Pregnant with something inhuman and locked in a basement where nobody could hear me or find me. I hadn't really thought about my circumstances with self-honesty. I had chosen to be entirely myself and ignore my surroundings. I had to, just to hear myself think with all of the horrified screaming and nightmarish and mind breaking laughter of mad women.

Asian girls are good for 'traditional marriage', according to the advertisements. I come from a most traditional family; a family with a tradition of being very poor. I do know where I come from though; a long line of arranged marriages and shameful scandals. I was a good girl though; I had always used good manners and spoke the truth. Those were my ways.

I told my sister that the arranged marriage to Professor Thadeus Crispus was more than a little good for our family. I promised her I would be as happy with him as I was with her. We spent that afternoon making daisy chains and I realized I would never see her again. In our letters, Thadeus had made it clear I could not 'have the in-laws move in with us' to his house. I would live there without my family, belonging to him, essentially. It seemed unAmerican.

I thought about those moments as I sat alone in the darkness of my padded cell in his basement. I was the sixth of his young mailorder brides. He had no interest in what a husband should be interested in. Instead, he had locked all of us up in his basement. It was hardly the worst of what he had done to all of us. He hadn't touched us though, he simply wasn't a normal man. What he lusted for was unnatural and horrible.

I could feel it growing inside of my womb. The other girls were much further along in their gestations. Sung was already at eleven months of pregnancy when I had arrived. I wondered if she was still alive, still pregnant. It was unclear to me why he had shown them all to me. Perhaps my submissiveness and openminded approach had him off guard. It was when I began to scream and crawl away from him and my eyes were filled with swirling terror of him that he decided to lock me in my cage.

There were things in jars. We were not his first six brides. He had 'married' five before us and they had given birth to the things in the jars. I had seen those things and I had seen the five places where he had made rectangular cuts into the concrete floor of his basement. He had buried the mothers of those things in unmarked graves under his home. It was moments after all of that became obvious to me that I had panicked and lost my composure.

He had a laboratory in his home and he kept us in his basement in cells where there were graves and a museum of dead things kept in jars and a birthing room splattered in bloodstains.

I thought endlessly of the birthing room. It was a table with leg straps under a light. Plastic sheets made up its four walls and they all had brown splatter marks on them, bloodstains. A drain in the floor had a brown ring and the light and fan made the plastic sheets move and shimmer evilly and silently, waiting for another.

I sat there in my thoughts as my mind worked over the horror of my reality. The other girls had all gone mad, singing, laughing, screaming. It was a mad house of young women locked up in the darkness and pregnant with inhuman things. I stayed sane because I wanted to and because I realized that I was already insane just because I wanted to be sane in such a nightmare. Who would suffer great agony when the painkiller is a choice? My mind could not break because my madness was to not let it go. I stayed there and dwelt on every single moment of the Hells I had to go through.

What he was making were not entirely human and not entirely something inhuman. They were things made from their mothers' bodies and his blood and the blood of animals he wanted to recombine his DNA with. He was making his own species, playing god, becoming the father of a new animal. He said they would replace humans and they would be immortal and immune to disease and unhappiness. He called us all goddesses and told us our sacrifice was a noble one.

My options were to accept all of this and go deeper, perhaps finding a bottom, or I could swim back up towards the light. Except there was no light.

I learned the rest as I thought of his few words to me and from what I witnessed and experienced. I knew the thing inside me. I knew that my husband was not a liar and in his craft he was not blundering. His madness was the evil that was required to use eleven brides to birth monsters for him; even if the monsters were his children.

I found my door open and I walked out and sat at the table with him and we drank tea and he told me I was very beautiful. I would be the mother of the New Ones. He was certain it would be me and he was very proud of me.

"I am a virgin mother." I pointed out quietly. Those words pleased him very much and he smiled. From then on I was allowed to wander around the basement out of my cell. I used my freedom to get exercise and to remain in better health. I knew he had me under surveillance and so I made no plans of effort to escape. I was sure he could do more than use a needle on a girl.

I was right to know this. Someone investigated him: a delivery of packages for our pregnancy needs had gotten the attention of the route driver. This person had assumed the role of heroic investigator and snooped too deeply into Dr. Crispy's affairs, only to wind up breaking in. Apparently, a booby trap of some kind had killed the investigator. I watched as my husband buried the body in his basement next to his five brides. When the concrete was cut there was a smell from the other graves. I made it back to my padded cell before I was sick from the smell.

The light from the digging was blocked by his silhouette in the doorway. I trembled and apologized.

That is when he explained that the intruder was someone he had found dead, trying to burglarize his laboratory. He had several booby traps for such a purpose and he later showed them to me. He mentioned that there was a secret entrance to the basement and even a second basement that was empty. He also pointed out that the delivery driver was inevitable and that he was expecting to be investigated. Unfortunately for his brides there was no real evidence of our existence because he had not legally married any of us under a real name.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"I work in a genetics lab and had to steal all of this equipment. Some of it is quite heavy. You would never guess what my real job is or why it was so easy to deliver all this stuff to my own home." He concluded.

"You are too smart." I smiled weakly after all my vomiting.

"Thanks. You are my favorite, Song Yu. You are such a good girl." He smiled and left me there.

He had to get rid of some things, the vehicle of the intruder, other stuff. He had left the door to the basement open. I knew better.

I laid down and got some rest. When he came home he found me asleep. I was gently woken up.

"You didn't try to escape?" He realized.

"Escape? No husband, I am faithful. I honor my family's agreement with you and everything I said I would do in my letters." I replied.

"You're insane." He muttered absently, almost a whisper. He was fascinated by my calmness.

"I just want to have the last of my life be what I had wanted. I cannot pretend, but I can be myself." I articulated neatly. I had practiced a conversation with him in my thoughts more than twenty thousand times. It was not difficult after so much rehearsal.

"You will not betray me?" He agreed.

"It is not my way." I swore. From then on, I was allowed upstairs and when the police were looking for the delivery driver and showed up, I was home. They told me that the person had complained to the police about the many pregnancy supplies and the weirdness of it and then had gone missing. I told them the supplies were for me and my happy pregnancy. When my husband reviewed the surveillance, he was pleased with me for lying to the police.

"You lied to the police so convincingly. I knew you could be a liar, but your actions show you truly are honest with me." He decided.

In my heart I knew there was nothing the police could do to help me or the other brides. They could bring Dr. Crispy to justice, but we stood no chance without his care and his serums. The monsters inside us would eat us alive from the inside out without his intervention. The animals he had chosen to recombine his DNA with were all cannibals to their mothers, a trait he had selected on-purpose for the New Ones. It was something I knew because he had mentioned it several times without saying specifically what sort of chimeras were brewing inside of us. I only understood that they had to be specially sedated once a week, mostly through injections, but sometimes he made changes to our diet to keep us healthy. I doubted any attempt to abort the creatures would be a safe option and so we were only going to live until it was time to give birth. It took about a year for the full gestation of a New One. That was our fate, unless something was to change.

"I have accepted my fate. This is my life, here with you and your purpose." I said.

"You do not think escape is possible?" He shrugged at me.

"I cannot escape from what is inside of me." I decided. "And besides, out there I am a victim. Here, I am a goddess."

"I see." Dr. Crispy thought I was very amusing and smiled warmly. From then on, he increased my comfort and took better care of me. I even noticed that he made efforts to distance himself from me. He was growing fond of me and my attitude towards my situation.

The newer brides needed care and for a while he showed me how to administer the serums and monitor their diets. I was a fast learner and while my role was to assist him, I learned all I could. Later I was too pregnant to assist newly pregnant girls, so I retired from helping him care for them. He was pleased with me, and I seemed more than resigned to him, I seemed content with my fate.

I did want justice, however. What he had done to me, and the other girls, was entirely monstrous. I had become resigned to my fate, cold and numb to it. Any thought of survival, any whisper of a dream that I might live and become myself again, only brought terror into my heart. There was an image of me on a shelf somewhere that my family could look at. I could not be her ever again. The thought of getting out alive was the thought that frightened me more than the impending day I was to go to the birthing room.

As my pregnancy advanced, however, my thoughts of giving birth in agony to a monster and dying, did scare me. I had heard the other girls before me down there in the basement. They began to give birth to New Ones. The first one kept me awake for hours with her screaming, which I could hear despite the sound proofing. Later on he had to cut concrete and dug another grave down there. The next brides to give birth were the same. I never got used to it.

Each one dying down there was ahead of me and one less. There were two and then there were none. I was next and the horror and lingering terror mingled with the agony of the pregnancy's final phases. I had premature labor several times. I was able to get up, somehow, and follow the sound of cooing into the nursery.

"Three survivors, months old." The strange version of Dr. Crispy sat there with his children. I stared at them. At him.

I couldn't scream because I would explode. My eyes couldn't look away because I was dreaming. My heart couldn't beat because I no longer wished to remain a living creature, alive on earth. I beheld the horror-fruit of his work.

I turned and went back down to the living room and crawled into the empty fireplace. It felt like the whole world was shaking. The shadows had become living things, speaking in whispers, saying: "This is always the way."

And I went into the darkness by turning around from where I stood in my thoughts. For a strange night I became the goddess of a New One, the mother of a daemonic-thing. I made the unnatural natural and I survived. I performed a miracle.

For that, Dr. Crispy worshiped me. When I stood in my blanket of shadows, I was afraid, and I was fear. I trembled and reached out and touched his kneeling forehead with one finger. Inside I was screaming in unending dread if my own lingering presence, the girl I was before, still part of me, trapped in the Hells of Dr. Crispy. There was a deathly light in her eyes, the source of my own insanity, the screaming, laughing, singing and mad version of me. The light exploded out of me, as my voice, my will against him. Dr. Crispy fell backwards. Behind him were the New Ones as they hungered for the flesh they came from. It was their nature.

I could only laugh as they tore him apart. Somehow, I found the little ones to be adorable in their ferocity as they played with their daddy. When they were satisfied, they went to their beds and slept, their bloody claws resting on full bellies and bloodied lips curled in smiles. I knew the remains would last them a while, there was plenty to eat in the nursery.

My greatest fear had become a reality. I had survived. My child and the others were in there. Monsters.

I could not do it alone, nor should I have. I had others who were the same as me, who needed my help. I considered them to be mine, my responsibility, my needed-help in the darkness ahead.

I went downstairs and opened up the cells of the new girls, his newest brides. I took them both upstairs and sat them down. Both of them good girls.

"So beautiful are you. I am so proud of you both to sit so poised after what you have gone through." I told them. They politely waited while I spoke and then each of them assured me, they knew their place. They would do nicely. I smiled for them and poured them some tea.