Hello, Hello

 It was dark in the well;  dark and cold.

Too cramped to stretch her legs, too frigid to stand the water prickling her hips. The walls here were slick with moss, fed by a steady stream of rainwater.
She knew every crack on every brick on the wall surrounding her; could trace them with a finger even in the dark. A personalised labyrinth.
Days passed in a haze of dripping water and flitting shadows, cold and green and silent.
Gods only knew how long she’d been down here; how many days had slipped past without her noticing. She’d stopped counting years ago, lain back in the darkness, let the moss and the tangled ivy enfold her like a shroud. It was better this way.
Sometimes, rarely these days, a shadow would pass across the circle of sky overhead. She would catch a glint of a curious eye, a flash of teeth, a twist of hair. A visitor to her dank little corner of the world.
Sometimes they called down to her, in voices young and old, rich and hesitant:
“Hello?”
Sometimes she called back.
“Hello…hello…hello…”
Her voice always surprised her; how soft and whisper-thin it was, hoarse from disuse.

It hadn’t always been this way. Once, she’d known so many words; could hold her own in any conversation. She’d been a shy thing, a skittish thing, but words had tumbled from her lips as freely as a forest waterfall. Once, she had loved and laughed and ran through the forest, delighting in the call of birds, the rustle of underbrush, her own pounding footfalls.
Once, she had craved a human so deeply that it faded her to whispers.
...Or perhaps he had loved her instead, and torn her to shreds across the fields of Gaia when she refused him. She lacked the energy now to remember which.
No matter the story, the outcome was always the same.
Here is Echo, here is Dané, mistress of the Lonely, patron saint of all the dark quiet places, doomed to an eternity of splashing water and loamy shadows.
One day, perhaps, she would call up and ask the visitors for their names, for information on the outside world, for something more than pennies and dead pigeons thrown into her darkness. Perhaps she would ask for flowers— bright yellow narcissi— to pluck from their stems and scatter across the water. Something beautiful.
But until then she would answer as she always had, offering her gifts of solace to the lost and alone. Those who asked their questions to the shadows deserved a reply, she thought. Even a small one.
Hello?
Hello…hello…hello…
Even if it was just their own voices, calling back to them.

***

Georgia Cook is an illustrator and writer from London. You can find her work in such publications as Baffling Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, and Vastarien Lit, as well as shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Reflex Fiction Award, among others. She has also written and narrated for the horror anthology podcasts 'Creepy', 'The Other Stories', and 'The Night's End' She can be found on Twitter and on her website at https://www.georgiacookwriter.com/