The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  The witching hour approached. He took a log of the mountain ash and put it among the bright new flames, with midnight only minutes away. ‘Rowan tree or reed, put the witches to speed . . .’ He whispered the old charm, just in time to protect him from all the evils which would rise like vapours and fumes from the blackness of the fir forest, to protect him from the rank and noisome things which would slither from the cauldron of the crater, to protect him from the stale spirits which would come wafting down the hillside behind the cottage like a stench from the tomb . . . With a smile and a delicious self-inflicted shudder, Andrew settled back deeper into the armchair. He glanced at his watch just as the mountain ash flared.

  It was midnight.

  And the next moment, the flames were extinguished. Andrew leapt to his feet as a heavy fall of soot cascaded from the chimney. It buried the fire. Clouds of thick choking smoke belched into the room. Springing from her basket, instantly awakened from the flickerings of her dream, Phoebe burst into peals of hysterical barking. More soot came down with a rattle and a rush, piling into the grate, overflowing on to the hearth and right across the carpet. Helpless to stop the room filling with smoke, helpless to stop the avalanche of stinking black dust, Andrew flapped his arms about his face. He cried out in a smothered, spluttering voice. The dog fled from corner to corner, whirling like a dervish. The fire flared again, it forced its flames through the dead layers of soot. And with the soot and the smoke, something else then fell into the fireplace, something alive and scratching and spitting, some live thing which was black and mad and shrieking, on fire with a rage to get out of the stinking flames. Horrified, man and dog stood suddenly still and watched the thing exhume itself from the grate. It screamed such a scream that only nightmares can conjure, before erupting into the room. Flapping and black and filthy, it beat from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall, adding its cracked and cracking voice to all the dirt which now settled around it.

  The mad thing was a cockerel. With the subsidence of the smoke, Andrew and Phoebe acted together. The man strode swiftly to the door and flung it wide open, turning back into the room to switch on the main light: the brightness gave a ghastly blue-grey glare, reflecting and refracting through a million particles of soot which hung and drifted in the air. And the dog moved like a liquid shadow, slid between the furniture so quickly that she seemed to go through it, to snatch the cockerel’s head in her jaws. There was a crunch, like the cracking of a walnut. She shook the bird violently from side to side by whipping her own head backwards and forwards. ‘Christ, Phoebe!’ the man shouted. But in spite of the shattering of its skull, the cockerel continued to scrabble with its strong claws, raking the dog’s chest and throat, and the black wings beat a pall of soot as Phoebe tossed her prize like a piece of rag. ‘Get out, Phoebe! Go on, out!’ She snarled through her mouthful of juices and splintered bone, slipping out of the door ahead of his attempt at a kick. Disappearing through the clouds of smoke which were now drifting from the cottage, she was lost with the tangled corpse of the cockerel in the darkness of midnight.

  He too hurried outside, in his stockinged feet. Footsteps, up on the low roof of the cottage? He spun round and peered up at the chimney. Slithering footsteps on the slates? Voices, muffled laughter, the clattering of boots on the guttering as someone scrambled down . . . ‘Hey, what the hell are . . . ? Who’s there, for Christ’s sake?’ But he was slow and clumsy in the dark and on the unfamiliar ground, baffled by the absence of his glasses, stifled by smoke, disoriented by the soot, his head ringing with the shrieks of the cockerel and the crunch of its skull between the dog’s jaws . . . He ran to the back of the building, his socks in the mud. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Someone jumped lightly from the roof, a single dark figure which clung momentarily to the drainpipe before wheeling and sprinting away from the cottage. ‘Hey! You . . . !’ But too fast, too agile for Andrew. He stood there, having stumbled from the light which fell from the front door, heaving with shock and anger in the billowing darkness. It had happened within a minute, one minute after midnight on Hallowe’en. The swift footsteps faded into the hillside, faded into silence. Andrew waited, panting. Naturally, as he nodded his head and grimaced at the stupid monotony of it, he could only listen as the night rang with the falsetto imitation of a cockerel, the falseness of it somehow more disturbing than the authentic shrieks of the real one had been. He shivered. ‘Fuck off, you ignorant Welsh peasant!’ he bellowed hoarsely. ‘F . . .’ Deciding not to shout it a second time, he exhaled the sound of the unfinished word like a long, damp fart. Muttering all manner of oaths against the natives of the country to which he had retreated, he squelched around the cottage and back to the front door. There was no sign of Phoebe, no sound of crackling bones. The cottage exhaled a fart of its own, in the form of a slowly shifting mushroom of smoke and soot which was gradually absorbed by the night. He stepped inside, to assess the extent of the mess.

  The smoke had cleared. Even in his bemused myopic condition, Andrew could see the room in a kind of bleary focus. Sitting, or rather lying, in the armchair which he had vacated on the stroke of midnight, there was Shân, the kennel-maid. She sprawled her legs apart and dangled her arms loosely from the chair. From between her open thighs a slim green bottle stood up. Her eyes were closed, but hearing Andrew come into the cottage again, she smiled and put out her tongue in a cat-like snarl. She brought up her right hand to the neck of the bottle. Still snarling, with her tongue slipping round and round her lips, in and out of her little pointed teeth, she closed her fist on the bottle’s neck and worked it slowly, rhythmically, up and down.

  ‘Trick or treat, Pinkie?’ she whispered, eyes closed, her hand massaging the bottle. ‘The trick was my brother’s idea. The treat will be on me . . .’

  She lifted the bottle to her face. It was open, already half empty, and she ran her tongue wetly over the rim before inserting it deeply into her mouth, tipping the bottle up so that the wine overflowed on to her chin and ran down her neck. Having drunk, she continued to lick the neck of the bottle, pushing out her tongue to its full extent. Andrew could hear it slapping and clicking, as well as seeing its pink wetness. The girl opened her eyes and looked at him. She returned the bottle to her thighs. Once more she caressed it, a little faster than before, gripping a little harder, breathing noisily through her mouth.

  ‘Come on, Pinkie,’ she panted, ‘you’ve had your fun with a cock tonight . . . It’s my turn now . . .’

  Wincing at the crass remark, he closed the door behind him. The room and everything in it was coated with a layer of fine soot. It hung in the air, a damp black cloud of condensation. He could see it on the pictures, on the mantelpiece, all over the carpet and on the furniture, it must be clinging to the curtains and all the wet walls of the clammy cottage. He moved across the room and switched off the main light. The girl was very drunk, her face puffy with alcohol. She was watching him, and when he turned off the light she held her breath, halting her friction of the bottle. He tended the fire. By now it was blazing furiously, burning up all the soot which had temporarily extinguished it, sparking and flaring with a renewed vigour. Kneeling on the blackened rug, he reached into the basket for another log of the mountain ash. Only then did he speak. He brandished the log in front of the girl’s face, and once more he recited the charm which had failed at midnight. ‘Rowan tree or reed, put the witches to speed . . . Are you a witch, Shân? Are you?’ She smiled uneasily. Kneeling there, between her knees, he leaned forward and held the wood close to her face. She was still holding her breath. ‘Put the witches to speed . . .’ he whispered, and he turned back to the fire, placing the log tenderly among the flames. Both he and the girl watched as the log began to run with flickering golden tongues, while the room and all the soot in the air were lit by the shifting lights. Then, something buckling and caving in his stomach, his mouth dry just as the girl’s was wet, he faced her again on his knees and took hold of her ankles.

  ‘Now, the witching
hour . . . and here we have a little wet witch, who’s been falling over down by the river . . . She’ll catch her death if she’s not careful. Oh dear, oh dear, look at her little white shoes . . .’ They were covered with thick wet mud, the laces were caked with it. Nevertheless, he unpicked them, the left foot and then the right, untied them and slipped her shoes off. ‘And her little white socks too, soaking wet . . . Oh dear, oh dear, they’ll have to come off as well.’ The girl giggled nervously and took another swig from the bottle. While he peeled off her socks, he said, ‘Don’t I get any of that, you mean little witch?’ and he drank from the bottle as she held it out to his mouth. Her feet were cold and very white. He took them one after the other and rubbed them hard. ‘Falling over in the mud . . . yes, that’s what she’s been doing. Look at her trousers, covered with it. This witch has been drinking too much of the magic falling-down potion tonight . . .’ Indeed, her jeans too were filthy with mud from the riverside track. ‘Oh dear, oh dear . . .’ but his mouth was dry again, in spite of the wine, ‘let’s see what we can do.’ He knelt up higher, running a hand slowly up each leg, pausing at the knee, continuing, pressing harder, spreading his fingers over the tight material on her thighs, pausing again with his thumbs deep in her crutch, and up to the buckle of her belt. And this time, when he started to frame the next oh dear, he could say nothing. Only a dry croak came from his mouth.

  ‘Lost for words, are we?’ the girl hissed. She put down the bottle beside the chair. ‘Yes, Pinkie, these jeans are a bit wet. Best get them off before I catch a chill . . .’

  Andrew had already undone her belt. She raised her bottom from the chair, there was a gentle sigh as her zip parted, and with a wriggle she was peeling down her jeans, over her long long narrow white thighs, where Andrew took hold and slid them off her legs and from her feet. ‘That’s better, much better,’ she whispered. ‘Soon get warm again now . . .’ and she sat forward on the edge of the chair with her legs splayed as wide as they could go while she wrestled herself out of her jacket and tugged the baggy blue sweater over her head. Andrew reacted as though he had been stung by a hornet, leaping to his feet. In the same time it took the kennel-maid to take off her jacket and pullover, he was rid of all but his shirt. Everything else was flung to the corners of the room. Hoarse with desire for the skinny unfinished child of a girl, he heard himself groaning, ‘Come on, you pissed-up little Welsh witch-bitch! Get off that chair!’ and he was pulling her by the wrist, down on to the rug in front of the fire. She squealed like a rabbit in the jaws of a fox, a half-yelp, half-giggle, and then they were grappling and tangling on the floor. In a moment, they were both grey with soot. Before Andrew tore it away, ripping it from the girl’s bony shoulders, her blouse was blackened and streaked, then her bra was filthy with smuts in a few seconds until he wrenched it off, and as she writhed on the rug her knickers were blackened too. Andrew yanked the shirt from his back. Her knickers he peeled roughly down her legs. Laughing, shouting, they slapped their hands into the moist soot of the hearth rug and daubed each other with it. Andrew, his head blank with passion, roared like a camel and kneaded the girl with fistfuls of black dust. She shrieked, wriggling on her belly across the carpet to reach the bottle of wine, and returning, her body entirely caked with soot, her face and hair coated with it, she began to pour the wine on to Andrew. He yelped, he boomed, he snatched the bottle from her and splashed her and then the hearth with it. Now there was a paste instead of the dust, a black sludge of soot and wine which they scooped up, with it oozing like oil between their fingers, and they painted each other’s body until man and girl were black and wet and glistening from head to toe. Still they squealed and roared, body to body, mouth to mouth, now on their knees, now standing and wheeling around the room, now with Andrew forced down and pinioned by the spread-eagled, soot-smeared limbs of the girl and feeling the long smoothness of her belly all wet against his, now with the girl snarling like a stoat on her back, her legs linked tightly round him, holding him in a sinewy grip . . . blacker and wetter they became, hotter and more tousled, until the girl lay outstretched on the rug, utterly pliant, her eyes wild with drink and the vigour of the game, her legs and arms sprawled wide apart.

  Andrew bent to her, his mouth open and running from her mouth to her throat to her stomach and back again, wanting her with a lust which eclipsed everything else from his mind . . . ‘Come on, Pinkie,’ she snarled at him. ‘Give the little witch-bitch what she wants . . .’ He applied himself to her compliant body.

  But not quite everything else was obliterated from his mind. Suddenly, so vividly that it seemed to be coming from just the other side of the room, he could hear laughter. Jennifer? The name flashed through his head. He twisted around to see, unable to stop himself from turning to look over his shoulder. There was nothing. Back to the girl again. ‘Pinkie, oh come on, Pinkie . . . oh come on . . . yes . . .’ and there, in front of him, like something from a nightmare, was the grotesquely blackened face of the kennel-maid. Even her teeth and her tongue were grey with soot, and she was moaning, her mouth wide open, ‘Oh, Pinkie, please, please, Pinkie . . . oh you fucking bastard, Pinkie, come on . . .’ He worked himself with her. But then he heard the laughter once more, clear and braying, Jennifer’s laughter pealing round and round inside the echoing chambers of his head . . . Jennifer? Jennifer? His head was filled with it, he could not blot it out, the laughter rang louder, mocking, contemptuous . . . And he felt himself succumbing to it. The girl was panting, her face horribly distorted. She sweltered with sweat and soot and sweet white wine. ‘Pinkie, come on, Pinkie . . . you bastard, why can’t you . . . ?’ His body sagged on to hers, like a deflating Zeppelin. And then, with a shove of her hands on his shoulders, throwing him off her, she burst out, ‘Christ, Pinkie! What’s up, for fuck’s sake?’ She sat up and pulled the parts of her body back together again. ‘Or, to be more precise, what isn’t up . . . ?’ He rolled away from her and stared at the ceiling, its sooty cobwebs. Fading now, as though it were receding down a long corridor, fainter and fainter until it was absorbed into a kind of ringing silence, Jennifer’s laughter echoed through his mind . . . Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer . . . fading and fading into nothing but the emptiness of a memory, leaving his head quite blank again. Having come to him and then vanished a few seconds later, it abandoned him on the filth of a hearth rug, with only a smutty naked child to console him.

  Fortunately for the kennel-maid, she did not feel inclined to laugh. Andrew lay there waiting, expecting her giggles. His stomach was heavy with the dread of what he might do if she laughed. She did not. With a great sigh of exhaustion, disappointment and drunkenness, she collapsed slowly backwards and lay flat out again on the rug. There was silence, man and girl lying side by side, naked, lit by the fire, their bodies black with soot. Silence for one minute. The girl’s breathing became noisier, more regular. And when Andrew sat up to look at her, hoisting himself wearily on to one elbow, he was amazed to see that she was sound asleep.

  ‘Little witch,’ he whispered. ‘Poor little witch-bitch . . .’ Dispassionately, he observed her body. Yes, she was a child. Her breasts were no more than buds, the nipples tiny and pink through the surrounding dirt. Her shoulders and hips and the contours of her pelvis were bony. ‘Little girl, fast asleep . . .’ Once more, as he had done in the hotel, he felt the stinging of tears in his eyes, a rush of anger at the foolishness of it all: his soft big body caked with filth, his cock, heavy and limp like a soft fat maggot, the room in catastrophic disorder . . . What a disaster, he thought, the whole thing, from hitting Jennifer right through to the events of this manic evening! ‘Stay asleep, you little witch,’ he said. ‘Best place for you, out of all this fucking mess!’ Then, stung by the inappropriateness of his chosen adjective, angry and abject, he let the tears run down his face, feeling them crawl through the ink, the whitewash, the sweat, the soot. You’re truly pathetic, Andrew Pinkney, he mouthed in silence . . . yes, you’re big and strong, a capable and intelligent man with a good
future and the use of a company car, but here you are sobbing over the body of a sleeping child . . . Shake yourself! Do something about it!

  This is what he did. Not bothering to cover his own body, his own flabby nakedness quite irrelevant to him, he got up and went to the kitchen, where he switched on the kettle. In a couple of minutes he had a basin of hot water, soap and a sponge, and the softest towel he could muster from the mouldering contents of his bedroom cupboard. He knelt reverently beside the girl. Leaning across her, he gouged a little more life out of the coals, prodding the logs of the rowan to give another display of flames. In the firelight, it looked as though some disgusting torture had been practised on the girl and was about to be resumed, for her body, skeletal and black, appeared to have been burned, branded and charred by the naked man who once again loomed over her. But now she had slipped gratefully into the oblivion of unconsciousness. Andrew could tell from her breathing and the utterly wasted expression on her face that she was quite stupefied with drink. She would not wake up, he would not wake her as he worked with the water and sponge. Rubbing away the tears from his face, he began to wash the girl as best he could. He wanted to. Then at least she would wake up clean, however else she felt brutalised and misused. Starting from her feet, he wiped off the soot, smudging it and rinsing it away, tenderly coaxing it from between her toes. He poured a basinful of black water down the kitchen sink and came back with more clean water. Three times, four times he did this, sponging her legs white again. He dabbed the dirt from her thighs, soaped and stroked her nest of soft black hair, fearing, when she moaned and let her legs shift further apart, that she would wake up. He held his breath. But still she remained asleep, dreaming perhaps of some future lover who would be kind to her. More water, more soap. Soon she was clean, at least he had removed most of the soot from her body by turning her gently and even washing her back and her buttocks before letting her down on to another towel, and the final basin of water was for her face. How like a child she then was, not only cleansed of soot but of the make-up she had applied! He removed her lipstick, the smudges of eye-liner, and still she slept, breathing evenly through her mouth. He pushed back the hair from her face, and there she lay, as clean as he could have managed, no more a witch, but simply a half-formed adolescent. He raised her head and put a cushion there, he took one long last look at her white, angular body, and he covered her with two blankets, tucking them up to her chin. The fire flared suddenly, the mountain ash exhaling a final flourish of flames. ‘. . . put the witches to speed . . .’ he said to the embers of the rowan. ‘No more witches tonight.’ When he had poured away the last basinful of dirty water, he gathered the kennel-maid’s clothes together and folded them on to the armchair. They were filthy, but he could do nothing about that. She was asleep, quite clean, and in the morning would be sober.