The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  He bathed, luxuriating in the deep, soapy water. Time and time again he knelt up in the bath and scrubbed himself, to scour away any last scum of the damp dark atmosphere which might cling to him . . . any mud he had brought from the crater, any blood from whatsoever wounded beast, any sweat of a nightmarish chase, any tears of bitter loneliness or bereavement, any traces of soot or the sludge of soot and wine, any faint lines of ink on his face, any saliva from a tiny pink tongue . . . He wanted it all off, to see it all go down the plug hole, down that unpronounceable river and away to sea. He must get clean! And soon, glowing pinkly from the heat and the scrubbing, he dressed in his clean clothes.

  All of this took him into the early afternoon.

  There was, of course, one item he would take with him to Sussex as a memento of his stay in Wales, as a trophy.

  He went to the front door, to examine the remains of the stinkhorn in the daylight. While he had been sleeping, the final phallus had fallen, as the others had fallen, to nothing more than a coil of wet wasted matter. But the flies which had fed on its head were buzzing vigorously about the jar.

  ‘You lot are coming with me,’ he told them. ‘Let’s get you organised for the trip.’ From the kitchen, where he had kept it separate from the other containers he had removed to the woodshed, he collected one of the receptacles of earth he had earlier prepared for this stage of the experiment. There was no point in keeping the defunct stinkhorn any longer. It was finished. The show was over. The ghost had evaporated into thin air. The flies were more important, carrying millions of spores on their bodies and in their digestive systems. Outside, in the chill light of afternoon, he transferred as many of the gorged insects as he could from the jar with its derelict fungus to the other. He screwed the lid on tightly. In that matter-of-fact way he reduced the entire experiment, all its dragging and digging and bottling and harvesting and waiting, to its quintessence. Hurling away the wilted corpse of the last woodwitch, he listened delightedly to the smashing of glass on the rocks. No more stinkhorn? Was that the end of the woodwitch? Would it continue to haunt him? In his hands he now held the trophy to be taken from that place, all that was left of the experiment. Not much to look at, he thought wryly . . . Was this the reason he’d come all this way to Wales and spent such a traumatic month in Cockerel Cottage? For this? An old jam jar buzzing with dozens of meat-flies? Was that the result of his banishment? Would anything come of it?

  Slipping the jar into the pocket of his jacket, he went back inside the cottage to check that he had cleared all his things. He tried each room, looking in drawers and under beds, touching for the last time those blooms of green mould on the walls. Wet whitewash remained on the tips of his fingers, a powder of sweat and plaster-dust lingered in corners and in cupboards, despite his efforts to improve the place. He thought he was ready to go. He’d left nothing in the cottage, everything was clean and tidy, the car was packed, he was bathed and he was dressed more smartly than at any time since he’d left Sussex. Thank goodness he had his glasses! he thought as he stood in the kitchen, thinking about his long journey, the route he would take and the time he should be home. It was two o’clock. In his pocket, the jam jar hummed with flies.

  He felt a spasm of guilt and annoyance about the woodshed, its grisly contents, and the obsolete possessions which he had put on the grass outside its door. Damn . . . couldn’t he just leave them all behind? Couldn’t he simply put the dog’s basket and those pictures in the woodshed, as a contribution to the fuel store for the next visitor to break them up and use them to kindle the fire? And the dead things? Now that he was clean and smart, having already slipped into the frame of mind that he was finished with all that and was leaving it all behind, Andrew was irritated to be drawn back into a consideration of the badger, the swan, that dog which had been Phoebe. Just leave them there? Yes, he thought briskly . . . it would be Easter before his boss came to Wales, in more than five months’ time, and long before then the corpses would have withered to nothing but a few dry bones, dropping from their hooks to be scattered by rats among the stacks of logs. The next person to go in there would first of all have a very pleasant surprise to see so much wood, cut and dry, ready for the fire, and later might fleetingly wonder at the whitened bones . . . There’d be nothing more to suggest the gruesome things which had once swung so usefully from those quaint old hooks on the rafters. Good, he thought, going through to the living-room . . . that was the problem solved. Now it was time to lock the cottage, to push those things into the woodshed and lock it up, and he’d be off. A tidy end to his stay in Cockerel Cottage . . .

  Meanwhile, the flies buzzed more loudly in his pocket.

  At that moment, he was surprised to see the movement of a big white animal, which was not a sheep, on the hillside in front of the cottage. And another, then a third, three pale creatures limbering easily through the broken bracken and coming closer with each loping stride . . . The three hounds moved like ghosts, fluid and athletic and dim against the beaten landscape.

  Andrew’s heart lurched. Immediately, his mouth went dry. Oh Christ! Not now! Please, not now! he prayed . . . not now, when I’m just about to leave and never come back! The girl appeared from round the bulge of the hill, calling to the hounds in Welsh. Her figure was engulfed by the big jacket, the baggy trousers, she seemed weighted down by those great boots. The curls of her short black hair, under a man’s hat, formed a kind of ragged halo around her white face.

  ‘Oh Christ . . .’ There was nothing he wanted to say to her, nothing he wanted to hear her say. His mind raced with notions of avoiding the girl. She was striding nearer to the car, glancing inside it and then looking up to the cottage. He could not see where the hounds had gone. Christ! If they were nosing around the woodshed, attracted by the smells! What if she started to poke about the pictures and the dog’s basket, wondering what all those maggots and flies were doing in . . . ! The last thing he wanted now, with the car ready to go, with the cottage tidy, was to start explaining anything to the kennel-maid or to listen to any schoolgirl apologies for what had happened to Phoebe . . . He just wanted to leave.

  Praying that she would not glance at the cottage again and see him, he slipped out of the front door and pulled it silently shut. There . . . it was locked. He’d left it for the last time. He darted around the side of the building, wishing that he was wearing his wellington boots instead of the smarter shoes he had put on, and headed quickly towards the woodland. His hermit’s cell! Yes, it would be ideal now as a hiding place from which he could watch the girl until she went off with her hounds. He sprang from tuft to tuft of the tough grasses, to avoid as much as possible stepping into the marsh. When he looked around, panting for breath, he saw that one of the hounds had come lolling after him, very friendly and soft, with its tongue dangling from a smiling mouth, moving easily over the boggy ground. Cursing the persistent dog, he turned and strode on, relieved to reach the first of the silver birches and pause among their twisted trunks. Above him now, the ground rose very steeply: tumbles of long wet grass and fallen leaves, bulging outcrops and boulders from which the trees had grown in all kinds of gnarled and knotted shapes; the oak split from between the strata of the rock, the rowan ran its roots along the lines of any crevice which afforded a grip, the birches were weary and grey with a covering of lichen. He started to climb. His shoes slipped as he scrambled higher. There was the hound, hesitating at the foot of the hillside to watch the man climbing. It coiled itself effortlessly before launching the first series of leaps, from crag to crag, between the trees, coming higher much faster than the man had managed to do, so that he renewed his efforts to reach his cave before the dog did. Out of breath, with the beginnings of a stitch nagging at his side, he worked himself up the face of the wooded cliff. His glasses almost dislodged themselves from his nose, he paused, sweating, to push them firmly into place. When he arrived at the ledge where the caves were, he fell heavily on to the grass, quite careless of his clean trousers, forgetful for those
minutes of the climb that he had been only moments away from leaving the cottage, concerned solely with the exertions of his legs and chest in order to avoid the kennel-maid. Lying there, he twisted round to survey the open ground below.

  The first hound had almost reached him. Some fifty feet beneath his vantage point, two other dogs were quartering the marsh, fast approaching the bottom of the birch wood. The girl looked very small, seen from high above, like a little child. He heard her shouts and whistles come filtering to him through the bare branches. Just as the hound scrambled on to his ledge, Andrew stood up and backed into the deepest cell. He hissed at the animal, ‘Piss off, you ugly brute! Go on, get out of it!’ But it nuzzled forward affectionately, perhaps remembering the man from the previous day, possibly recalling in the dimness of its heavy head how it had pressed into his hands that tattered black trophy of the hunt. ‘Bastard dog, piss off!’ The animal swerved easily from the arc of his foot, the kick went very wide, but the movement sent a clutter of leaves and acorns from the ledge, fluttering and bouncing down the steep cliff. The girl looked up. The man shrank into the recesses of the cave. Catching sight of the errant hound, she shouted a series of commands and exhortations in Welsh, from which Andrew could only gather that the animal’s name was Moonlight. Confused, it glanced from the man to the girl below and back to the man, waving its erect tail. ‘Look, bloody Moonlight, you daft creature!’ he hissed again. ‘She’s calling you . . . can’t you bloody hear her? Piss off, for Christ’s sake!’ He heard the whisper of footsteps in the leaves, the heavier tread of the girl’s boots, and realised that she and the other hounds were climbing too, to investigate the reason for Moonlight’s interest in the spot. Exhaling explosively, running his hands through his hair, he resigned himself to waiting for the girl, aware that he would never shake off the attentions of the hound . . . He recovered his breath, straightened his clothing. ‘Come on, Moonlight, you monster, come here . . .’ and the dog strolled to him, with a broad grin and giving a long-drawn-out yawn of satisfaction at the touch of the man’s hands on its velvet ears. This was the unexpected scene which first greeted the two hounds as they sprang up to the ledge, a scene which set all three animals barking deliriously, so that the girl, scrambling as fast as she could to find out what her hounds had cornered, was flushed pink when she pulled herself to the height of the cave and peered in.

  The girl sprawled on to the grass. The hounds drifted away from Andrew as if he had never been there, to bestow all their noisy affection on their mistress. She panted some order to them, she brushed them off with an irritable gesture of one arm, too breathless to speak. Andrew had nothing to say. The hounds fell into the grass as well, silent once more. So, for a minute, the man and the kennel-maid and the animals rested on that narrow ledge in front of the shallow cave which he had thought of as his hermit’s cell, high up on the steeply wooded hillside.

  Gradually the girl recovered control of her breathing. ‘Good,’ she said at last. ‘Found you.’ She stood up and shrugged her clothes into shape after the efforts of the climb. ‘I wanted to see you, after what happened yesterday.’ She flickered a smile, uncomfortable before Andrew’s silence and his unwelcoming face. ‘Tried the cottage,’ she said, waving a hand in its direction, ‘but you weren’t in . . .’

  There was a short silence, the girl waiting for some response. He blurted out, ‘Wasn’t I? Well, here I am, just taking a last little walk before I go.’ He was annoyed with himself for being unable to match her candid expression. Looking down at his muddy shoes, he said, ‘I’m about to set off for Sussex. The car’s all packed and ready.’

  There was a longer silence, while Andrew thrust his hands into his pockets. He felt the jam jar vibrating with the bumbling of the flies.

  ‘Oh, you’re going,’ the girl said. ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell you we were . . . that’s me and my brother . . . wanted to say we were sorry about your little dog, and all that . . .’ Andrew did not look up at her. ‘Bit of a mess, the whole thing.’ She went on defiantly, to fill the silence. ‘An accident though, like Huw said, what with the hail and the dark and so on . . . nobody’s fault really.’ Seeing that she would have no acknowledgement of her apology, she concluded it briefly. ‘Well, that’s what I wanted to say, that’s all. Glad I caught you before you left, would’ve felt bad otherwise . . .’

  Andrew sensed his anger rising as he heard her voice go trailing on. But it was a dull kind of anger, something numb which had no energy to demonstrate itself in an outpouring of rage. He could not speak. The girl moved close to him. He saw that she was clean and pink now, quite different from the sooty witch with whom he had grappled on the hearth rug, she was somehow quite different from the little witch who had been dwarfed by the grand piano. Different . . . except that she smiled that sudden twinkle of a smile and the tip of her tongue appeared from between her tiny white pointed teeth. ‘Come on, Pinkie,’ she said very softly, her face close to his, ‘aren’t I forgiven?’ She ran her tongue around her lips, she lifted one grubby paw and touched his neck. ‘Pinkie? Don’t go home without forgiving me. That wouldn’t be very nice, would it?’ She shuffled even nearer, until her body in its cladding of baggy clothes was pressed to him. Still he said nothing, looking dully down into her eyes, but he felt in his pocket a sudden surging of energy from the jar of flies. They rioted against the walls of their prison. And sensing their power, feeling it course through his body, he lowered his head to the girl’s. ‘That’s it, Pinkie,’ she breathed, her mouth very wet, and then his mouth was on hers, his tongue and teeth with hers, while every piece of his body and mind was concentrated solely on the heat of the kennel-maid and while everything else was reduced to a blur of nothingness . . . Only he felt still the buzzing electricity of the flies in his pocket, charging him like a dynamo, sending a surge of energy through his belly, activating such a stirring in him that the girl sensed it and crushed herself into him, so that she burrowed one hand expertly into his trousers and clenched it hard on his hardened cock . . . ‘Pinkie . . .’ she panted, disengaging her face breathlessly from his, ‘that’s a good boy, Pinkie,’ with her hand closed tighter still. ‘This must mean you’ve forgiven me, mustn’t it?’ And she started a slow rhythmic motion, gripping and relaxing, clenching and unclenching, while the man stared dumbly down at her, while she flickered her tongue across his lips as delicately as the touch of a moth, while she breathed into his mouth. There was silence in the woodland, such a silence that the next time the flies set up their riotous protest in Andrew’s pocket, the girl heard it, the drumming together of wings, the brawling of maddened bodies inside the jar. Her rhythmic massage hesitated. The flickering tongue was still. ‘Pinkie? What’s that? What’ve you got there?’ And her hand, as though it knew the connection, as though it instinctively knew that the source of the man’s power was so close by . . . the hand withdrew from the suddenly sagging cock and flew straight to Andrew’s pocket. She knew. ‘What’s this?’

  The girl stepped away from Andrew, slipping the jar out of his pocket. As she brought it up to her face to examine it, the jar misted for a second from the heat of her hand, from the heat of the man’s cock, but the mist vanished just as suddenly as the energy was gone from the man. The power drained from Andrew. She stared into the jar, her face very close to the glass. ‘What do you want with these, Pinkie? What the hell’ve you been up to?’ He saw her serious expression split into the stoat-grin once more, as she backed away. The hounds were lolling in the long grass, Andrew transfixed at the mouth of the shallow cave, the girl grinning into the jar. ‘You great big schoolboy, Pinkie!’ she giggled. ‘Playing with flies, like a kid in a playground! What are you going to do with them? Pull their wings off, eh?’ And she began to laugh more loudly.

  Rousing himself from her kisses, from the taste of her tongue and the clenching-unclenching of her hot little hand, he took a step forward. ‘Give me the jar, Shân,’ he said hoarsely, attempting to smile. ‘It’s just a little game I’ve been playing, that’s
all. Here, give it to me.’

  ‘A game?’ She shook her head, her face serious again. ‘No, I don’t think so, Pinkie. No, it’s not a game, is it? You don’t want to go tinkering with things you don’t understand, do you? Not now that you’re on your way back home . . .’ Once more she started to laugh, a bright tinkle of laughter which reminded Andrew immediately of the bright music she had somehow winkled from the vast black coffin of a piano. ‘You go home, Pinkie, and leave this kind of thing behind. Like this . . .’ And, laughing more and more loudly, stepping further back from the advance of the man, she began to unscrew the top of the jar. The flies fought more furiously than ever, sensing their release. The girl laughed, the sound ringing hard through the cover of silver birch, while her pink tongue glistened with bubbles of saliva and darted over the sharp points of her teeth.

  A wave of panic swept through Andrew. His fear was compounded by the expression of glee on the girl’s face, that she was the witch appointed as the stinkhorn’s agent to secure the release of his precious flies, to end their imprisonment and prevent their removal from their land of mists and mountains . . . ‘No, give them to me!’ he snapped, stepping forward, the anger rising within him. ‘I’m taking them with me!’ But she laughed, she flashed the points of her teeth at him, and she continued to unscrew the lid of the jar.