The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  Andrew wrapped himself in another blanket. Too tired to sleep just then, he built up the fire and sat down by it, cross-legged on the rug. He still wanted to be close to the girl. Somehow, he wondered, washing her tenderly while she slept, cleaning every inch of her body and patting her dry was more satisfying than making love would have been. He knew more about her body this way. The washing was a far more intimate thing than mere sex. Because she had been asleep, that was why. Because, in silence, in the hush of such a deep sleep that every muscle in her body was limp and loose, he had been allowed to mould her with his hands, slowly, gently, with respect. And then to wrap her in a warm blanket, to see that the fire was burning satisfactorily. Tending to her had given him a feeling of relief that no orgasm could ever have done. The skirmish with Jennifer, all that grunting and frantic undressing for the sake of their gratification on the sofa! His lunatic grappling in the sludge of soot and wine with this little kennel-maid! What a farce, compared with the simple actions of fetching water and ministering to the sleeping girl on the firelit rug . . .

  Andrew might almost have managed to convince himself, as he pursued this line of thought and studied the features of the girl. He might almost have succeeded in diminishing in his own mind the significance of another humiliating failure. But his eyes wandered from the girl’s face. His stare moved upwards, from the hearth, past the fire, up to the mantelpiece. And there in front of him was the starkest reminder of what he had failed to achieve.

  The second stinkhorn was erect. It had burst from the egg since midnight, thrust its head from the ruptured shell, and was now standing up in the jar, some five or six inches tall. It was a perfect phallus. The column, an inch thick, was white, unblemished by any stain or split, and the bulging head was covered by an oily slime, black and green, not unlike the slime of soot which Andrew and the girl had smeared on their bodies. And, seeing it there on the mantelpiece, not detached from him as the stinkhorn had seemed to be in the shadows of the forest, but before him in the sitting-room of the cottage like an ornament or a fashionable conversation piece, he felt it was inescapable. He could not take his eyes from it. It reared up and mesmerised him, as powerfully as if it were a cobra and he were a mouse.

  In its effortlessness, its arrogance, its brazen lewdness, the stinkhorn sneered at him and said, ‘Look at me, Andrew Pinkney, and compare your flaccid maggot of a cock with mine!’ It said, ‘You caught my stink in the softness of Sussex, but you weren’t interested then, were you? Now you’ve come to the drizzling black forests of Wales and entombed me on your mantelpiece, like a party-trick for a party which never happened! Will you stand up and be a man, Andrew Pinkney, or will you mope like a fat white maggot, soft and limp and full of pus? Will you ever be like me, the stinkhorn? I doubt it! You know, the Germans call me “Hirschbrunst”, which means “the rutting of stags”, for they imagine I grow from the spilled seed of an urgent copulation . . . Yes, Pinkie, “rutting”! Will you ever rut like a stag? I doubt it! Look at yourself, your flaccidity, your sagging, your wilting, your craven drooping! And then some people call me “the woodwitch”. A lot of good that did you, didn’t it, Pinkie? To have me on your mantelpiece, a woodwitch erect and pulsing and dripping with seed, and to have a little Welsh witch-bitch come panting to your fireside, on heat, her mouth open and her legs open, just begging for the kind of rutting I’m famous for . . . and what happened? You play a dirty game on the hearth rug and then you leave the bitch still panting for something you couldn’t give her! She’s asleep! Yes, look at her, asleep! She’s asleep, Pinkie, because she’s more likely to find her rutting in a dream than with your maggot between her legs! No, Andrew Pinkney, you’ll never be like me, the stinkhorn, the woodwitch, the spurted seed of a stag, Phallus impudicus, however long you manage to keep me prisoner. You can try, you can cultivate as many dead things as you like in your woodshed, you can hang whatever corpses you want on those meat-hooks and cull a million dung-flies from them, and you can imprison me in this jar. But I’ll always haunt you . . . always! You might even take me with you back to Sussex and flaunt me to that other bitch you left panting . . . She didn’t get her rutting either, did she? Unless she’s getting it now, while you’re in Wales! No, Andrew Pinkney, you can keep me prisoner and spectate my itches, but you’ll never be like me! Never, never, never . . .’

  In this way, the stinkhorn spoke to him. He pulled the blanket tightly around his shoulders, for he felt a sudden chill in spite of the rowan which burned fiercely on the fire, and he was hypnotised by the phallus he had trapped in the jar. He continued to sit and watch. It was impossible to appreciate the passing of time as he gazed at the thing’s luminous white column and its oozing head. From the holes he had pierced in the jar’s cap there rose the stinkhorn’s unmistakable perfume, the stench of decomposing flesh; it drifted to his nostrils and quite eclipsed the resinous scents of the burning wood. Hours must have gone by. Only when he saw that the phallus was leaning a little, imperceptibly at first and then he was sure of it, when its head began to sag until it rested against the side of the jar, only then did he break its spell over him. The stinkhorn, reared so quickly in the heat and dampness of the room, was wilting just as fast. Andrew moved painfully from the position he had maintained for so long. Yes, it was over, the fungus was discoloured and moist, slithering slowly down the glass and leaving a trail of slime like a snail’s. The girl had not moved. She was sound asleep, breathing regularly. He went to the sofa, too dirty to go to bed and too tired to wash himself, where he lay down and buried himself deep inside the blanket. In seconds, he too was asleep.

  He dreamed once more that he was pursued through the forest by a flock of bleating manic sheep. There was always the crashing of undergrowth, the breaking of brittle branches as he stumbled to stay ahead of them. The awful panic of being chased by something more powerful and less rational than oneself gripped him, he could almost feel the hot and fetid breath of the animals which closed behind him. Everything was blurred. And this time, the sheep which led the pursuit, the one with the black face and the gaping white sockets where the eyes should have been, was a horrifying caricature of the kennel-maid and of Jennifer: that is, when it stamped and lunged at him from the shadows of the trees, there was something about its face that he had seen in the soot-blackened and sweat-smeared features of the girl, combined with the earnest seriousness of the blue-stocking which was Jennifer. When he awoke, he was weary from being asleep. The dream, the pursuit of the mad sheep-woman, had drained him. He felt as though he had really been racing over rocks and through bracken, for his limbs ached when he shifted under the dampness of the single blanket. It was light. He peered from the sofa. He sat up painfully.

  The girl had gone. The blankets and the towel where she had been lying had been slung on to the armchair where he had folded her dirty clothes. She must have got up and dressed while her bestial equivalent was harrying Andrew through his dream. Phoebe was in her basket. The girl must have found her waiting outside when she left, she must have let the dog in. Phoebe unwound herself from the basket and slunk slowly across the room, seeing that Andrew was awake, to push her face into his outstretched hand, as she had always used to do. He caught the smell of her warm fur, mingled with the damp and the sweet scent of the slime which had dried among the tangled hair of her tail. She sat by the sofa and submitted to his fondling, torpid from sleep and from her night outside with the splintering bones and the scattered feathers of the cockerel. The room was smudged all over with soot, a fine layer of it which coated everything. On the hearth, the congealed mess of the wine and soot paste was matted into a pattern of handprints and fingermarks, the daubed signatures of himself and the kennel-maid who had painted each other’s bodies in a frenzy of lust.

  Sitting up, he pulled back the blanket and inspected his body. He was entirely blackened. There was something quite primitive in his dispassionate appraisal of his body and of the room . . . a primitive man who saw around him the evidence of a night’s ancient
ritual, the oldest and most important ritual of all, that of the mating of male and female, the union of the two beasts for the transmission of seed. He might just as well have been a caveman in his cave, for all the trappings were there around him: he was naked and black, in the way that cavemen are depicted in school history books; he was emerging from under his blanket with a head full of dreams of the hunt, in the way that cavemen would dream; his abode was a place of sooted walls of rock which ran with moisture and where everything had been touched by the smoke of the previous night’s fire; there were strange daubings, the imprints of a man’s hand and a woman’s hand near where the fire had been, as though a record had been left to commemorate their coupling, as though it were important to leave a mark as evidence of the act; and here was the caveman’s dog, coming to his side after a night spent crunching bones and spitting feathers . . .

  Yes, Andrew Pinkney, he thought . . . so it’s come to this. Only a few weeks ago you were an articled clerk in Sussex, with all the trappings associated with that status and that place. And now you’re a caveman on a Welsh mountain, where smoke and soot and sweat and blood are the essential ingredients of your lifestyle. But, Andrew Pinkney, there was one thing missing from last night’s ritual, wasn’t there? After all the heathen rites and the hoo-ha, after the dancing in the firelight, after the painting of the flesh, after the sacrifice of a cockerel in the flames and in the teeth of another beast . . . after all of that, there wasn’t any transmission of seed, was there? You didn’t manage the most important part of the entire rigmarole, did you? You missed the point of the whole complicated performance! All that ritualised foreplay, which men and women have been practising since they were living in caves on this same hillside some ten thousand years ago, the celebrations of fertility, the worship of the phallus . . . and what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. The man and the woman go to sleep. That’s all that happens.

  He stood up from the sofa. Pulling back the curtains, he saw another morning of grey drizzle, with the fields and the mountains all but obliterated by a dense drenching mist. He wrapped the blanket closely round his shoulders and shuffled to the hearth. The second stinkhorn, which had taunted him through the night with its luminous erection, had collapsed into a jelly and now resembled nothing more than a gobbet of phlegm which an old man had spat on to a pavement. In the remaining two jars, the eggs were unaltered. Their hours of lewdness were still to come. And Andrew determined to be ready for them. He would not simply spectate the next time. He would not be hypnotised into a stupor of envy and shame. He would promote the transmission of spores. He would sire a new generation of stinkhorn, set the flies buzzing into the jars, to gorge on the dripping seeds of the phallus . . . The slogan ran through his head: save the stinkhorn, save the stinkhorn, save the stinkhorn . . .

  And the sibilance of it was echoed in the sighing of the drizzle, it was whispered in the blowing of the mists which wrapped themselves more closely around the cottage.

  V

  There was work to be done that morning, the first of November.

  Andrew switched on the immersion heater. In one hour’s time, there would be enough hot water for a bath. He opened the front door. Phoebe went outside into the slow rain, sniffing long and deep into the grass and searching out the remains of the cockerel she had killed and eaten that night. She disappeared behind the cottage. Having dressed in the dirtiest clothes he could find, covering the foolishness of his filthy body, Andrew set about cleaning the room. He shook out the rugs, he boiled water in the kettle, he filled basin after basin and washed down the walls, he knelt by the hearth and wiped away the encrusted soot. When he took down the pictures and cleaned them, he revealed squares of whiter wall which still had been scored by rivulets of condensation and the silt of soot they had carried. Every corner was infiltrated by the black cloud. The few books were grey, they coughed a sooty cough when he riffled their pages. The curtains were sweaty with damp soot, as though an exhausted miner had used them to wipe down his aching body. Andrew shook them vigorously, he shook out the blankets which he and the girl had used, again and again he wiped up the settling dust with more and more clean water, and when he thought there was nothing else he could do apart from actually hosing the walls and the ceiling and floor, he ran the vacuum cleaner over and over the carpet, over the rugs, over the furniture, until he switched it off and stepped outside for the peace and coolness he suddenly wanted. He needed air, clean, sharp, fresh air.

  Standing in front of the cottage, a hot man streaked with blackened sweat, he inhaled deeply and felt the drizzle settle like a cold kiss on his forehead. His glasses . . . he was missing his glasses. And there was something else yet to be cleaned. Rumpled on the grass, there was the rug which Phoebe had soiled in the hotel. Swearing through his gritted teeth, he attacked it with another basin of soapy water, melting away the congealed scabs of slime, dissolving the knots of matted material and finally dousing the rug with a concentrated solution of disinfectant. He did all this in the driving mists. He knelt on the grass and scoured the rug while the rain clung around him, a suffocating silver cobweb of drenching drizzle. Why was there no air, even here, outside the cottage? Why couldn’t he simply breathe a breath of fresh air, without swallowing a mouthful of water? Was there any air in Wales, for Christ’s sake? Or was it a straight choice of soot and dust inside, mist and drizzle outside? He cursed the country he had come to, where there were mountains and forests and waterfalls which were acclaimed worldwide in the tourist brochures but which, for the most part, were entirely obscured by smothering cloud. As far as he could tell (and the cottage was supposed to enjoy one of the best vantage points in the county), Wales was nothing more than one dense billowing cloud of wet mist which shifted in a wet wind, changing shape in the aimless gusts of drizzle, but always a cloud. Save for the square bulk of the cottage behind him, there was nothing else solid to be seen. There was no mountain, no crater, no forest. There was no air. He felt as though his head and his lungs were being drowned under a mass of damp cotton wool.

  He left the rug lying on the grass. Inside the cottage his impression of being suffocated was intensified in the bathroom. Having turned off the immersion heater and run the bath, he stepped out of his dirty clothes. The bathroom was the same cloud of wet mist he had left outside, except that it was warm. The air swarmed with droplets, he saw them swirling when he exhaled, he saw them flutter when he breathed in. It was a thick bank of steam which engulfed him, which wrapped its folds around him, which forced its vapours into his nostrils and filled his whole head with a white fog. He felt the weight of the moisture on his lungs. Within seconds of sinking into the water, it was grey with soot. He fell back, plunged his head into the hot grey water, lay there, immersed, to listen to the rumblings and the cries and the whistling of his own ears. He sat up and blew like a manatee, soaping himself time and again until his flabby flesh was shining white once more, he clambered to his knees and soaped every crevice of his body to be clean of the sweat and the wine and the soot in which he had revelled with the witch who had come to him on Hallowe’en. He felt better, much better, with every smear he rubbed from his skin. The caveman was being stripped and scoured of his primitive daubings! he thought. In this way, he was returning to the twentieth century! But when he surged out of the bath, standing up like a god from the black water, all glistening with soap, he inspected himself in the mirror and found that some vestiges of the night’s debauch remained . . . he still had most of the goatee beard and its sinister moustache, there were streaks of ink around his eyes, and a trickle of red ran from the corner of his mouth. He scrubbed his face with a nail-brush until the skin was sore, managing to fade the stark lines of black, but still there remained a smudge of grey, like a bruise or a birthmark around his chin and his eyes. Short of continuing until he drew blood with the bristles of the brush, there was nothing more he could do. For another day or two, he would carry the stigma of his Hallowe’en disguise, the mark of the vampire he had tried so clum
sily to imitate.

  Air! He had to get some air, or else he would smother! Dressing quickly in the living-room, he saw that it was as steamed and clammy as ever, perhaps there was even more condensation on the walls and on the pictures after his efforts with the soap and hot water. He gave no more than a glance to the jars on the mantelpiece. For the time being, his priority was to flee the cottage on its invisible hillside as fast as possible, to find somewhere to breathe for a few hours. The more he thought about it, the heavier the weight of the mist seemed to press him down and hamper his movements. He was being crushed by the pressure of the cloud. There was only one place to flee to, where he was hopeful of finding some air which was not too thick and wet to breathe. . . The sea-shore! He had been there before and promised himself another visit, to the estuary near Caernarfon. Now that he and the cottage were clean again, he would quit the hills for the afternoon.