up from the grass and limped away, squatting and then dropping a patter of droppings which shone bright as the berries of the mountain ash when Andrew touched them with the beam of the torch. As he drew nearer to the cottage, he ran the light over the low white shape of it, an oyster fungus, pale and luminous, blooming on the dead wood of a fallen beech. To the right, there was the stone outhouse, and this was where he headed, the slapping of the boots and the regular sounds of his breathing suddenly louder against the side of the building. Before he went in, as he undid
the padlock, he smelled the ripe rottenness of dead meat which was to him like incense from the gloom of a cathedral, and he composed himself by steadying his breath and clearing some condensation from his glasses. He inhaled the sweetness. Then he opened the door and ducked into the woodshed. In the torchlight, the badger seemed to be moving as the light moved, it swung slowly on its hook, wearing only its truss of barbed wire and its immovable grin. From it there rose an almost audible stench of decomposing flesh. The beast had swollen with the workings of gases in its belly, and Andrew grinned back at it, amused by the irony that now it looked sleeker and healthier than when Phoebe had found it emaciated in the forest. Now, this time, as he tendered one ear closely to the grey bristles of the badger’s side, he was sure he could hear the machinery of countless jaws, busy in the tubes and organs and cavities which death had tried to silence, and he ran the torch lovingly from the stub of the animal’s tail to the mask of its hanging muzzle.

  ‘Good boy,’ he whispered in the quietness of the woodshed. ‘You’ve been busy.’

  He left the woodshed in darkness again, tiptoeing out as though he were leaving a confessional and wanted no one to see that he had been there, and he let himself into the cottage.

  Phoebe started to snarl before he could step across the room and reach the light switch. She remained in her basket, wild-eyed, baring her teeth, dazzled by the sudden glare. ‘Calm down, Phoebe, it’s me,’ he said to her, but he did not approach her and soothe her as he was used to doing when he could see that she had just been woken from a deep sleep. As she unwound herself from the basket, got out stiffly and stretched each joint of her back with a cat-like languor, Andrew could smell the warmness of her fur and the dampness of it. She stopped snarling and rearranged her dishevelled coat on the hearthrug. He bent to feel her blanket: it was hotly moist, as though she had wet it as she slept. He took it out and draped it across the back of an armchair, to air a little, meanwhile fetching another one for her from the next room. Everything in the cottage was unpleasantly clammy. It was when he came inside from the clean air that he could almost taste the stagnation of the atmosphere on the roof of his mouth. He threw down the new blanket for Phoebe, who was vigorously slapping at her paws with the length of her tongue. He straight away thought back to the tiny pink tip of the girl’s tongue, the faint aroma of her sweat as he had leaned across her lap to take his drink. ‘What’s the matter, Phoebe? Let me see . . .’ and he knelt by the dog to inspect her paws. She rolled automatically on to her back, as she always did, and this time she was soft and consenting, the Phoebe he had known before, who moaned a long pathetic sigh as she allowed the man to press his fingers between her pads. Had she been hit by a few pellets of shot? Maybe, he wondered, a shotgun fired through the dense cover of the plantation would diffuse its pellets into a fine, less incapacitating spray. Perhaps this had saved Phoebe from the direct blast (most likely fired by the girl’s rancid brother), but the dog could nevertheless have sustained a slight wound. But he found nothing to explain Phoebe’s persistent licking, putting it down to her cleaning out splinters from the forest or washing off the sickly scent of sheep droppings. He stood up.

  Turning to the mantelpiece, he inspected the four glass jars. One of the eggs of the stinkhorn had split open, there was a scar across its fleshy whiteness. None of the other three seemed any different from the eggs he had planted into the moist soil. Next morning there might be a proud new erection when he awoke . . . He was suddenly very tired.

  ‘Out you go, Phoebe,’ he said, and the dog went obediently from the front door. Andrew watched her circling the area of light which fell from the cottage on to the hillside, slipping sometimes from light into shadow and back again. Then, near the privet, finally satisfied that she had found the spot she was searching for, she elegantly lowered her haunches and trickled a brief golden thread into the grass. She held up her long face into the breeze. There was a dead thing close by. She could smell it. Something emphatically dead swung silently in the same breeze which blew its stink to the dog’s nostrils. And this brought first a wrinkle to Phoebe’s face, then a quivering of her lips, until she started her electric snickering snarl. ‘Come on in, girl, come on,’ the man called from the open door. The dog ran to him, glancing into the darkness in the direction of the dead thing. When Andrew bent to stroke her, to greet her return to the cottage, she slithered past his proffered hands with a leering of her teeth towards his fingers. She slunk to the corner and dropped instantly into the blanket of her basket.

  Andrew closed and locked the door. One last look at the splitting egg of the stinkhorn, then he was going to bed. The egg stared at him through the glass of the jar, a gaping, sightless eye, slit across and seeping a mucous tear. He shivered, for the room was chill, and he switched off the light.

  *

  That night, above the mantelpiece and its gallery of unborn phalli, the watercolour of Phoebe was changing. While the man slept, the mist of condensation on the glass had increased, forming droplets of moisture. The droplets grew, they quivered under the mounting pressure of their own weight, and soon they trickled down the inside of the frame. The paper puckered and creased. The colours started to run. The dog’s affectionate grin distorted, the line of her lips was changed about her teeth. And then there was something different in the set of her eyes.

  Slowly and secretly and silently, through the hours of another night, the smile became a snarl.

  IV

  Andrew Pinkney woke late the following morning and dragged himself to consciousness. He had had a dream, he realised as he lay still in bed and gathered the shreds of images and sounds which had troubled him through the night. In the dream, he was being chased by a great flock of sheep, bleating and crying in one unrelenting cacophony as they pursued him through the trees of the forest; the noise rose and fell, he was whipped by the tough branches of the plantation as he fled in a panic and forced his way among the trees, everywhere around him were the rasping cries of the sheep, the splintering of undergrowth, a labyrinth of shadows and darkness with that flock of manic, mad-eyed women behind him. Whenever he twisted to face his pursuers, when he was trapped in the clutches of the trees, there was the big black sheep staring him down with its empty white sockets, stamping its feet and lunging towards him. Time and again he would wriggle free. And then the hunt would begin once more. He was flayed by twigs, scored by needles, and always behind him came the swelling chorus of the sheep as the flock drew ever closer, and then there was the black sheep which separated itself from the shadows and made its charge . . . On waking, Andrew lay still, weary from sleeping. It was late, nearly ten o’clock. He crawled out of bed and padded through to the living-room.

  Phoebe hardly stirred when he pulled back the curtains. The room was lit by a grey metallic gleam, the feeble sunshine which was reflected from the opposite hillside. The air was heavy with condensation. The dog opened her eyes and watched, without lifting her head from the blanket, as Andrew moved vaguely around the room. He found his glasses and went straight to the mantelpiece.

  In three of the four jars nothing at all had happened. The eggs of the stinkhorn remained pale and round, just peering from the soil. They had not split. But in the fourth jar, the fungus had risen and fallen overnight. It was over, the erection was over. However jaunty it may have been in the smallest hours of darkness, Andrew had missed it. Now the phallus lay limp against the sides of the jar, a clammy shrivelling thing whose head slipped slowly down as the white column of its body deflated. Perhaps, thought Andrew, he had not allowed enough air into the jar, so that, although conditions were right for a rapid and spectacular erection, the surfeit of moisture in such a confined space had caused wilting just as quickly. And, of course, there were no flies to feed on the glutinous secretions which had oozed from the honeycombed head. No pungency lingered. Well, there were three more jars on the mantelpiece for him to watch. As yet, the eggs showed no sign of hatching a cocky new horn. He might still be able to find more eggs in the
forest, for further experiments. Andrew drifted thoughtfully to the bathroom, pleased that one of the stinkhorns had worked, sorry to have missed it. The atmosphere in the cottage must be ideal for their growth, the clinging damp combined with the warmth which he managed to generate from the fire. In the bathroom, moisture ran unashamedly down all four walls. The mirror was fogged with condensation; Andrew wiped it with the heel of his hand and studied his face. He needed a haircut, the blond curls fell heavy on his brow and his ears were hidden. But for the hillsides of Wales it was somehow appropriate, he thought, that he was becoming shaggy and dishevelled, that he should become more a part of the untended, glowering landscape. He was no longer an articled clerk in Sussex. He was in Wales to rear a clutch of pulsing erections on his mantelpiece, to cultivate the seething of maggots in the rotten sack of a dead badger . . . there would soon be a crop of phalli in his living-room, and he would move from jar to jar to feed each one by hand, releasing dung-flies to gorge themselves into a state of stupefaction on the stinkhorns’ seed . . . No, you don’t need a haircut, Pinkney, he thought, leave it to fall like a mane over your ears and down your neck. The mirror misted again, and he watched the familiar genial features become clouded into something different, something he had not seen before. He removed his glasses and washed, avoiding the face he had just seen in the mirror, uncomfortable whenever he met its altered glance.

  The day passed under a lowering mist of an unhealthy dun colour, not the drizzling grey which Andrew was becoming used to, not the shifting silver sheet which filtered through a little watery light, not a series of clouds with any individual shape or characteristics, but a thickening brown fog whose weight pressed dully on the hillside, like a bruise. It was as though the world were being lagged by a conscientious guardian, wrapped around with a thick, soiled blanket to protect it from the hard colds of an approaching winter, smothered in folds of fusty wool. The ravens rowed over the mist, invisible, croaking, panting with their wings through the clutches of the air. The sheep drifted past Andrew’s window, to nibble at the grass outside the cottage, to stare fixedly into the distance as though they could pierce the fog with their protruding eyes. Andrew peered out over the rim of his coffee cup, and he imagined he was marooned on an island, surrounded by the rolling vapours which the ocean exhaled . . . not an island with jungles and parakeets, but a barren outcrop of rock which was peopled only by himself and these barmy women, who loomed from the surrounding fume to nibble and pee, to pee and squitter, to nibble and squitter, a flock of deranged women who had escaped from an asylum or a nunnery and had been washed up on Andrew’s island . . . On a morning like that, it seemed that the world was inhabited by the man and his dog and the ubiquitous sheep, overseen by the dark invisible birds, and by nothing else.