Their bodies were a true puzzle of intricate anatomy. Carlos del Puente Stories

The first thing Inspector Lecter noticed upon entering the crime scene was that the victim’s spleen had been arranged into a perfect origami swan, resting delicately on the liver, which pulsed rhythmically despite the absence of a heart. The intestines formed an elaborate Celtic knot, spilling from the open cavity like grotesque party streamers. Nearby, a lone eyeball balanced on the tip of a fountain pen, staring with reproach at the chalk outline where the rest of the body should have been.  

This wasn’t the first time.  

Across town, in a dimly lit parlor that smelled of formaldehyde and mint, Norman Bates and his twin brother, Damien—though they insisted on being called *The Janus Collectivein their private language of whistles—were arguing again. Their speech was a symphony of clicks, hums, and the occasional sound of a spoon dragged across a chalkboard. Their mother, a taxidermied figure rocking in a wicker chair, nodded along, though it wasn’t clear whether in agreement or due to a loose hinge in her neck.  

Their sister, Wednesday Addams, sat cross-legged on the floor, dissecting a frog that wouldn’t stop singing La Vie en Rosein a disturbingly accurate imitation of Édith Piaf. She looked up, her black eyes shining with perfect roundness. *The spleen swan has returned, she observed. Someone’s being poetic.

Norman and Damien halted their argument, turning their heads toward her in perfect sync. Their spines emitted a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled.  

The police station was a circus of incompetence. Chief Inspector Clouseau tripped over his own extravagant mustache while Detective Rust Cohle scribbled equations about time being a flat circle on the walls with what appeared to be his own blood. The forensic pathologist, Dr. Frankenstein, was elbow-deep in a corpse that wouldn’t stop laughing.  

The organs, murmured Frankenstein, are reorganizing post-mortem.He held up a lung that had folded itself into a paper airplane. This one tried to escape.

Lecter sighed. He’d seen this before. Not the lung—though that was new—but the pattern. The bodies weren’t just being mutilated. They were being *edited*. Like a deranged sculptor working in flesh, the killer refined them into something... more. Something that made eyes avert, that made the brain itch.  

Meanwhile, at the family dinner table, things were, as always, catastrophic.  

Grandfather Dracula noisily sipped from a wine glass filled with what he insisted was very aged vinegar. Aunt Annie Wilkes tapped her knife against her plate, humming a lullaby from Misery, while Uncle Hannibal served a suspiciously human-looking roast. The twins, Norman and Damien, were engrossed in a silent conversation consisting solely of eyebrow movements and the occasional synchronized nosebleed.  

Wednesday speared a Brussels sprout with surgical precision. The inspector will come, she said. He always does.

Let him, replied Damien in a voice like a broken music box. We’ll show him the black swan of calculated exception.

Norman laughed, a sound like a cicada dying in the August sun—where there was a terrible sun that some knew; otherwise, they wouldn’t understand. Lecter, the man who came from the cold, did not understand.  

The latest victim—a lonely librarian named Igor—had been reassembled into a perfect anatomical model of impossible geometry. His ribs spiraled like a nautilus shell. His fingers branched into fractal patterns. His brain had been removed, sliced thin, and arranged into a mosaic of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Frankenstein prodded it with a scalpel. It’s still thinking, he announced. I can hear it humming.

Rust Cohle, now wearing a tinfoil hat, nodded gravely. Time is a flat circle, he intoned. But the spleen is a swan.

The confrontation, when it came, was inevitable.  

Lecter stood in the Addams’ parlor, surrounded by taxidermied relatives and the scent of something baking that he really didn’t want to identify. Wednesday offered him tea in a cup made from one of Ed Gein’s hollowed-out skulls. Norman and Damien stood shoulder to shoulder, their faces unsettlingly blank.  

Why the swan?Lecter demanded.  

Damien tilted his head. Why not?

Norman smiled. It’s prettier this way.

And then the walls began to breathe.  

Later—though time had grown slippery and grotesque—Lecter awoke in his own bed, his pajamas impeccably pressed, his slippers placed with precision. On his nightstand sat a small origami swan, folded from what appeared to be... well. He didn’t examine it too closely.  

Outside his window, the town hummed with invisible energy. Somewhere, a fugitive lung from a recent homicide took flight. Elsewhere, a brain finished humming its final song as it suffered separation. And deep beneath the earth, something with too many teeth and a fondness for riddles laughed softly to itself.  

The bodies, after all, were only the beginning.