The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  At last it was dawn. There was a frost. The hillsides were turned to steel. As the first light of morning silvered the room and Andrew realised with relief that he had not so far been side-stepped by sleep into missing the bursting of the egg, he went outside to stir himself. It was very cold. The landscape was a place of bone in which he too felt fleshless and bloodless. Everything was hard, beaten by the frost into sheets of dully glinting metal. His footsteps rang hollow on the frozen grass. He took the key to the woodshed, went there and back twice for some coal and an armful of logs, confident now that he could have the fire lit without jeopardising his ability to watch the jar. He ducked among the three dead things, whose smell was somehow quenched by the cold, setting them swinging on their hooks, rearranging a few pots of paint and a bottle of turpentine in order to reach some of the first logs he had cut some weeks before, those that would be driest. Locking the woodshed, he returned quickly to the cottage. Now he found that the room was really cold, that the fingers of the frost had reached in and touched everything while he went busily back and forth for fuel. He seldom took his eyes from the mantelpiece for more than a minute at a time, lighting the balls of newspaper which ignited the kindling wood which struck the yellow flames from the coal. And then a log or two. It was rowan this time. But it had no power over the woodwitch. He had discovered that some nights before.

  The room warmed up and Andrew continued to man the stinkhorn. Quickly the windows became blurred with condensation, he saw the moisture like a sheen of sweat on the walls, he watched the patches of green mould and imagined he saw them spreading into odd and various shapes, of birds and animals and clouds and islands. But, whatever fancy his imagination took, he could never erase the pale phantom which shimmered before him. Over the course of the morning, he made cups and cups of coffee, black, because he had not been down to the village for milk. He was comforted by the drone of the flies in their jars, that they grew stronger and were ready to carry out their part of the experiment. It helped him to remain watchful, although he was very tired, to see that the flies were not inclined to sleep; he instilled in himself the notion that it would be unfair, pulling rank, for him to snatch the blessed relief of sleep, while the flies, so vital to the operation, drummed restlessly at the glass walls of their jars. Sitting beside the fire, he watched the rowan flare and felt the warmth of it on his legs. He thought that soon he could go home to Sussex, depending on when the stinkhorn chose to hatch. Possibly even tomorrow, he’d throw his few remaining things into the car and drive south, bearing gently his single precious trophy, a jar to which the spores of the stinkhorn had been transmitted by the flies. Yes, one more day in the stew of the cottage, Cockerel Cottage, whose misnomer had resulted in a number of extraordinary happenings . . . Another day to endure in the shadow of that mountain, under the shroud of the forest, and perhaps he could go home! Get some air! See some sky! Breathe, without feeling the damp clinging to his lungs!

  Despite the rising temperature and the increasing clamminess of the atmosphere, nothing altered on the mantelpiece. Stimulated by the volume of the flies, wanting something to do, anything to keep him alert and vigilant, Andrew decided he could risk being out of the cottage for a few minutes on end. Another harvest from the woodshed, that was what he’d do. If he were going to leave soon, what a shame not to reap as much of the crop as possible! Invigorated by this idea to stir himself, he searched the kitchen until he found exactly what he needed at the back of a cupboard: a set of plastic containers, unfortunately without their appropriate lids, boxes of different sizes for storing various foodstuffs in a refrigerator. He took them with him across the thawing turf, to the door of the woodshed, recoiling from the renewed stench which blew from the swinging corpses. And for half an hour, with regular returns to the cottage to be sure he was missing nothing, he plucked from the badger and the swan every maggot he could find. The dog had nothing to offer him. He worked hard, as all harvesters must. The cooler air and the activity refreshed him after his night of wakefulness and the morning’s torpor in front of the fire. Box after box he filled with maggots. The strange fruit tumbled from the badger’s jaws, from its nostrils and its eyes. He pummelled the belly of the beast, he milked a procession of maggots from the animal’s anus. They oozed from the discolouring wounds which the barbed wire had inflicted. The badger groaned under his massage, it gave up with a sigh all the busy blind miners which had been tunnelling the chambers of its obsolete body. He turned to the swan. Under each wing there was a rent where the harvest was easily plundered. By shaking the bird’s emaciated neck, he induced a spurting of maggots to rain into his containers and overflow among the logs. He unhooked the swan and swung it upside-down, its head stiffened in the position which the hook had dictated, while an orderly single file of maggots fell out. So he went on, returning the swan to its hook, giving a final hug to the badger’s deflated belly, pulping the bird’s breast, until he was satisfied that all was safely gathered in. There was no more. All the containers were writhing with the plump yellow larvae. The maggots were very ripe. Finally, he scooped handfuls of pupae from the sawdust on the floor of the woodshed, delighted to find that already there were brand-new flies sculling their wings among them, and he filled one container with a mess of pupae, sawdust and a rowdy assembly of the freshly hatched insects. Gently, careful to avoid any spillage, he carried the entire crop back to the cottage. With a reassuring glance at the mantelpiece, where nothing yet was different, he passed through the front room and into the kitchen, where he busied himself with sheets of cellophane to keep the harvest safe. He put the container of pupae and new flies near the warmth of the water tank. It was the afternoon. The woodshed was locked once more. Andrew returned to his armchair by the fireside, happy to have been busy, feeling better for the activity, satisfied to know that the kitchen was occupied by hundreds and hundreds of maggots and that there were plenty of mature pupae in the water-tank cupboard. How many of them would develop into flies before he vacated the cottage? Would he still be there to witness their fruition? The muttering of flies continued. He wondered whether the sound might stir those thousands of pulsing things to quicken into flies so that he’d have a great black cloud of them to release . . . He built up the fire with more coal, placed a tangle of ivy there. The scent of it filled the room. Sitting comfortably in his armchair with the blanket across his lap, he inhaled the perfume and closed his eyes.

  The warmth of the fire . . . The droning of the flies . . . The smell of roasting chestnuts . . . A November afternoon becoming dark and pressing closely to the windows of the cottage . . .

  This time, when he slipped into the abyss of sleep, he did not dream.

  The ivy saved him.

  One moment he was lost in a splendid oblivion, warm and relaxed and untroubled, and then he was wide awake again. He sprang up to rescue his feet from the hot coals and smouldering ivy which slipped from the fire, skidding across the hearth and on to the carpet. Having burned through one coil of its twisted limbs, the ivy had leaned and unbalanced, to tumble from the fireplace. He quickly reached for the tongs and returned the wood to the flames. Its perfume rose from the singed rug. As his eyes followed the spiralling plume of smoke, they were arrested at the mantelpiece. Only then, salvaged from the depths of sleep, did he remember the object of his vigil.

  The final stinkhorn was erect.

  Alone, unchallenged, it seemed to Andrew Pinkney to be the finest specimen of them all. The jar was only just big enough to contain it. The fungus had stretched up its thick, white column; its hooded head, honeycombed with the stipples of oozing oil-green and viscous black, was some six inches out of the earth. The masterpiece of the stinkhorn stood up: the forest’s unashamed caricature of the human phallus, at which the ancient peoples of the mountains had marvelled for century after century . . . the object of their wonder and witchcraft, a totem, a thing to be prized and loathed and feared, a pale mocking shape which taunted them with its unwholesome smells, which lured them to its cl
ammy clearings, which reeked with the buzzing of flies, which became the stuff of their folklore, their superstitions, even their primitive worship. The stinkhorn was woven into man’s dreams, ever since there were men on these hillsides. It hovered, dim and white and putrid, in their nightmares. It was a symbol of their manhood. Its very transience was essential to the magic, that it came and went so quickly, as a witch of the woods would flicker faintly and then vanish among the dark shadows. And here, on the mantelpiece, was the best of that coven of witches, the most handsome, the most potent, and the last of the year which had reared it.

  Stung into action by the realisation that he had only been alerted by an accident of the fire, Andrew bolted to the cupboard. He seized a jar which was so dense with flies that it had all but fallen silent, with the insects packed closely together and hardly able to move. He dashed back to the hearth and put down the jar of flies on the mantelpiece. Then, breathing deeply, trying to steady himself, determined that no clumsiness should spoil his final chance, he picked up the stinkhorn. It swayed dangerously. ‘Christ, oh Christ! Be careful!’ he heard himself grunting, his teeth clenched, for now he saw how fragile the thing really was and how top-heavy in the shallow soil. No wonder it was over so fast, this fine erection, no wonder it was so easily unmanned . . . It was made of nothing but frail tissue . . . there was no blood in it, no gristle. It was all a show! It made a spectacular, arrogant entry, it stood up straight and tall, but there was nothing to it! Any blundering shrew which brushed against it in the forest would destroy it in an instant . . . It made a grand showing for an hour or so, only to be quickly demolished by flies. Like all ghosts, there was no substance to it.

  He unscrewed the jar. The pungency of dead meat hit him, just as it did in the woodshed. As gently as he could, he knelt and placed the open jar on the hearth. He stretched up and took the jar of flies. Kneeling there in the firelight, with the two jars before him, he was the priest at some mystic sacrifice, bowing to the offerings which he laid on the altar. The jars gleamed with dancing flames. They shone with golden sparks. In one of them, one half of an equation which Andrew had been trying to juggle for weeks, a host of flies glinted blue and green and glistening black. In the other, the other half of the equation, the stinkhorn was a white candle, its flame oozing. Andrew slowly peeled back the cellophane skin which imprisoned the flies. They were stupid from the crush. Before they could untangle themselves and spin upwards from the jar, he tipped it gradually over the head of the fungus. He held his breath. The room was silent, save for the whisper of the flames. The first few insects dropped from one jar into the other. More followed, grappling together like schoolboys. With his finger, Andrew persuaded more and more to tumble around the stinkhorn, until the soil from which the egg had thrust the phallus was deep with flies. He swiftly screwed the lid on to that jar, he covered the other jar with cellophane. Still kneeling there, his golden head alight with the flicker of the fire, he trembled to see how his equation balanced.

  Slowly, clumsily, as though they were awakening from a long sleep, the flies around the base of the stinkhorn separated one from another. They tested their brand-new wings. First one, then a few more, started to scale the sheer walls of glass. Higher and higher they climbed, half-flying, half-crawling. Yes, there was something which drew them on, something which told them to quit that bed of warm moist earth and strive towards the top of the jar. When the first fly spun away from the glass, dizzily crossed that airspace which was so trivial for the fly and so important to Andrew, when it landed and stuck on the stinkhorn’s head, Andrew rose from his knees with a great shout of excitement. A second fly followed. A third, a fourth, a fifth, and each time he bellowed. Until the head of the stinkhorn was completely hidden by a cluster of flies, gorging themselves on the slimy seed.

  His elation was short-lived. It collapsed like a punctured lung. The shouts stuck in his throat.

  At the peak of his exhilaration, Andrew was overcome by a feeling of awful loneliness. For a few weeks he had lived alone, with Phoebe his only company, and never felt lonely. Now he was bursting with something to tell somebody, to show somebody, he needed someone with whom to share his excitement. There was no one.

  The darkness and the sheer weight of that mountain which loomed behind the cottage seemed to bear him down, to crush him into nothing but a speck. The night folded around him, to squeeze the life from his body. He felt as though he were shrivelling to nothing, as the slug had shrivelled, as the stinkhorn would inevitably shrivel. Phoebe was gone. There was Andrew Pinkney, and nobody else on the whole of that hillside, not another human soul with whom to share his sense of achievement, no one to hold close and feel warm against the dampness and chill of that benighted place . . . He stood at the hearth, numb. So intense was the realisation of his loneliness, that all he could think to do was to pick up the key to the woodshed and to run out there with his torch. He fumbled with the padlock. Throwing open the door, he stared despairingly about him and flashed the light from the floor to the rafters. No one else, just the man, alone and very lonely, so lonely that he had no alternative but to share his moment of joy with the three dead beasts in the woodshed . . . a dead badger, upside-down on a meat-hook, grinning; a dead swan, its throat pierced by a meat-hook; the broken remains of a dead dog, with a meat-hook through its belly. Jesus . . . this was all the company he could find in the shadow of the mountain that night . . . ! He put down the torch and covered his face with his hands. In the beam of light which illuminated the interior of the shrine, watched by the three silent, stinking, dead things, he sobbed until his chest ached, until his big soft face was streaming with tears.

  When he could cry no more, he wiped his eyes and came out of the woodshed. There was no solace to be found there. Locking the door, he returned to the cottage, where the flies stuck stupidly to the remains of their feast. Tomorrow he could go home, he thought with a massive sigh of relief. Dirty, tired, feeling quite hollow, as though every last part of the pith had been cut out of his body, he curled up on the sofa with his blanket and sank into the quicksands of sleep.

  The shadow of the stinkhorn flickered faintly in his head . . .

  *

  That feeling a small boy has when he awakes in the spartan featurelessness of a boarding-school dormitory, when he comes to consciousness and remembers that this is the last morning of term, that within hours he’ll return to all that is familiar and warm at home . . . ! Something very like that indescribably lovely sensation filled Andrew’s heart when he next opened his eyes and stared around the room. Home! Yes, this day he’d go home, to the civilisation and sense and routine of Sussex, his guilt expiated by the events of his weeks in Wales! With the same eagerness he had felt as that boarding-school boy, unable to stay in bed a moment longer, he unwound himself from the blanket and stood up. As though in celebration of the occasion, the morning sent a bouquet of warm sunlight on to the hillside opposite the cottage, picking out an emerald meadow studded with a flock of clean, white sheep. Splendid! he thought. So there really was a spark of brightness in that dismal valley, if only on the day he’d chosen for his departure. It cheered him quite disproportionately to the actual warmth of the morning, for he suddenly felt that his breast could burst with happiness. He grimaced guiltily at the sight of Phoebe’s empty basket, wiped her from his mind. Glowing like a schoolboy in anticipation of his release, he began his preparations to leave.

  He switched on the immersion heater, which gave him an hour before there would be water for a bath. Hurriedly dressing, he went to the car, which had been so little used over the past month, and drove it as close to the cottage as he could. The track was very slippery, so the wheels spun and churned in the mud, but he managed to move the vehicle nearer so that packing it with his few belongings would be easier. Already he felt himself returning to normality, before he had even left the place. The shreds of cool sunshine and the activity of organising his departure made the cobwebs drop away from him. He thrilled at the weight of his g
lasses, comfortable and heavy on the bridge of his nose. Simply getting in and out of the car, the smell of the upholstery, reminded him of the tidy life which beckoned him back. In the cottage, he folded his clothes and packed them into his suitcase, looking forward very much to washing everything thoroughly when he arrived home, anticipating the scent of freshly laundered shirts and the crispness of the smart suits he wore in the office. On impulse, he went to the bathroom with a pair of scissors, where, in front of the mirror, he snipped away the heavy locks of golden hair which had encumbered his brow. The curls fell from around his ears until the sink was sprinkled with cuttings. Better and better! he thought. He wanted to cast off the shabbiness, the scruffiness, the mould which clung to him, and be renewed to the twentieth century. How could he have lived like this? How could he have behaved as he had done? He wanted to shrug off the spell which the country had cast on him.

  Keeping out a set of clean clothes, he carried his case to the car. He paused to wonder what he should do with Phoebe’s­ basket and with the spoiled pictures. For the time being, his priority was to clear the cottage so that he could give it a good clean before he left, so he brought the basket and the pictures out and laid them on the short grass by the woodshed. He tried to ignore the smell which filtered to him from the shed; all that was a part of the aberration of his stay in Wales, something soon to be erased from his memory. He shut out the stink from his nostrils. He carried the plastic containers from the cottage, for how could he clean the place and leave it presentable for his employer’s next visit when every space was cluttered with maggots? In fact, many of the pupae, so ripe when he had harvested them, were already changed to flies which hurled themselves loudly on the cellophane skins. He shuddered, feeling the boxes vibrating in his hands with the turmoil of the big black flies. He left them all near the woodshed, near Phoebe’s basket and the washed-out watercolours. For the rest of the morning, postponing his bath until he was satisfied, he attacked each room of the cottage in turn with sponge, hot water, disinfectant, duster and vacuum cleaner. He spent a long time on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floors of the kitchen and bathroom, he emptied the ashes from the grate. Certainly the place would be better for his visit. He was determined to leave it cleaner than he had found it.