Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 5
Blood Pact
Alex Moonn
Certain doors, once opened, begin to open you.
Hwaseong, South Korea, 1980. The country lives under martial law, and Detective Kim Min-ho, fifteen winters on the force, has the photographs of seven young women spread across his desk, working women no one goes looking for, opened with a surgeon's precision. From each of them the killer took a different organ. Kim believes in fingerprints and in causes. Within days, he will cross a threshold there is no coming back from.
English edition, available on Amazon.
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“Woman, early twenties. Bled to death, but slowly.” He spoke without lifting his eyes from the body, flat as a man who'd taught himself flatness the way you teach yourself to swim — to keep from going under. “Clean cut. Whoever did it knows anatomy better than half the surgeons signing reports in this province.” He pointed at the open abdomen with the cap of his pen, never the finger. “They took the liver. Whole. And barely soiled the rest.”
I shut my eyes a moment. The liver. Before her, the heart. Before that, both kidneys, lifted out without a single vessel torn. Before that, the lungs, scooped clean the way you scoop the flesh from a fruit without breaking the skin. Each woman returned to the world hollowed, each missing a different part. I kept avoiding the sum the thing demanded. The sum implied a purpose, and purpose was the word I refused to write in the report.
English edition, available on Amazon.
