The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  When he shouted her name, Phoebe ran around to the front door. She had a few black feathers in her teeth. Andrew pulled them from her and she trotted away, spitting some morsel of sinew or gristle from her mouth. Watching her, he saw the caked fur of her tail and this confirmed his decision to go to the coast, where the dog would get a good salt soaking by chasing sticks in and out of the sea. He remembered too how he had found the remains of a bird already in the chimney, when he had first lit the fire some weeks before. Was that a cockerel as well? Was his employer aware of the spelling error he had emblazoned on the cottage, and had he already had the cockerel trick played on him during the summer? Was it the idiot Huw, the kennel-maid’s brother, who had put that other bird down the chimney? Most likely, if he had tried it one night in the summer when the solicitor and his family had been there, the bird had just jammed in the blocked chimney and the occupants of the misnamed cottage had remained oblivious of the practical joke. The idiot’s trick must have gone unnoticed. At least this time the joker had had the satisfaction of seeing Andrew emerge from the cottage, coughing and spluttering, had seen the dog spring out with the wreckage of the cockerel in her jaws, and had enjoyed the triumph of his crowing. Would he ever know what his little sister had done as an encore to his surprise? ‘Come on, Phoebe, let’s get out of here for a while.’ Andrew followed the dog down the track to where he had left his car, a little lower down the hillside. Without his glasses he would have to drive slowly and carefully, but he had to go somewhere to breathe even if it meant a myopic journey along unfamiliar roads. He would return to the hotel only when he had finally removed all the ink from his face, in a day or two, when the rug was dry; meanwhile, he had packed it around the water tank in the cottage. Only then would he take the rug back and reclaim his glasses, and apologise to Mrs Stone.

  As he splashed with the car across the flooded bridge at the foot of the hillside, when he saw the river overflowing the bridge in one smooth silken wave, he decided exactly where he would go to clear his head that afternoon. He would follow the river to its estuary. It seemed a neat idea that, just as he was determined to ease the pressure of water which was building up around him from the engulfing wetness of his surroundings, he should see exactly where all that water disappeared, exactly where the swamp that was Wales emptied eventually into the sea. He would take pleasure in watching the water drain out. It would feel to him as though he were opening some sort of safety valve in his head and releasing the weight of the water which had built up. Once he reached the road and was facing towards Caernarfon, he paused and pulled out the map which his employer had lent him for his stay in the cottage. It was the first time he had bothered to look at it, so seldom had he been out in the car. ‘Let’s see then, Phoebe. Where are we?’ The dog sprang on to his lap in answer to his question, concerned only that they were on an expedition which might culminate in a walk or a swim. Perhaps she too was relieved to escape the clammy folds of the mountain’s mist. Pushing her away while he consulted the map, grimacing at her smell, he read that they had just forded the river Gwyrfai near the village of Salem. He ran a finger along the snaking line until it came to the sea. Foryd Bay . . . that was the estuary of the bulging river, that was where the unbearable weight of the water slid to sea. That was where these mountains and this valley shed their load of water.

  *

  It was midday when they arrived at their destination. The sky cleared as Andrew drove from the hills. In the distance, across the Menai Straits, the island of Anglesey stretched flat and green and handsome . . . To Andrew it was a refreshing view of a piece of England which had somehow become attached to the slimy grey slabs of Wales. He swung the car through the lanes to the south of Caernarfon. There were high hedges and lusher, more even fields now that they came closer to the coast. More and more like England, he thought, as the weight of the mountains and the blackness of the forest seemed to lift from him . . . less and less like Wales. Ahead of him, a glimpse of the sea was as brief and as exhilarating as the flash of a trout’s belly in a green pool. He felt his spirits lifting with every mile. The air was cold and clear, it blustered through the open windows of the car with the tang of salt in it, it blew away the festoons of fusty cobwebs which had hung in Andrew’s head. Phoebe yelped like a fox, standing on the passenger seat and furiously flagging her tail. Closer and closer to the coast they travelled. The lanes became narrower. They passed a few fields of caravans, and even they seemed neat and white and clean, gloriously suburban, splendidly English! How civilised, he thought, that all these people had come from cities like Chester and Shrewsbury and even from Cheltenham with their fresh little caravans and their well-maintained saloon cars, just for a fortnight before returning to their suburban existence! The sky was such a pale blue as to be practically white, a clear and luminous sky like a new fall of snow. The mountains were behind him, he could make out their clinging fog with a glance in his mirror, but ahead there was only the last flat fields of the coastal farms, a few more twists in the high-banked lanes, a glimpse of crisp black and white cows in a green meadow, and suddenly the expanse of the sea spread silver and smooth to an invisible horizon . . . Marvellous, marvellous, marvellous! . . . the word rang over and over in Andrew’s head. Phoebe whirled and leapt beside him, her voice cracked with pleasure. At the first opportunity, now that the road turned and ran parallel to the beach, he stopped the car. Phoebe was out before he could unfasten his seat belt. She bolted from the car, black and furious and alive with the scent of salt and seaweed, haring across the shingle to the water’s edge. He struggled from the car, into a coat and wellingtons, locked up and looked around for his first appraisal of the coast.

  The tide was going out. Acres of glistening wet sand stretched to the sea. In spite of Phoebe’s noisy arrival, flocks of waders speckled the shoreline, scores of curlew and redshank and dunlin and knot; they rose and shifted in a series of flickering clouds, moving from flat to flat and settling again. There were oystercatchers, determined that neither their voices nor their feeding grounds should be yielded to the dog, for they piped as furiously as she yelped, returning to the sands in a black and white whirl of confetti as soon as she had scampered on and left her delicate footprints where the birds’ beaks had been probing. Turnstones lived up to their name with commendable seriousness, prising over the pebbles of the foreshore, shaking out strands of weed for the countless sand-hoppers and sea-­spiders which burrowed there. There were a few ringed plovers, moving with the pipits and almost as inconspicuous, there were dozens of starlings which had matched their colour to the predominant browns of the boulders and weed, and there were gangs of carrion crows working the waterline for a morsel among the flotsam and jetsam. The crows rose time and time again with a mussel in their beaks, to drop it on to the rocks and smash it open, and then they floated down like rags to jemmy the cracked shell. They were burglars, beachcombers, scavenging ruffians, and Andrew loved to watch them. He followed the dog. He went crunching across the shingle and scuffed his boots into the line of scum which the sea had deposited, mostly plastic bottles and the sodden remains of wooden crates tumbled together with weed. Millions of insects wriggled in the rotting vegetation. No other people were there on the beach, no other dogs. Under the white sky which shone the sea silver and made the sands as bright as glass, the man and his dog walked and breathed as they had not breathed for weeks. Phoebe dashed wildly in and out of the sea. Andrew inhaled until he felt his lungs ache with their scouring of salt. Marvellous! He was renewed, invigorated. A weight was lifted from him. His face went pink, flushed with a fresh pumping of blood which nearly suffused even the smudges of grey ink, and his eyes smarted short-sightedly as he gazed into the glare of the air and sea-water. Marvellous!

  Sure enough, they came to the estuary of that river, whose name he had forgotten. It was a disappointment. Nothing much more than a trickle ran from a brackish drain, feeling its way through a maze of marsh grass which crackled and popped as the mud dried out, and then
the river was consumed by the sea. Was that it? Where was all that water which drained from the crater and coursed down the sides of the valley? Where was the water which glistened on every slab, which dripped from every branch, which squelched under every boot, which found its way through the walls and the roof of the cottage? Here, all that water was swallowed into a marsh of muddy creeks and spiny grass . . . And, as though to remind him of what he had left behind in the hills, there was a smell of staleness which rose from the estuary. Something sweet and rotten had been washed down the valley and brought up here. What was it? He glanced back to the beach which he and the dog had come crunching over, where there were curlew, elegant and wise and exquisitely mirrored in the polished sand . . . He looked at the phantasmal flights of knot which flickered and faded and flickered in fidgeting flocks . . . He watched the oyster­catchers shuffle themselves like a conjuror’s card-trick . . . All of these things under a white sky, in air which was clean and sharp, where the mists of the stale mountains could not reach . . . and still his mouth was touched with a taste of something rotten. Even here, in his nostrils there clung a whiff of something past its best. That line he had traced with his finger, so neat and innocent on the map, connected him with the stinks he had tried to leave behind. He had not escaped them after all. There was no pleasure to be had in seeing the river absorbed into the greater mass of the sea, because the river carried its own taint to the very end.

  Something was dead in the river. The man and the dog could smell it.

  The expression on Phoebe’s face changed as drastically as it had changed on the painting in the cottage. Her yelps and grins, the bobbing of her plumed tail, all the exuberance she had let loose by dashing in and out of the sea, altered now that she was close to the mouth of the river. She curled her tail tightly between her legs. She skulked at Andrew’s heels, and when he reached down to touch her head she bridled from him and started up her buzzing high-pitched snarl, contorting her face into a mask of teeth and snickering lips. Some smell, some stench had reached her. It reminded her of the thing which the man had hung in the woodshed, that grinning thing which swung and stank on the meat-hook. Something else was dead close by. It was not just the river and the refuse it bore with it to spew into the sea . . . Some dead thing was nearby, oozing its vapours of putrefaction as an advertisement for death. The dog hunched her back. Again she spun from the man’s proffered hand, she bared her teeth at it as though the hand were the source of the smell. Andrew sniffed the air. The rankness of the slow river and its standing pools of brackish water was in his nostrils. He inhaled, turning his face this way and that, trying to pinpoint the direction from which that stronger, riper scent was blowing, until he saw five or six crows beat upwards from the depths of a creek, from where they had been hidden by mudbanks and marsh grass. They cartwheeled away like cinders in the wind, calling hoarsely as they flapped from the river. The dog accelerated her snarls into a series of ill-tempered barks. She pointed her face where the crows had been. Andrew set off, marking the spot which the crows had left, striding towards it.

  And then even he, a mere man, ill-equipped for following scents, was struck hard by the power of the stink of dead meat which rose from the marsh. Reluctantly, obsequiously, the dog went with him, her belly almost brushing the ground in her efforts to efface herself, to erase herself from the impact of what she knew they would find. Suddenly, the edge of the creek gave way beneath the man’s boots. He slithered down the bank of a deep channel, tearing with his hands at the tough grass to slow his fall. Sliding on his backside, turning and twisting, he tumbled helplessly into the mud, where he landed with his feet in the water some six feet below the bewildered dog. She looked down at him from the top of the collapsed bank.

  And there was the dead thing.

  It was a swan. In death it was as splendid as it had been in life. Some creatures might cower and fawn in the attitude of being dead, as though by dying they ceased to make a contribution to the state they had left . . . But this swan was still as grand and as theatrical as it had ever been when it beat along the estuary. It lay spread-eagled in the grey mud, breast upwards, both vast white wings stretched out like sheets, sheets which might have been rumpled and stained by lovers. The column of its neck was straight. Its beak was open, as if it were singing that song which dying swans are reputed to sing. There were no eyes, now that the crows had paid their call and taken them away. The bird was huge and white, somehow bigger and more spectacular than any swan which Andrew had seen before. It made an art of being dead. Around its webbed black feet and around its legs there were yards of nylon twine which an irresponsible angler must have discarded up the river, to become entangled and to pinion the swan’s feet together. Andrew lay next to the dead bird. The smell of it was so strong as to eclipse the smells of the river and the mud. Its belly pulsed with the movement of maggots, there were flies crawling speculatively from the swan’s open beak and buzzing around its empty eye sockets. Above him, Phoebe was silent, stunned by the stink and by the spectacle of death which the bird so proudly presented. She stared down. She started to snarl at the droning of flies.

  ‘Splendid . . .’ whispered Andrew, manoeuvring himself on to his feet. ‘Well done, Phoebe! You’ve done it again! We can use this, can’t we . . . ?’

  From that moment, the idea of clearing his head with a bracing walk on the seashore was forgotten. He had come to the beach to blow away the smells of damp, to cleanse himself of rotting things. But now all he could think of was the stinkhorn, those innocuous jars on the mantelpiece which had within them the power either to give him strength or to humiliate him. The stinkhorn flooded his head once more. A vision of their glowing phallus flashed before his eyes, it fused for one dazzling second with the column of the swan’s straight neck as though the swan and the stinkhorn were inextricably linked . . . and of course they were, for Andrew Pinkney, for the festering of the swan and all the busy workings of its corpse would help him to foster a new generation of stinkhorn. Swan and badger . . . he ran the words together in his mind, let them rub together like pebbles in a stream . . . Badger and swan . . . Alive, they were utterly independent of one another. Dead, they joined forces and found a single shared purpose.

  It was perhaps a good thing that the beach was deserted that afternoon, for any passing rambler, ornithologist, jogger or fisherman would have witnessed a bizarre sight. The dog herself could not bear it. She fled along the shore, raising a cloud of clamouring curlew as she made for what she imagined would be the familiar security of the car. Andrew saw her go. He ignored her. There was work to be done and it would be easier without Phoebe pestering him. He took hold of the swan by the neck, just below its head, tested the strength of it in case it had already decomposed so much that the head would just come off in his hand, and he hefted the dead bird out of the creek. In spite of its size, it was very light. Like the badger, it must have died of starvation, unable to forage successfully with its feet bound together. He then dragged it behind him along the smooth sand. An observer might have thought that the bird was still alive: its wings flapped open and closed now that they were exposed to the sea wind, its body bounced sometimes up and down over the undulating flats. Along they went, man and bird. The man leaned against the breeze, his wellington boots slapping rhythmically and noisily on his calves. His long blond hair blew about his ears. His cheeks were flushed with the walking and the crispness of the November air, although the skin around his eyes and mouth was smudged with grey. There was a strange, obsessive light burning in his face. Engrossed in this operation, he was no longer missing his glasses. He walked on and listened to the sliding, slipping, slithering of the bird as it swept across the sand. The swan submitted. It lay back and trailed the wreckage of its wings beside it, it dangled its flat black flippers and their ravellings of twine. Man and bird left an unusual signature on the beach . . . before the tide returned and erased the evidence, there was a succession of heavy booted footprints, over which the sand had been ligh
tly brushed by some dragging, skidding object . . . A sleuth might have concluded from the trail that a poor wretch, weighed down by his boots, had been pursued relentlessly by a light-footed whirlwind of a fiend, a creature from the sea perhaps, which dogged the man’s heels wherever he tried to turn . . .

  But Andrew Pinkney pressed on.

  As he approached the car, Phoebe grew hysterical. She saw the apparition coming along the beach, closer and closer, the man who was rapidly becoming a stranger to her so that she hardly recognised him as her master who had brought her to Wales, and the big white stinking thing he was towing towards her. She ran round and round the car, her barks becoming more high-pitched with every circuit, her tongue lolling and slavering, her eyes rolling. When he arrived and lifted the tail-gate with one hand, still holding the throat of the swan with the other, she could not contain her horror at the sight of what he was doing. She sprang forward. Leaping, she raked the hand which had opened up the back of the car, she closed her jaws hard on it. Then she fell to the ground as lightly as a cat and dashed away again. Andrew shouted a single unlovely word. Blood was welling fast from the bitten hand. Swearing loudly at the dog, which wisely stayed out of range of his boots, he swung the body of the swan into the car and leaned in to fold the wings across the bird’s breast, holding his breath against the stench which was intensified by the enclosed space. From under the wings, where the skin had been broken by the crows, handfuls of plump yellow maggots scattered from the corpse and writhed blindly on the plastic upholstery. The hard dry cylinders of pupae tumbled too. A swarm of black flies broke from the swan’s mouth, there was a rush of wings through the tunnel of its neck as a mass of blackened tunnellers were released from their shift down the mine. He reeled back, nauseated by the sight of the swan’s yawn of flies. Eyeless, it stared at him. For a few seconds he was as mesmerised by the droning of the flies, the spillage of maggots and the empty sockets which the crows had pilfered, as he had been by the stinkhorn the previous night. Only by stepping back again and cracking his head on the tail-gate of the car did he rouse himself, to the persistent barks of the dog. He slammed the door shut.