the wife answered, she saw not the radiant man that the husband had glimpsed in his mirror, but rather a dark, slimy, horrible monster. She took one look at the awful thing on her doorstep and fell down dead from shock. The husband knelt at her side and wept. He could not understand what had happened. Then he saw his horrible slimy arms and his long-fingered claws, and he looked down at his bent and thorny legs, at his feet like yawning hellbenders, and he understood.
He picked up the wife. He carried her to the well. But you know how feelings are: the well had uprooted itself and flown, and left only a bare patch of hard earth. Well the husband dropped to his knees and with his long-fingered claws he dug a hole, six feet wide and six feet deep, and he buried the wife there. A single black tear splashed on the grave, and from that splash grew a poison thistle, and that was her grave's only marker. The husband moaned and howled, and all the birds flew from the woods, and he locked himself in the house for good, and his moans and howls could thenceforth be heard shaking the walls of that house, shaking the trees, shaking the black beetles from the branches. And if no one goes into those woods to this very day, well, now you understand why.