Last night, the Queen of the Underworld

It's the early 18th century. There is a medical academy. One young student is madly in love. The student looks like Brendan Frasier, and his pretty young wife looks like Abby Cornish. Anyways...He is on his way to become a doctor. But a disease spreads through the town, taking at least one person in every house, including the young wife. Years later, the student who is now a well esteemed doctor and teacher is walking through a market. He sees someone. Just a flash of a face through the crowd. It's her! It's his wife. He runs through the crowd, pushing people aside, and there she is...alive and waiting. How did this happened, where had she come from? She says nothing, but he doesn't care. He takes her home and marvels at God's gift. She lounges around his house, but something is different about her. She moves as if gravity weren't there, as if she was pretending to stand on earth when she was actually on the moon. Her limbs could bend and twirl in ways that joints would not allow. She could turn things red and make flowers wilt, just by touching them.

Then one day she is gone. He frantically searches the town, but there is no trace of her. Not until that night. When she comes for him, in shadows and darkness. She answers his questions, those initial questions that were buried deep, covered up with giddy happiness. After she died, she was made Queen of the Underworld. Now in her castle, in the great hall of ghosts, we see her true face, she is nothing but bones and hair, a few strings of flesh still hold on to her skull. She is blue and luminescent. I want to live, she tells him. What she needs is a human girl, a human girls' face and blood. The doctor agrees.

I am one of his most gifted students, the only girl in the entire school. Three weeks have passed and in his great lab and adjoining study the students crowd around, hearing nothing. No one has seen him for weeks. The buzz and rumors concerning the good doctor isn't the only scandal. The chancellor's young wife, Jennifer, is missing. There are rumors she left with one of the students. There are rumors she went to America. There are rumors she is dead.

And then the doctor appears. He calls me into his chambers. I enter the long hallway that leads to his study. The windows are all covered and a strange blue light is filling the space. He asks if I would like to meet his wife. And there she is, a beautiful woman, stepping out of his study like Aphrodite. But then I notice blood on her face. And when she gets closer, I understand, that's Jennifer's face. That's Jennifer's body, but it isn't Jennifer. The young woman laughs and I run out to the sunny courtyard and throw up in front of the entire student body, shaking and horrified.