Everyone wants to be beautiful. And the Aesthetic Surgery Unit of Chicago's Greenwood Memorial Hospital can make anyone more attractive...for a price. For one patient thought to be undergoing a scalp-reduction the price is a grisly death, when Dr. Lloyd goes insane during surgery and performs a violent liposuction instead...and literally sucks the life blood out of the man.

     Scully and Mulder are called in to investigate the doctor's unusual defense: demonic possession. Scully logically assumes the doctor's sleeping pill addiction caused a psychotic break. When Mulder discovers evidence of a pentagram--an occult symbol of protection-- on the floor of the operating room, he concludes that some kind of magic is at work. Scully is dubious, to put it mildly. Another surgeon goes into an uncontrollable frenzy, using a laser to burn through the flesh of a patient's face . Mulder discovers the mark of the pentagram on this body as well -- placed there by Nurse Waite, a practicing witch.

     Dr. Franklyn admits that Nurse Waite worked at the clinic ten years earlier when similar deaths had occurred. Scully and Mulder search her house, finding a spooky den of candles, incense, herbs and witchy objects. But Nurse Waite is gone. She's lying in wait for Dr. Franklin; submerged in a tub full of gore in his bathroom. Her sneak knife attack fails, and she's arrested.

     Before Nurse Waite can explain herself to Mulder, she dies horribly, in what Mulder recognizes from Nurse Waite's occult books as a classic case of death by hex.

     Waite was trying to protect the patients...but against what or whom? Maybe Dr. Franklyn -- who smiles inscrutably as he levitates a few feet above his bed.

     Putting all the clues together, Mulder deduces that Franklyn is a black magician. Cursed with the sin of vanity, Franklyn transforms his looks beyond the limits of surgery: using sorcery and human sacrifice. Ten years ago, he had escaped suspicion. Today, he manages to escape even Mulder. Mulder is too late to stop the final sacrifice that completes the spell. Dr. Franklyn slices off his own face, to disappear forever...