The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  Andrew telephoned for an ambulance and the police and had time to dress before they arrived. Only minutes had passed between their fiasco on the sofa and Jennifer’s hasty removal from the room, and the ambulance was gone in a blur of lights and sirens. Andrew was mortified to be faced by policemen who knew him as a young lawyer from his regular visits to Lewes magistrates’ court. While he was detained for questioning in Lewes police station, two important developments took place: first, it was soon established that Jennifer was not seriously hurt and that she had swooned from the shock as much as from the force of the blow. There was no damage which a little dentistry could not repair; hours later, she was alert enough to prevent the police from pressing any charges. And secondly, the influence of Andrew’s employer was invaluable in securing Andrew’s release; the solicitor’s reference was considerable enough to impress the police that their detainee was a man of impeccable character who had suffered a momentary aberration. Andrew was released, Jennifer was discharged. Neither of them seemed much the worse for their experience. But their employer, who valued both of them as conscientious members of his firm and did not want to lose either, saw that they would not straightaway be able to work together, so he offered them the option of taking an extended break from the office. The woman bridled at this, stung by the implication that she might not be ready to take up her duties after her injury. But the man, far less volatile now that he had once more assumed his role as a mild and malle­able old labrador dog, accepted the offer immediately. His employer, the senior partner, had a holiday cottage in north Wales: Andrew could use that if he wanted, for a month or two months, right through the autumn. And then he could come back whenever he liked, refreshed and wholly recovered from the shock he had had.

  Thus, a week later, Andrew drove north and west, followed the winding but scenic route from Shrewsbury to Llangollen to Betws-y-coed, and arrived at the isolated cottage he had been lent. Naturally, Phoebe came with him. Apart from a few clothes and a radio, he brought only his paintings to enliven the cottage and to give him some permanent visual link with the woman he had struck: for they were watercolours which Jennifer herself had painted and given to him. Mostly they were landscapes of the Sussex countryside which she loved and knew so well: she had captured the flat and featureless expanses of the Pevensey levels, more sky than land, with the glinting of frost in the air and on the fields. Andrew could almost sense the cold in the prickling of his nostrils. There were golden plover, geese and a smudging of snipe. From the downs, she had painted the sinuous estuary of the Cuckmere river, a silver snake which wound its way to the metallic sea. One of her paintings caught the clutter of the moorings behind Denton island, the view from Andrew’s bed-sitting-room, something of the untidiness and accumulated debris of boats and their tackle against the mudflats of a tidal river. All Jennifer’s watercolours were of sunshine. But Andrew’s favourite was her watercolour of Phoebe. From a series of preliminary sketches, she had conjured the quintessence of the dog, her alertness and good nature, somehow a combination of the persuasive powers of her eyes with the vitality of her shining frame. Phoebe was smiling an affectionate, feminine smile. This was the picture of Jennifer’s which Andrew Pinkney admired most.

  But it was quite unlike the chain-saw snarls and the abhorrence on Phoebe’s face when she recoiled from the dead thing in the moonlit forest.

  *

  The man and his dog slept soundly. They were alone in the cottage. The woodlands of birch and oak and mountain ash were alive throughout that night, with the movements of the moles and voles, the leathery clicking of bats, and the padding panting footsteps of the fox. The brown owl was gorged on beetles and had swallowed the sweet body of a shrew, so that it sat stupid against the trunk of a tree until dawn, when it retched a smooth wet pellet of fur and bones and chitin on to the ground below. The night was a place of hunting and killing and eating, where little lives were snuffed out with nothing but a whimper or a swiftly silenced squeal. And then there was a splintering of bones, like the tinkle of icicles. It was cold. The first rime of the year lay faintly on the grass, just a beaded breath of ice to warn of the winter to come.

  But in the plantation it was warmer, under the cover of the heavy black blanket. Things grew in the clammy moisture of drains. On rotting tree stumps, in the decay of needles which were warm and wet and which could not breathe under the smothering of the forest, fungi grew. They were white things, dank and mucous like the flesh of something very sick. They pushed up quickly through the soil, forcing their way like fetid fingers through the beds of needles, white and somehow luminous in the muffled shadows. They gave off a powerful pungency of rotting meat. The stinkhorn thrust upwards its globose head. Its perfect phallus was erect in the silver lights of the forest, erect in the darkness too. Where the badger had been before the man came to take it away, the stinkhorn grew. From the earth which had been first warmed by the body of the dying beast, then dampened by the rising of moisture to meet the heat of the body, from the spores of the bruises and the poisoned flesh and the rusted barbed wire, there rose a fine new stinkhorn. It stank. It was putrid through and through. It dripped a green-black slime which drew dung-flies to feed there. But for a short time, a matter of hours, it was the phallus of a corpse, the perfect expression of rigor mortis.

  Not far away, the dead thing which had fostered such a bold erection swung slowly on its hook. No more blood dripped from its teeth. The crimson stain was dry on the mountain ash. And when that night dissolved to dawn and the frost no longer clung to the long grass, more flies came to the woodshed. They came to the blossoming stink of the badger, and when they found its wounds among the wire they laid more eggs on the purpled flesh. They laid their eggs in the dead thing’s ears, they tunnelled through the congealed blood in its nostrils and into all the secret places of its head. Only a fly could penetrate the gritted trap of teeth: the flies did, and then there were more eggs in the badger’s mouth.

  In every part of the corpse, things were working. The ripest of the maggots were developing now into pupae, dropping from the badger and landing gently in the earth and the sawdust below. The dead thing which Andrew Pinkney had hung in the woodshed was really not dead at all.

  II

  The cottage was easy to find but hard to reach. That is to say, Andrew followed his employer’s meticulously drawn map, which was to conduct him from Betws-y-coed to the cottage, and was straight away able to recognise the building from the road. He had driven some five miles from Beddgelert, through hills which folded into the mountains of the Snowdonia national park, through a number of villages made up of dismally grey terraced cottages. The road became narrower and more winding. It was a nondescript day early in October, under a sky the colour and texture of corrugated iron, when at any moment it seemed that the windscreen of Andrew’s car would be spattered with the spittle of an irritable squall. But it did not rain. He drove very slowly, consulting his map, until it was quite obvious that the angular white cottage he could see high up on the hillside to his left must be the one he was looking for and which he was going to inhabit for the following weeks. It crouched in the shadow of a beetling bulge of mountain. Splendid, he thought, and he reached out to Phoebe, who was dozing on the passenger seat. She sat up straight and looked grandly ahead of her, with that delicately cultivated expression of unconcern which driving instructors wear so fixedly on their faces. ‘Over there, Phoebe, that white one, that’s where we’re going . . .’ He noticed as he spoke that the fields were speckled with the grey shapes of the sheep which his employer had warned him of, and he reminded himself that it was imperative to keep the dog most carefully under control if she were to survive the ready shotguns of the local farmers. Phoebe peered into the distance, cocking her ears at Andrew’s voice but perfectly oblivious to the reason for his enthusiasm. He stopped the car at the gate which was indicated on the map.

  It then took him twenty minutes to negotiate the quarter of a mile from that first gate to the cottage. H
e drove very slowly across the field, following a track which was rutted so deeply that the long grass and thistles in the middle of it hissed and screeched along the bottom of his car. The track rose sharply and dipped, to reveal the river ahead, as marked on the map. There were two bridges across it. The first was the old railway bridge, completely derelict, simply a rusted skeleton which had remained since the mountain railway had been closed some fifty years before. The sudden sharp rising and falling in the track was the remains of the embankment. The second bridge was made of concrete which was laid directly on to the bed of the shallow river, shot through with a number of great iron pipes which took the water on its way, and Andrew was exasperated to see that just now the level of the river ran smoothly over the surface of the bridge, overflowing in a curtain of silk, undisturbed by a single snag. Stopping the car, he got out and changed into his wellington boots, for at the other side of the bridge there was a second gate into another field. He drove carefully on to the bridge and stopped the car, while the water ran smoothly underneath it, only an inch or two in depth. Again he left the car, the water flying in fountain sprays from his boots as he waded to open the next gate, drove through, shut the gate, returned to the car and continued into the second field. He was beginning to see that his employer’s cottage was indeed a refuge from the pressures of a busy solicitor’s office. Here the track was even more deeply rutted. The sheep rose so reluctantly from it that Andrew had to stop and wait before he could drive on, while they squatted and squittered a spatter of shining brown droppings. Phoebe watched them with an air of haughty disdain. The next gate let the car into a farmyard, and this time he accomplished the business of opening and closing the gate and getting the car through very briskly, encouraged by a wild-eyed sheep-dog on the end of a leash which kept the animal only narrowly at bay. He drove on. Once more the track rose sharply and continued to climb, through a fourth gate they went with only the sheep to contend with, and then the car was slithering its way upwards, closer and closer to the cottage, to stop gratefully on the steep hillside in front of it.

  The cottage was old, hundreds of years old by Andrew’s estimation. As he unlocked the front door and went inside, his nostrils were assaulted by the smell of the damp. There was another smell too, of soot and decomposing meat, which combined with the damp to give the overwhelming first impression that he was stepping into a dungeon. The building was on one floor, a sitting-room leading directly into a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. Everything was clammy and dark. Wherever Andrew put down his hand he felt moisture, something sticky with wet soot. He moved quickly from room to room, drawing back the curtains and flinging open the windows, leaving open the front door, and soon, as he went backwards and forwards to and from the car with his few belongings, there was some welcome circulation of air through the building. Pausing on the path outside the front door, he realised that, notwithstanding the cottage’s dank interior, it enjoyed the most beautiful sweeping views down the valley, to the distant road and across to the opposite hillsides. Behind the building there rose a steeper hillside, green at first and mottled with a woodland of oak and birch which was quickly quenched by the dark monotony of a fir plantation. Above that there was barren rock, a towering cliff all grey and glistening, until the clouds concealed the mountains. There would be time later to explore the surrounding country. The first priority was to make the cottage habitable as soon as possible. So he attacked it vigorously with sponges and dusters and powders, with anything available in the kitchen cupboards, and before the afternoon was over he had made the place more welcoming. After all, there was only himself and Phoebe, for a month or so. There was no need to be meticulous, as long as the rooms were reasonably clean. The dog waited patiently outside while Andrew bustled from room to room. He had tied her lead to a drainpipe, from where she sniffed her face into the building, recoiling from the unfamiliar scents, and then she concentrated her attention on the sheep which had strolled closer to the cottage. She sat still and stared at them, flashing her benign smile.

  After a while, Andrew was reasonably satisfied with the state of their temporary home. He had spent hours, once the rooms were cleaned, searching for the source of the smell of dead flesh, without success. It lingered above the freshness of the new air which had been allowed in, it obscured the scent of disinfectant. Phoebe wrinkled her nose at the whiff, but she settled into her basket in a corner of the strange new room, rummaging with her paws into her blankets, rearranging them over and over again as though these familiar things with their familiar smells were a great comfort in a time of upheaval. Andrew shifted cupboards, he flashed his torch into that abyss which harbours nameless things behind the cooker and behind the refrigerator, he pulled out the wardrobe in the bedroom and he tottered precariously on the back of a chair as he pushed his head into the dusty cobwebs of the roof space. The torch lit up the glistening darkness of a roof which had had no attention for many decades. But there was nothing to explain the putrid odour which permeated the cottage.

  Until, in the evening, he lit the fire in the front room. He had found, as his employer had told him, that there was some coal and a few pieces of firewood in the little outhouse by the side of the building, enough for a week, and after that Andrew would be entitled to scavenge for fuel from the surrounding hillsides. He inexpertly laid the fire, unused to doing so, accustomed to the instant heat from the electric fire in his bed-­sitting-room. But the wood was dry, there were the desiccated spars of gorse which crackled instantly into flames, and soon he was adding pieces of coal to form a dome over the blossoming core of heat. Thick blue smoke went puthering up the chimney. Andrew reclined in an armchair and smiled at the success of his handiwork, and straight away Phoebe was there beside him with her wet black nose against his fingers.

  But she sprang away in disgust when the smoke stopped pluming up the chimney. Dense clouds came billowing back. Andrew cried out and beat his way to the front door, flailing his arms through the smoke. In seconds, the room was thick with it, and it continued to pour from the fireplace in a stinking black wave. The smoke boiled from the hearth until it was impossible to see across the room.

  While the dog escaped into one of the bedrooms, preferring that to the unknown darkness outside, Andrew searched in desperation for the broom he had been using in the kitchen. Wielding this, he forced himself forwards to the grate, where he knelt on the rug, gagging and retching on the fumes, and he thrust the handle of the broom as far up the chimney as it would go, in a wild attempt to clear some imagined blocking. The broom handle struck something. Showers of soot cascaded on to the fire, exploding into short-lived but spectacular flames as they landed on the coals. Rubble came down too, crumbled pieces of brick from the lining of the chimney. Still the smoke came writhing into the room . . . Until the broom handle broke through the obstruction. A wreckage of debris crashed on to the hearth and spewed outwards over Andrew’s knees. With this avalanche there issued a nauseating smell of rotten meat, as though the chimney had vomited into the room the remains of some disgusting meal. Andrew staggered back. But as the fire regained its composure, it exhaled its smoke through the piles of soot and half-bricks, through the filthy stuff which now lay all over the rug, and the smoke went sweetly upwards to vanish in an unbroken wave into the maw of the chimney.

  It was a bird of some kind which had died up there. The stink of its putrefying corpse now filled the room, quite eclipsing the smell of the soot. Phoebe had started to howl in the bedroom, sobbing in a resonant high-pitched voice. Whatever the bird had been, it was reduced to this, a chaos of filthy black feathers from which there protruded a pair of shattered legs complete with claws, clenched into tight fists, and a beak of weighty black horn. The compacted remains of its frame were pulsing with maggots. Andrew, no longer so blond nor so good-natured as he was generally reputed to be, rolled up the hearth rug into a temporary coffin and hurled the whole thing from the front door. The smoke swiftly dissipated. When Andrew had been through the room once
more with his sponges and cloths and had manhandled an antique vacuum-cleaner across the carpet, Phoebe consented to being led from her hiding-place in the bedroom. The fire drew beautifully, blooming a tremulous golden flame. It sent the smoke up the chimney in one cooperative plume.

  *

  Andrew kept the cottage warm in the evenings and he left it to be aired in the daytime, while he and Phoebe scouted the countryside. It seemed to him that there were two distinctly contrasting sides to the cottage, in outlook and appearance: the front of the house was painted white and from it there were open views of light and air; the back of the cottage was painted black, and to walk up the hillside behind it was immediately to enter a darker world. There was a stiff climb into the gentle dappled shadows of the silver birch, a place of pungent autumnal scents where the leaves had fallen and matted into a perfumed carpet. Clusters of berries had dropped from the mountain ash, and they lay like jewels in the sweetened dampness. A stream ran swiftly through the woodland. Where it hurried over boulders which were thick with sponges of moss, it tossed up a spray so fine that only the sunlight could see it, and in the invisible mists of moisture there gathered throngs of tiny insects. Cobwebs of grey lichen had grown and covered the branches of the trees. It was an underworld of little creatures living little lives: the creeping of a wren among the dead leaves or the ticking of a tree-creeper in the fractured bark of a birch were somehow appropriate, a shrew might hurry past the columns of toadstools with the writhing coils of a worm wrapped round its face, but it was a place which must for ever remain a mystery to anything bigger than a hedgehog. The fox and the badger and the ubiquitous magpie could use it as their larder, raiding it for a feast, and then the darkening clouds of fieldfare in their hundreds could strip it of its fruit, but it was not their place as it was the place of the vole and the pipistrelle. To be sure, the woodland was a joy to Andrew Pinkney, but it could never be more than a whispering jungle of mystery to him, where he went trampling in his big black boots and where he would come with his saw and his wheelbarrow. To Phoebe it was a playground. She splashed ecstatically into the stream, she sprang out again in an explosion of spray, she chased the scent of every hot-blooded creature which tickled her nostrils, but the only things she caught were the sticks which Andrew flung for her, deep into the dying bracken.