I used to work as a county coroner, I won’t say where, since it’s a matter of public record and I wish to remain anonymous. Just know it was a fairly rural area, and the sheriff was really the only law enforcement.
This account is concerning a series of unusual bodies that were found, on which I performed autopsies.
The first body was found by a local farmer in his pasture. I was tasked with determining the cause of death, which is standard procedure whenever a body is found under mysterious circumstances. The body was still slightly warm when EMS arrived on the scene, particularly notable because it was quite chilly that morning meaning it could not have been dead long before it was discovered. There were no external signs of trauma, the body was dressed appropriately for the weather, making both death from a violent cause or exposure unlikely. Toxicology came back clean as well. From the outside the body looked healthy, and the blood work was completely normal. You wouldn’t have known anything was wrong unless you took a peek inside.
I knew something was up as soon as I made my first incision. It’s hard to describe, and I don’t want to be too graphic, so I’ll just say that the consistency was off. Like, the connective tissue was too dense in some places, too tough, and then almost non-existent in others. The next point of note was the near lack of digestive organs, it didn’t look like it had any way to digest food of any kind, and judging by the lack of scar tissue, it appeared to be a natural defect.
The likely cause of death was almost immediately apparent when I began inspecting the chest cavity. It was the heart. The thing had some sort of congenital heart defect. The tissue all looked healthy, but anatomically it only remotely resembled A human heart. It was far too large, and perhaps fatally, all of the veins and arteries seem to enter together all directly connected only to the left ventricle. There was no way this heart could effectively pump blood, if it could even pump blood at all. No one with a heart condition like this could have grown to adulthood. I’d be surprised if someone with that sort of condition lived for an hour, let alone the apparent 20 or 30 years of that body.
At the start of the autopsy, I began to feel nervous as it became apparent something was off. By the end of it, after thoroughly inspecting a series of malformed, or underdeveloped organs, I felt outright Disturbed. That night I had dreams. dreams of deformed figures swarming my house, like something out of a zombie movie. I went into work early the next morning. Partly because after my nightmares, I found myself lying in bed awake before dawn, unable to get back to sleep, but mainly because I received a call about 5:00 a.m. that they recovered another unidentifiable body.
This one was found in a pond, cold and stiff. Again, there was no sign of trauma to the body. This body felt off the same way as the first, and also showed the same general underdeveloped nature, especially the digestive system. The heart looked better, but there were no kidneys. The lungs were fairly stiff, lacking the elasticity of healthy lungs. The lung tissue itself looked healthy, making some sort of disease or damage unlikely to be the cause of their inadequacy. When the blood work returned, the cause of death was immediately clear. The thing had almost no red blood cells. even with healthy lungs, which this thing did not have, asphyxiation would have taken place extremely quickly. On further inspection, the creature also completely lacked bone marrow. Note, I said “completely lacked”. I did not say it was damaged, or diseased. it was completely missing. There were no signs it was ever there. Instead of soft spongy tissue on the inside, the bones were solid all the way through.
The sheriff demanded that I show him the bodies. He wanted to confirm my reports for himself. I don’t blame him. Things were usually fairly quiet in his domain, and two mystery deaths with equally mysterious bodies, in 2 days, was A bit hard to swallow. Heck, I was pretty worried about it myself. Though he was worried about crime statistics, while I was more worried about the two bodies in my morgue that defied all medical explanations.
I showed him where the bodies were stored, and had one of my assistants keep an eye on him while he took a look. I didn’t want to spend any more time around those things than I had to. I obviously, given my profession, am not generally bothered by corpses, but these Twisted forms put me on edge. I don’t think it’s hard to see why. You learn from your books all sorts of things about human anatomy and biology. To suddenly find yourself face to face with a creature that defies all known explanations, would be unsettling for anyone, but for a trained expert I think it just hits a little bit harder.
Just a couple days later, the next body turned up. Still technically alive when they found it too. It died in the hospital a couple hours later. It showed no EKG activity. However, despite the lack of brain activity, the body continued to breathe on its own for several hours before succumbing to cardiac arrest. The autopsy revealed similar under developments as the others, though this heart was only moderately deformed. There was also an orange sized bundle of what appeared to be brain tissue in the chest cavity.
About 12 hours later, the next body was found. Though the cause of death for that one was abundantly apparent. Gunshot. One of the deputies was investigating a call about a trespasser, and when confronted, the suspect let out a shrill shriek, which the deputy said sounded more animal than human, and then charged towards him. The officer opened fire on his attacker, striking it four times. Normally I wouldn’t perform an autopsy on a clear shooting related death, but given the strange bodies over the previous days, I reluctantly gave into my better judgment and examined the body.
If it hadn’t been shot, I doubt it would have survived long anyway. The liver was nearly completely absent, except for half a lobe that wasn’t actually connected to the circulatory system in any meaningful way. There was only one lung present, and it was hard to tell due to ballistic damage, but the heart appeared to be far undersized.
I’ve tried to stay clinical, professional, so far here. Force of habit I guess, comes with the job. But, the strange bodies were taking a toll on me. I don’t think the deputies out there looking for those things fully grasped what was going on. I doubt that the sheriff told them the full story. Those things weren’t human, I had zero doubt in my mind. The thing that got me though, and maybe this is a bit more of an abstract fear, wasn’t that there were monsters walking around. There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. A bear or a mountain lion could attack me as well. In my line of work, you get used to just the general biological frailty of life. No, the thing that got me was that judging by the fact none of them were put together enough to stand any real chance of living for even a week, Whatever was behind them, whatever had the ability to put together things like these human mimic, had little idea of how biological life works. Which to me, I think reveals a far more concerning state of affairs. At least then, if whatever was behind them understood biology, I could guess what sort of entity or group was putting these together, and what their goals were. Even if it was wild speculation, I could safely assume some sort of internal consistency to its aims. On the other hand, something with the ability to create these things, but lacking a basic understanding of biology or Anatomy, must have such a foreign, otherworldly, understanding of us. If our basic biology is so occult to it despite its apparent skill or power to create fully formed bodies, how could we possibly understand its motives? There is no rational explanation of something that can create things like these, but yet make such glaring mistakes.
The next, and last body, I would encounter was found on my doorstep, I came across the body as I returned home from the night. Like the others, it was wearing ill-fitting clothes. Unlike the others, this one had something else with it, a knife. Well, it was sharp anyway. It was one long double edged perfectly symmetrical blade, no handle. It was impossible to hold without slicing up your hand. I suppose whatever was making these things and sending them out, didn’t know any more about knives than did about Anatomy. It was quite a morbid site. Unlike the others, this one was visibly clearly deformed based on its external appearance. Perhaps it was rushed, set loose early, or perhaps whatever the source of the thing was, underestimated how important skin is.
I called the sheriff, told him it was on my porch, then got in my truck and never went back. Haven’t been within a thousand miles of that place since. The distance helps me feel a little safer, but not much. I’m pretty sure the one on my porch was sent to kill me, maybe I know too much, maybe they just didn’t like me cutting into their friends, no way really to know. I’ve spent most of my time since then, wondering if it’ll look for me again. But after all, there’s no way to know what something like that wants.