Echo: Isle of Rain

Chapter 1: White Hope

A shrill scream from the red painted lips of a monster begins the morning. The noise cut through dawn like a sunbeam and seemed to invite disaster with its very tongue. The shrill was directed at none other than fifteen-year-old Echo Mae.

Blood matted her hair, in the mold-growing, cold and damp concrete surface of the basement. Conditions had been like this for years now.

The scream had come from a woman, grey eyes frantically glancing at one side of the room to the next, searching in the dark for where the young girl had fallen. Her eyes seemed to glow with a hatred, thousands of stars in their reflection. Echo Mae, a young girl that tawny-haired, grey-eyed woman called a daughter. Although the resemblance was never quite there in the face, they shared the same small frame. Their arms and legs too long with bones that stood out like hooks that lured the innocent people of Brooklyn into a false sense of security.

"Up. Now!" The woman said, her hoarse voice called into the darkness, it vibrated through the walls and shook Echo to the core.

Another slap across the cheek, it had stung like acid to her skin and a kick to her stomach that marked the fifth bruise in the same spot. It had turned some sort of yellowish purple color, like the fog that descended around the gates of hell. With that the woman leaves, leather black heels stalked up the stairs with a harsh pounding noise following them.

Echo Mae was once again left to her own thoughts, which roamed in the dark haze inside her blood matted head. Her long-sleeved and night black shirt couldn't protect her from the harsh winds that slipped through the cracks of the basement walls. It was fraying at the ends and torn in multiple small circles around the sleeves.

As she stood her weakened body nearly toppled, unsteadiness replaced her knees before she regained her sense of control.

Pull it together, Echo's voice seemed like a stranger to herself even in her own mind. Her body felt as if it was slowly deteriorating as she moved towards the mirror. She could see herself harshly flinch back at the sight of her face, a revolted look grasped her features in its hand. A seemingly dead person was staring back at her. Her cheeks had hollowed and emptied out casting a dark shadow that loomed over the crevices of her face. Perhaps it had just been another sick prank?

Like the mirror's reflection could be ripped away and the person she once knew would come back. Perhaps she could go back to when she was six and was being dragged down to this cold, damp place, for the first time. Her ankles and wrists had burned, a heartbeat caught in them from the germ infested and skin chafing rope she'd been bound to the wall with. It had smelled of mold, a thick and disgusting air that made it hard to breathe and would pile up in her lungs like grease. Her eyes were brighter than stars, burning wildly to their destruction. She swore she could almost have seen a reflection of hope when she looked back in them. The very same eyes would scorch a hole through the walls to see the outside world, now the walls blankly stared back at her. Now in the cold darkness that washed over her body in waves, she could only see the faint outline of an unfamiliar face, one that was much too sunken into the pit of it's despair. A bit too large and deep to climb out of, it stretched for miles in her mind, one wrong turn and she would fall forever.

Echo grabbed an oversized smoky colored coat from the back of the old rocking chair that Mother had long since forgotten about. Her blood matted hair was mostly hidden underneath a black wool hat that she had taken from the nurse's office. The rest of it hid underneath her coat, otherwise falling down her back in severe knots. Four knocks from her frail fist rapped on the door, a sign she was ready to go. Eight locks on the other side were holding her in, and the windows had been taken out years ago, now in their place were huge blocks of uneven concrete. Stacked over each other in a pile, they locked her in. It seemed she had always been locked in.