Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Gemma Files’s “Little Horn,” first published in Nightmare Magazine in October 2024. Spoilers ahead, but go read!
The narrator, called Little Horn, has her own church. Not one she attends or ministers, but one that’s been built around her. Some of her worshipers grovel naked, while others stand guard against intruders with a dagger in each hand. She sits enthroned, a crown of bones biting into her scalp, a rough and foul-smelling goatskin robe chafing her skin; the reversed cross drawn in pig’s blood on her forehead draws stinging flies. The reverend and his sister-wives enter with a bag of feral cats and some three-foot-long skewers. The preaching, as always from the Book of Jubilees, tells how lawlessness increased upon the earth, and all flesh corrupted, until all creatures devoured each other and the thoughts of men were evil continually, et cetera, et cetera.
Little Horn knows that good people have a light about them, while bad people (the ones she’s grown up amongst) have “slime-mold souls.” Without Little Horn, her worshipers’ “ridiculous gothic shit” would be nothing but “simple human perversion.” She’s the chosen one, whose instinctive powers of destruction have been nurtured through the eighteen years since she was cut from her comatose mother’s belly. A strange seven-year cyclone seeded Little Horn into the virgin receptacle, or so she’s been taught, making her the harbinger of rebellion against the god who made this cruel world.
She is the Antichrist.
Or one of hundreds of candidates for the job who wander hunger-driven, occasionally to “collide and tangle,” perhaps to mate before going solo again.
Fed up with her congregation, Little Horn throws open the red door in her mind, releasing a lurking power that burns her church to the ground.
Afterwards she walks along a highway, naked and sooty, her feet leaving molten pools in the asphalt. She savors her rare solitude. The sheep-folk will flock to her soon enough. A young man stops his car to offer help, and she lets him take her to his home where she cleans up and dresses in his girlfriend’s Barbie-pink clothing. She has him drop her off at an all-night diner, where by coincidence (or not) she meets a young woman taller than herself, probably older, but with the same olive skin, reddish hair, and eyes with slitted pupils like “a pair of black moons floating in an alien sky.”
The two share coffee and a little mind-reading. Little Horn’s newfound “cousin” is The Nail on the internet, Beata Callander “at home.” Each claims the other is the first fellow Antichrist she’s met, but Beata describes another Antichrist wannabe who, like Little Horn, destroyed his church and worshipers. Maybe, Little Horn suggests, he got sick of “naked morons rubbin’ up on him.” The conversation turns to the trials and possible triumphs of Antichristism. Their demonic half, Beata says, makes them stronger than the human sheep; that strength makes its own laws and ensures that they’ll always lead, never be led. Yet if, per their creed, they are weapons to be honed, for whose Hand are they meant? Can they really have free will? And mustn’t one of them finally devour all the others to become “the sum of All”?
Says who, exactly, Little Horn asks. (Maybe she’ll work in a library instead, and call herself Peggy.) A very good question, Beata says.
Little Horn is digesting this idea when other diner patrons start to notice the pair. An old woman tells Little Horn she loves her. Little Horn’s rejection nearly has the usual deadly effect, but Beata soothes the woman. She asks for help controlling the rest of the humans. Little Horn grudgingly agrees, but then “a jolt, a spark, a charge” passes between the “cousins.” Quite the trick, Beata think-remarks. A trick and a treat, Little Horn thinks back, “energy humming at almost the same pitch through the holes between our atoms, sewing us together and the rest of the world apart.”
Then the night outside delivers another of their kind into the world. It’s the “sumbitch” Beata mentioned earlier, morphed into the kind of demon Hieronymus Bosch envisioned: multiple faces and eyes, six-foot tail and three-foot penis, four black wings, and three rows of teeth behind black lips. This third “cousin” has already subsumed many Antichrist-candidates into himself—thus the faces.
The two join hands and send a “spike” of power through the diners, turning them into a mob that attacks “the Beast.” The Beast incinerates them with streams of fiery semen, then turns on Little Horn and Beata. But through their joining, and connections with the subsumed “cousins,” the women become instruments of assault and sacrament and vengeance all at once. In a “spasm of de-Creation,” they destroy the Beast.
Slow clapping announces a newcomer who looks like “Robert Johnson by way of Stagger Lee, classic crossroads style,” but with goat-eyes and spiky nubs under his pork-pie hat. “Lucifer,” Little Horn murmurs, and he responds that he’s well-pleased with “his beloved.” With both of them, actually, and why shouldn’t there be two Antichrists? They aren’t like the other Power’s sheep, who must submit. They can fight for what they want, his daughters, and for them victory means: Everything.
What if they don’t want everything, though? What if at the last confrontation, with the Lamb opposed to their Goats, they decide not to fight? But Little Horn’s not dumb enough to press that idea with their devil-daddy. Instead she and Beata decline his offer of everything. That’s not what they want.
Lucifer corrects them gently: Not yet. Then he’s gone, leaving Little Horn and Beata to walk down the highway “alone once more, together.” Does Little Horn want to call herself Peggy after all? “I’m thinkin’,” she says.
What’s Cyclopean: Peggy’s been raised on semi-biblical poetry, and has some poetry of her own: wicked people’s “slime-mold souls—their flesh spored like fungus, turning from within.” Files, in her interview, says she was aiming for “poetic from top to tail, half murder ballad, half chorale.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Antichrists have more reason than most to refer to ordinary people as “sheep.”
Weirdbuilding: The roots of this one go all the way back to Revelation, not to mention Hieronymus Bosch.
Anne’s Commentary
My colleague in weird journalism, Carl Kolchak, has lately devoted his energies to investigating Antichrist-centered cults (ACCs). Therefore I’ve asked him to read Gemma Files’s intriguing piece and contribute his thoughts on its portrayal of ACCs and Antichrists in general.
His first comment, as we downed deep mugs of joe, was that coffee did indeed beat all holy crap out of goat’s-blood brewed with moonshine, although goat’s-blood laced with Macallan Double Cask Scotch was surprisingly good. Given that few cultists (and few freelance weird journalists) can afford high-end single malts, I didn’t ask how Carl knew this.
It turned out that he had infiltrated Little Horn’s branch of the Left Hand Path shortly before its dissolution. He posed as one of the robed and masked cultists, it being tough to disguise cameras and recording devices while groveling naked in a hexafoil.
Re: cultist couture, Carl had much to say. In his experience, Little Horn’s ceremonial garb was typical of lower-rent “home-made” paraphernalia. If a cult leader has sister-wives and/or brother-husbands with rudimentary sewing/taxonomy/bonework skills, fabricating a get-up like LH’s is no big deal. Carl wasn’t surprised to read how torturous LH found her duds. Horn crowns are bound by their pointy-jabby nature to be uncomfortable. To line the crown with a scalp-protective cap is considered cheating, and chin-straps are too tacky for even a “hillbilly” cult to tolerate. Robes made from uncured hides have cachet derived from their sheer nastiness both for the wearer and anyone standing downwind. Plus they, even more than pig’s-blood skin art, will attract flies. Plus they tend to harbor fleas. Carl thought he had it bad in his sticky papier-mâché mask and scratchy polyester robe, until he saw LH slouch onto the podium.
No wonder she flipped out and torched her church and followers. Admittedly, there was more involved in LH’s rebellion than her cult’s “ridiculous gothic” aesthetic, but it’s cumulative gaucheries like Hand of Glory wall-sconces, a steady diet of feral cat kabobs, and an itchy costume straight off the CD cover of a heavy metal garage band, that will push an Antichrist over the edge. ACC leaders should never forget that a genuine Antichrist is the child of Lucifer His Own Self and therefore inherits superior intelligence and exquisite sensibilities. It doesn’t matter if, as in LH’s case, the “devil-baby” is kept illiterate and isolated—if their worshipers are at base driven by “simple human perversion, the same old lust and hate and murder,” they will finally disgust their idol into spitting them out.
And when an Antichrist spits, Carl said, what comes out of their mouth is hellfire. Which is why, when he saw LH squirming with boredom and repugnance on her throne, he hightailed it out of that “hillbilly” cathedral before the conflagration started.
The feral cats caught up with him soon afterwards. Given any opportunity to save its ass, a hard-knocks feline will seize it with all four sets of claws. That’s why I call Carl the feral cat of newshounds.
I was hoping he might by chance or hunch have been at the diner where LH meets Beata, but no such luck. However, Carl could confirm from other Antichrist encounters that debate comes to them as naturally as it does to their infernal papa. LH envies Beata for having been educated to the art of “conjur[ing her] own opinions and formulat[ing her] own insights into arguments.” LH, however, is innately a keen observer and questioner. She makes so apt a pupil for her more advanced cousin that by the end of the story she’s up for a debate even with their Dad.
About LH and Beata’s shared paternity, Carl wondered whether it made them half-sisters rather than cousins. If “the Beast” was their brother, offing him was fratricide, if a necessary one. Carl believes that the Beast isn’t the first Antichrist to make a good go at eliminating much of his competition, thus monstrifying himself into a demon superlatively fit for the brush of a Bosch.
Carl and I then had our own debate about why Lucifer applauded LH and Beata for killing the Beast—wouldn’t he view the son who’d already proven his dominance more worthy than two linked but individual daughters? LH even asks Lucifer if it wouldn’t be breaking the rules to have two Antichrists. As ever, Lucifer has a quick, slick answer: The rules of the Antichrist competition can change because Lucifer’s Creed, unlike the Lord of the Sheep’s, is that he and his children don’t have to obey.
One exception: the Antichrist(s) would have to obey Lucifer with regard to their world-ending confrontation with the Lamb. There they wouldn’t have a choice. Or, LH speculates, would they? If defying his Creator was Lucifer’s transforming act, might not LH and Beata defy theirs through a transforming act of strength and sacrifice?
They know better than to share this notion with Dad.
Clever girls, Carl said, and exchanging our mugs for shot glasses, I agreed.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I’m rarely a fan of Christian-inflected horror—the common failure mode is too black-and-white, with too much power given to unsympathetically-simple forces of good. That’s not a problem in “Little Horn,” where the focus is on sympathetically-complex forces of… evil? Destruction? Apocalypse? Destiny? Or perhaps none of the above. That question is what drives the story, along with the idea that the answer just might be a choice.
Which is an impressive thing to get out of characters who do, in fact, bleed at the name of “the carpenter”—even if they also (much like me) are enough creatures of mainstream culture to take his name in vain in moments of stress.
The idea of “antichrist as a position” adds to the complexity. Why should the apocalypse be a one-shot deal? We live in the time of “poly-crisis,” so why not as many devil-kids as there are more mundane existential threats?
As with those threats, there are all too many people attracted to world-ends, congregating (literally) around them, and denying that anything should be done to change the supposedly inevitable. Peggy’s been raised as a prop to give meaning to “simple human perversion.” The idea that she might be interested in a life beyond being a passive conduit for destruction—that she might want a name beyond the one forced on her, and a job beyond emperor of the end days—is itself a horror to the cult that claims her. On first escaping to the normal world, she’s not even sure she’s earned being a “ma’am,” or whether she’s anything more person-like than “a scream walking ‘round on two legs.” (These are really very trans-coded antichrists; I approve.)
This sort of constraint only works on people isolated from others like themselves. Once you start finding community, you start figuring out personhood. No wonder the antichrists are all told that they’re battling for the big prize. There can be only one. If you’re old enough to have wondered why the Highlanders couldn’t just not, you’ll appreciate both Beata and Peggy’s lack of interest in that game and the Princes of the Universe aesthetics of their brief confrontation with the Bosch Beast.
I also appreciate the lack of easy answers about their nature—even from their dad. Sure, there’s a clear mythology, but they’ve been lied to their whole lives. No guarantees that the prophecies are true, or that the entity passing as the Prince of Lies is being honest about his origin. So Peggy runs down possibilities from “nephilim in reverse” (basic Christianity-as-apocalypse-cult stuff) to “something from outside space-time forcing a little bit of itself inside, moving us around like human-skin finger puppets” (cosmic horror wearing a biblical mask).
And in that uncertainty is possibility, an opening that Lucifer (or whoever he is) seems to approve. If you don’t have to take everything you’ve learned as gospel truth (sorry), then you don’t have to obey the “inevitable” directive – whether that involves dueling to the death, ruling the world, or ending the world. “I don’t have to fight you, not really. I never did.” So we move from the prophecy-driven devil of Revelation to the free-willed rebel of Paradise Lost. In the follow-up interview, Files says that “both salvation and damnation require you to be complicit”. Good and evil can’t be meaningful in a universe of pure puppetry. They have to be choices, and that means you can choose something else.
In addition to the trans resonance, I also appreciate the neurodivergent resonances raised in that same interview. A childhood where people keep telling you what you are and what you have to do, and none of it jibes with how you see yourself—and going along with it is likely to destroy everything? That’s relatable for a lot of people, many of whom have no supernatural parentage at all.
Next week, we cover chapters 55-57 of Pet Sematary, and then—on to Oz the Great and Tewwible!
