The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  The girl said simply, ‘Yes, it’s fucking Phoebe. Take the fucking thing home.’ She brushed past him to the bar again, which signalled the instant resumption of animated conversation from the entire party, as Andrew went quickly to where the dog was lying.

  The renewed talking became a snigger which threaded its way through the room, in and out of every pocket of people, running from group to group like an electric current. Andrew knew why as soon as he knelt on to the hearth rug beside the dog. His knees sunk softly into a pool of slime which was still oozing from the dog, seeping like lava through the fine plume of her tail, a spreading pool of yellowish liquid excrement which the dog was unable to control. ‘Hey, Phoebe,’ he whispered down at her, and she managed to flick her tail in response, splashing it twice in the stinking hot mess. ‘Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe . . .’ eliciting a flap of the tail for each whisper of her name, ‘hey, Phoebe . . .’ and all he could do was to stroke her head and down her neck to her belly. There, when he touched her stomach, she snickered like a weasel, showing her teeth and starting her mournful wail. This provoked another current of sniggering. Andrew experienced a rush of anger right through his body, such as he had not felt since his humiliation by Jennifer. It provoked the same reaction.

  His mind a blank, a pure white sheet which obliterated all reasoning and sense, he sprang up and flung himself at the crowd. From his mouth there spewed a stream of incoherent words, for he was too furious to frame anything intelligible but an outpouring of hisses and meaningless expletives, and he lunged at the blurred figure of the kennel-maid’s brother, swinging the fist which had pole-axed Jennifer. The crowd surged around him, shouting and shrieking. His shortsightedness made a shifting shapeless mass of faces and limbs in front of him, one set of which (in contrast to Jennifer’s crumpling at his single blow) now retaliated with a series of accurate jabs to his chest and stomach and including a stinging impact on his ear which made his head reel, until he was separated from the mob by more pairs of restraining hands. And there beside him, as Andrew stood heaving and trembling, quite unable now either to speak or think while his rage subsided and was replaced by shame, there was the round white face of the girl, very close to his, working and mouthing and writhing as she spat her invective at him. He understood not one word of it. He simply heard her hissing, guttural noises, noises, not words as far as he was concerned, and he watched the hostility in her eyes and on the sharp edges of her lips. As he watched her and listened, while the rest of the room seemed to fade into a distant irrelevant background of smoke and sweat and jabbering laughter, he was again helpless to control the lovely lovely caving of his stomach at the flickering wetness of her tongue . . . Before he knew what he was doing, still unhinged by the events of the past two minutes, he found himself ducking down and forwards and clamping his open mouth on to hers. For a second his tongue was on her lips, it ran across the smooth slipperiness of her teeth and then it joined her tongue and slid with it for what seemed like a timeless limitless moment . . . She shoved him away. More hands clutched at his elbows. The room was deafening with shrieks of laughter and outrage. The girl leapt from him, her face agog as though she had been struck, and she glanced down her legs with disgust to see that some of the slime from Andrew’s knees had been transferred to her jeans. There was ink on her face too, from Andrew’s face. Andrew, in the midst of all this chaos of shouting and slime, engulfed by the mayhem of flying fists and that sudden pain when his ear was punched, his head reeling with lust, his mouth inflamed with the taste of the kennel-maid’s tongue, managed to catch a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of a painting above the fireplace and was jolted back to reality . . . for his efforts at washing away the ink and the shoe-whitener had succeeded only in mixing the two together into a filthy grey blur. He looked more like a fiend by accident than he had done by design. This sight revived him to action. He pushed the girl to one side and strode back to Phoebe. The dog had been stimulated by the confusion, enough to have got to her feet and practised a few half-hearted barks, but she trembled at Andrew’s rapid approach and in the embarrassment of her disgrace. Now she rolled quite deliberately on to her side and on to her back, offering her belly and splayed legs to the man. ‘Get up, Phoebe!’ he snapped. ‘Come on, up you get! We’re going . . .’ To his annoyance and to the amusement of the onlookers, the dog would not stand up again. She lay there, her tail swinging through the congealing pool of slime, and she bared her teeth in a razor-edged snarl whenever Andrew bent to her. There was more general laughter. Mrs Stone, who must have watched everything helplessly from behind the bar in the knowledge that it was best for her not to intervene on behalf of the young Englishman in case she should inflame national feeling, now raised her voice tremulously over the crowd. ‘Just get the dog out! Go on, please get the thing outside! For heaven’s sake, take the rug with you, but just get it all outside!’

  Andrew suddenly bent again, flipped over the edges of the hearth rug so that the dog and the slime were enfolded like the contents of some exotic pancake, and he lifted the whole bundle from the floor. Phoebe squirmed and snarled, but he gripped her tight in her straitjacket. She could not get free. He marched like this to the door, which he was unable to open with his arms full, where he turned to the girl. She was standing stunned and expressionless, as though drugged by the effect of Andrew’s kiss. ‘Open this for me, Shân.’ She obeyed. Saying nothing more, looking at no one except the girl and the bruises of smudged lipstick on her mouth, he stepped from the room and strode out of the hotel.

  There, on the gravelled drive, his heart and head and especially his ear pounding from the last few minutes’ uproar, he stood still.

  Over and over, he inhaled long draughts of cold air. The dog lay motionless in his arms, buried in the rug. From within the hotel, the noises of the people who had witnessed an extraordinary fracas built up to a layer of rumblings and chatter, punctuated, as Andrew had anticipated, by the inevitable crowing of the cockerel. This time, however, as Andrew walked away down the drive, someone cut short the cockerel. The last sounds he could hear while he crunched through the shadows of the horse-chestnuts were voices raised angrily in argument, male and female, boy and girl in a dispute which silenced the rest of the room.

  ‘Down you go, Phoebe. I’m not carrying you all the way home.’ At the foot of the drive, where he turned along the road through the village and past the shop, Andrew stopped and put the bundle down. The dog was absurd, her head only appearing from the folds of the rug, her eyes wide and white with embarrassment and fear. She was trembling violently. At first she would not move when he opened the rug, but she lay as she had done in the hotel: her stomach exposed as if expecting a caress, her teeth exposed as if expecting an attack, her tail twitching through the drying stickiness of the slime. The smell of the mess came hot and sweet from the rug as Andrew unfolded it. ‘Jesus, Phoebe! Get off there. Come on, let’s go home . . .’ But still she lay back, distorting her muzzle into a mask of wrinkled snarls, issuing the chain-saw threat. ‘Bloody hell!’ he shouted at her, and the words clanged along the avenue of chestnut trees. One of the frozen horses started stumbling from shadow to shadow, a massive prehistoric creature moving in a dream, a fossil which had come back to life at the sound of the man’s shout. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ And he picked up one corner of the rug, yanking it so sharply that the dog was pitched from it on to the gravel. He screwed the rug into a bundle again so that the mess was folded inside. Phoebe limped painfully away from him, her tail wrapped tightly under her legs, her ears drooping. She arched her back as she went, obviously in some discomfort, and the effect was to make her look utterly craven, whipped and wretched. If Jennifer could see you now, Phoebe . . . he caught himself thinking, with your snarls and your stink and your slinking, grovelling . . . But he joined her on the road, and together, side by side, the man matching his pace to that of the sick dog, they began to walk from the village.

  Away from the brightness of the hotel’s floodlights, they fol
lowed the insignificant light from the torch which Andrew had brought with him. They crossed the bridge over the river, they followed the track through the trees which grew at the waterside. The moon was not so bright now. A shoal of grey clouds had swum across the sky. The air was still, and everything in the valley was quiet save for the slapping of the man’s wellingtons and the hesitant footsteps of the dog. What had happened in the hotel, the dog’s disgrace, the brawl, his tongue on the girl’s tongue, his face disfigured with ink, their exit with the dog wrapped in the hearth rug . . . it all seemed impossible, incredible, the disjointed fragments of some ridiculous dream! It was the hallucination of a junkie or the delirium of an idiot! Especially now, in the muted moonlight and the stillness of the muffling clouds, he could hardly credit the events of the evening with any degree of reality. Had he imagined the whole thing? Was the entire episode a dream? If so, not just this evening, a couple of hours of folly, but maybe everything he had found in Wales! Was Wales a hallucination? What was happening to him? Was he dreaming the corpse of the badger in the woodshed, its adamantine grin? Perhaps, in reality, he was lying in a hospital in Sussex, enmeshed in the heat of a fever, delirious with dreams . . . dreams of a forest so black and clinging that he could not escape its clutches, of a crater so thick with mist that only the sounds of ravens and hounds came clanging from its walls, of a flock of lunatic females which pursued him with their bleating voices and staring eyes . . . Was there really such a cottage as his, sweltering in damp, its walls oozing a kind of sweat which rotted everything? Or was it a part of his fever? And finally, the most ludicrous of all the images which had come to haunt him, was there really a gallery of phallic fungi on the mantelpiece, to taunt him with the effortlessness of their erections? Was he dreaming the stinkhorn?

  Another whiff of the rug he was carrying convinced him that he was wide awake and quite sober. It acted like a draught of smelling-salts, to jolt him back to reality. There was the dog in front of him, moving more easily and increasing her pace with the idea that she was returning to the sanctuary of her basket after her hours in the unfamiliar scents and noises of the hotel. She had unfurled her tail from under her belly and was holding it aloft once more. He would have to do something about cleaning the rug and then return it to Mrs Stone, probably with the accompaniment of a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers. In any case, as he stumbled after the wavering beam of the torch, as he tried to keep up with the dog, he was without his glasses. In the skirmish in the toilets, they had remained where he had put them down to wash his face, between the taps of the basin. The sooner he washed the rug and went humbly back to the hotel, to beg forgiveness of Mrs Stone, the sooner he would have his glasses again. ‘Hold on, Phoebe, take your time,’ he called out, but she hurried up the hillside, only occasionally turning to see that the man was following. Soon, there was the white shape of the cottage before them, illuminated now and then when the moon succeeded in lancing the cover of the clouds. The cottage cast a ghostly light of its own, somehow luminous in spite of the surrounding shadows. Behind it there reared the pitch-black mantle of the forest and the stark ridge of the mountain, sharply defined against the remaining glow of the sky. Somewhere there, Andrew knew, was the crater, a closed world of wet slabs, mists and bogs and the metallic clacking of jackdaws. With a shiver, he quickened his pace. Slipping, misjudging the path, cursing the absence of his glasses, he continued now that Phoebe had vanished, and when he panted up to the door of the cottage, she was there, looking up at him and waiting to be let in. He flung down the rug first of all, securing it on the grass in front of the building by placing two heavy stones on it, before unlocking the door. Phoebe went directly to her basket and lay down. Andrew stepped out of his boots and sank into an armchair, without turning on the lights, to sit for a while in the darkness.

  As he had hoped, the fire was still burning. The hot coals glowed golden. But he did nothing to revive the flames until he had recovered his breath after the pace and the unevenness of the walk home. It was not late, about eleven o’clock.

  Home? He had thought of the cottage as home just then because it felt safe and cool, as the hotel toilets had done before he was wrestled back into the bar. The cottage was quiet and private after the tumult of the evening. Phoebe, by now at any rate, hurried back to its haven. She recognised it as her refuge even if only for the familiar smells of her own basket. But for Andrew the cottage was a long way from home. He thought of his little bed-sitting-room in Newhaven, with warmth available at the turn of a switch, with his books and pictures surrounding him and not in the least danger of disintegrating with the damp, with the car parked conveniently in the street outside, just a few paces from his front door, ready to be driven away without the need to bump and jostle along a rutted track . . . That was home, in Newhaven, not far from the office where he was a trusted young articled clerk with a good future as a provincial solicitor, where he had a company car and might one day have a wife like Jennifer . . . That was home for Andrew Pinkney. However, he’d stay in Wales a little longer yet, he thought as he stared into the blurred brightness of the fire, he’d stay because . . . because (and he realised this with a sudden clarity and obviousness he had not achieved before), because, of course, he had something to expiate. Yes, that was it! He sat up straight in the armchair, relieved to have understood himself. For a matter of weeks he had struggled with the worry of his impotence, as though that was his chief concern. But he was staying in Wales now, when he could easily pack up and drive down to Sussex again, because he wanted to atone for the guilt he must feel for striking Jennifer. He was not yet ready to return. In a naïve way, his ideas of guilt and expiation quite undeveloped in spite of his days and weeks and months as an informed spectator in Lewes magistrates’ court, he wanted to feel he was being punished, that he was punishing himself, and then, only then, might he go back and present himself to Jennifer. Meanwhile, the business with the stinkhorn, that deliberate attempt to cultivate the erections he had been unable to promote in his grappling with Jennifer, would be one way to foster the feeling of atonement he was looking for. The jars on the mantelpiece would remind him hourly of the reason why he was in Wales, that he had done something awful for which he must repent. He had not been sent to Wales for a mere holiday.

  Thinking this, deliberately fixing a clear picture in his mind of Jennifer’s crumpling body that fraction of a second after he had hit her, he stood up and switched on the light. He went to the mantelpiece to inspect the jars. One of the stinkhorn eggs had split right across. The soft shell was ruptured, and inside Andrew could see the bulging head of the fungus as it started to thrust its way upwards. Splendid! Splendid! he thought, smiling broadly his friendly old labrador smile, here was something to spectate through the hours of the night, as midnight fast approached on Hallowe’en . . . And then tomorrow, if all was developing in the woodshed as he hoped, as the badger was bursting and ready to split with the seething soft fruit of the maggots, tomorrow or the following day he would progress to the next stage of the experiment: to gather the dull brown pupae from the sawdust of the woodshed floor, where many of them had already been lying for a week or more. Then there’d be handfuls of fine new meat-flies to feed on the evil-smelling slime which oozed from the erect stinkhorn and carry the spores to other jars which he would have prepared in readiness. More flies to defecate the transmitted spores of the stinkhorn, more burgeoning stinkhorn eggs, more phallic fungi to adorn his mantelpiece and perhaps to be taken back to Sussex as a gift of atonement to Jennifer . . .

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, thought Andrew. See how it goes. The experiment might not work at all. The stinkhorn might wilt and slither like slugs down the insides of their jars. He was not a serious mycologist. He was just an enthusiast who wanted to explore a field of his own in order to impress a woman he had offended. Perhaps it would not work . . .

  He saw to the fire. A quarter to midnight. He tipped on a little more coal from the coal-bucket, immediately eclipsing the heat
and light of the dying embers and replacing them with a smooth curtain of blue smoke which puthered into the gullet of the chimney. It would soon burn up and generate some warmth. There were some logs in the basket, pieces of the mountain ash he had wheelbarrowed down the hillside, and he meant to place one or two of them on the fire when the fresh coal was ablaze. He switched on a table lamp and switched off the main light. He found some undemanding music on the radio. Before he sat down again, he studied the paintings on the wall above the mantelpiece. As for the watercolour landscapes, they were washed with banks of driving drizzle, almost completely clouded by the mists of condensation behind the glass so that only a suggestion of colour and definition was visible. Here in the quagmire of Wales, where everything was mouldy and warped by damp, even the bright frosts of Sussex were smothered. Phoebe’s portrait was ambiguous: the eyes streamed tears, either of discomfort or embarrassment, yet from her jaws there dripped the white froth of a rabid pariah-dog. In real life, she was whimpering in her sleep, twitching like a spastic through some complicated dream. Andrew sat in the armchair. He too felt somehow restless as the minutes slipped by. A few timid flames were peeping from around the coals. He sat and wondered whether he also was changing, to what extent he was being altered by the suffocating atmosphere of this dank and clammy country. He sat and watched the jars. He got up, turned off the radio and sat down again. Then he imagined he could almost hear the tearing and splitting of a mucous shell, the ripping of soft fibres, the silent screams of a painful birth as the stinkhorn stirred and forced its head from the ruptured egg. He sat and he strained his ears, and he thought he could almost hear it.