The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  while.

  Over the mantelpiece, Jennifer’s watercolours hid some of the worst patches of damp, her sunlit souvenirs of Sussex blotting out a growth of virulent green. Her visions of air and light and sunshine were a façade behind which the mildew bloomed.

  As the weather closed in, Andrew thought of Jennifer a good deal. There was so much more he could have seen in his walks up to the crater if she had been there with him. It was she who had opened up the countryside for him on their expeditions in Sussex, with her twilit vigils in the forests where the fox and the badger gingerly moved, with her conjuring of the owls, her magic with the nightingale when the woods were a trembling mist of bluebells. Wherever Andrew and Phoebe walked, either behind the cottage where the world grew darker, or below it, across the fields and down to the river, he was picturing Jennifer beside him and imagining her reaction to all there was to see. He was exasperated to feel that, however much he thought he was appreciating his unfamiliar environment, he was probably missing so much more which Jennifer would have pointed out to him.

  One evening, by the fire, he started to write a letter to her. Perhaps he could mend their relationship by writing, by trying to share with her something of this new place; maybe, in spite of the indelible fact that he had knocked her senseless, he might bring her round again, raise her to a consciousness of his own condition by offering a gift. ‘Dear Jennifer, Just a scrawled bulletin from my banishment in the wilderness of Wales . . .’ But a picture of her unconscious face as she was carried away on a stretcher kept swimming into his mind, so that he screwed up the letter and put it on the fire, where it exploded into a flame as big and as bold as a chrysanthemum. He wanted to tell her about the bush of wild privet which was blossoming outside his window: gnarled and knotty though it was, it was just then abloom with tiny white trumpet-flowers, like the blooms of a bindweed, and to these flowers there came a host of red admirals to probe with their long tongues. A flock of longtailed tits blew into the privet one morning, but the butterflies returned when the birds had gone. He wanted to describe his heron on the river, for Jennifer liked the heron; she would be thoughtful, chewing her lips and quite abstracted when she watched her Pevensey heron, and Andrew was pleased to spot his bird most mornings when he and Phoebe went down to the bridge. It stood like a statue in the reeds, a grey hunchback, a frozen fisherman, until, at the sight of Phoebe, it came miraculously to life and flapped heavily upstream. Why then did it suddenly jink and dive in flight, as if under attack from a falcon, when there was no such bird in sight? Was this some vestigial ploy it practised, something bred deep in the heron’s memory? Andrew watched, and he knew that Jennifer would know the answer to his questions if only he were to write to her. Why was the rowan so thick with berries, for weeks before the redwing came? When the fieldfare arrived, the sky was dense with their flocks: scores upon scores of them filled the air with their clucking; big handsome thrushes which had flown all the way from Scandinavia to Andrew’s cottage, so that they could gorge themselves on the mountain ash. He stood on the hillside with his binoculars, as Phoebe gnawed a stick in the long grass, and he watched the murderous skills of the sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus, for Jennifer’s benefit) which had noted with a welling of blood-lust that the winter thrushes had come: the hawk went hurtling through the woodland, fast and as lethal as the jets which howled from Anglesey, and it sent a whirling cloud of fieldfare from the trees. Easy pickings for everyone, thought Andrew . . . The thrushes were sated on the clustered red berries, and the sparrowhawk killed at random, for the man and his dog to find the shattered remains of its meals on the forest floor. Jennifer would have been thrilled. Andrew picked up a pellet from the foot of a tree, the regurgitated wad of matter which some bird of prey could not digest, and he took it back to the cottage to dissect. Imagining Jennifer’s approval, he dismantled it with tweezers: the pellet was an inch long, three-quarters of an inch in thickness, black and dark brown, containing the chitinous remains of fifteen beetles (‘one dor beetle, that’s Geotrupes stercorarius, and fourteen leaf beetles, or rather, Chrysolina staphylaea . . .’), assorted grass, and seven quartz pebbles up to a quarter of an inch in size. Why? Why the pebbles? To aid the digestion? Surely, on a diet of tiny beetles, an owl or a hawk wouldn’t need to pick up pebbles for this purpose? Jennifer would have known the reason, and she would have been able to deduce which bird had produced the pellet. A kestrel? A merlin? A little owl? He had begun to pose these questions in his letter, before consigning it to the fire. Jennifer was recovering from some complicated dentistry. She might not be in the mood for owl pellets.

  Meanwhile the weather worsened. In the sloping fields, the bracken changed suddenly from bronze to black, the bracken which had been so tough and elastic lay now in blackened spars, like the charred remains of a devastated city. A few contrary foxgloves stood up, survivors of the wreckage. In the sodden grass, the armoury of thistles grew tall. Morning after morning, Andrew awoke to the enveloping blanket of drizzle on his windows. The surrounding mountains were erased by cloud. The air was warm and dense with moisture. He continued to walk the woodland, through the plantation, high up into the seething cauldron of the crater, where he and Phoebe recovered their breath to the accompaniment of the hounds’ wild chorus. And Jennifer was on his mind throughout this time, a ghost who shadowed his footsteps when he climbed to the hermit’s cell, a ghost who laughed him to sleep. Always, night after night, he heard her laughter, and he felt again the shame and the anger which it had provoked. It had broken over his nakedness like a bitter cold wave. He squirmed at the memory of his flaccidity.

  *

  All was not flaccid in the fir forest. There was nothing nervous or reluctant about the stinkhorn. In the shadows, from any bed of warmth and damp, the stinkhorn thrust its lewd erection. Throughout the plantation, the phallus stood up, white and firm, crowned with a swollen head which ejaculated its viscous seed.

  But the stinkhorn was tired. It was nearly finished. It would be time for even this erection to be unmanned.

  Until Andrew Pinkney arrived . . .

  In his walks through the forest, he had smelled the stinkhorn many times. From the dark trees there was wafted that whiff of rotting flesh which Andrew knew was no such thing. Phoebe may have been deceived, or else she was simply unnerved by the scent in the clinging clamminess of the plantation, for she lunged onwards, pulling the man towards the open air of the crater. It was the dog which was reluctant to linger, so Andrew was whisked from the fetid corners of the forest. But he recognised the smell. Jennifer, of course, had shown him her selection of fungi in the sweeter woodlands of Sussex, delighted by the fairy-tale umbrellas of fly agaric which decorated the glades of silver birch. There were blewits and blushers and crumble caps. In passing, with a grimace of disgust on her mouth, she had gestured into the gloom of Alfriston forest and mentioned the stinkhorn. ‘Filthy things . . .’ she muttered. ‘Come along, Andrew, come away from them . . .’ It was one of her tricks to stop dead suddenly on a woodland track and to sniff the air excitedly, twitching her nose like a hamster. ‘Fox?’ she would whisper to Andrew. ‘Fox? Vulpes vulpes? Can you smell it?’ And Andrew would raise his eyebrows and nod his head, although he could never smell anything different at all. To make up for this olfactory incompetence, he cultivated a routine of his own, which involved taking Jennifer by the elbow, stopping her abruptly as they walked along, to inhale long and loudly through his nose before hissing an exaggerated stage-whisper: ‘Stinkhorn? Phallus impudicus? Can you smell it, Jennifer?’ She was amused by this at first, pleased that Andrew was copying her techniques albeit facetiously, but for her the joke wore thin when he started to work the same routine in the office. Nevertheless, he could pick up and recognise the putrid odour of the fungus whenever he and Phoebe made their breathless way up the hillside, although he did not stop to investigate more closely.

  It was the big black sheep which induced him to do this, one dark afternoon that October.

  For
once, that day, the sheep would not move from the track. It had drifted from the trees, as Andrew had become used to seeing, almost invisible in the gloom, to take up its position some fifty yards ahead of him and his dog. The sheep had slipped out of the shadow and was now a heavy black smudge on the lighter strip of the path. Phoebe strained on her lead. As the man and the dog drew closer to the sheep, Phoebe started to yelp, emitting a strangled yip-yip-yipping against the tightness of her collar. Andrew yanked her back to him, irritated that he was being taken for a walk by his dog, angry that the pace of the walk should be dictated by her. But she increased the intensity of her barks, fusing them into one unbroken wail. The sheep fixed its unblinking white sockets on the dog. It remained still. Once more Phoebe lunged forward, until she received the unmistakable signal from the sheep that it was not going to give way this time. Some magic through the air-waves was transmitted from the big black animal, impassive and silent on the forest track, to the smaller hysterical creature which came noisily closer . . . For the dog suddenly stopped lunging and barking. Instead she tucked her tail between her legs and froze. The two animals eyed each other for a further second, sniffing, quivering. And then the sheep strolled casually towards the dog, slowly and inevitably like one of those big mad women who assume the right of way with their supermarket trolleys, while Andrew found himself stepping meekly aside and tugging Phoebe with him. The sheep passed by. Phoebe was stunned by the insolence of it. She gazed in disbelief at the waddling creature, which now squatted as decorously as a duchess and extruded a single glistening turd on to the track, before drifting back into the darkness of the fir trees. Only then did the dog recover her wits. Shrugging off the hypnotic effect of the sheep’s stare, Phoebe wriggled from her collar, somehow writhing her head free from it. She flew into the forest in pursuit of the animal.

  There followed five minutes of confusion among the densely packed trees. Andrew ran up and down the path, shouting hoarsely for the dog. Her lead, with the collar attached to the end of it, dangled uselessly from his wrist. The sounds of a frantic chase were all around him: at first to one side there was the splintering of branches as a number of animals stampeded riotously through the undergrowth, and then on the other side of the track he heard Phoebe’s manic cries. She was beyond his control. Now that the sheep were running ahead of her, there was nothing he could have done, nothing he could have shouted to bring her back to him. Around and about him, as though the animals were deliberately describing a series of circles through the plantation, with the big blond man aghast in the middle, Andrew heard the blundering progress of the sheep; the snapping of brittle wood, the trample of hooves through dead bracken, the scrambling of heavy bodies through muddy ditches . . . everywhere the plantation echoed with the breaking of ground and vegetation to make way for the sheep. Piercing high and clear above all this, there rang Phoebe’s joyous yelps. More and more sheep which had strayed into the forest were now swept into the pursuit. Bunching together for the security of numbers they had learned from their previous experiences with dogs, they blundered in blind panic from end to end of the plantation. As Andrew waited, his hairless face blenched with fear and his eyes expressionless behind the heavy lenses of his glasses, he leapt with the shock of seeing a dozen or fifteen sheep go haring across the track higher up the hill, appearing and vanishing from one side to the other. And behind them there was Phoebe. She sped through the forest, very low to the ground, gliding between the trees as swiftly and easily as an otter in the green depths of a pool. Black, shining, volatile, she went snaking like a shadow and there was nowhere for the sheep to hide.

  Then the forest was shaken by a deafening explosion. Very close by, there was the boom of a shotgun. It was followed by a ghastly, welling silence, more abysmal than the silence of an empty cathedral. No more cracking of branches. No more bleats of terror. No more yelps of simple joy from the dog. Nothing moved. Nothing was heard to move. Andrew was frozen still, as the crash of the gun dissolved its echoes into the blanket of trees. He listened to the layers of silence settle one on top of the other, until he was buried under the weight of the hush . . .

  The first sound then was Andrew’s voice. It came out, faint and disembodied, and all it said was, ‘Phoebe? Phoebe?’ like the call of a rare bird of passage which had been blown by a storm into that unwelcoming place. There was no answer. Louder this time, the call went out, ‘Phoebe! Phoebe!’ and still it sounded somehow lonely, the cry of a lost and solitary bird. But it was answered by the movement of footsteps, human footsteps, high on the track above him, the noises of someone striding away up the steep path. Andrew shouted an indeterminate word and began to scramble upwards. His breath came short, his wellington boots slapped loudly as he ran and slithered from bend to bend, and when he stopped to listen for the footsteps they were always receding, higher and higher towards the lowering clouds of the crater. He ran on. His head was pounding when he reached the top of the plantation. The mists were so low into the bowl of the cauldron that he saw nothing of the sheer walls. He stood still, taking long and rasping breaths to settle his pulse, again and again pushing back the flopping curls of hair from his face, and he peered dimly around him. He cried out an incoherent sound which clattered on the slabs of wet rock. A party of jackdaws beat through the cloud, clucking like chickens. The only other sound was the ubiquitous whisper of water down the cliffs. As his heartbeat settled, he thought he heard the rhythmic splashing of footsteps through the quagmire of the crater, and again he called out. But by the time he had smeared away the droplets of mist from his glasses, he had missed any chance of sighting that person who now strode quickly away. Nevertheless, Andrew waited for a minute in the darkness of an evening which had crept unnoticed over the mountain. And he was rewarded by the sound he expected to hear, the pealing chorus of the hounds which rose suddenly into the gloom. Cursing at this, a single crisp expletive, he wheeled round and returned to the forest, his bulk moving rapidly downwards and downwards, drawn into the twilit bowels of the plantation.

  The light was fading fast. However, Andrew found the spot from where the chase had begun, marked with the turd which was losing its sheen as it cooled. Now there was no time for timorous cries if he were to find Phoebe before the forest became too dark. Over and over he shouted the dog’s name, no longer like the plaintive notes of a bird, but a bellowed enquiry. The trees rang with it, they tried to absorb the ringing into their clustered needles, failing as the man persisted, while he paced the track upwards and downwards from the turd. When he paused to listen for a movement or an answering bark, that benumbing silence took hold, infecting the forest with a kind of fatal torpor. He paused for breath and strained to catch a sound. There was none, except the clamour of the blood in his own head and the rasping hoarseness of his throat. He held his breath. From somewhere in the serried darkness, there came a voice, very small, but a voice which echoed his shouts. ‘Phoebe?’ he said quietly, as though to himself, and he heard that little voice again, hardly more than a mew. Repeating his gentle call, he plunged from the track into the trees, burrowing on his hands and knees through the tangled network of twigs. They tore at his face and his hands, they snagged in his hair, but he leaned more heavily into the clutches of the undergrowth and writhed further into the ranks of the forest. Drawing him on were the insistent whimpers of the dog, somewhere ahead. The ground fell away in front of him when he came to a drain, so he dropped gratefully down where he could move more easily beneath the branches. There was a thread of light too, from the thinning of trees above his head. And, shining faintly in a clearing, where the gloom was relieved by some silver slivers of sun which the day had left behind, there lay Phoebe. She had forced herself tightly under the up-ended roots of a fallen sapling, and there she crouched, whimpering for the arrival of the man. ‘Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe . . .’ he murmured, continuing to repeat the word like a charm as he knelt by the dog and took her head in both his hands. ‘Let me see, Phoebe, let me see what’s happened to you . . .’ He
ran his fingers around her face and neck. The dog was shuddering with terror. Every part of her, as Andrew felt along her sides and up and down her legs, every piece of her was trembling. ‘You’re all right, Phoebe,’ he whispered, his voice catching in his throat with the realisation that she was uninjured, ‘come on, girl, come to me . . .’ And at this, the terrified creature crawled on to the man’s lap and buried her head as deeply as she could into the folds of his jacket.

  Together, the man and the dog remained enfolded in the swelling silent darkness of the clearing, entirely cut off from the world outside the plantation, from the silver birch below and the crater above, embedded in the core of the fir forest.

  Andrew closed his eyes. The beating of the dog’s slim body relented while he held her close. There was no sound at all, no light, he tasted nothing, now that he had swallowed the rank saliva of his fear . . . No sensation whatsoever, except for Phoebe’s diminishing tremors against the pit of his stomach. He was cocooned from the persistent demands of his own senses . . . until he inhaled one long draught of the evening air, and the unmistakable stench of the stinkhorn jolted his eyes open.

  ‘Stinkhorn?’ he whispered. The dog lifted her head from his jacket, looking quizzically up at him. ‘Yes, Phoebe, stinkhorn. Can you smell it?’

  Surrounding him and the dog were a score of the pale fungi. They seemed to possess a light of their own, for they glowed faintly like phallic devotional candles, lit by pilgrims in a hushed cathedral. Confidently erect, they pushed up their tumescent heads and exhaled a powerful smell of rancid meat. They were horny with desire, quite brazen in their own rigidity. Their covetousness, their itch was upheld in the most cavalier way, which made that clearing in the forest a shrine to lust. And in the middle, uncomfortably like a winsome madonna encircled by candles, sat Andrew Pinkney, whose itch had not sufficiently itched, whose covetousness had not been covetous at all, whose own candle had flickered and gone out. He gazed around him. All this way to bloody Wales, he thought, all the way from Sussex to create a breathing space, to clear the air after that failure and the subsequent disgrace, and here I am buried in the deepest Welsh forest where no one could ever find me . . . surrounded by the most vivid and explicit reminder of my successlessness! Surrounded by these lewd phalli! ‘Jennifer, oh, Jennifer,’ he started to say, ‘is this something you arranged? Part of your magic, along with the owls and the badgers?’ But he knew that the stinkhorn was not part of her repertoire. He was forced to smile, and then he felt a chuckle beginning to grow until it erupted and became a laugh, that same braying guffaw which Jennifer could not resist, and that little clearing shook with Andrew’s laughter. ‘Splendid, splendid!’ he chuckled, while Phoebe grinned and pricked her ears and began to bark. He laughed and laughed at the irony, inhaling the fetid pungency with the sensual relish of an opium addict. He forgot the mayhem of the dog’s mad chase after the sheep, and for a while he forgot that explosion from a shotgun which had rocked the forest and begun a frantic search for Phoebe. As he sat and cuddled the beloved dog, he thought of Jennifer, her love of the countryside in which she had so thoroughly instructed him, and he started to spawn an idea which might help him to mend the rift in their relationship. The stinkhorn were still erect. But it was October. Their emasculation was inevitable. Soon they would flag and falter and fail, as other erections had failed before. Unless? Unless he, Andrew Pinkney, could postpone their wilting and return to Jennifer with a phenomenon of his own amateurish creation, signifying nothing but a joke against himself which might endear him to her once more. At last, he might be able to claim his own area of expertise.