The Genesis of Abigail Thorpe

Short story

Abigail Thorpe was a painfully normal girl.

She was not exactly an underachiever, but neither was she particularly studious. She had no trouble making acquaintances, but she had never been popular, either. She could play exactly two songs on the piano; her childhood pet was a dog named “Max”; she liked the taste of salt alright, but not enough to keep a shaker on the table; she had never tried escargot. Her hair was a shade just between light and dark, and her face could be definitively described as a face. In short, Abigail was Daedalus’ dream—a middle-of-the-road kind of person whose wings would never fail, because she refused to reach for anything higher or lower than what was handed to her.

She was certainly not the type of girl to be ritualistically sacrificed by a demonic cult.

Now, this specific fate is admittedly bizarre. One could argue that it is, therefore, universally unexpected, and that Abigail’s relative normalcy is entirely irrelevant. But while there has been no official census conducted on the matter, cult-victims tend to fall into categories of extremes. A young female sacrifice will either be, a) the most insufferably straight-laced virgin to ever attend Sunday School, or b) an incredibly promiscuous man-eater, complete with fishnet stockings and high-heeled leather boots. (It’s all about the symbolism, with cultists.)

But Abigail Thorpe was neither of these. Her choice of attire was as fashionable as it was sensible. She was not a virgin (though the experience had been an overall unpleasant one, so she often claimed that she was). The only reason she was chosen by the Unholy Order of Lord Moloch was because Acolytes Dave and Benny were already late for the meeting, and Abigail—who had been walking to her car after an uneventful shift sweeping up popcorn at the local Cinemark—was the easiest to kidnap.

“She should be fine, right? I mean, it’ll work?” Benny asked. His voice was high and warbling. Squirming in the backseat with a burlap sack over her head, Abigail guessed that he was anxious. Unbeknownst to her, this was his permanent state of being.

“Good as any,” Dave responded. “‘Grab a girl,’ that’s all they said.”

Benny sighed worriedly; it sounded like a train whistle. “I told you,” he muttered. “I told you, we shouldn’t keep putting these things off until the last minute! But no, we just had to stop for ice cream—”

“Shuddup. I’m trying to drive.”

Abigail tried to twist her hands free from the cords binding her wrists. Unfortunately, the jump rope was a sturdy one. She struggled fruitlessly for a few moments more, then finally slumped back, defeated. This entire situation was the furthest thing from ideal; it’s no wonder that she began to cry.

After a particularly wet snuffle, Benny took notice. “Oh,” he said, turning to face the hostage in the backseat. “Oh, don’t do that! It’s nothing personal, we promise!”

These words were not as comforting as Benny had hoped. Abigail just wept harder.

“Really!” he continued, his voice letting out an ill-timed squeak. “It’s just, we have to bring the sacrifice. Our names are on the sign-up sheet and everything!”

Dave grunted. “Yeah. And whose fault is that?”

“Don’t turn this around on me. The potluck slots were all filled, you know that.”

“Could’ve brought paper plates.”

The two men bickered all the way to the Sacred Place of Summoning, which was really an old utility tunnel with a pungent odor that no amount of Febreze could improve. Abigail was choking on the stench of sewage even before they opened the van door and removed the sack.

“Candles,” Dave said as he and Benny hoisted Abigail from the backseat. “We could’ve signed up to bring the candles.”

“Candles are expensive, Dave.”

They escorted her further down the tunnel to a chamber where the other acolytes had already gathered. Standing around a circle of candles and demonic sigils, wearing hooded robes and mumbling strange incantations, the Unholy Order of Lord Moloch was certainly an eerie sight. The effect was tainted somewhat by the fold-up table that was pushed off to the side, loaded with various casseroles and desserts—but Abigail was terrified all the same.

“Acolytes,” a voice boomed. High Priest Abraham had been practicing his vocal booming; the tunnel’s acoustics made the space ideal, despite the smell. “You are late.”

“Sorry ‘bout that, Abe,” Dave said.

A long, booming sigh. “High Priest Abraham.”

“Oh, yeah. Well. We’re late ‘cause we had to grab the girl. Not easy business, you know?”

Benny looked like he was about to reveal that it had, in fact, been easy business, and that ice cream was the true reason for their tardiness. But Dave’s brow crinkled in such a way that Benny quickly snapped his mouth shut.

High Priest Abraham rolled his eyes. His hood was still covering his face, but he had figured out a way to roll his eyes with his entire body, so that the acolytes would know when he was displeased. “Fine, then,” he boomed (but not quite as powerfully as before). He swept his hand towards a chair in the center of the candles and diagrams. “Bring the sacrifice forward.”

Benny and Dave dragged Abigail into the circle. The cultists shifted and murmured excitedly. Usually, their meetings were quite uneventful; they would do some routine chanting, listen to High Priest Abraham read from the Forgotten Tome for a while, and then they’d eat and socialize a bit before heading home to their mortgages and monotony. Now, finally, something interesting was happening.

“I haven’t done anything,” Abigail pleaded as they tied her to the chair—and it may have been the truest statement of her life. She whipped her head around the gathering, desperately hoping that behind one of the shadowed hoods, a sympathetic face was hiding. “I won’t do anything.”

“You have been chosen,” High Priest Abraham intoned, “to provide a channel for Lord Moloch and his terrible powers. Tonight, we will read the ancient incantation and bring him to our Sacred Place of Summoning.”

“Hail Moloch!” the acolytes shouted. (The shouting was not quite synchronized, but their enthusiasm almost made up for it.)

“We have followed every step of the ritual exactly,” High Priest Abraham continued. His booming grew louder. “We, the Unholy Order of Lord Moloch, will finally fulfill our glorious purpose!”

“Hail Moloch!”

The air hummed with the static buzz of adrenaline. Thinking it to be an appropriately dramatic moment, High Priest Abraham began to slowly raise his hands. The heartbeat of the congregation rose with them.

“Sacrifice!” he boomed, louder than he had ever boomed before. “Speak your final words, and consecrate His Unholiness’s arrival!”

Abigail, who had been halfheartedly tugging against her binds, froze. She racked her brain for something, anything, to say—some final message for her sparse loved ones? A statement of courage and dignity? An expletive-filled tirade condemning the cultists for their sins? Nothing especially profound or persuasive presented itself. So in a trembling voice, Abigail simply asked, “Will it hurt?”

At this, a few of the acolytes wilted. Someone coughed uncomfortably. It is no fun to be reminded of one’s misdeeds, and in that moment, Abigail didn’t sound like a sacrifice; she sounded like a young girl with no business being ritualistically murdered.

High Priest Abraham, though, held no such sentiments. In fact, he was rather annoyed. “Your soul is about to become a gateway through which Moloch himself will traverse,” he scoffed. “Your very essence will be obliterated in the face of his awesome powers, along with your mortal shell. So, yes, it may be painful. It may also be messy, which is what Acolyte Lisa is here for.”

Acolyte Lisa, who worked as an elementary school janitor, sighed.

With Abigail’s final words sufficiently over and done with, High Priest Abraham clapped his hands thrice. An acolyte rushed forward to present him with the Forgotten Tome: musty, moth-eaten, and mistakenly believed to be bound in human skin. (It was vellum.) Opening it ceremoniously, High Priest Abraham began to read.

“O daemones profundi, ignes inferni te rogamus…”

At once, a hush swept through the Sacred Place of Summoning. The candles, emanating the various scents Bath and Body Works had to offer, flickered. A chill drew its long and spindly fingertip up each cultist’s spine.

And then—to the surprise of everyone in attendance—the strange and haphazard sigils on the ground actually began to glow.

High Priest Abraham tripped in his booming. He nearly stopped reading entirely. But he quickly caught himself, and pressed on with the musty old book’s incantation, wearing the giddy grin of a schoolboy behind his hood. Finally, finally, he had done something right, however morally wrong it might be. Because to a boy picked last for every game—a man rejected at every date—a son whose parents’ eyes reflected nothing but shame and disappointment—to someone like that, what do the scales of justice matter in the blinding face of what’s “special”?

Abigail Thorpe was not special. And seeing as she had allowed her entire life to pass her by, she decided then that her death should be no different. The flames rose. The sigils burned. One booming voice was joined by the rehearsed chanting of dozens. And as she waited for the end to hand itself to her, Abigail closed her eyes.

***

Latin is a tricky thing.

It’s a dead language, for one—something only scholars with a hyper-specific emphasis or those wishing to appear “intellectual” study. Latin also has a vastly different grammatical system than English; it contains many more cases, and while English meaning is derived primarily from placement in a sentence, Latin focuses on the forms and endings of the words themselves. Even for students of the language, a complete mental shift is required to make sense of it all. Scholars struggle for years to perfect Latin’s flexible inflections and syntax.

High Priest Abraham was not a scholar. He was simply a man named Abe who had found a book in a dumpster. So he could not possibly have known that there is, in fact, a difference between what he meant to say, and what he actually said.

Roughly translated, what he meant to say was this: “Through this sacrifice, channel the horrid powers of Moloch.”

What he actually said…well, it was a different beast entirely.

***

The sigils glowed, the flames flared, and Abigail began to shake.

Not the shivering little trembles from before; no, this more closely resembled an epileptic fit. Jarring thrashes that yanked her from side to side, creating a macabre imitation of a marionette with a particularly abusive puppeteer—the chair she was tied to creaked, the jump rope strained—High Priest Abraham slammed the Forgotten Tome shut and took a step back. A few of the most zealous acolytes continued to chant “Moloch”; the vast majority of them, though, huddling in the utility tunnel like a frightened bunch of sheep, simply stared with mouths agape.

“Oh, crud,” Dave whispered. Nobody heard it over Benny’s teakettle-like squeal.

As they watched, Abigail’s hair slowly lifted from her shoulders; it levitated in an open fan around her face. Her eyes snapped open. Blinding beams of light shone from them, startling the cultists back with a collective gasp.

She screamed.

“It’s happening!” High Priest Abraham shrieked. He did a little hopping dance and clapped his hands together. “It’s happening!”

But although Abigail certainly felt like she was being torn asunder—skin cracking, bones splitting, muscles tearing—it was not the fault of an extradimensional demonic entity. Despite the wishes and predictions of The Unholy Order of Lord Moloch, she was not being destroyed at all.

She was being transformed.

And as anyone who has gone through a significant change in a very short period of time can attest, it was a painful process, indeed.

Spikes punched up from beneath her skin. Spines protruded down her back in sharp ridges; scales jutted in haphazard patterns and patches. Leathered bumps spread like a fungus, winding along her limbs. Her nails lengthened and hardened, and curved horns sprouted from her head, her cheekbones, her jaw.

When a prickly tail shot out from her rear, the chair finally broke. The jump rope slithered to the ground like a bashful worm, and Abigail, still writhing and wailing, collapsed to her knees.

Then everything stopped.

Abigail stopped screaming. The acolytes stopped chanting. High Priest Abraham stopped his (admittedly undignified) dance. The light emanating from the sigils dimmed, and then faded away completely. The candle flames shrunk down to their typical underwhelming size; a few blew out. And in the center of the dimly-lit circle, head bowed and swaying back and forth in a fragile sort of way, knelt an unrecognizable silhouette.

Silence—the heavy, tension-choked hush of a few dozen people all holding their breaths at once. Finally, a high and warbling voice sliced through the tunnel.

“Did it work?” Benny asked.

Several cultists began to murmur. Beneath his hood, High Priest Abraham frowned. The incantation was meant to obliterate the sacrifice and summon Moloch; he was sure of it. But then again…

He stepped towards the sharp-edged, spine-covered thing. Slowly, he stretched out a hand. His intention was to grip the form by its shoulder and command it to speak—that seemed like something a High Priest of a cult would do. (A real High Priest would probably feel a bit more confident about the whole ordeal, though.)

He took a deep breath and prepared to boom. He placed his hand on Abigail’s shoulder.

Her head jerked up.

Blood shot from her eyes and splattered directly into High Priest Abraham’s wide-open mouth.

***

The thorny devil is a species of desert lizard native to Australia. Like most Australian-endemic creatures, the thorny devil was forced to adapt to its harsh environment in rather peculiar ways. It can consume water from anywhere on its body due to a unique network of grooves and capillaries. Its bristles and spines make it very difficult for predators like snakes and birds to swallow, and if that wasn’t enough, it can also inflate itself like a blowfish. Its mimetic skin is the perfect camouflage; a spiky knob on the back of its neck serves as a “false head”; it walks in a slow and jerky pattern, similar to that of a chameleon. And as one final defense mechanism, it can squirt streams of blood from its eyes—reaching a distance of up to six feet.

The thorny devil has many names. “Mountain devil,” “thorny lizard,” and “thorny dragon,” to name a few. But its taxonomic designation is Moloch horridus.

Really, it was an understandable mistake.

***

High Priest Abraham reeled back, screaming and sputtering his way through an entire library of curses. Several cultists fainted. Benny was one of them; Dave scrambled to catch him. People frantically leapt away from the summoning circle, crashed into each other, fell into a muddled heap of limbs and robes. A few folks made a dash for the utility tunnel’s exit—one man snatched a platter of cookies from the refreshment table as he went, only realizing what he’d done once he was halfway home—Acolyte Lisa sighed at the fresh blood splashing across the ground and reached for her mop.

In the midst of the chaos, Abigail blinked. She wasn’t in excruciating pain anymore, so that was something, at least. But she felt…different. Warmth trickled from the corners of her eyes, and she lifted a finger to wipe at them. A curved claw appeared in front of her face instead. She blinked again, harder, and tried to wiggle her hand. A set of five scaly talons waved back.

She stumbled to her feet; her tail swished clumsily against the concrete with a rasping clickclickclick. Immediately, every acolyte froze.

“Look!” Dave shouted, struggling to keep the still-unconscious Benny from falling. He pointed at Abigail. “Look!”

So they looked. And now, with their initial panic steadily dissipating, they saw—saw her horns and her scales, saw her ridges of spikes, saw her tail, her claws, her eyes with blood still dripping. The Unholy Order of Lord Moloch looked, and in the reborn face of Abigail Thorpe, they did not recognize an Australian lizard.

They saw a demon.

“Moloch,” someone gasped, and at once, everyone bowed.

High Priest Abraham clambered up unsteadily from the floor. His hood had fallen; blood still speckled his face and ran down his chin. He coughed—then gurgled—then cleared his throat.

“Lord Moloch,” he managed. He was not booming anymore. His knees quivered as he inclined his head in what he hoped was a respectful nod. His tongue was sandpaper; he licked his lips and tasted iron. “We welcome you to our domain. We are your Unholy Order…your humble servants…the ones who offered the vessel you now possess.” His voice cracked down the middle, and he finished with a squeak that trailed off into nothing.

Abigail glanced to the side, then back at him.

Realization hit her as suddenly as a kidnapping.

“Oh,” she said. Everyone flinched. She straightened and tried to puff her chest in a commanding manner—it puffed more literally than she anticipated, but it only made her appear more intimidating. “Oh. Um, yes. It is I, Moloch. Thank you for…summoning me.”

At this point, Benny regained consciousness. He spotted Abigail, then let out a shriek that screeched like steam-engine brakes; he was immediately shushed by five other cultists.

“Your Unholiness,” High Priest Abraham stammered. “We are but lowly mortals, unworthy of your presence. We live to prepare the world for your dominion…What would you have us do?”

Abigail thought for a moment.

“Well,” she said slowly, “I think I would like to leave. To see what I need to conquer. Um, yes.” She lifted her chin, spikes bristling. “So, my first command…is to take me back to wherever you found me. Or, my vessel, I mean.” Abigail nodded, pleased with herself.

High Priest Abraham felt an immediate surge of relief. For all the time he had spent preparing to summon Moloch, it was a much more stressful experience than he had anticipated. He quickly nodded, gesturing towards Dave and Benny. “Yes, yes, of course! These two acolytes will return you.”
Benny gulped loudly. Dave tugged the collar of his robe and wiped at his forehead, sweating profusely. But when Abigail turned to them, they yelped and sprang into action.

As they led her out of the Sacred Place of Summoning and back through the stench of sewage, High Priest Abraham called out in a hesitant, wavering voice, “When will we be graced with your presence again, my lord?”

Abigail stopped. Dave shot Benny a nervous glance; Benny squeezed his eyes shut, certain that the interruption would result in their disintegration.

“Next Thursday,” Abigail decided.

And to the tune of the two men’s grateful murmurs of praise, she continued down the tunnel.

***

They dropped her off in the Cinemark parking lot, and once she’d given them permission to leave, their van sped away fast enough to burn skid marks into the asphalt. The sun was just beginning to peek over the tops of the buildings around her—a strip mall exactly like any other, all straight edges and right angles, uniform storefronts with washed-out signs and sidewalks in need of repair.

She found her car keys on the pavement where she’d dropped them. She climbed into the driver’s seat—it needed some adjusting, what with how much space her new tail occupied—and she turned the key in the ignition.

As the engine rumbled to life, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. The blood on her cheeks had dried in rusty streaks that she didn’t feel like wiping away just yet. Her skin was bumpy and blotched. Her horns and spikes scraped against the roof and the headrest; her hair, or what was left of it, was sandy and coarse; her face was not exactly human, but neither was it completely reptile. She could not be definitively described as anything.

Abigail Thorpe locked eyes with a reflection she did not recognize, and grinned.

---

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, here’s another one you might like.

The Bone Fairy