My wife was preg/nant with 10 babies, and we rushed to the ER in her seventh month. I was blocked at the operating room doors, left with only my panic. As I listened to a nurse desperately counting the babies to nine, I heard the lead doctor shout, “What… that’s not a baby!”
It started as a miracle. It ended as something I still don’t have words for.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rivers,” said Dr. Ellison, his eyes wide behind his glasses. “You’re expecting ten babies.”
For a heartbeat, silence filled the room. Then my wife, Clara Rivers, laughed—a trembling, unbelieving laugh that cracked halfway through. “Ten?” she whispered. “That’s… impossible.”
My name is Nathan Rivers, and for years, my wife and I had lived in the shadow of heartbreak.
We’d tried everything—treatments, prayers, sleepless nights watching test results turn from hope to despair. Three miscarriages had nearly broken her. By the time she turned 38, we’d given up.
And then—without IVF, without planning—it happened. She was pregnant.
The scans confirmed it: ten heartbeats. Ten tiny flickers of light dancing across a monitor.
The news spread quickly through our small town of Lakeview, Indiana. The “Rivers Ten” became local celebrities overnight. Church groups held fundraisers. Neighbors dropped off baby clothes. Strangers sent letters calling our family a miracle from God.
But miracles, I’ve learned, can turn dark when you stare at them too closely.
Clara’s pregnancy was brutal. By her fifth month, she could barely walk. Her belly stretched to the point where her skin bruised in places. But worse were the nights. She’d wake up gasping, drenched in sweat, clutching her stomach.
“They’re moving too much,” she’d whisper. “All at once.”
I’d rub her back, whisper that it was just the babies kicking. But her eyes—haunted, terrified—told a different story.
“Nate,” she said one night, her voice shaking, “I think one of them isn’t like the others.”
I froze. “What do you mean?”
She looked down at her belly, her fingers tracing the curve of it like she was afraid to touch. “I can feel them… but one never moves. It’s there, but still. And sometimes—” she swallowed hard “—it feels like it’s watching me.”
I told her it was exhaustion. Hormones. The strain of carrying ten lives. But the next morning, when she vomited dark blood into the sink, I called Dr. Ellison immediately.
The clinic smelled faintly of disinfectant and coffee. Clara lay back on the bed as Dr. Ellison spread gel across her belly and pressed the ultrasound wand gently.
The first few minutes were normal. He counted out loud, each word easing the tension in the room.
“One… two… three…”
Clara smiled weakly.
“Four… five… six…”
Her grip tightened around my hand.
“Seven… eight… nine…”
He frowned. Moved the wand again.
“Ten?” I asked, my voice catching.
The screen flickered with static, then cleared. A dark shadow pulsed near the lower right side of her womb—larger than the others. Still. Silent.
Dr. Ellison leaned closer, his face draining of color.
“Doctor?” Clara whispered. “Is something wrong?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He zoomed in, adjusted the probe, then exchanged a glance with the nurse.
Finally, he spoke, carefully. “Nine fetuses are perfectly healthy. The tenth…” He hesitated. “…the tenth isn’t a baby.”
“What do you mean, not a baby?” I demanded.
Dr. Ellison took off his glasses. “It’s a mass,” he said slowly. “It’s alive… but it doesn’t have a heartbeat. It’s attached to the placenta—feeding from her like the others—but it’s not developing normally. It’s…” He trailed off, searching for words. “…it’s organized tissue. Something we can’t identify.”
Clara began to sob quietly. “So it’s cancer?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Not cancer. But not human either. At least, not entirely.”
He scheduled more tests. Specialists came from Indianapolis. They called it “an unprecedented gestational anomaly.”
I called it what it felt like: a nightmare.
Over the next few weeks, Clara grew weaker. Her skin turned pale, her eyes hollow. She said she could feel it pulling from her—the “other one.”
“It’s stealing from them,” she told me one night. “The others kick when it moves. Like they’re afraid.”
Her words chilled me to the bone.
June 9th. Two months early.
Clara woke me in the middle of the night, screaming. The bedsheets were soaked with blood.
I called 911, carried her to the car, and raced through red lights toward St. Mary’s Hospital. She was shaking, whispering, “Don’t let them take it. Please, Nate, don’t let them take it.”
The emergency doors burst open. Nurses swarmed her gurney, shouting for more hands. I tried to follow, but a nurse stopped me.
“You can’t go in, sir.”
The double doors slammed shut.
Through the narrow window, I saw glimpses—blue scrubs, flashing lights, shadows moving too fast. I pressed my forehead to the glass, praying.
Then came the voices.
“One!”
“Two!”
“Three!”
Tiny cries pierced the air.
“Four! Five! Six! Seven!”
Each one a miracle.
“Eight! Nine!”
And then silence.
Someone said, “Where’s the tenth?”
Dr. Ellison’s voice rose sharply: “Check the lower cavity! There should be—oh my God—what is that?”
A nurse gasped. “Doctor… that’s not—”
Then nothing but static from the intercom. When the doors finally opened, the air was thick with disinfectant and fear.A nurse approached me, trembling. “Mr. Rivers… your wife is alive. The babies are in neonatal care.”
I grabbed her arm. “And the tenth?”
Her lips parted—but no sound came out. She turned and walked away.
An hour later, Dr. Ellison found me in the waiting area. His face was gray, his hands shaking.
“Ethan,” he began. “We removed something during the procedure. It was fused to her uterus. It wasn’t an embryo. It had… human-like features, but malformed. And it was still moving.”
I felt my stomach twist. “So what is it?”
He looked down. “We don’t know. We’ve sent it for genetic testing.”
I stared at him, horror crawling up my spine. “And Clara?”
“She’s weak but stable. She needs rest.”
He paused, then added quietly, “Whatever it was… it had your wife’s DNA. And something else.”
Clara refused to see the tenth “child.” She couldn’t bear to hear about it. But something changed in her after that night.
She grew quiet. Her skin turned almost translucent. Sometimes, I’d wake in the middle of the night to find her standing by the nursery door, whispering to the sleeping babies.
“It’s not gone,” she’d murmur. “It’s waiting.”
I told Dr. Ellison, but he only said she was experiencing postpartum trauma. He prescribed medication.
Then, two weeks later, the lab called. The sample had vanished in transit. No one knew how. No records. No trace. Just gone.
Three months later, we brought the babies home—nine tiny bundles of life. They filled the house with crying, laughter, warmth. But one night, around 3 a.m., the baby monitor crackled with static. Then, through the static, a voice whispered:
“Mommy…”
I froze.
When I reached the nursery, Clara was already there—standing in the dark, her nightgown fluttering in the air vent’s cold draft.
All nine babies were asleep.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
She didn’t turn around. “It’s back.”
I flipped on the light—and gasped. Blood seeped through the front of her gown.
“Clara!”
She collapsed before I could reach her.
At the hospital, they said it was internal bleeding. But when they opened her up, they found something they couldn’t explain—small veins and nerve tissue growing along the inside of her womb, pulsing faintly as if still alive.
They removed it. It dissolved in seconds under the surgical lights. Clara never woke up.
A week after her funeral, Dr. Ellison resigned from St. Mary’s. He sent me a letter.
“Nathan,
What happened that night was not natural. I have studied human development for thirty years, and I have never seen anything like it.
The tissue wasn’t fetal. It responded to light, sound, and temperature like a living organism — but not human. Whatever it was, it used your wife as a host. And if what she felt was true, it may not have died when she did.
If you notice anything unusual with the children… watch the youngest first.”
X. Seventeen Years Later
Seventeen years have passed.
Our nine children grew strong and healthy. All except the youngest — Liam.
He’s brilliant. Too brilliant, sometimes. His eyes are different — pale gray with tiny flecks of gold. When he stands in the doorway, the lights flicker.
Last month, his blood test came back with anomalies—chromosomes that don’t align with human DNA.
I showed the report to a new doctor. She stared at it for a long time, then asked quietly, “Mr. Rivers… has Liam ever experienced unexplained fainting spells? Temperature fluctuations? Static interference with electronics?”
My mouth went dry. “Why?”
She looked at me, her voice barely a whisper. “Because these patterns… don’t occur in humans.”
That night, I found Liam sitting alone in the dark, watching the storm through the window.
“Dad,” he said, not turning around, “do you ever think about Mom?”
“Every day,” I said softly.
“She used to talk to me,” he said. “Before I was born.”
I frowned. “You mean when she was pregnant?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. Before that.”
Thunder cracked outside. I opened my mouth to speak—but he looked at me then, really looked—and for the first time, I saw it.
The faint shimmer under his skin. Like something alive. Moving. Watching.
He smiled faintly. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll take care of the others.” And in that moment, I finally understood what Dr. Ellison meant.
“If it didn’t die with her… it found another way to live.”
Sometimes, late at night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the old baby monitor crackle to life. Nine voices murmur softly in their dreams. And then a tenth one — low, calm, and almost tender — whispers:
“You kept your promise, Dad. Now it’s my turn.”
The static fades. And the house grows very, very quiet.