The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  The inside of the shrine was heavy with the perfume. It maddened the flies. It obliterated the stench of the dead things.

  Standing at the open door, he glanced away to the bonfires in the further darkness. People were dancing about them, holding flaming torches. There was the fizzing of sparklers as children whirled them round and round and round, the exhilarating whoosh of rockets which burst into sparks before cascading in glorious colours back to earth, all the wonderful paraphernalia of an event which the children loved, a celebration whose focus was the cremation of the effigy of a man . . . Poor kids! thought Andrew Pinkney. Is that what you call a bonfire? With a dummy made out of laddered tights stuffed with newspaper, an old gardening jacket, a plastic mask bought from a novelty store? A spineless rag-doll which the first flames will shrivel to nothing? You poor little bastards! Now, if you’d come over to this side of the valley, to Cockerel Cottage, you’d see a real witch burning . . . !

  He struck a match and tossed it into the woodshed.

  He was driven backwards by an explosion of flame. The floor of the shed seemed to launch a single blast of fire which filled every inch of the space, from wall to wall, right up to the rafters, so that the little outhouse became a capsule of intense white heat. The force of the flame was not dissipated by burning into the night sky, none of the heat was wasted as it was wasted from those other fires. Imprisoned by the confines of the woodshed, the blast fed on itself. One solid ball of fire swelled to fill the room, and then it raged more powerfully to escape. Andrew threw up his arms to protect his face from the heat, a sledgehammer of heat and brilliant white light which struck him from the open door, he saw the basket writhe and disappear while shreds of the blankets and his jacket spun up and around in the turmoil of flame. The logs, carefully stacked so that the air could move freely among them, flared fast as their bark curled and frizzled like frying bacon, and this became the unquenchable bed of the blaze to enflame everything above it. In a second, the four dead things were four torches, their shapes still quite separate and clearly defined, the white flames running over them and through them to find more of the fuel they craved. A pall of stinking black smoke rolled from the door, the girl’s boots melted and dripping to burst into orange flames. The badger was a bubble of fire which broke there and then with a tearing of swollen flesh. It fell from its hook and was gone. The swan revelled in this new moment of glory, holding its head up to let the fire devour its wings, hanging white and holy, like a martyred saint. It dropped from its hook. The dog was nothing, blistered and shrivelled, a dead thing which slithered off the

  hook.

  Only the girl remained. And what a Guy Fawkes she was! Without her boots, now that they were gone in a smother of black smoke, she was embraced by the fire. Her clothes slipped from her and blew about the woodshed like demented bats, the cinders of rags tossed by the heat. Only for a moment her exposed skin was as white as Andrew had once seen it . . . then it was as black as he had smeared it. The transformation was uncanny, so that he walked dumbly closer to the fire to watch it more intently, to stand in the full blast of the heat and gape with astonishment Yes, it was the same trick! The trick of Hallowe’en played again on Guy Fawkes Night! First she was white, long and smooth and white as he’d undressed her in the firelight, and then she was black, distorted and writhing and black as he’d daubed her with wet soot! But this time, her skin bubbled. Flies struggled from her mouth, only to ignite into brilliant golden sparks. Hundreds of them, thousands of them burst from her into their individual pinprick of fire which then was gone for ever, like the distant implosion of a dying star . . . The flames sprang to her and fell away, recoiling with pieces of blackened stuff. She was a torch. She shivered with a coat of white fire. It covered her black body. And when her face and hair became one inseparable mass, when she exhaled a long plume of flame from between her lipless teeth, she slipped from her hook, consumed by the insatiable flames. Gone. The kennel-maid, the little witch-bitch, the woodwitch was gone.

  Still the woodshed blazed. There was a great deal of timber, heated to such a pitch by the constraints of the fire which turned back on itself and fed itself to a greater frenzy, so that there was nothing the furnace could not consume. The rafters burned through. All the slates of the dilapidated roof crashed down. No longer confined, the fire roared up towards the black sky with a torrent of sparks. Across the valley, there were people who glanced over to see this blaze which was funnelled higher than theirs, people who admired it and wondered what kind of a Guy had been burned on it. Their effigies were gone. Nothing was left but a few cinders. And soon, as the logs of birch and oak and rowan continued to burn, folding themselves inwards as the stacks collapsed to engulf everything which had fallen among them, nothing remained of the four unlikely Guys which had hung on their hooks in the woodshed. Nothing. The four dead things were gone. Claws and bone, nails and even teeth . . . Nothing was left in the core of that fire.

  In a daze at the dazzle, his nostrils scorched by the blast and by the diminishing stench, Andrew Pinkney stepped back from the relics of the shrine of the stinkhorn.

  *

  He sat in his car and watched the fire die down. It subsided, contained within the stone walls, but still it burned fiercely, wasting none of its energy, concentrating its heat inward and gorging on itself. Cocooned in the darkness, he only heard the random crackle of distant fireworks. The brightness of the flames was the only light, for the mountainside and its blanket of the forest rose sheer before him, merging into a blue-black sky. He saw the glow of the fire diminish, until he knew that nothing but a few embers were bedding down and beginning to cool. Then he started the car.

  As ever, there was a smooth wave of shallow water running across the river bridge. In the beam of his headlamps, it slid like silk, an inch or two deep. Glad of the wellington boots, he got out of the car and opened the gate, drove forward a little and stopped on the bridge while he walked back to shut the gate again. He paused there, with the water whispering past the wheels of the car, he stood in the water and felt its gentle pressure on his boots. Taking off his glasses, he closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fingertips. The blaze continued to burn inside his head, a flickering orb of fire in the dark cavern of his mind . . . And what else? There was something else. Screwing his eyes more tightly shut, he found that the image of the burning woodshed and its four torches became focused into the single white column of the stinkhorn. Yes, it was still there . . . How long would he be haunted? Would he ever shake off the ghost of the woodwitch?

  He opened his eyes. High on the hillside, a fading pinpoint of light marked the end of the fire. Indeed, as he watched, it vanished, swallowed by the enveloping darkness of the night. The spark disappeared. And the effect of its disappearance was to obliterate every trace of his visit to Cockerel Cottage. If his mind were a slate on which a record of his stay had been inscribed, then it was wiped clean and blank by the sudden extinction of that spark. There was only blackness where the cottage, the woodshed, the dead things had been . . . But when he sat in the car and ran his tongue around his lips, he could still taste the final kisses of the kennel-maid. From his pocket he took a clean white handkerchief, wiping his mouth over and over and over again, until the handkerchief was smeared with blood. Once more he squeezed shut his eyes . . . There shimmered the spectre of the stinkhorn. So he would carry it home with him after all.

  He slammed the car door. From the shadows of the trees, disturbed by the sudden sound, the heron beat heavily towards the bridge. The big grey bird flapped upstream and was illuminated briefly by the headlamps. There, it jinked and swerved before it was gone into the darkness, for it was enmeshed in a nightmare it could never throw off, haunted by a ghost it would never exorcise.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen Gregory (b. 1952) was born in Derby, England, and earned a degree in law from the University of London. He worked as a teacher for ten years in various places, including Wales, Algeria, and Sudan, before moving to
the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales to write his first novel, The Cormorant (1986), which won Britain’s prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and drew comparisons to Poe. The book was also adapted for film as a BBC production starring Ralph Fiennes. Two more novels, both set in Wales, followed: The Woodwitch (1988) and The Blood of Angels (1994). His work attracted the notice of Oscar-winning director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), and he spent a year in Hollywood working on stories and scripts. More recently, he has published The Perils and Dangers of this Night (2008) and The Waking That Kills (2013). His new book, Wakening the Crow, was published by Solaris in November 2014.