Abby

Cleo Richmond wired all money in her bank to her next of kin. The following day, she was found in her bedroom, dead of an overdose.
Many other managerial staff and executives at the Giving Back Body company headquarters did the same over the course of two weeks. Not all of them simply wired funds; some wrote detailed wills, penned large checks, and inordinate amounts of money were passed to the staff’s family, friends, and in many instances, one Ramona Hubert.
“My deepest condolences. I hope you can accept this in light of everything that has happened,” an executive wrote in a note beside the $300,000 check mailed to Ramona. He died the very night it was mailed of a heart attack.
Alan Gibbley worked too hard for something like this. He was Giving Back Body’s founder and CEO, and had built it from the ground up so beautifully ever since its main practices had been legalized in the United States. He worked too hard to see it crumble. And he wouldn’t see it crumble.
He shook on the pant legs of his pajamas and set a small glass of wine down at his bedside table, ready to sink into sleep. Today had been tiring. Press reaching for his comment. Him giving them nothing. Sorting out GBB’s financials. So many dead. Alan felt numb to the losses. Perhaps if it were mass suicides plaguing the company, things might look worse. Maybe worse would be better. The varied nature of the deaths, and for such healthy, wealthy people, made news outlets only more curious. He wished they would just shut up. He wished whatever was taking out all of his best employees would take those irritating ingrates with them as well.
He lay down in bed, his back hard and his head heavy. He tried not to think about the obvious thread. Ramona. And he’d checked the forms, too; Ramona Hubert had signed away her young daughter’s body to them. She had no husband. She had no living parents. She was alone, all alone, and too old to give any of her fat or bones or skin grafts away.
It must have been some kind of silly revenge plot. Killing off his company, one by one, for the unfortunate circumstances that took her daughter. Forever. He scoffed to himself. If he ever dared to look up her picture one day, and saw her in the street…the stupid woman had to know that whatever happened after she signed off was her own fault. Nobody’s but hers.
Pit. Pat.
Alan wrinkled his nose. A soft noise echoing from downstairs swallowed his attention. He perked up from his deeply pitying thoughts and listened for another.
Dear God. All of these awful happenings, the stress of managing a collapsing tower, of ducking the news had put him on edge. There was nothing to be worried about. He was in perfectly good health, and certainly wasn’t weak enough to throw back a pill bottle like that one woman. Sleep. Just sleep.
Pit. Pat. Pit. Pat.
He cracked a nervous eyelid. There wasn’t a leak, was there? It had rained last night, but it hadn’t been a problem then. This was a small, sparse, wet tapping sound. It sounded an awful lot like a drip, to him.
Alan self-consciously awaited the next drip. A minute passed. Pit. Pat. Pit, pat.
That was no leak. The sound was coming closer.
No, closer. He was sure of it. Alan let out a small, squeamish grunt and sat up in bed, propped on his elbows.
Pit. Pat.
Pit.
The sound was at his door.
Alan recognized them as slow, staggering footsteps.
He was certain. There was someone else in his house. Some thing. An animal. Or a burglar. He clenched the bedsheets in clammy, sweating hands. His mind raced. In his desk was a fountain pen. That was about the sharpest thing he had here to defend himself with.
Something rattled. Then clicked.
In the dark, Alan saw the handle on his bedroom door turning.
The door began to crack open, ever so slightly. It whined on the hinges, then let out a long, painful creak as it slowly swung open, as if by a gust of wind.
Alan blinked, swallowing down a gaseous lump in his throat. All he saw was black. Darkness. There was nothing in the doorframe. Nothing at all.
He blinked again, and
“GUH—!”
Alan jumped in his bed and let free an involuntary, guttural yelp of shock. He scrambled back in the sheets, hitting the headboard, his heart pounding against his ribs.
A figure. A child, standing in the doorway. It was inside.
The thing had a large puff of dark hair around its head, a lacy embroidered shirt and large overalls reaching to the ankles of its bare feet. What Alan could not decipher was what he was seeing on its face. The thing had no nose, no chin, no real features to make out by its silhouette in front of the door. A mask, he realized. The thing had on a large, circular mask.
It looked at him, unflinching, and he saw what features he failed to before. Two wide, ovular blank eyes carved into the mask’s white surface, two short eyebrows, and a mouth. A smile. A wide, toothed smile.
“You’re the boss of this company, aren’t you?”
A voice echoed around Alan, quiet and suffocating. He gagged, feeling as though something cottony were being slowly shoved down his throat and into his ears. He coughed and shook his head frantically, tears singeing his eyes. The voice distressed him, unsettled him, and though it hadn’t sounded like it was uttered by the child he knew it belonged to her.
The child, the girl, didn’t move. Alan couldn’t stand the way she was holding her hands in front of her body, strained and twisted. His gaze stayed on them. They were darker than the rest of her skin, missing some nails, and fixed in unnatural directions. Little bones protruded from the joints. Dark stains ran down their length. Her hands, and her elbows—-her feet, as if they’d been broken and bound, were all absolutely mangled.
Alan was sickened. This was a nightmare. This sort of a person couldn’t exist. This sort of person couldn’t live.
His eyes fell on the bottom edge of the girl’s mask, and without her having to say so, he knew who she was.
“I didn’t hurt you,” He stuttered out. He scrambled for her name. The one who’d had Ramona sign, the glorified junkie. “That was Cleo. She was the one who convinced your mother to give you up, wasn’t she? You’re Ramona’s daughter.”
“I already hurt Cleo.”
The girl still didn’t move. She stayed where she was, before Alan’s bed, bruised and pudgy feet staining the floor black, head hanging so slightly to the side. Her voice rang and subsided in Alan’s ears, feeling fuzzy, like spoken into a broken microphone. Muffled through a pillow. She didn’t sound angry.
“But you’re the one who gave my mommy all the money.”
She sounded darkly curious.
Alan’s heart began to beat erratically. He feared he’d start having palpitations.
“Ye—no, I—we compensated her greatly.” He swallowed, feeling sick and dizzy. “We gave her a lot. More than we even agreed upon. It was tragic, what happened—”
“But you made even more. You didn’t give her all I was worth.”
This can’t be what she looks like, Alan assured himself, flooded with panic and disgust.
This can’t be what she looked like, he corrected.
The girl took a slow step closer to Alan’s bed. Heart leaping from fright, he fell back and tumbled off of the bed, hitting his head on his desk. He shambled on his hands and feet backward against the desk, watching with a soft, terrified whimper as the girl circled around his bed towards him.
“Do you know exactly what you removed from me? What’s now in other girls’ faces, and bodies?”
She stood mere feet from him, unclasping her hands with agonizing difficulty. Alan felt she was forcing him to watch them crack and disjoint and pulsate and bleed, as some sort of sick amusement, just as she was forced to feel it. He couldn’t look at this tangled display of such a small body, and understand which procedures were involved in this. Which procedures had resulted in this.
“No.” He shuddered as the word left his mouth. He felt limp and helpless. The next words choked him. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The girl’s blank face turned a slight bit to the left—to the tall bedroom window—then back to stare at him.
“I don’t know either. I can’t see myself that well. But I know that you killed me.”
Alan opened his mouth to object, to blame someone else. But everyone else was dead.
The girl began to raise her hand—a slow and painful task, the broken bones in her arm twisting visibly under the skin.
“I’m wearing this mask,” she said floatily, “because you left nothing in my face. It’s all empty now.”
She grazed her purple hand on the edge of the mask. A drop of blood dribbled down from the tip of her swollen finger, like water from a balloon.
“Do you want to see?” she asked.
“No,” Alan said before she had a chance to move. His mouth was moving clumsily, ahead of himself, and he shook his head and blubbered like a child. “No, no. Don’t move it. Please.”
A moment passed. He flinched into the desk when the girl finally moved her hand—to his surprise, away from her face, back down to hang at her side. Alan took a wheezy breath and shook his head, desperately attempting to appeal to some sort of reason.
“Your mother is the monster who let all of those procedures happen to you. Why are you coming after me?”
The girl paused. It was not those loud, deliberate pauses from before. It seemed she did not know what to think of that. Alan thought, prayed for a moment, that he had disarmed this creature. This nightmare. He wasn’t to blame. He had barely known of this girl before a week ago.
Abigail Hubert. Ramona’s daughter. Sold.
The girl’s torso shifted, and her two broken arms swayed by her sides as she said, quietly, to the ground,
“I love my mommy.”
Alan’s face drained of color, his body ran cold. The girl gave another considerate pause.
“I want her to have this house. And all the money you made. All your money.”
That’s what you told all the others, eh? Alan thought deliriously, bitterly. He swallowed a slough of profanities and curses and attempted to obey the order he knew she was making.
“Okay. Okay.” Alan breathed with difficulty, fumbling behind him for the handle of his desk drawer. “I’m—um—I’ll get my, um—”
“I talked to the rest of them. I know what you have to do.”
“Thank you, thank you. You’re very understanding, um, Abby.” Alan huffed through his teeth and attempted a consoling smile. “It is Abby, right? Abby. I’ll put those funds through as fast as I can—”
“I know.”
Abby stepped closer to his shaking body on pulsing feet. Her small bones crunched underneath, every step a disjointed hobble. She looked down at him with such distance as if looking down at a halved worm on the pavement. When she spoke, it was below a whisper. But Alan heard it. He heard it loud as an amp blaring in his own head.
“If your checkbook isn’t here, you’d better start running.”

All investments had been sold back and all infrastructure collapsed as Giving Back Body closed its business for good. The last of its associated deaths had come swiftly, like a horrid omen of the company’s failure having come to pass. Nobody would poke the burning pile with a ten-foot pole.
Alan Gibbley, founder and CEO, had been found dead in his New York home that week. He appeared to have tripped descending the stairs in the night, face down, a fountain pen gouged through his right eye.