He was too clumsy to stop her. As her laughter rang in his head, hard and metallic and mocking, as the first of the flies spun from the jar and buzzed away, he lunged at her to snatch the jar from her hands. She writhed like an otter to avoid him. His anger blanked out everything except her laughter, which seemed to jangle as hard and as discordantly as the bells of a godless chapel, her laughter which pealed through the woods and through his head . . . another, more powerful spell cast by the woodwitch. Until he roared his rage at her, until he lifted his fist and crashed it with all his strength into her face.
The laughter continued in the woodland, its echoes fading to silence. But the girl was gone.
Numb, still intoxicated by the stinkhorn’s charm, he watched the kennel-maid spin from him. She arched away, away from the ledge, her body suddenly weightless, turning over and falling like the body of a fish in mid-leap. Her laughter stopped the same instant as she struck the first tree. Thereafter, the girl’s descent continued in silence, for her limbs were so encumbered by heavy clothes that they made no sound as she cartwheeled from one projecting boulder to another, as she bounced like a rag-doll down the cliff, striking tree after tree, now spinning from a blow on a slab of rock, now rolling in the air before glancing against a lower ledge, falling and falling and always falling, until her body lay still, more than fifty feet below the hermit’s cave . . .
For a minute, Andrew remained still as well, staring down through the trees at the girl. She lay on her front, her head turned to one side, sprawled comfortably as though sleeping in the luxury of a big, soft bed. And in that minute, the woodland blithely resumed the movements and sounds of its everyday lives, unconcerned by the spectacle of a briefly plummeting body. A pair of jays cried harshly to one another, before beating black and white and brilliant blue from the branches of oak, vanishing again with a couple of undulating swoops. A magpie chattered, an ugly sound like the clacking of a rusty old lawnmower. High above the trees, a buzzard wheeled and diced with a raven, both masters of flight in their contrasting styles, the former smoothly evading the rolls and pitches of the latter. The hounds, one moment alerted by the shouts, simply flopped once more into the long grass and lolled their fleshy tongues. Andrew looked down at the girl. Unconsciously, his hand went back to that pocket. But there was nothing. The charge of power was over, as ephemeral as the stinkhorn itself. He made his way from the ledge, slipping and slithering from boulder to boulder, while the hounds sprang nonchalantly around him. Quite quickly he was at the foot of the woodland. Picking up the girl’s hat and stuffing it into his pocket, he broke from the cover of the silver birch and walked over to the girl.
Unlike the badger and the swan and the dog, this dead thing did not flaunt itself. They had seemed to relish it, the chance to put on a show . . . grinning jaws, like the teeth of a steel trap; a mantle of massive white wings, the corpse’s ready-made shroud; bowels which oozed steam, eyes which were rearranged or burst . . . This girl might have been asleep. When he turned her gently over, kneeling to take hold of her shoulders, she lay back with her eyes half-closed, her hair tousled, and her mouth slightly open in a kind of smile, showing the tip of her tongue very wet between dry, bruised lips, as if she had just experienced the most satisfying orgasm. She was unquestionably dead. Something odd in the angle of her neck suggested that it was broken. Otherwise, the only concession she made to death was the flowering of a big round bruise on her right temple, like an exotic bloom slipped tenderly into her hair by a lover. But, as Andrew knelt over her, a sudden gout of blood broke from her nose, from the force of his fist and the trauma of the fall, spurting on to her lips, into her mouth.
Beside her, in the grass, the jam jar was shattered. The girl had not let go her hold on it even as she reeled from the man’s punch, even as she bounced from rock to rock. Now it was broken. The last of the flies crawled from among the splinters of glass.
The hounds drifted away. As they had done in the forest, no longer interested in the body of the little vixen, they trotted off, the three of them, without a glance or a sniff in the direction of the dead kennel-maid.
‘Little witch . . .’ he whispered. ‘Poor little witch . . . What are we going to do with you?’
He held one of her hands in his, while she smiled up at him through a mouthful of blood. A procession of incriminating evidence came to mind as he forced himself to think clearly about his next move, as the first flickers of panic twitched at him. What sort of a character reference might save him this time? A man who, only weeks before, had narrowly escaped a prosecution for beating his girlfriend unconscious! And here, in Wales, a man who provoked brawling in the village hotel, his violence witnessed by a dozen people! Had he hit the kennel-maid’s brother? He couldn’t remember. This little girl had shot Phoebe, the day before, and now he’d punched her from the top of a high cliff . . . ! And finally, the crawling of crippled flies from the broken jam jar reminded him starkly of the contents of the woodshed . . . What kind of a man kept a gallery like that? Whose recommendation could save him from that?
The dead girl smiled at him. She held the power of the stinkhorn.
‘Come with me, little woodwitch,’ he said quietly.
Her neck groaned and her head rolled as he picked her up, so that she seemed to be twisting to peer over her shoulder. She was very light, no weight at all for a man the size of Andrew Pinkney. For a second, her face was very close to his, with a tiny wet bubble of blood on the tip of her tongue, that blurred, dreamy expression of a female temporarily sated with sex. He could smell her mouth. Swinging her easily across his shoulder, he heard something crack very softly as her head lolled behind him, he felt the warmth of her thigh against his cheek. With her boots knocking rhythmically together, he picked his way over the marshy ground, towards the cottage. There was no sign of the three hounds. He was alone on that hillside, with the body of the kennel-maid bumping gently and sometimes creaking. The sky was beginning to darken. Another November afternoon leaned more heavily on the mountain.
He put her down on the grass in front of the woodshed door, as tenderly as a father lays his sleeping daughter in her cot. Taking her hat from his pocket, he slipped it into the pocket of her jacket. He felt for his keys and found them, not to open the front door of the cottage, but to unlock the woodshed and step inside. For a moment, he sized up the space he had left, that the stacked logs or the odd tins of fuel would not hinder him, and reaching up to the rafters, he touched the one hook which remained vacant. It was very cold. The tip of it was very sharp.
The woodshed was loud with the swarms of flies. They were busy around the badger’s snout and in the ruptured flanks of the swan, some of them were showing a preliminary interest in a sac of fluid which quivered from the belly of the dog. And outside, surrounding the girl, all the containers were drumming with heavy bodies, the taut cellophane was battered by a storm of wings. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was inside a power-plant of some kind, where all the air was throbbing with a low, insistent hum. He could feel the vibration of energy. He hesitated like this for a minute, and the pulse of power had never been stronger, through his ears and through every pore of his skin as the atmosphere hummed, through his nostrils as the stench of the woodshed surrounded him. And before him, more brilliantly emblazoned on the darkness of his eyelids than ever before, there shimmered the spectre of the stinkhorn . . . erect as he had failed to be erect, cocksure as he had never been, splendidly tumescent as he knew he could never be. The stinkhorn was everywhere, in his ears as the air hummed, in his nostrils, in the charge which surged through him and filled his belly, imprinted on his vision. When he opened his eyes, it remained there. Its spell was on him.
He stepped outside. The girl smiled. She was in cahoots with the stinkhorn, a member of the same coven. She would make a fine new offering to the shrine . . .
He leaned over her and took hold of her lapels. Her head rolled as he sat her up. When he straightened, she stood with him. Her face lolled v
ery slowly forward. With both hands occupied, he had no other way of stopping her forehead cracking against his, so, instinctively, as though it were the most natural and loving thing to do, he pressed his lips once more on her mouth. The weight of her head gave the unmistakable impression that she was administering the most passionate of kisses, her mouth was still hot, it fell wider open and her tongue was wet and soft on his . . . Andrew’s head reeled with desire. He returned her kiss, tasting her blood, moaning her name, his lips devouring her lips, his teeth clicking on her teeth . . . The stinkhorn was bright behind his closed eyes, and he felt the rising warmth in his belly as his own poor imitation coursed with blood. The air drummed with flies.
Blowing, licking his lips, he blinked and swung the girl into the woodshed. With a glance at the rafters, he composed himself with a series of deep breaths before lifting her from him with a sudden straightening of his arms. But the weight of her was beginning to tire him. A squadron of flies, detaching itself from the badger’s anus, swarmed about his face and made him stumble on the logs. Some of the flies settled on the smeared blood and saliva around his mouth. Spitting, breathless, he was forced to lower her while he rested; she sat on a stack of wood, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Andrew wafted irritably at the flies, the movement of his hand catching the side of the badger and initiating a shower of maggots from its nostrils. They fell among the sawdust, where, while he regained his breath, he popped them with the toe of one shoe until their yellow pus was a single smudge on the whiteness. He waited while another charge of strength ran through him, then he took a firm grip again on the girl’s lapels. One . . . two . . . three . . . he counted, shaking his head to dislodge more flies, and he hefted her upwards.
There was a loud crack as the crown of the kennel-maid’s head struck the rafters. But, as he felt the body sag, it snagged and hung there. The tip of the hook had pierced the dead thing in the soft skin under the jaw, and now it swung in mid-air while the man stepped back panting.
‘Lovely, lovely little woodwitch . . .’ he whispered to the dead thing.
A cloud of flies broke from beneath the wings of the swan, to be joined by another cloud which spun dizzily from the badger’s jaws. At first, the droning swarm blew about the gloom of the woodshed in a desultory, aimless manner, clustering now in the dog’s congealed fur, banging noisily on the big dry feet of the swan. They strafed the man, drawn to the stickiness of his mouth, maddened by his flailing hands. But ultimately they knew where they were bound. In tight formation, they suddenly sped up to the rafters and landed as one black and inquisitive congregation on the girl’s face.
‘Of course . . . !’ the man exclaimed. ‘Of course!’
More of the flies abandoned the three other dead things for the upturned mouth of the fourth. He watched them gorging on her, on the blood, on the saliva, as he himself had gorged on her, just as the flies had gorged on the oozing head of the stinkhorn. For the power of the stinkhorn was in her, ever since she had confiscated the jar of flies from him, and now the flies were drawn inexorably to feed . . .
‘Of course!’ he said again, darting out of the woodshed. He snatched up the plastic containers, in which thousands of insects were butting and battering, he dashed once more inside. ‘These weren’t meant to be wasted!’ he cried. ‘The harvest was for you! Of course it was! These are all for you! Yes, all of them . . . !’
And, one after the other, he ripped open the tight skins of cellophane. Box after box he tore open. His hands trembled to feel so much power, to feel the weight of the flies shuddering in his grip before he unleashed them, to feel the air in the confined space around him throb with their galvanic energy. Within seconds, as his whole body started to shake and he shouted his exhilaration in a harsh untutored voice, the inside of the woodshed was engulfed by an enormous thunderstorm of flies. They were black, violent, hectic creatures, whose wings combined to make a single roar of anger. He felt them in his hair, in his ears and eyes and mouth, but he stood there, shaking, shouting, in a kind of ecstasy to be in the shrine of the stinkhorn while one great host of the stinkhorn’s communicants joined to celebrate their sacrament . . .
Gradually the swarm settled. The flies gathered to gorge on the face of the dead thing. The air in the woodshed fell still. There was a warm, reverent, enveloping silence as the entire congregation fed on the woodwitch.
Andrew Pinkney spent a long time, or so it seemed to him, staring up at the body of the girl. Her neck, distended by the tug of the hook beneath her chin, was very white. He was surprised how little blood appeared where the skin was punctured, just a tiny blob like a jewel which broke and ran a quick trickle into her collar. He could not see her face, for it was covered by a crawling mat of flies. Her arms dangled loosely by her sides, her legs pulled straight by the weight of the big boots. He watched her, while she stopped swinging and was perfectly motionless, while the inside of the shed became dark, for it was evening in the valley and the night pressed hard on the heels of the retreating day.
Alone with the four dead things which hung on their hooks, the man lingered in the shrine. When he felt a wave of weariness fall on him, he sat on a stack of silver birch, reluctant to leave, and he listened to the silence as it was fuelled by the contented whisper of the flies. He was warm and safe in the woodshed. It enfolded him like the womb. Nothing could harm him there. Nobody would laugh at him. Such was the lull in the air of that fetid place that a splendid, slumberous apathy weighed him down . . .
Until, perhaps an hour later, he was aroused by a shrieking explosion from the far side of the valley.
Startled from his torpor, he stood up and staggered outside. He was just in time to see the night sky scored with sparks, red and golden sparks which fizzled and fell back to earth. He rubbed his eyes, wondering what it could have been. There was another detonation across the valley, and there rose above the river a barrage of exploding lights, blossoms of fire and colour erupting in whistles and screams and crackling before they were quenched by the darkness. At the same time, in the distance he saw the first lickings of a flame as a fire was lit, a fire which burst into a chrysanthemum of golden light as someone splashed it with petrol. More fireworks went up. The sky splintered with sparks. Further along the valley a second blaze began, and there was a third, as though at an agreed time these beacons should be lit to unite the valley in celebration. It took the explosion of another volley of fireworks to light the sky before the bemused man who had stepped from his woodshed understood what was happening. It was the fifth of November. At six o’clock that evening, up and down the valley, the Guy Fawkes parties began . . .
So he could go home to Sussex after all! That glorious end-of-term feeling welled up in him again!
Home! Nothing need stop him, he’d leave nothing to incriminate him . . . The sky raced with explosions, the sparks and flares of rockets, and from near the fires which flamed across the valley there were the bright eruptions of Catherine wheels and Roman candles. Andrew busied himself. First, he picked up Phoebe’s basket with its bundle of blankets and carried it into the woodshed, putting it down among the stacks of logs; he took Jennifer’s washed-out watercolours there too, laying them on top of each other in the basket. Running to the car, he found the wellington boots he had packed away, and he put them on. His shoes were wet and muddy from scrambling about the woodland; returning to the woodshed, he tossed them inside, with the dog’s basket and the paintings, and, after a moment’s thought, he slipped out of the jacket he had put on for the drive south, took his keys from it, and slung it inside. With the deepening cover of night, the blackness of it enhanced by the fireworks, he could see nothing in the shed now. Again he went down the hill a little way, to the car, coming back with the torch he needed in the pitch darkness where the dead things hung on their hooks, beaming its pool of light below the badger’s snout, under the swan’s wide black feet, through the tangled fur of the dog and past the girl’s boots. There, in a far corner, where he had first seen them weeks befor
e, he picked out that assortment of paint pots and brushes, bottles of turpentine, and a couple of tins of fuel . . . Leaning past the body of the girl, so that he brushed one of her hands with his face, he took these tins of fuel and stood back. The movement of his head had set the girl swinging. The hook under her chin creaked in the rafters, for it was a long time since it had accommodated a dead thing; the hand which his face had touched now moved in the torchlight, indeed, had it not been that the kennel-maid’s boots hung heavy in mid-air, she could have been realistically alive, her arms quite natural and casual by her sides, her face upturned as though she were fascinated by some tiny thing, perhaps the cocoon of a rare moth she had spotted on the rafters. The single runnel of blood was drying on her throat. Andrew wrested his stare from the whiteness of her taut skin. He inspected her fingers to see that she wore no rings, there were no keys in her pockets, she wore no watch. He set the torch down on the logs so that its beam lit the gloom of the woodshed. His head began to drum with the industry of the flies, they settled on his face, those which were gorged on the feast he had provided for them, they buzzed from their meal and the repositories of their eggs to the blond hair of their benefactor. Ignoring them, he unscrewed the top of one of the cans and sniffed its contents. Paraffin? The can was full. He splashed it over the driest of the logs, hearing its cheerful glugging in the throat of the can, admiring the golden lights of the fuel as it caught the beam from the torch. When it was empty, he opened and sniffed another can, pouring the paraffin on to the basket, the blankets, his abandoned jacket and shoes, pausing to feel that there was still plenty left. Precariously, he stepped higher on a big trunk of the silver birch and bent his head against the rafters. From there, it was easy to saturate the four dead things. The flies were not pleased. As he poured the fuel into the badger’s corrupted anus until it overflowed and trickled through the coarse grey bristles, the flies rose in a cloud from the corpse. When he poured the amber fluid down the throat of the swan, hearing it run into all the secret channels of its gullet, a swarm of flies fled in disgust. He doused the bird’s feathers. What was left of Phoebe’s face gleamed wet as he drenched it, the liquid ran deep through the dog’s coat and dripped from its hanging snout. Still there was fuel in the can, sloshing noisily as the level dropped. Stretching up, he tipped it into the girl’s hair. She drank it, between bruised lips, swallowing drunken flies. It filled her mouth. He poured fuel into her shirt. When her clothes stank of paraffin, he stepped down to the floor again and emptied the can into her boots.
The Woodwitch Page 22
