The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  It was an idea which he cuddled to himself as he cuddled the dog, while he carried her tenderly through the dense undergrowth, shielding her from the needles. The idea started as a wry joke. Slowly, carefully, for they were both weary from the trauma of the afternoon, the man and the dog went down the track and emerged from the forest. Andrew pondered. He followed the nodding plume of Phoebe’s tail along the path, through the less hostile shadows of the birch wood. He pondered the idea which might occupy his time constructively over his weeks in Wales, and which might raise a smile of forgiveness on Jennifer’s face when he returned to Sussex. That was all he wanted. Save the stinkhorn, he thought, and then he tested the slogan out loud to anyone or anything which might be listening in the woodland. ‘Save the stinkhorn! Save the stinkhorn!’ he sang, chanting it like a spell. The sibilance of it lingered in the leaves. They rustled as a shiver of cold cold wind ran through the tree tops. Andrew shuddered violently and glanced over his shoulder at the dense blackness of the forest. He hurried back to the cottage.

  Save the stinkhorn . . . Save the stinkhorn . . . sighed the breeze that night, long after the man and his dog were sound asleep.

  III

  The spores of the stinkhorn are dispersed by flies. So the badger in the woodshed was preparing to play its part in Andrew Pinkney’s little game.

  Only a few days after Phoebe’s unnerving experience in the forest and Andrew’s subsequent discovery of the stinkhorn clearing, the dog had led him into the plantation on the scent of the dead badger. Now that he had suspended the corpse in his woodshed, he could leave it there for the maggots to proliferate while he gathered the other essential ingredients for his project. Whereas he had become used to glancing into the outhouse because of the simple satisfaction he felt in his accumulation of wood, now he found himself ducking inside twice or three times a day in order to inspect the condition of the badger. The morning after he hung it there, he caught the rising odour when he went to the outhouse. He smiled excitedly at the dead beast. It grinned back at him. He saw on the freshly cut logs their crimson stigmata, and in the air of the woodshed, mingling faintly with the sweetness of congealing sap, there was the powerful whiff of putrefaction. Andrew spun the badger slowly, he turned it on the corset of barbed wire, inspecting the bruises which now turned black and the seeping wounds. ‘You’re perfect,’ he said. He was pleased to see the tiny white eggs of the flies inside the badger’s nostrils. Bending close to the animal’s body, he listened carefully, expecting almost to hear the murmurings of industry from inside, imagining the myriad workings of gases and juices with the maggots which were breaking down the dead flesh. He saw that the pupae had fallen into the sawdust at his feet. He listened to the silence and he thought of the countless millions of organisms which would play their part in the decomposition of the badger: it reminded him of a radio debate he had heard not long before, about the decommissioning of a nuclear power station. Someone had protested that it was all very well wanting such stations to be closed, but what of the jobs of the people who worked in them, the hundreds of people who would be made redundant? There was a simple answer: the decommissioning of a nuclear power station took years, involving the work of many more people than normally worked in an operative station. There would be plenty of work for plenty of people . . . And here was Andrew’s badger, being decommissioned. Dead, it was busier than it had ever been when it was alive.

  He made a rapid trip to Caernarfon, where he sat in the noisy little library long enough to get a picture of what he could do to bring off his surprise for Jennifer. He thought of her fondly and often, now that he had set himself a harmless and interesting task, the sort of inexpert experiment she approved of; she liked to think of herself instructing Andrew in the patterns of wildlife, showing him things which were alive in their natural environment, and Andrew guessed that she would muster her wry, crocodilian smile at his schoolboy enthusiasm. That was all he wanted. If she could smile and shrug, even ridicule his silliness with her schoolma’am manner, then he might have mended something. He wanted to show that he could make a joke at his own expense. And, for a change, he could be the pundit, he would be able to instruct her in his new field of expertise. Furthermore, after a fortnight in the cottage, although he did not want to return to Sussex yet, he saw that there was a limit to the satisfaction he could derive from his solitary walks and the long dark evenings alone with the radio. He was pleased to have stumbled across a game to occupy him and inform him as the autumn closed down. It would be something to do.

  After a brief exploration of Caernarfon, where he admitted grudgingly to himself that the castle beat any castle that the south of England had to offer, and after exercising Phoebe on the sea-shore, he returned to the cottage; sometime, he thought, when he needed a rest from the suffocation of the mountains or when the stinkhorn let him down, he would go back to that sea-shore. The estuary was busy with waders on the sand flats, along with gulls and terns and cormorants; in five minutes with Phoebe among the rock pools of low tide, he saw fifteen or twenty species of bird, and again he felt the presence of Jennifer at his side, the lingering appeal of her enthusiasm. Yes, when he needed the sharper sting of the salt air, just as he and Jennifer had needed sometimes the tingle of the frost on Pevensey levels, he would return to the estuary.

  But now, having gleaned from the library all the information he wanted, Andrew was eager to be busy. Equipped with wellington boots, he made short work of the river bridge and its silken curtain of water. He shouted and gestured in the face of the sheep-dog in the farmyard, having established from the safety of the car that the snarling beast was on its leash, and he slithered the car up the track to the cottage. Furthermore, in the library, he had not forgotten to glance into a Welsh-English dictionary for a translation of the name of the cottage: Clogwyn Ceiliog, the sign read, which signified something hilarious to the coalman. ‘Clogwyn’: ‘Cliffs’ . . . appropriate enough with the steep hillside and the crater high above. ‘Ceiliog’: ‘Cockerel’. Therefore, something like: ‘Cockerel in the cliffs’? Was that anything like a good translation? Andrew was mystified, whereas the coalman had been greatly entertained. He could think of no reason why the cottage should have such a name, putting it down to some distant chapter in the building’s past when perhaps a farmer lived there with his stock. The only bird he had encountered in connection with the place had come tumbling down the chimney with a choking cloud of soot. A cockerel? More likely a jackdaw which had been trapped there in the summer. He put it out of his mind.

  It was easy to find the clearing full of stinkhorn, except that Phoebe had to be practically dragged there. In spite of her gleeful return to the plantation when she had found the badger, when all her memories of her terror seemed to have gone, she was reluctant to go by the spot where the confrontation with the big black sheep had taken place. Andrew kept her carefully on the lead, in case there were stray sheep in the forest again. Phoebe had been allowed free before, precisely because Andrew gathered there would be no sheep in the plantation. Now, having seen the derelict state of some of the fencing and realising that stray animals came and went as they wished, he was alert for the sound of sheep among the trees. Along the track, they came to the single big turd, now powdered with the cottony mould of coprophilous fungi. The dog raised her lips and recoiled from it. ‘Come on, Phoebe,’ Andrew said, tugging her with him into the cover of trees, ‘no sheep today, and no guns either.’ Together they dropped into the drain, and Andrew’s squelching footsteps preceded the delicate patterings of the dog as he led the way through the darkness, towards the daylit clearing ahead. Before they reached it, he sniffed the scent of the stinkhorn. It tunnelled at him down the gloomy corridor, it felt his face with fusty fingers. When he emerged, still crouching, into the light, he was obliged to pull Phoebe after him or else she would have fled from the malodorous place. Andrew bent sharply to seize the scruff of her neck, preventing her just in time from slipping her head again from the collar. And to his sur
prise, she struck at his hand so fast that the movement was invisible, nipping him keenly with her teeth. He swore at her. It was the only time she had ever bitten him. Angry, he used both hands to hold her head and he heaved her out of the ditch.

  ‘Come out of there, you bastard!’ he yelled at her, squeezing tight to prevent her striking a second time. He spun her across the clearing. There, releasing her quickly, he took the lead and tied it twice around a branch of the fallen tree. Phoebe rolled on to her back, to lie there in her most pathetic pose, hind legs splayed apart, forelegs raised and trembling, her ears flattened against the sides of her head and with her eyes pitifully rounded. ‘That’s all right, girl,’ the man whispered, kneeling to console her, for he could see that she was aware of her guilt in biting him and needed consolation. ‘All right, Phoebe, all right . . .’ and he put out his hand to touch her belly. She lifted her lips in a high-pitched snarl. Andrew stood up, withdrawing his hand an instant before she writhed from her back and shot out a second raking flick of her teeth. ‘You bitch!’ Instinctively he thrust out his boot. It caught her under the mouth and there was the sharp click of her jaws closing together. A few flecks of blood flew from her tongue, rubies in the long grass. Sorry for what he had done, but not prepared to make another gesture of consolation, he turned to see what the clearing could offer for the benefit of his experiment.

  There were the stinkhorn, in different stages of their erections, growing around the base of the fallen tree. The collapse of the tree had permitted more light into the area, enabling the growth of lush grasses to take place. The ditch, running through the clearing, promoted the burgeoning profusion of mosses, and among the litter of needles in the damp grass the stinkhorn pushed up their heads. Andrew squatted, examining the honeycombed crown of a fine example, to dab it with a finger and feel the stickiness of it. He turned to another which was weeping its glutinous juices. Two big green dung-flies rose heavily from it, intoxicated by the sweetness. The pungency was sweet to the flies, but not to Andrew, whose mouth went dry as he inhaled it, as though his tongue were powdered with the mould which flourished on sheep droppings. But he probed with his fingers into the soft earth around the fungi, gently feeling through the needles, until he found what he was looking for.

  ‘Here we are, here we are . . .’ he muttered, and he levered from the ground a pale round object, not unlike the egg of a pigeon. It was the fruit-body or ‘egg’ of the stinkhorn. Unlike a bird’s egg, it was soft, as though there was a layer of some jelly or spongy substance beneath the flexible shell. A number of roots dangled from the bottom of it, fine strands which were not much more substantial than hair. In the ground around this first egg, Andrew found more, until he had four of them lying on the grass beside him. Wrapping each one individually in a piece of tissue paper, he put them into the pocket of his jacket. Satisfied that he had found enough eggs, he then produced a plastic bag from another pocket and filled it with handfuls of earth and needles from where he had dug up the eggs. That was all he needed.

  ‘Let’s go, Phoebe. Come on home,’ he called to the dog, which was sulking on the other side of the clearing, and he undid her lead from the tree. She made no objection to this, indeed this time it was she who led the way along the drain, eager to quit the unwholesome place. Perhaps she could sense that, for the first time on their walks, there was something which interested and preoccupied her master more than she did, and she was jealous. Once they were back on the track, she leapt and wheeled so hysterically at the man’s slow pace that he grew irritated with her. Against his better judgement, thinking guiltily about the incident with the sheep, he unleashed her and watched her go streaking away down the path. She disappeared around a bend without a backward glance. She would be all right, he felt sure, she would run all the way back to the cottage and be waiting for him by the door when he arrived. Nevertheless, as he trotted through the plantation, he listened carefully for the movement of sheep or indeed the sounds of human footsteps which might precede that appalling explosion of a shotgun. But nothing else was moving in the forest that day. When Andrew approached the cottage and whistled the whistle which Phoebe knew, she dashed around to meet him, waving the banner of her tail and beaming as though they had had no difference of opinion in the plantation.

  ‘Now, this is what we do . . .’ Clearing the table in the living-room, he prepared to plant the stinkhorn eggs. He unfolded them from the paper, put them gently on the table. From the kitchen he brought the empty jars he had mustered for the job, large coffee jars whose screw-on caps he had already pierced with two or three small holes. At the bottom of each jar, four of them, he laid a wad of tissue paper which he then dampened by pouring in a trickle of water. He took the plastic bag he had used in the forest and added to each jar a handful of the soft, moist earth, to a depth of about an inch. Using a kitchen fork, he dug over the soil to be sure that it was fine enough, leaving a hole in the centre, and there he planted an egg, with the roots or hyphal strands at the bottom. He tenderly arranged the soil around it with the fork, so that just the top of the egg was still exposed. Then he screwed on the caps of the jars. These jars he put on the mantelpiece, to adorn the room alongside Jennifer’s watercolours of Sussex.

  That was it. There was nothing more that Andrew could do, not yet, having followed step by step the instructions he had found in the library book. The stinkhorn would grow, and he would have a grandstand view of their erection. Phallus impudicus was their name, ‘the lewd phallus’, and lewd they would be . . . no longer reserving their arrogance for the denizens of that wasteland of a plantation, for the unappreciative stares of a few sheep, but rearing their tumid heads in his sitting-room! He smiled. In suburban Sussex, suburban people were watching their televisions from the security of their armchairs . . . In Wales, Andrew Pinkney, having failed dismally in his last attempt to rear a homegrown erection, could sit back and enjoy these surrogates as he relaxed beside the fire.

  Before his eyes, the stinkhorn would grow. That was the easy part. Andrew’s plan was to prolong their cultivation past the usual time, well into the winter, and this would be somewhat more difficult. He did not know whether his trick would work.

  Stinkhorn did not smell so unpleasant simply to aggravate passing ramblers, it was not just a practical joke which nature played on the human nose, to imitate the smells of dead meat. It was intended to deceive the flies, to encourage them to visit the stinkhorn and to feed on the glutinous ooze which dripped from their swollen heads. The flies then carried away spores on their bodies and also released more spores, unharmed, from their digestive systems when they defecated. In this way, spores were communicated from site to site. Apparently, one single fly speck, carried from an oozing stinkhorn, could contain several million spores of the phallus. In the natural way, the onset of winter would limit the activities of the flies and cut short the transmission of spores, until the following spring. Andrew Pinkney’s idea was to promote the continued cycle by introducing a fresh and eager supply of flies to a new generation of the fungus in his living-room, so that he could return to Sussex with an unusual present for Jennifer: the proudly erect phalli of the stinkhorn, completely out of season in the depths of winter, as highly prized and as exclusive as Christmas strawberries . . .

  *

  Andrew’s living-room was developing perfectly as a nursery for his fungi. As he worked harder to keep it warm, by lighting the fire earlier in the afternoons, settling in sooner against the onset of the darkness which crept more quickly over the valley, so the blooms of damp increased their disfiguring hold on the walls. The fire drew perfectly now that he had cleared the chimney, but, within minutes of lighting it, the first breath of condensation formed its film on the windows. Shortly afterwards, the film was a sheet of vapour on the glass, which trembled as the moisture put on weight.