MISSING-DARK BOX

A young woman and a man (her boyfriend or husband) are patients at Hospital Taiping, a notorious old psychiatric hospital in Malaysia. Both are clearly mentally unstable: they laugh hysterically, scream, and behave in exaggerated, childlike ways.

One day the man jumps (or is pushed) out of a high window and dies. The woman is devastated. She limps to his grave on crutches, weeping uncontrollably. While she’s crying at the tombstone, a small green ghost (the man’s spirit) appears above her, smiling mischievously.

That night the ghost returns to the woman and literally rips his own legs off his spectral body, offering them to her. Desperate to “walk together again” and unable to live without him, she accepts. The ghost attaches his ghostly legs to her stumps. From that moment on, she can walk perfectly again… because his dead legs are now hers.

At first she’s overjoyed. She runs through the hospital corridors, laughing and dragging the bewildered nurses around. The couple is “reunited”; they hold hands, smile, and behave like nothing ever happened.

But slowly the truth becomes visible to everyone else: her lower half is now semi-transparent and faintly glowing. The man’s ghost is permanently fused to her waist down, smiling upside-down from her hips. Whenever she walks, he is there, attached forever. The nurses scream in terror when they finally notice. The woman herself doesn’t seem to care; she’s happy again.

The final panels show the couple cheerfully gazing out the hospital window together, arms around each other, while outside the building looks exactly the same as it did at the beginning, implying the cycle will continue with the next pair of broken people.

The horror is in the twisted, literal interpretation of “I can’t live without you” and “I’d give my right leg to have you back.” Love and grief drive her to accept a fate far worse than death: being physically tethered for eternity to the corpse-legs of the person she lost, all while believing she’s found happiness.