The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Living off the land we call this, Phoebe,’ he said, as the dog left her basket in anticipation of some heat. ‘We backwoodsmen get our fuel from the forests and we kindle our fires by dismantling the kitchen cupboards. Steeped in country lore, that’s me . . .’

  He slipped out to the woodshed while the nest of paper and splinters was flaring. In the torchlight, the outhouse resembled a grotesque wayside shrine in which travellers had hung offerings to their god. The smell was a blow from a heavy fist. Side by side, badger and swan swung slowly on their hooks, their frames stuffed with maggots. He leaned between them, brushing his hand on the dissimilar textures of feather and fur, and soon he was laden with logs. He chose the contorted limbs of ivy he had cut from around a silver birch one afternoon, which he reckoned would have dried out enough to burn well. Reversing from the woodshed, struggling with the torch and the logs, he set the swan and the badger swinging in a macabre dance, two totally disparate partners swaying to the tune of their own humming putrefaction. He left them to the privacy of darkness.

  The fire burned up briskly. The knots and entangled sinews of the ivy, which looked so ugly among the flames, like the wrinkles of a giant toad or some other prehistoric creature, gave out a lovely perfume as they burned. It reminded Andrew of the smell of chestnuts roasting. The room became warm, full of the incense of ivy. And, in the light of a single lamp, he thought for a second time of writing a letter to Jennifer . . . not to mention any of the strange threads of events which surrounded his obsession with the stinkhorn, but simply to recount a few innocent impressions of the cottage and the countryside. It was the sight and the scent of the ivy in the fire which gave him the idea, that here was something quaint and bucolic which might appeal to her down in the suburbs of Sussex. He wanted to write to her about his afternoons with the bowsaw and wheelbarrow, how he cut the choking serpents of the ivy from a slender birch, how the ivy then filled his room with perfume, how it gave him pleasure both to cut the wood and then to smell its burning. What else could he tell her? There was the cormorant, of course, his afternoon on the sea-shore where the sands were busy with waders; there was Phoebe’s temporary sickness which maybe the toad had caused; there was that music, the Satie which he knew she liked for its elegant quirkiness . . . No. No. While he sat by the fire and even went so far as to reach for some paper and a pen, he realised there was nothing to tell her which was not completely and inextricably bound up with the stinkhorn. It was impossible to disentangle any of those things from the business of the stinkhorn. What would he tell her when he returned to Sussex? Everything? Or nothing? He could think of no middle way. Here in Wales, in the cottage which ran with damp and disfigured the watercolours of Sussex and of Phoebe, where he felt he was being sucked into the wet mountainside, where the people and the sheep and the birds were caught in the meshes of a spell he would never understand, there was nothing which had not been touched by the magic of the woodwitch. Nothing! And after all, that was why he had come in the first place, to absolve the crime he had committed as a result of his impotence, to face here in Wales the judgement of the stinkhorn. There was no escaping it. There was no separating it from the country it held under its charm.

  He screwed up the paper and tossed it on to the fire. The ivy spat a flame at it, and soon it was gone. On impulse, he threw the pen there too. It squirmed into a mess of sizzling plastic. Then it too was gone.

  *

  It was nearly midday when Andrew awoke the following morning. Instead of rising refreshed from a long dreamless sleep, he lay torpid under a tangle of malodorous blankets, feeling that he was surfacing from an anaesthetic after an operation on some distant part of his body. He ached in every joint, the sheets were damp with sweat and the moisture in the air, and his head felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton-wool by a hamfisted taxidermist. Groaning as he glanced short-­sightedly at his watch, he struggled from the bed and sat there, head in hands, staring down between his thighs at the clammy whiteness of his feet. They were unappealing things, cold and moist and yellowing, and from them rose that whiff of corruption which the whole cottage exuded, the smell of an airless place which the sun never touched, the inside of a crypt where there were dead things busily decomposing. Just as he was studying his feet (and likening them to the gawping sightless creatures he had culled from the corpses in the woodshed and garnered into jam jars), he heard an unfamiliar sound which made him sit up and listen quizzically to it. A drumming sound . . . The persistent thrum of some kind of machine, like a small power-drill or an electric razor . . . Phoebe was asleep in her basket, she barely twitched when Andrew padded past her and into the living-room to find out what the sound really was.

  It was the flies in the jam jars.

  In both jars, a cloud of them was buzzing stupidly from the bed of sawdust, blundering against the walls of glass and then rising giddily to the cellophane which was stretched tight over the mouth of the jars. As the flies drummed their powerful, brand-new wings on this transparent ceiling, the hum went up and the water-tank cupboard droned as busily as a city sweat-shop with its ranks of sewing machines.

  This is good! thought Andrew. Very very good! . . . that at least one part of his experiment was working. And he pictured with pleasure those dangling corpses of the badger and the swan, working night and day to make sure that the supply of maggots would continue, dripping the ripe fruit of pupae to develop in the sawdust of the woodshed floor, so he could rear many more litters of lusty meat-flies. He found himself oddly satisfied that one side of his equation of flies and stinkhorn was primed and ready to work; it seemed so easy to rear the blundering flies that he felt a surge of eagerness to rear more and more of them, even though there would never be a need for so many in the experiment he planned to carry out on the two remaining stinkhorn eggs. Why did he shudder with pleasure at the idea of those dead things in the woodshed, knowing that their harvest of maggots would be massively in excess of what he actually needed? For the sake of the two stinkhorns, the last two in Britain? How many hundreds of flies could he feed on the spores of the stinkhorn? And how many millions of spores would be transmitted by them? No, he could never use more than a fraction of the flies he might cull from the woodshed . . . Nevertheless, it gave him satisfaction to cull them. He equated this with the pleasure he took from collecting timber from the woodland, sawing the logs, stacking the walls of the outhouse, continuing to stockpile the fuel in the certain knowledge that he’d never use more than a fraction of it in his short stay in the cottage. Yes, that was it. In the same way as he’d carry on cutting and gathering timber, he thrilled to see his meat-flies thriving in their jars and was eager to foster more and more and more . . .

  He pondered vaguely along these lines, as he stood in the living-room and scratched at his groin through his pyjama trousers, as he pulled open the curtains to admit the light of another metallic-grey day. A leaden sky weighted down the hills and the fields, the pressure of it squeezed yet more water from the mountains and drenched everything. November in Wales, he thought . . . when the country is erased by a grey cloud, sheeted with grey drizzle! When little stirs and is alive, apart from the sheep which are soiled with mud and entangled in their own excrement! When the ravens and the jackdaws are nothing but the distant cries of creatures buried in the mist! He found himself thinking, with a weary sigh, that December and January and February and March would probably be exactly the same, perhaps with the creaking of ice to give a harsher, more brittle ring to the slabs of the slippery rock. Phoebe looked up at the light from the window. She did what Andrew felt like doing: she put down her head again, shut her eyes, sighed, and fell asleep once more.

  In the jars on the mantelpiece, nothing new had happened. There were the remains of two defunct fungi, blobs of slime which curled up and dried on a bed of moist earth, and there were two eggs which blinked sightlessly from the soil. Andrew was ready now for the next erection, whichever one of the eggs should burgeon first. In the water-tank cupboard, as tho
ugh they were straining with eagerness at the taut cellophane which imprisoned them, the flies drummed their wings and brawled drunkenly together. The noise rose and fell, like the murmuring of an expectant crowd in the dim intimacy of a theatre. Andrew smiled with satisfaction, to see the eggs patient and blind on the mantelpiece, to hear the flies hysterical in the cupboard. He studied Jennifer’s watercolours. They ran with damp, their bright and frosty colours washed out by the trickling moisture behind the glass, so that her compositions of Sussex sunshine were transformed into dismal impressions of a Welsh November. In all the pictures now, it was raining: banks of drizzle billowed over the Sussex downs; angry grey clouds smothered the Sussex coast; blankets of sea-mist rolled in from the English Channel and obliterated the white cliffs; trawlers and dinghies skulked at their moorings under a sullen sky . . . The Cuckmere estuary was no longer a shining silver snake with its head in the sea and its coils in the green meadows. It was an earthworm, wrinkled and bruised. Phoebe had stopped snarling. Her picture had lost the definition of teeth and eyes which made her look so aggressive. That phase was past. Now her face was all but dissolved, as though she had been burned in a ghastly fire.

  And, in one corner of the glass of her frame, there was a little green slug, about an inch long. It had crept that night across the wall and slithered on to the picture. Andrew followed the trail of its slime backwards and downwards, to a patch of the carpet which was particularly wet. Lifting the carpet, he uncovered a dozen or twenty slugs, green ones like the one on the picture, coiled closely together, entangled and dormant. Were they asleep? Do slugs sleep? Was this something that even Jennifer, the omniscient Jennifer, might not know? Would his mentor, his guru, have to admit her ignorance at last? He gently laid the carpet down, a moist blanket of darkness to cover the family of sleeping slugs, and he returned to the one adventurous slug which had preferred to explore the glistening, slippery walls of the living-room while its brothers and sisters slept. It hesitated on its corner of the picture, perhaps bemused by the sheer featurelessness of the glass after the irregularities of the wall. It waved its antennae. Were its eyes on the ends of those inquisitive fingers? Andrew had no idea. Could it deduce any impression of the terrain ahead by brandishing them like that, could it make out beneath the glass a contorted image of the dog that Phoebe had once been? All the time that Andrew was dressing, while he doused his own altered face in the bathroom, as he flinched from its intolerable expressionlessness in the mirror, while he boiled water in the kitchen and sipped some coffee, the little green slug remained still. It would not yet venture on to the smooth surface of the picture. There was something it was not quite sure of, something in the texture of the glass or in the image beneath it which might make it wish it had not been tempted to quit the nest under the damp carpet for a night of gentle exploration . . .

  How alike they were, the slug on the picture and the wasted blobs of the stinkhorn in their jars! In their colouring and their shapes and their glistening skins, the exhausted fungi were very similar to the slug, as they wilted against the glass and fainted to the earth. It seemed suddenly to Andrew that one of those fungi had now risen from the dead and was reincarnated in the form of a little green garden slug, about to cross the glass of a picture frame, to peer wonderingly down at the blurred impression of Phoebe’s face . . .

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Pinkney!’

  He determined to shake off the torpor which the atmosphere seemed to enforce on him. Just because the rest of the country was going into hibernation and the covers were being drawn across a slumbering landscape, it did not mean that he would also remain dormant. Admittedly, he and Phoebe were changed by a month in Wales . . . they looked different, they acted differently and thought differently away from the tidy suburbs and the trim countryside of Sussex, but he was not going to surrender to the feeling of apathy which the weather cast over everything.

  ‘Come on, Phoebe!’ he called sharply. ‘Get out of that basket, you idle creature!’

  Before she had time to do more than raise her head from the blanket, he tipped over the basket completely and sent the dog sprawling on to the floor. Even then she was reluctant to stir, but she unwound herself painfully and arched her back like a cat. Somehow, as in her portrait, her features were blurred, either by too much sleep or by the last shreds of a dream which continued to cling there. Her face was a slate wiped clean by sleeping, a palimpsest on which nothing new had yet been inscribed. It was a face which was waiting for this new day to mould something new out of it.

  ‘We’re going out, Phoebe. Come on, girl, let’s try and find some air in this place.’

  He put on his boots and his jacket, and picked up the bow-saw. It seemed the obvious thing to take with him on a walk, as natural for him to reach for the saw as it was to pocket Phoebe’s­ lead. But, as soon as they stepped from the cottage and were enveloped by the shock of a much colder day than they had imagined it to be, Andrew changed his mind about cutting wood and straight away decided on another destination for their walk. Because the clear cold air, with almost that grip of a frost which pinched around Andrew’s nose and brought a tear to his myopic eyes, carried from the crater the belling of the hounds. He turned without hesitation to replace the bow-saw inside the front door, and locked the door behind him. ‘Don’t need that today, Phoebe. Come on, this way . . .’ And with a wave of his arm to indicate to the dancing dog the direction they were taking, he trudged up the track behind the cottage, towards the woodland, towards the dead black fir forest, towards the crater. Phoebe, woken to exhilaration by the prospect of a run, sped on ahead of him. Hearing so clearly the musical voices of the hounds, he remembered what the girl had suggested as she turned from the piano, that he should climb up to the kennels and reclaim his glasses. That was what he determined to do.

  There were no sheep as the man and the dog pressed on into the woodland of silver birch. For some reason they had all drifted down the hillside and towards the river, as he had seen at midday from his living-room window. So he felt easy about letting Phoebe sprint on and disappear from time to time among the trees. Most of the leaves were down, forming a dense carpet of wet black vegetation. The bare trees now exposed those shallow caves high up on the cliffside, the cells to which the name of the cottage should have referred if it had not been misspelt. ‘Caves in the cliffs’ or ‘the cave in the cliffs’ . . . that was how the lady in the post office had translated the name as she dispelled his original idea of ‘the cockerel in the cliffs’. And here, among the wintry woodland of oak, birch and mountain ash, all the little caves were visible, including the deepest one in which he had sat and meditated and which he had thought of as his ‘hermit’s cell’. Seen from below, it was indeed quite high and remote, having a steep cliff of jagged boulders beneath it, affording a splendid view across the valley and down to the river, if only the mist lifted to reveal something of the countryside. But now, Andrew strode onwards through the open woodland of deciduous trees, with just a thought that, sometime before he left the cottage and drove south again, he might scramble up to his hermit’s cell for another few moments’ quiet retreat.

  The dog had already sprinted on. He looked upwards, panting from the pace of the climb which was dictated by her, and there she was, slim and black and alert, at the gate which led into the shadows of the plantation. When he arrived there, he was badly out of breath. Leaning on the gate, he waited until the thudding of the blood in his head was still. Meanwhile he noted once more that they were about to enter quite a different world from the one of the slender birch and the gnarled knotty branches of oak . . . for, ahead of them, where the track grew narrower and darker, there were only the blackened ranks of the fir forest where little light could penetrate. The trees grew in tight formation, like the battalions of a silent and sinister army. There were shadows and deeper shadows and then the deepest darkness. And before he was ready to clamber over the gate, he was aware of the closeness of the hounds’ barking. He thought he heard shouting t
oo, one or more human voices mingled with the baying of their hounds. Phoebe looked up into his flushed face and she flagged her tail before unexpectedly wheeling away from the gate and trotting back in the direction she had come, as though wanting to continue her frolics among the birch rather than go into the forest. ‘No, Phoebe, this way. Come here, come on!’ But it took Andrew an exasperating few minutes to persuade the dog to come to him and then to clip her lead on to her collar, for it seemed that that would be the only way he could make her jump over the gate. Yes, the hounds were close by, in the quagmire of the crater perhaps, or even somewhere in the forest. Their chorus floated through the cold afternoon air. And the afternoon grew darker, as man and dog dropped over the gate and breathlessly entered the plantation.

  Together they climbed the path, higher and deeper into the forest. Phoebe slunk alongside the slap-slap-slapping of the wellington boots, all her ebullience gone as she quivered at the sound of the hounds. Andrew too felt the gloom infect him. Above, the narrow strip of sky was gun-metal blue, clamped down on the hillside like a steel trap, screwed on to the mountain like the lid of a coffin. There was silence which only the panting breath of the man and the dog interrupted, and then suddenly, explosively, the pealing of the hounds welled up and faded down among the black trees. One moment the hounds seemed to be to their left, for a great shout of baying rose into the grey sky and there were human cries which seemed to orchestrate the dogs’ voices. But then, to Andrew’s right, from somewhere close by in the closed ranks of the forest, the chorus reached a more dramatic crescendo before it was absorbed into the dense cover. The effect which this shifting of sounds achieved was to disorientate the man, to disable his sense of direction, so that all he knew was that he must continue to climb, that so long as he was striving upwards he must be moving in the direction of the kennels, that he must try to ignore the ebb and flow, the surge and counter-surge which the outbursts of shouting inflicted on the balance of his senses. And all the time it was getting darker, both from the bristling branches of the plantation and from the lowering lid of the sky. Colder too . . . The air snapped at his face as he scrambled up the rough track and dragged the reluctant dog with