Barry had never been much of a thinker, but he was blond, fit, and handsome, with the prettiest storm-gray eyes. So when he proposed, I said yes. My parents passed away when I was young, and Barry’s couldn’t afford to fly, so we just signed some papers and Barry brought them to the courthouse. His single-minded insistence that we get pregnant right after getting married and moving into a new house was a little surprising, as he hadn’t mentioned wanting kids before. I suppose we hadn’t talked about those things much.

Surprisingly, I did get pregnant sometime within the first few weeks of our marriage. I was happy. When I told Barry, he was ecstatic. He was also very supportive, fetching everything for me and cooking and cleaning when he got home from work.

Shortly after he left for his job at the hospital in the mornings, I would start to hear banging sounds coming from the basement. The door was locked, and anyway, the basement steps were steep and I didn’t want to risk them if I didn’t have to. I sent Barry down to investigate when he got home, and after checking, he assured me it was just the pipes making noises. He told me the water heater was doing its programmed flushing, and then he went down and flushed it to show me it made the same noises, which it did.

Barry’s friend, Dr. Gene, was an OB/GYN he knew from school, so we saw him. He didn’t do much aside from conducting an ultrasound every few weeks. The image on the monitor was always a little hard to decipher but Dr. Gene always printed out a photo for me and circled the baby so that I could hang it on the fridge at home. At six weeks, I heard the baby’s quick and thumping heartbeat.

I had almost none of the traditional “side effects” of pregnancy. I never felt sick, I ate and slept normally, and even as my body grew, I managed to stay comfortable. Maybe it helped that I only left the house for appointments. Barry handled everything else.

39 weeks in, I felt my first contraction. I had no real birth plan in place, but had assumed that when the time came, we would call our doctor and go to the hospital in our neighboring town. But when I told Barry to call Dr. Gene, Barry informed me his parents were coming to visit. I protested that now wasn’t the best time to meet his parents, who didn’t even come to the wedding. Barry just said they were already on the way.

Barry’s parents arrived just a few minutes later. They were all smiles, gushing over the size of my belly and the glow of my skin, which irked me. Barry bounced around with nervous energy as he got drinks for everyone, but seemed to relax once we were all seated.

I was about to impatiently ask when we should get the doctor on the phone when I started to get sleepy. Barry saw me nodding off and smiled at me.

“Let’s get started,” said Barry’s dad.

Wait, what? I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move.

Barry picked me up with surprising ease and carried me out the front door. His parents followed close behind. He carried me around the side of the house, and I noticed the grass had been worn away in a path from the front door around the corner, to the cellar door in the back. I knew then that Barry had walked that path every morning when he told me he was going to work and every evening right before he walked in the front door.

Barry carried me down into the cellar, and I saw what all the banging noises had been. A chair, not unlike the chair at the OB/GYN, was in the middle of the room, and all around the chair were interconnected, zig-zagging copper pipes leading to about a dozen metal canisters, each the size of a beer keg.

Barry put me in the chair and strapped me to it, which felt redundant since I couldn’t lift a finger. I looked down past my swollen belly and between my legs as Barry and his parents started to sag. Then they reached up to their heads and started ripping their scalps open. They stepped out of their skin as it sloughed onto the floor, revealing large bodies unlike anything I had seen before. Gray appendages stuck out of seemingly random places all over their large gray and pink bodies, swaying in the air like tree branches.

One of them–I could no longer tell which was which–flipped a switch on one of the metal canisters, and all around me, machinery chugged to life. Green gas sprayed into my face from one of the tubes, and the rest emitted gases of various colors and temperatures to between my legs in the stirrups. I smelled the salt and brine of the ocean.

I felt an intense squeeze in my belly, but the pressure didn’t release like my other contractions. I looked down to see a gray appendage reaching out from between my legs. It was soon joined by another one, and then another, and another, flailing in the air, wrapping around my legs, coiling with each other. I willed myself to wake up, or if I was awake, to pass out. No such luck. I watched as the appendages scrambled for purchase on the chair and then pulled, the creature inside me pressing itself through my body and tearing my flesh as it went. I felt, more than heard, the back of my body give out as my tailbone cracked. A hideous scream pierced the air. It came from between my legs. A large, gray form–too large–slumped out of me and onto the floor. It stood up and towered over me. The baby I was going to name Jacob.

The four figures stood there. I wanted to banish them from the room, from the universe, but I still had no control of my body. I felt another burning pain arise between my legs, and looked down in horror to see another gray appendage reaching out of me, watched another being emerge, watched it join the others.

I finally lost consciousness then.

When I woke up some time later, I was in the basement in the same chair, but all the pipes and machinery were gone. The straps around my wrists and ankles had been removed. The main thing I noticed was the pain in my body. I was surprised to be alive. Eventually, I noticed that I was moving my hands and arms as I took stock of my condition. Without the horror and adrenaline of what had just happened, my body focused entirely on the pain that I felt.

Amazingly, I could walk. With great effort and suffering. It took what felt like hours, but I finally made it out of the cellar and into the house. I noticed that every sign of Barry was gone.

I called the police, but aside from my trauma, I had no evidence of anything. Once I was discharged from the hospital, I took the police to the OB/GYN, but it was just an empty storefront in a mostly empty strip mall. No wedding certificate had been filed. It was like my life after meeting Barry had never happened. Except I can never have children. Human children. I still shudder at the thought.

It took me years to summon the courage to write this, and I only did it in case someone can help me find them. I brought these monsters into this world, now I will take them out.

Are you pregnant? Are any of your friends? Have you ever met a Dr. Gene? Please tell me. I have to find them.