The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  The man stood up. ‘Good girl, Phoebe,’ he said. ‘Just what we want for our little experiment.’ With one boot, he turned the animal over, raising a roaring cloud of flies from it. The broad black and white stripes of the badger’s face were a startling caricature of everything in the forest that night: impenetrable shadows and silver light, the one crisply delineated from the other so that there was no blurring or smudging, and the tip of every bristle on the animal’s back was a tiny tingling spark, iron filings pricked out by the unblinking eye of the moon. The wire had cut deeply into the flesh. There was a great deal of raw bruising and the workings of putrefaction.

  Kneeling closer, the man was struck by the force of the smell which the dog had caught on the wind from outside the plantation. The corpse was over a week old, he thought, for it was ripe with maggots and in the surrounding grass there were scattered the dull brown pupae. Nevertheless, since he had turned it on to its belly, a little blood had started to ooze from between the animal’s teeth, quite black in the monochrome forest. Furthermore, both eyes were intact, untouched by the chisel-beaks of ravens, but they were glazed, suffused with a milky blur, so they would not accept the brilliance of the moon. In spite of the increasing cold which was clamping down on the hillside, the man took off his pullover. He tucked it and bound it around the strands of barbed wire, to form a secure grip for him to hold, and he tested the weight of the animal. He could lift it easily. Grimacing at the smell, he swung it up and on to his back, so that it hung head downwards behind him like a sack of coal. The dog increased the volume and the menace of her snarls, repelled by the sight of the man and the swinging corpse of the badger on his back, but she trotted at his heels when he ducked with his load into the dry drain. Bent double to avoid snagging the dead animal on the overhanging branches, the man went painstakingly through the tunnel, hearing the beat of his own blood and his shortness of breath. The dog was behind him, now and then releasing a snarl of disgust at the scent of the dead thing. Or else she paused to avoid the dripping of blood and maggots from the badger’s snout.

  Together they emerged from the ditch, on to the forest track. The man went quickly down the hill, for the path was brightly lit, his burden was a comfortable weight which pressed him easily onwards and between the black trees, and he could hear the movements of the dog behind him. When he reached the gate at the edge of the plantation, he swung the badger over it, on to the grass on the other side, before he climbed the wooden bars. The dog slid silently over the gate. She stopped her snarling and went running on ahead, as though pleased to have quit the claustrophobic confines of the forest, and she disappeared down the steep hillside before the man had heaved the badger again on to his back. He went carefully through the glades of birch and oak, and there, from an outcrop of rock, he could look down and see his wheelbarrow, all stacked with logs, with the bow-saw on top of them, in a clearing by the stream where it seemed that the frost had quickly clenched its fist, for the ground was white over. He smiled then, warm and happy from his exertions with the saw and with the weight of the old badger bouncing between his shoulder blades. The dog was waiting by the barrow. When the man arrived, he gently eased the corpse down on to the stack of logs. It lay there on its back and smiled its steel smile at the moon.

  The barrow was quite heavy. Its wheel went bouncing along a narrow track across the hillside, where the sheep had worn the grass away. The moon was floating overhead, so that the shadows of the man with his barrow and the dog which trotted on ahead were black puddles which sucked noiselessly around their feet. It was much colder in the open, but the man had left his pullover entangled with the barbed wire around the body of the badger and he pressed on faster to reach the cottage. It was not far away, just a little further down the hillside from where he had spent the afternoon dismembering the mountain ash. And there it was, the bulk of it like a big black boulder hunched under the cliffs and trees of the valley. The man wheeled swiftly past, although his dog had automatically turned in towards the front door, expecting to be let inside, and he gathered speed with the barrow so that he could use the momentum to push it up a slope to the ramshackle outhouse in which he stored his fuel. There he stopped, leaving the barrow while he walked to the cottage. The dog was waiting furtively by the door; her elation at leading the man to her prize had been eclipsed by her distaste for the man’s manhandling of the dead thing, and now she was cowering from the man and the moonlight as though both were repugnant to her. She slunk inside when he unlocked the door, going directly to her basket and lying down. Ignoring her, the man took a torch from the mantelpiece and returned to the outhouse with it. The dog remained inside.

  While the man had been in the cottage, only long enough to fetch the torch, a single unspectacular cloud had risen from behind the mountains and travelled like a gigantic moth to the candle of the moon. It was suddenly much darker on the hillside. The man fumbled for the padlock, unlocked it and opened the door. Ducking into the outhouse, which was constructed of stone and slate but had been much neglected for a decade, he felt about his head for a hook he knew was hanging there. He found it and set it rattling as he brushed it with his hand. Then he switched on the torch. Its beam lit up the neatly stacked logs along one wall, a few planks and buckets and coils of rope, the litter of paint pots and brushes, a few tins of fuel, paraffin or turpentine, relics of the days when someone had taken an interest in the condition of the cottage. There were four meat-hooks swinging from the timbers, about head height as the man stood in the little shed, and he tugged on one of them to test that it and the rafters were strong enough to take a weight. Satisfied, he set the torch down on the logs so that its beam shone upwards. He stepped out to the wheelbarrow, where still the brightness of the moon was smothered, and he hefted the corpse of the badger in front of his face, lifting it with his hands in the folds of his pullover around the rusted strands of barbed wire. Then, turning into the shed, straining to hold the weight and the smell away from his body, he managed to summon the strength to raise the badger to the hooks. He was lucky first time: the confusion of wires which had buried themselves in the flesh of the animal now snagged on a hook, and as the man stepped backwards he left the badger aloft, swinging its head downwards, rotating gently so that now the mask of the jaws was grinning at him and then it was the milky eyes which stared blindly into his. The man was breathing hard. But he was pleased with what he had done and to think of what it would produce, and he thought of this as he took the logs from the wheelbarrow and stacked them regularly against another wall of the outhouse so that they would dry quickly. When he had done this, he stood and regained his wind, happy to be in his little shed with the ranks of timber which he himself had cut and with the hanging corpse. ‘You’re perfect,’ he said quietly to the badger. He removed his pullover from it. The light from the torch was soft and warm on the walls and the wood, and it made golden sparks of the animal’s bristles; it made the awful fixity of the mask relax, as if almost the warmth of the light could restore some life to the badger and unclench its gritted teeth.

  The man turned out the torch, locked the shed and went back to the cottage. As he did so, the single cloud moved on and the land was once more flooded with moonlight. There was silence, not the breath of a breeze to move the trees, nor the cry of an owl in the forest. Only, in the woodshed, there was the dripping of blood from the mouth of the dead thing, forming a crimson stain on the new white wood of the mountain ash, and the tumbling of maggots from its nostrils.

  *

  The man’s name was Andrew Pinkney. Phoebe was a little collie, no bigger than a fox, crossed with some other indeterminate breed, and in the eyes of Andrew Pinkney she was the prettiest dog alive. Predominantly she was black, her coat was long and very fine, and she was vigorously brushed after every walk and every plunge into the streams, so that she shone more beautifully than any other dog. Her tail was a great black plume, almost as long as her body, which she could raise like a banner. She had a long delicate face, all
black except for a pair of patches of tan, one above each eye, and these patches were like another pair of eyes which stared from the dog’s head even when she was asleep. Her real eyes were liquid brown with rims of white, and Phoebe used them to get whatever she wanted from her master. When she drooped her tasselled black ears and melted those eyes at Andrew Pinkney, at the same time resting her face most gently on his knee and then lifting a paw to touch his hand, he knew that he could do nothing else but submit to her, whether it was simply to reassure her of his presence by caressing her velvet black head or to take her out on to the hillside, in rain and wind and darkness. Outside, she would run away and always turn to see that he was there, returning if he stopped, to nuzzle her face into his hand and to gaze up at him with those beseeching eyes. Under her throat and on her chest she was tan, and so were her paws and her belly. She could run and swim for as long as the man was prepared to walk with her or to lob branches into the pools for her to retrieve; she looked with a kind of disdainful curiosity at the sheep, as though they were imbeciles, but she was not inclined to pursue them, which was a great relief to her master who knew that the local farmers did not hesitate to shoot any dog which stampeded their flocks; she stayed healthy on her regime of long walks on the hillsides and through the forests, on a good diet and painstakingly groomed every day, so that her coat gleamed and her eyes were clear and frank; and she was the only close companion of her master’s life, always nearby with her face on his knee, always there with her eyes looking directly into his, seemingly as grateful for his companionship and love as he was for hers. In a nutshell, he relied on her affection. He knew that, while he sat in an armchair and dangled one hand from it, or while he stood on the hillside and waited with one hand hanging by his side, he would always, yes, always be comforted soon by the touch of Phoebe’s face against his fingers. And then he could look down and meet her enquiring eyes, knowing that she would hold his gaze and never glance carelessly away.

  Andrew Pinkney was a man of twenty-five who looked younger. He was big and blond, with a hairless face and blurred features. Talking of dogs, if he had been a dog instead of a man, he would have turned out as a big, soft, golden labrador with a name like Bumper or Bruno, patient with children, adored by the elderly, always ready with a smile or a long, beseeching yawn, whichever was appropriate to the situation. In spite of his size and weight, for he was six feet tall and heavily built, he gave an impression of tenderness, as though he were a great blond baby, a man-sized toddler, with his fine blond curls of hair which fell over his forehead and over his ears, with his downy cheeks all pink from walking the hills or from sitting too close to the fire, and with that look of baffled vulnerability in his eyes. He wore glasses with thick lenses and black rims, and these gave the only real definition to his face. Not that he was really a tender child: he was as strong as his height and weight suggested and was becoming harder with more recent exercise, and he was capable in his own way if left to use his initiative as well as a kind of dogged perseverance. These days he did not speak much, except to Phoebe, but he had a soft flat voice which could be curiously persuasive. He was an articled clerk in a small firm of solicitors in the south of England, before his move to Wales a few weeks previously, and in the office he had proved himself to be diligent, organised and able. He was valued by his employer. People liked him, especially when he gave them the benefit of his sudden, instinctive smile. And then they thought that Andrew Pinkney was something like a big old labrador dog, all soft and smiling and indiscriminate with his affections, incapable of a hard word or of inflicting a wound of any kind. He would have thought this himself too, until he did what he had done which resulted in his sudden removal from his job as a budding lawyer and brought about his visit to Wales.

  It was like this. There had been a colleague of his in the office, a young woman called Jennifer, who was gradually charmed by the softness of Andrew Pinkney’s smiles. Some years older than Andrew, she was fully qualified as a solicitor and might soon be invited to join the partnership. She was no beauty, as they say, for she resembled one of those caricatures of a lady librarian which appear deceptively in second-rate films: rather fearsomely bespectacled, her long dark hair drawn too tightly back into a knot behind her head, her boyish figure hidden somewhere beneath a plain skirt and cardigan. Her smiles were white and thin, like those of a reptile. But, like the lady librarian, she was transformed when her glasses came off, when they were taken off by Andrew, and she became quite an attractive and yielding woman. She was only yielding, however, to a certain point which meant that she would allow herself to be kissed (after Andrew had removed her spectacles) and then she would wriggle free, smacking her lips and wincing as though she had been forced to swallow some unpleasant medicine; she would hurriedly tie up the heavy mass of her hair which she had allowed Andrew to release, complaining that now she looked a mess, and she would have to tidy herself scrupulously with mirror and comb while Andrew watched her and wondered about her boyish figure. But he became very fond of her.

  She grew to like Andrew. Furthermore, she approved of Phoebe. Every weekend they were out together in the Sussex countryside, throughout the seasons of the year, for there was so much to see and for Andrew to learn from Jennifer. She had a profound and genuine love of the outdoors, supported by a knowledge of it and its wildlife which greatly impressed Andrew. They left Phoebe in the car while she led him breathlessly through the woodlands of Alfriston. There they stood silently in the twilight of the trees until, before their very eyes, only yards away, the enquiring young head of a fox cub bobbed up from the ground and the animal emerged to roll and sniff and to groom itself, quite oblivious of their presence, and then to trot suddenly into the enveloping gloom of the forest. With the badgers, it was Jennifer’s gentle boast that she never went in search of them, to watch them, without success: evening after evening, in different locations, she and Andrew held hands in the shadows and enjoyed the spectacle. The badgers and their cubs tumbled shamelessly in the moonlight, everything bathed in a silvery glow which was generated by the scree of chalk from the badgers’ set, until the moon would vanish and reappear to find that the animals had gone. Her speciality was owls. To Andrew, who had often listened to owls and wondered about their secret shifting as he lay in bed at night before he drifted into an owl-inhabited dream, it was simply magical that Jennifer could show him so much so easily. One frosty Sunday morning in January, she had him drive her very slowly across the Pevensey levels, until, even as she told him to pull into the verge and stop, the lovely wafting shape of a short-eared owl rose moth-like from the rushes. It blew away down the frost-covered fields. And then it sat on a broken gate, dipping its head and writhing the cat-mask of its face in the direction of Andrew’s car. ‘Asio flammeus,’ whispered Jennifer. ‘Beautiful . . .’ Andrew answered, the Latin name quite out of place on the ice-encrusted marsh. There were celebrations which resulted in the removal of Jennifer’s glasses and the untying of her hair, before she was shoving away Andrew’s hands to sit up and smack her lips. Andrew breathed heavily while she put up her hair again. Phoebe watched keenly from the back seat. On another expedition, Jennifer produced a little owl (‘Athene noctua’) in the churchyard at Bishopstone, a bobbing hissing gnome of an owl which sat obligingly on a headstone, and there was even a long-eared owl (‘Asio otus’) in a hawthorn hedge near Arlington reservoir. It stood motionless in the deepest, most impenetrable thicket of the hedge, with its eyes shut. Andrew peered through the twigs until his own eyes ached, to make out the upright shape of the owl while it roosted there in a state of torpid stupefaction. But never, even after the long-eared owl, did Jennifer’s yielding yield more than a flurry of tight-lipped kisses. And then there were nightingales in the bluebell woods; golden plover and snipe among the clods of earth in winter fields; woodlands pungent with fungi; hedgerows which boiled with the flocks of fieldfare and redwing and the mistle thrushes which stripped away the berries before rising in a dense, vociferous mass to forage
somewhere else . . . The year was a treasure-­house for Andrew which Jennifer unlocked for him and taught him to explore, although her insistence on Latin labels seemed to place an unnecessary barrier between him and the creatures he loved to watch. He became fonder of her, wishing ruefully that he had some area of expertise of his own to offer her. She liked him. And gradually he wanted more and more for her to yield to him, to give up to him something of herself which was more than a teenage fumble in the car. He needed her, and he told her so. Eventually, that dogged perseverance, which characterised his work in the office and made him such a valued employee, was rewarded with success, of a kind . . . And a failure which led to his sudden departure from Sussex to the hillside cottage in Wales.

  It was a painful affair which can be recounted in a few words. Andrew’s perseverance, bred from a real fondness for Jennifer, took them to his bed-sitting-room in Newhaven. There was a brief skirmish on his sofa. Clothes were very quickly shed and strewn to all the corners of the room, once it was established that the removal of glasses and the loosening of hair was not the only yielding which would take place that afternoon. And in the ensuing encounter, perhaps because of the delay before Andrew had been allowed to manifest his affection for Jennifer in such an unequivocal way, perhaps because Phoebe was following their efforts with such a keen and noisy interest, he could not kindle any spark with which to prove his love . . . They fell apart, panting heavily. ‘Was that it?’ the woman asked. That was it. ‘Heavens! What a lot of fuss about nothing!’ Jennifer covered herself quickly with the clothes which came to hand, while Andrew sat naked on the sofa and scowled shortsightedly at that piece of him which had let him down. She dressed, angry and disappointed now that she had dropped her defences. And then she made her big mistake: she looked at Andrew’s desolate figure and in particular at that unprepossessing thing which lay white and flaccid between his thighs, and she started to laugh. At first it was only her reptilian smile, then a smothered giggle. But it grew and grew and she disguised it no longer. She broke into a braying guffaw. Phoebe began to bark. And Andrew Pinkney forgot that he was a harmless old labrador dog, all soft and slow and golden blond, for he crossed the little room in one leap to land the woman a heavy punch in her mouth. ‘You bitch!’ he shouted. She went down in a heap. Andrew groped for his glasses. ‘Jennifer? Jennifer? Oh Jesus Christ . . .’ A brief inspection revealed that she was unconscious. The dog had retired to her corner, from where she looked on and smiled, as though the whole affair was one baffling but marvellous game.