Gregory Maguire once stated: “People who claim to be evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's the people who claim to be good, or somehow better than the rest of us, that you need to be careful of. The manipulation of the younger girls, Reverend Parris, and the Procters will prove that Abigail Williams is the epicenter of all evil in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Abigail terrorizes the girls to prevent her reputation from being destroyed. After admitting to Reverend Parris that she had danced in the forest, she pleaded with the little girls: "Let one of you say a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a timely reckoning that will make you shiver” (Miller 1268). Abigail realizes that if the truth comes out that she drank the spell to kill Elizabeth Procter she will be sentenced to death, so evident by how she speaks to Mary Warren and Mercy Lewis while Betty remains unresponsive after being threatened by Abigail. The depths she went to ...