In the Woods

by Simon Whitechapel

As the shreds of a plumage of gold on the ground
   The sun-flakes by multitudes lie...

A.C. Swinburne, “The Palace of Pan” (IX 1893).

The only thing he did not like was its full scientific name. The generic Circaea was well enough, but the specific lutetiana was prosaic even in its obscurity. “Parisian flower of Circe”. It was an unequal yoking. But one of its common names in French was beautiful: l’Enchanteresse. As he turned off and descended the wood-divided earth stair that led to the tree-shaded path to the river, he wondered again how he would change the scientific name if he could. Circaea nigromantica? Circaea sciophila? Circaea in-sylvis? He grunted. Where had that come from? “The Circean flower in-the-woods”. But not a bad name, after all. He reached the foot of the stair and turned towards the lefthand verge where the enchanter’s nightshade grew, its tiny white flowers star-like in the gloom, forked with those double yellow stamen, like snake-tongues or wands. But a new stand of nightshade had grown since he was last here: on the right, flanked by three or four Stachys sylvatica, hedge woundwort, with livid purple flowers, like small, half-healed wounds cut into the air.

Not one of his favorites. He sniffed. He could smell the odd, thick scent of its leaves. Enchanter’s nightshade had no smell. Another attraction for him, in an inverse way. That which does not smell cannot disappoint. He passed the woundwort and bent to the nightshade, smiling as though he greeted an old friend. Which it was, after its fashion. An old friend unchanged by age, fresh now as it had been in his youth. Behind him the church-clock began to strike the quarter-hour for the top of the hill and he swore softly, looking at his watch again. It was slow and he would be late if he did not return now. But it was as he turned from the new stand of nightshade that he saw it lying on the earth between their slender green stems: a flower of monkshood, Aconitum napellus, instantly recognizable in its odd purple curves, but smaller than any monkshood he had ever seen before.

He turned back and reached between the flowers of enchanter’s nightshade to pick it up, making them shake and tremble. When his fingers touched the monkshood he grunted with surprise and jerked his hand back, for a dull shock had traveled up his arm, as though something had stung or electrified him. And the feel of the thing had been wrong. But now he sniffed. What was that piercingly sweet scent that had suddenly appeared? It seemed to be, yes, it was the nightshades, for it redoubled almost sickeningly as he bent nearer to them, reaching for the monkshood flower again. This time he felt no shock as he touched it and he lifted it from between the nightshades, relieved to straighten up from them, for the sweet scent was starting to make his head swim.

He held the monkshood on the palm of his hand, examining it closely. As he had thought, it was artificial, not a real flower, woven of some very fine silk and dyed to match the real thing. He looked at the ground where he had picked it up, wondering if there was anything else, but he didn’t have time: he really would be late if he did not hurry back up the hill. He dropped the flower into his pocket and turned towards the stair, stopping short a moment later. Where had this new path come from, leading directly towards the river and lined on left and right with glimmering stands of Circaea in-sylvis? No, of Circaea lutetiana. He looked at his watch and shrugged. He was late already: another five minutes would do no harm. The little silken monkshood in his pocket would be sufficient explanation, for he knew the vicar, at least, would appreciate its strangeness.

He set off down the path, walking briskly and passing almost through mists of the scent rising from the stands of nightshade. How had he never smelt it before? And why had he never seen it mentioned in his botanical texts? The path was curving, carrying him out of sight of the stair, and he looked back, touched for a moment by disquiet, then shook his head and carried on. In another minute he’d be at the river and could turn back, even run back. Arriving flushed and out of breath would add verisimilitude to his apologies. He’d smell the river any moment and was surprised that for once there was no noise of traffic in the wood. No, there had been, but there wasn’t now. Not since he set foot to this new path. Perhaps there’d been an accident, blocking the bridge over the river. Lucky for some.

The path was running straight now, and he glanced at his watch again. Surely he’d been walking a minute? But he couldn’t smell the river, only the mist of nightshade in the air, and he somehow had the impression that the wood stretched out much further ahead of him. It was gloomier than ever beneath the trees and what little light there was had altered, becoming almost lunar, he thought, looking up, as it filtered through the silvery underleaves. He began to walk faster, determined to reach the river before he turned back, but the path carried him serenely into the gloom between the stands of enchanter’s nightshade. The scent of them truly was making his head swim and all at once he had no recollection of whether he was walking to the river or returning from it. He stopped and turned in a circle, staring out between the trees. Stands of enchanter’s nightshade met his eye as far as he could see, their minute white flowers glimmering like stars in the gloom.

“Never seen so many,” he muttered to himself. Oh, he would have to turn back, there was no time to explore this new path. But had he turned back already? He looked up and down the path, trying to decide whether he had passed this way twice or that way. It was now that he saw the church, the tiny but precisely detailed church, lying just off the path at the end of its own little path amid a stand of nightshade. He shook his head, staggering a little as he walked towards it, forgetting that he was late in his astonishment. It had a graveyard too, he saw, stretching out behind it among the nightshade, and he could hear a bell tolling thin and silvery in its grey-bricked tower, which was twisted and ended in a point, like an animal horn. He reached the little side-path that led to it and went to his knees on the soft beaten earth, peering for its thousand tiny details. The script on the tombstones defeated his eye, but it did not seem to be English, or even in the Roman alphabet, and the church’s architecture struck him as paganesque or even diabolical, as though it subtly mocked the larger church atop the hill.

The tiny bell in the horn-like tower ceased to chime and he suddenly sneezed. Light had flickered through a side-door of the church — yes, the door was opening and the incense of some ceremony inside was wafting onto the night air. He accepted now that it was night: somehow the new path had carried him both in space and in time, granting him this mad vision. Tiny purple-robed figures were emerging from the church, lifting acridly burning torch-splinters, and he blinked in recognition, for they wore monkshade hoods like the one he carried in his pocket. He reached for it even as he realized he was watching was a funeral procession: a coffin as black as and no longer than a pod of vetch was being carried from the church, and his alerted eye darted to an open grave waiting amid the tombstones.

But the movement he made reaching for the hood in his pocket was his undoing. The purple-robed priests twittered thinly with awareness of his presence, their hoods tilting upward to survey him but revealing nothing of the tiny faces that must sit beneath them, he was somehow glad to see. The coffin was whisked back inside the church and the priests crowded after it. He might almost have smiled at their panic, had their movements not had nothing of alarm about them. Yes, nothing of alarm, for here they were crowding out again, with minute bows in their hands. He started to push himself off his knees, lifting a hand to protect his face as they notched and aimed, but he was too slow. One of the priests twittered a brief order and sparks of light leapt upward at him. His face and the back of his hand pricked and tingled in half-a-dozen places, but now he was on his feet, turning from the church and running, running, running.

He knew where he was now and what their poison would do to him if he let it work much longer in his veins. But he could defeat them: he was running towards the music that sounded to him from the river, passing through growing patches of moonlight as the woods thinned around him and the scent of enchanter’s nightshade faded in his nostrils. Running smoothly and eagerly, losing twenty years of fat and sloth, and there ahead of him, glowing on the river-bank, were his auditory saviours: the hundred white trumpets of a wholesome flower, Calystegia sepium, white bindweed, serenading the cool night air and watching moon with Mozartian grace. He trampled five or six of them as he crossed the bank to make his dive into the cleansed flesh of the river, sparked and splashed with waiting fish, but he could detect no lessening in their volume in the two or three moments of air left to him.