The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  THE WOODWITCH

  STEPHEN GREGORY

  With a new introduction by

  PAUL TREMBLAY

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory

  First published London: Heinemann, 1988

  First Valancourt Books edition 2015

  Copyright © 1988 by Stephen Gregory

  Introduction © 2015 by Paul Tremblay

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘. . . the back of the cottage was painted black, and to walk up the hillside behind it was immediately to enter into a darker world.’

  Ah, the country life. Who hasn’t dreamed of leaving the city or the mind-numbing suburban sprawl behind for the simpler life in the country? All of your stresses and responsibilities will melt away into tranquillity. How about a nice cottage in the woods, where the solution to what ails your commodified soul awaits? It’s where you’ll be left alone. Dreadfully alone.

  So many of us hopeless daydreamers who can barely put together a bookcase purchased in a box retail outlet, never mind being capable of cutting and stacking the proper amount of wood to heat your daydream cottage for the winter (perhaps I’m projecting my own shortcomings a bit too much here, but you get the drift . . .), share this same or similar getaway fantasy. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, the getaway solution is just that: a fantasy. Stephen Gregory knows that going wild will not, in and of itself, solve your problems, but more than likely will amplify them.

  In Gregory’s brilliant first novel, The Cormorant, a cosmopolitan school teacher is the recipient of a strange inheritance and relocates to the countryside as an opportunity to fashion a better/simpler life for his wife and young child. The Woodwitch is Gregory’s riveting second novel also set in the woods of Welsh Snowdonia. The Woodwitch’s deeply disturbed Andrew Pinkney is a young solicitor’s clerk who seeks temporary refuge in a rustic cottage, the aptly misnamed ‘Cockerel in the Cliffs’, with hopes of achieving redemption.

  The anchor to the story is, of course, the totally mad Pinkney. Gregory reflects Pinkney’s rapidly deteriorating mental state with the sensual, lush description of the surrounding landscape and in the seeming feral oddness of the locals he encounters. Pinkney is an oafish refugee who imagines that he is the new master of this exotic domain, when in actuality he doesn’t even know its proper name. Pinkney is in over his head and totally out of touch with the people who do call the woods and neighbouring plantation home. The only real home, then, for Pinkney is made from an appalling mix of lust, rot, decay, and obsession.

  The balance and dichotomy Gregory achieves is remarkable. He has the uncanny ability to evoke beauty and horror, often within the same passage. He knows that both are inexorably linked and he flinches from neither. At times Pinkney tiptoes through the landscape and the lyrical and precise prose reads like a nature travel log detailing the awe and wonder of the surrounding flora and fauna. Pinkney is also a beast that rampages through the dark, hypnotic, and malicious world in which madness lies in some of the very same details that were previously presented as poetic and idyllic. It’s a magnificently affective and unsettling approach.

  Pinkney strikes me an odd precursor to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Both characters are representatives of the supposedly new male professional of the 1980s and they are vile, misogynistic monsters, who are, somehow and despite ourselves, utterly mesmerizing. Bateman defines his maleness by exhaustively cataloguing the excess of the Reagan-era American consumer culture both in his material trophies and his victims. Pinkney is similarly obsessed with what comes to define his own warped sense of maleness. His trophies are the dead and decaying animals and the woodwitch (phallus-shaped fungi), all of which he tends to with the morbid, compulsive ministrations of an acolyte. Of course, unlike Bateman, who haunts the financial district of New York City, Gregory throws his eager Pinkney into the reflecting pool of Nature itself, muddying the waters.

  Gregory’s Nature reflects the all-too-familiar ugliness and weaknesses of his doomed protagonist, and by proxy, our own. It’s that recognition that is so unsettling, so unnerving, and completely authentic. We are repulsed by Pinkney’s depravity, yes, but we are also haunted by his condition within the cottage in the woods. He’s alone, unsure, vulnerable, and like the animals he collects and the short-lived erectile sprouts of the woodwitch he too is in the process of decaying, a process that can never be reversed. We are all haunted by our vulnerability and our eventual decay, and Gregory masterfully details the truth of this, so much so we can see and smell the maggots under the skin.

  When we learn that Pinkney’s misnamed cottage more accurately translates from the Welsh to ‘Cave in the Cliffs’ we have a Platonic epiphany: in the cave allegory of ourselves, our own nature is so much more complex, debauched, haunted, and doomed than we’re willing to admit. At least not in the light of day and while in good company.

  Perhaps Gregory’s Cave in the Cliffs is something we might be more willing to contemplate while taking a nice, long walk in the woods, alone.

  ‘Something was dead in the forest.’

  Indeed.

  Paul Tremblay

  July 20, 2014

  Paul Tremblay is the author of The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland, In the Mean Time, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, and the forthcoming horror novel A Head Full of Ghosts (William Morrow, June 2015). His short fiction and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He has co-edited a number of anthologies, including Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (with John Langan). He lives just outside of Boston and is a member of the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

  THE WOODWITCH

  FOR JAN AND BRIAN

  at

  Tros-y-gol

  I

  Something was dead in the forest. The dog could smell it.

  However, for the whole of that autumn afternoon she had been lying in the long grass, in a patch of sunlight which fell through the branches of the silver birch, watching the man at work with his bow-saw. It was a golden day, and the man was working in his shirtsleeves, sweating as he sawed rhythmically through the limbs of a fallen mountain ash. The dog lay and watched. When the breeze changed direction, she lifted her delicate face to meet it, and it was then that the smell of death came to her, the smell of something dead in the forest. Sometimes she rose lazily from the grass and went to the stream to drink, or else the man would rest for a while and amuse himself by throwing sticks for the dog to fetch. He threw them into a deep pool of clear brown water, where the dog sprang and swam repeatedly until the water was no longer clear. And when the man was tired of the game, he dropped the stick and directed his dog to lie down again in the soft grass. She did this, after she had shaken vigorously from head to tail and sent a rainbow shower of droplets into the still sunlight of the glade. ‘Good girl, Phoebe. Stay there.’ The man returned to his tree. It had fallen, but most of it was still alive, for there were clusters of shining red berries dangling from its branches. However, one of the branches was quite dead, the man was sure, for it had not a single berry on it and the wood was dry and brittle beneath the bark. The sheep had sheltered there, gnawing the bark away and stripping the greene
ry. So the man felt justified in taking his bow-saw to the tree. Now he had completely severed the branch, dragging it into the sunlight, and for the rest of the afternoon he had been removing the smaller sections and sawing the wood into manageable lengths which would go into the wheelbarrow he had brought with him to the side of the stream. As the afternoon wore on, he saw that his work would result in one good barrow-load of timber for the fire, and this made him happy, to feel that aching in his shoulders and to wipe away the sweat from his face, looking forward soon to wheeling the barrow down the track to the cottage, where he would stack the logs in the little stone outhouse.

  The breeze changed direction. Turning her face into it, the dog sniffed. Her nose wrinkled and she lifted her lips in a silent snarl which showed her perfectly white teeth. The man did not notice her snarling, for he was just then arranging the lengths of wood in the barrow, but he felt the breeze and realised that soon it would get cooler. He shivered, reaching for his pullover from the branches of the mountain ash which were still alive and fruiting, tugging it over his head. As his face emerged from the inside of the pullover, he glanced upwards through the fine sprays of the birch trees to see that already the sun was slanting and would shortly vanish behind the hillside. The moon had risen, a massive white disc against the darkening blue of the sky. And there was Venus, the man wondered, a single brilliantly silver spark which made the whole of that autumn afternoon feel tired, a spark in the sky which made the man shiver again and realise that his afternoon in shirtsleeves was over. The sun itself now touched the black horizon of the mountains, throwing up splinters of light as though it had shattered on impact with the cold rocks, and, as the man watched, the sun slipped down and went, in quite a matter-of-fact and unspectacular way, to leave the sky suddenly much darker. At the same time, the moon and Venus were brighter and bigger, launching themselves higher and claiming what the sun had left behind. It was an evening in October, with the moon as big and as heavy as it could be. There might even be a frost that night. It was time to return to the cottage and light the fire. The man put the saw on top of his logs. He went to the fallen tree and knelt down by the fresh white stump where he had sawed away the dead branch. Pulling up a tuft of grass, he rubbed the stump with soil until it was no longer white. He smiled to himself, that he was something of a countryman and a poacher who could survive the cold autumn nights by pilfering fuel from someone else’s land, and he turned to the barrow and manoeuvred it away from the stream. The floor of the glade was white with sawdust, as if that frost had already bitten, so the man scuffed it about with his wellington boots until it was hardly noticeable. It was getting dark quickly. Then he pressed forward with the wheelbarrow, calling out to the dog to follow him. When he glanced around to check that she was there, he saw that she was not. The man was alone in the twilight.

  The dog watched all this from an outcrop of rock in the silver birches, some fifteen or twenty feet above the man’s head. Just as the sun went down beneath the horizon, as though that was some sort of a signal to her, she moved noiselessly from her patch of soft grass and sprang higher up the hillside. Behind her, where the woodland of birch and oak and mountain ash finished, there began the endless acres of the fir plantation, a bristling black blanket of larch and pine, hundreds of thousands of trees packed densely together and covering every feature of the land like a shroud. Even in the brightest sunshine, the plantation was a place of gloom and shadows and silence. Now, with the sun just a memory of warmth and colour and light and the flutter of small birds among bright red berries, the forest was simply black. Nothing much lived and moved inside it. Only its tracks and clearings were picked out like threads of silver by the trembling moonlight.

  And in the forest there was something dead which the dog could smell. She looked down and watched the man. ‘Come on, Phoebe, where are you?’ he called out to her, and then he whistled his customary whistle. At this, the dog barked once, a high clear sound like the bark of a fox, so that he looked up and saw her. She barked again and sprang away further up the hillside, to the very edge of the forest, and she continued to bark until he put down the wheelbarrow and began to scramble up the path towards her. Seeing him approach, the dog cavorted with excitement, one moment lying in the grass and beating it with her tail and then spinning round and round and yelping. The sound was pure and light, echoing a little from the surrounding hills, but then it was absorbed into the deadening mass of the plantation. It was the only sound, for not a raven or a jay was moving that evening, with the dark blue sky leaning more heavily on the horizon, with the moon quite silent and almost opaque in its luminosity. The twilight was still. The trees did not move and even the streams were muffled and oiled to a kind of whisper. But the dog increased the intensity of her barking so that it rang against the darkening bowl of the sky and would not be obliterated by the forest. And the man was soon there with her, stroking her glossy black head and wanting now to follow her urgent beckoning. The dog stopped barking. In a few seconds, she was sprinting alongside the barbed-wire fence which ran around the perimeter of the plantation, to the nearby gate. She leapt over it and stood waiting on the forest track while the man climbed carefully over. ‘Hang on, Phoebe, wait for me.’ He came down heavily on the other side, the big black boots slapping against his calves. The dog lifted her face and sniffed. Then she turned like an eel, such was the silken movement of her blackness in the enfolding blackness of the forest, and the man saw only a disappearing blur of a shadow along the moonlit track. But he walked on, hearing the rhythmic slapping of his boots and the accompaniment of his own breath. Also he could hear the patter of the dog’s feet. He could hear her running on ahead and then her stopping and waiting for a second before she turned and retraced her steps to see that he was following. And once or twice, picked out in the moonlight which made the footpath bright but which could not penetrate the trees themselves, he saw the glimmer of her teeth or the reflection of Venus in her eyes. So he continued to follow her, concerned to stay with her but quite content to go further into the plantation because there was no one at home in the cottage who was waiting for him or who might wonder where he had

  gone.

  Deeper into the forest went the man and the dog. It was only a hundred yards, but the matter of depth inside the plantation could not be measured in feet or yards or miles: to be inside it on a cool clear moonlit night was to be entirely cut off from the gentle shadows of the silver birch. In the plantation, there was only blackness in the trees, only metallic white moon-colours in the tracks and the clearings, and nothing in between. The edges of the shadows were sharp and cruel. The man’s moon-shadow was simply another man who went striding up the track, a rippling black oil-shadow on the ground. The shadow of the dog was another dog, which flickered like a guttering black flame. It was this shadow which turned suddenly from the track and was eclipsed by the blackness of the trees. The dog disappeared.

  The man whistled faintly, somewhat winded by the pace of the climb. Standing very still and listening, he was exasperated at first to hear only the thudding of his own blood in the back of his head, until it relented and was replaced by the creaking silence of the forest. He called out to the dog. His voice clanged into the shadows. Above him, the moon was massive and seemed to pulse with the clanging of his voice, as though by crying out in the stillness he had drawn some resonance from a huge silver gong. Then he could hear the dog, and he ducked quickly from the track into a deep dry ditch, a drain along which he could stumble beneath the low branches of the trees and aim towards a pool of moonlight ahead of him. He felt with his hands for the twigs which were brittle and sharp and which tore at his hair, and he trod cautiously with the boots through a carpet of needles. There was the dog, in a clearing. Her coat shone brilliantly in the moonlight. But now, instead of her silent, determined pursuit along the ditch, she was drawing from within herself a series of long pathetic howls which began as moans and ended as sobs, as the dog stood still in her silver floodlight. She closed
tight her eyes and lifted up her face to the moon. The man shivered, stopping to catch his breath. He watched the dog along the tunnel under the trees and his scalp prickled at the intensity of her almost human cries. Then he burst noisily from the drain. As he clambered into the brightness of the clearing, he stumbled on something and fell sprawling on the lush long grass. The dog retreated from him with her lips raised, snarling a long, high-pitched snarl. It sounded as loud and as keen as a chain-saw. The man sat up and looked around him.

  He was in the centre of a small clearing which had been created by the falling of a tree. The tree had been taken away, but the stump remained and was overgrown with grass and mosses and lichen. The deep drain joined another drain there, and with the sunlight and air and the moisture which the clearing had enjoyed through the summer, something of an oasis had appeared, surrounded by the arid shadowland of the plantation. And in the clearing there was the dead thing which the dog had scented through the brightness of the afternoon. The man saw it at his feet, for he had stumbled over it when he burst from the ditch. Now he grunted with surprise and recoiled from it.

  The dead thing was a badger. It lay in the direct beams of the moon, the size of a good pillow, on its back so that the grin of its muzzle was bright and hard as the jaws of a steel trap which had sprung and were clenched tightly together. It had died slowly, reluctantly, unwilling to surrender its grip on a long and dour life. Entwined around its hind quarters were strands of barbed wire. The man looked closely. His dog had withdrawn to the edge of the clearing and continued the buzzing snarl, her lips curled at the blossoming smell of dead flesh. The badger must have blundered into a derelict fence somewhere on the perimeter of the forest, where the wire had been left to sink slowly into the bogs and the marsh grass. The wire was rusty, almost rotten through, but the animal had somehow entangled itself in it, by turning and twisting to free itself, and now it formed a kind of corset around its body. The badger had managed to bite through the wire with its powerful teeth, except that the wire had become inextricably tightened around its hind legs and fatally hampered its ability to find food. The animal was emaciated, an empty sack of skin and bones and bristle and teeth, an ancient beast which had crawled deeper and deeper into the forest, along the tunnel of the drain, drawn by a desire to reach that pool of light and life in the clearing. Finally the badger had dragged itself with its forelegs out of the ditch. There, in the soft grass around the tree stump, it had rolled on to its back and ground its teeth together for the moment of extinction.