The HUM: The complete novel

by Michael Christopher Carter

  When, after the normal time for someone to answer a knock at the door, she hadn’t responded, the knock came again. She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say ‘come in’. It might be like a vampire in the films: unable to enter without an invitation.

  There was no more knocking, but worse than that, the handle began to move downwards, ready for the door to open. Carys flew across the room, determined not to meet her alien foe lying down.

  It had the effect that as Marco opened it a crack, and peeped cautiously and respectfully round the jam, she met him inches from his face.

  Relief, like a dip in a plunge pool after a sauna, giddied her and she was shocked to hear her own peals of laughter. Marco grinned back, certain she had expected him; that she’d heard his voice downstairs and known the footsteps on the stairs were his. Her greeting him face to face and laughing, to him, seemed like a good-natured joke.

  A few short moments of exchanged amused glances and they were falling about hilariously, propping one another up in their hysteria. It was natural for Marco from that easy standpoint to offer to pray with Carys, and she accepted gratefully.

  And then she felt well enough afterwards to accept his kind offer of a trip to the pub. Geraint and Diane smiled jubilantly as they watched the pair go. Their plan, which they both knew could easily have backfired, had paid off. Their daughter was back. For how long, they’d have to wait and see, but they were for now, grateful for small mercies.

  They walked into The Angel Inn, a large (probably the largest of Narberth’s half dozen or so public houses) white, Georgian looking building on the main Narberth high street, and tried to find a table.

  “Wow. It’s really busy in here,” Carys commented. She might not have agreed to come if she’d realised the crowd she’d be walking into.

  “Well, it is Friday night. It’s usually pretty busy,” Marco explained patiently. “What would you like to drink?”

  “Just a lemonade, thanks.” It wasn’t only her pregnancy which prevented her ordering something stronger. She was surprised at her desire to make a good Christian impression to the son of a Pastor.

  She felt a little foolish for this second point when Marco returned to the table with her lemonade and his pint of Double Dragon ale.

  “You’ve not been feeling too great, your Mam told me. Morning sickness, right?” Carys felt heat rise to her face, surprised Marco knew. She nodded confirmation whilst holding the straw of her lemonade between her slender fingers and rose petal lips. Marco couldn’t help but find her endearing with those big brown doe eyes and thick long lashes looking up at him from behind the drinking glass.

  Conversation flowed easily. Carys was relieved her confinement hadn’t lasted long enough to miss the coming Sunday, Narberth Christian Fellowship, morning worship. And when Marco officially invited her to come and see him play, it felt like a date (but with the rest of the church being present, a safe date.) She’d make sure she wore something attractive for this week’s Sunday outing though. The excitement was undeniable.

  Marco put her at her ease completely. He oozed confidence and charisma, yet suffered none of the cockiness so off-putting about the boys she used to know. Whilst his charm was undeniable, he made it clear, very clear, that his intentions toward her were honourable.

  Not that she wasn’t the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, she was to understand, but his holy values meant he was planning to wait until he was married to be intimate with a girl. She felt relaxed and safe.

  She didn’t know what the future held, and didn’t much want to think about it. But she thought she could enjoy being with Marco until her baby fears surfaced and ruined everything. ‘Stop it, Carys’ she berated. Things might turn out okay… somehow.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  What if..?

  Carys had a letter. Receiving it provoked within her, a nervous response; a fear that she’d been able to distance herself from for the past ten weeks.

  Things with Marco had developed. Not dramatically, but weekly or bi-weekly dates to the pub, out to eat, or to the cinema had proved very pleasant indeed.

  When he’d announced a solution to her further education dilemma, she’d opened her heart even further. Unable to be away from home with a new baby, she’d resigned herself to not furthering her education. But Marco had suggested she do something closer to home. She could be there for her baby, and have the support of her family on hand.

  As a result, she’d enrolled on an A-level Psychology (it seemed pertinent with her family history) course at Pembrokeshire College. It would give her an A-level, hopefully with decent grades, and a pathway into a degree course (also run from the college by Swansea University.)

  She had a lot to thank Marco for. He’d given her the strength to change her life. She wasn’t in love with him. She didn’t think so, anyway. Him being sworn to chastity meant their friendship could skirt harmlessly into the territory of mild flirtation without fear or expectation.

  The easy, relaxed feeling she’d become tentatively accustomed to was spoiled by the letter she held in her hand. At the top were the initials NHS, and the Welsh equivalent which looked bizarre even though she spoke quite a lot of Welsh. The address of Withybush Hospital and contact numbers, fax numbers and email were displayed as she would have expected. The reality of it shook her.

  The Hywel Dda National Health Trust were inviting her to have an Ultrasound scan to check everything was okay with the foetus growing inside her. She shuddered. Would everything be okay? Or would it all suddenly be the furthest from okay it could be?

  Carys had witnessed the process of an Ultrasound numerous times on television. They told you the sex of the baby and took all sorts of measurements to see if it was developing normally. Convinced her baby may be developing anything but normally, she gripped the letter harder, willing it to be okay.

  With a deep sigh, she resigned to a more positive outlook. Maybe the scan would reassure her everything was fine after all. Then, only her judgement, and memory, not to mention her sanity, would be in question!

  A further chill travelled down her spine as she imagined her parents, or even Marco inviting themselves along for moral support. She had to keep it secret. If she was going to learn her foetus has exceedingly large eyes in a huge skull, she wanted to hear it alone.

  She decided to lie to Diane and Geraint that the appointment was on a later date than it was. That way, they wouldn’t be tempted to chase it up, it being such a landmark in her gestation.

  Once she’d been, she could explain her reason for her lie was the genuine anxiety she had about the scan. She was sure they’d understand. Her mother had got away with all sorts of odd behaviour over the years down to her bipolar condition. Carys was sure that the stress of her pregnancy, conceived from appalling abuse, would be excuse enough for her.

  She hid the letter in her bedroom and adjusted the appointment date in her mind in advance of any questions. Tuesday, October the twenty third would be changed to Thursday the twenty fifth. With a cough to compose herself, she collected up her college books and scurried downstairs.

  Sitting at the kitchen table with a fresh coffee and various text books at her side, she hadn’t been working for long when she was joined by Diane, trying to sit quietly and enjoy a late breakfast. Her attempts at silence were excruciating. The noise of the chair being slowly scraped across the tiles instead of the usual pick up, clonk down manoeuvre was far more disturbing.

  Carys looked up from her reading to glare at the perpetrator. The sight of Diane’s pursed-lipped, raised-eyebrows expression, straining to be quiet, struck her as hilarious. They caught one another’s eye and cracked up. When she had recovered a little, Diane apologised for the disturbance, sat down in a normal fashion and proceeded to eat her cereal.

  “That’s okay. If I really needed privacy I’d work in my room. I wanted company. I’m a bit nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve had a letter. It’s my twelve week scan next week. I’m worrie
d there’ll be something wrong with the baby.”

  “Twelve weeks already eh?!” Diane looked thrilled. “Things might have changed, but I don’t think the first scan tests for abnormalities. It’s usually just a dating scan, I think. They’ll tell you when you’re due. Exciting!”

  Relief poured its calming oil on Carys. A dating scan; that was okay. She could carry on fooling herself for weeks before any ‘abnormalities’ might become apparent.

  Maybe she didn’t need to lie about the date of the appointment after all. It seemed a shame to deny the anxious grandmother-to-be. “Would you come with me?” Diane’s face lit up as she happily accepted.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world!” she beamed. She marked the real date of the scan appointment in her diary. After her breakfast and a little more chatting, she drifted off leaving Carys to her work.

  Carys was diligent with her A-level studies. Her Tutor, Professor Simpson, seemed pleased with her. She liked him too. He looked like how a professor should look: tall with a bald head, apart from above his ears, and spectacles perched on the end of his nose which he would peer over at the class from his desk.

  An incongruous part of his attire was his cowboy shirt and string tie, alluding to a different life outside of college.

  His enthusiasm for his subject was contagious and Carys seemed to have a real understanding of some of the more complicated conditions of mental health (surprise, surprise). The information from the course concerning her understanding of her Mother’s condition was enlightening.

  She was finding it particularly fascinating learning about ‘what was normal?’ According to the textbooks, ‘normal’ was a shifting parameter dependent on your geographical location and place in history. For example, she was shocked to learn, someone of her mother’s condition would have been locked away in an asylum fifty years ago. She would have joined thousands of others classified as schizophrenic, which was a word she thought she understood, but was surprised to find she was completely wrong.

  She’d supposed that twin, or multiple personality disorders depicted in films was accurate. She had often wondered why her mother’s diagnosis hadn’t featured the word as it seemed wholly appropriate, but the term schizophrenic in her books simply meant ‘mad’.

  It was a term out of favour for some time as the definition of ‘mad’ changed as well. Fifty years or more ago, very everyday things could have led to a mad, schizophrenic tag. Carys was alarmed to find out that she was guilty of one of them herself, or soon would be.

  Being an unmarried mother could have seen her classified as mad. Homosexuality was in the same category. Mad was classified as ‘behaviour which deviated from the normal behaviour of society’ (behaviour categorised by the same society!)

  Back then, you’d have to be crazy to be an unmarried mother, or a homosexual, or think you were Napoléon, or believe in UFO’s. Nowadays, she thought thankfully, many of the definitions had been revoked.

  Whilst some people in New Age circles could freely suggest they were the twentieth incarnation of Moses, and that Jesus Christ was their spirit guide; and others could talk quite happily about their fervent belief in all things extra-terrestrial, others were persecuted.

  The class had discussed how most people had a very scathing view of a certain ex-footballer who now was more famous for his talks on the presence of the illuminati. How the class had laughed.

  One definition they all agreed on was whether the person in question was coping in their society.

  David Icke’s views, whilst seen as ‘not normal,’ are not inconvenient. But could the David Ickes’ of this world, instead of being popular, have been turned into dribbling imbecile’s, the like of which Carys personally witnessed in hospital wards, if they’d been treated as mad instead of eccentric visionaries? (When Carys wrote these thoughts in an essay, she received an ‘A’ from a proud Professor Simpson.)

  Add to that, the mix of tranquillisers, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotic medications, and the previous generation’s psychotherapy and electric shock therapy, along with brutal frontal lobotomies, and it was no wonder the psychiatric wards were full of patients who became lifelong residents.

  Alternatively, could the poor patients in the mental wards have been world visionaries themselves, if they’d had the same views under different circumstances?

  Professor Simpson assured there was no right response. Any answer to the question of what defines mad is subjective, even today. And as he’d told them on day one of the course, Psychology is not a science, because all its conclusions are merely opinion. Granted, opinion often backed up by great research; but opinion all the same.

  Carys had liked that. It made her feel free. She felt so much better about her mother’s, and her own, mental health that it was worth attending simply for that. She doubted Marco had known quite how genius his suggestion of college had been, but Carys was eternally grateful.

  Her upcoming scan was unsurprisingly the subject of the family’s evening meal discussion. Carys had offered to cook. It was something she did as often as she could without appearing ungrateful to her mother’s limited repertoire. She excused it as wanting to take on some of the burden, and it was something she’d been looking forward to doing at Uni.

  Diane tended to pick at the offerings like Gordon Ramsey in one of his kitchen nightmares. It was hard not to take offence, but the irony helped. Tonight it was ‘Roman Lamb’: a recipe she’d found in one of her mum’s new cookbooks comprising lamb (in this case from the local Preseli Mountains), and a sauce made with anchovies.

  Diane struggled with its richness, whilst Geraint wolfed it down declaring it the tastiest food he’d ever eaten, then coughing and sharing a smile with his wife to say ‘I’m just encouraging our delicate daughter.’

  Leaving washing-up to her mum and dad, Carys took herself up to bed early for her college lectures tomorrow. Once under her duvet, she suddenly didn’t feel tired anymore. Grabbing the huge tome of her psychology course book she began reading.

  Re-reading line after line as her tired mind struggled to assimilate the long names and dates and theories, she knew she was wasting her time. It became most apparent when she woke herself by dropping the heavy book to the floor. Jolting awake, she expected her parents would come running in to see what the noise was.

  Sighing with relief at the silence, she put the books neatly on her bedside table and turned off light. Moonlight filtered through the curtains leaving the room in a soft glow. As her eyes became accustomed, they darted to things moving in ghostly ways: her cardigan thrown casually on her bedpost took on the shape of a child with long hair; her dressing gown hanging from the back of her door morphed into the grim reaper.

  It was only her imagination, but it unsettled her. Perhaps reopening her textbooks would be a good idea? Before reaching across and heaving them from the bedside table again, her mind drifted to topics she might read about. Suddenly, in her peripheral vision, she caught sight of movement. Her gaze shot to the cornice of the wardrobe and she stared in disbelief as the unmistakable repugnant legs of a huge house spider wriggled into view.

  She gawped in horror as the one spider turned into five.

  And then ten.

  And then hundreds, and thousands, of frantic legged monstrosities, cascading down the wardrobe like a hellish avalanche of wriggling revulsion.

  Reaching the floorboards, the rat-a-tat-a-tat of a million scurrying legs grew Carys’s terrified anticipation like a drum roll; the mass, tumbling over itself as they hurtled towards her on the bed. Clutching her sheets to her face with only her nose and eyes peeping out, she could barely breathe.

  Thousands and thousands of spiders still spilled over the top of the wardrobe. An unbearable unease gripped her, knowing she could no longer see the ones which had already reached the floor, obscured as they were by the foot of the bed. With nowhere to run, she paused in petrified anticipation for them to reach the top of the footboard and find their way onto her bed. Her poundin
g heart surged blood through her veins, sending tingles to every extremity. A scream poised in her mouth, waited for an order from her brain which would never come. Shaking her head, she knew they weren’t real. They couldn’t be

  Then they were there, surging over the bottom of her bed, thousands and thousands of horrible black bodies, their legs moving as only spiders’ legs can, onto the bedspread. As they tore towards her, she could contain her fear no longer and the scream bounced from every surface.

  As soon as the first spider reached her, it vanished. And then, in a pulse of dream erasing consciousness, a dispelling tremor flowed back, eradicating all of them until, rapidly, the room was back to normal.

  What was happening to her? She must be stressed with her pregnancy more than she realised; or perhaps it was the effect of her hormones. Whatever caused the hallucination had exhausted her, and she was finally ready to sleep. She gave one more nervous look around the room, and particularly at the top of the wardrobe, before cautiously laying her head on the pillow.

  Her chest slowed to normal breathing after a few minutes lying in tense silence. Sleep followed, but for only the briefest time. When she next awoke she had another terrible shock.

  She stirred to someone stroking her leg. Half-thoughts of Marco in her dreamy state made her smile.

  The rubbing became rougher and more urgent - like a child tap, tapping their mother, demanding attention. She became more and more alert until her eyes sprung open. Immediately, she wished they hadn’t.

  There, sitting at the foot of her bed, its skeletal fingers upon her leg, was an archetypical alien being.

  Hunched, expressionless, skin translucently pale and white, stroking her bare leg with its clammy, rough hand; it stared at her forever before indicating her stomach with a long bone-thin finger. Making noises like a cheap space toy, it shifted towards her.