Death Is not the End by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
Published: 2020-04-09T16:17:44+00:00

Sacrifices

Pete Woodworth

It’s long been said that certain places have “character,” personalities they’ve acquired over time as they soak up the lives and events that occur within them. A beloved grandmother’s house hums with love and oven-warm nostalgia; loss and fury ripple across a battlefield like a summer breeze through tall grass. Sometimes these feelings ebb over time; a place that once blazed bright in history gradually burns down to embers, then goes out and is forgotten. Others, though, not only hold on to the feelings they contain, but magnify them, warping those who walk there into reflections of the past it cannot leave behind. Sometimes the restless dead help the process along, but in rare cases the place takes on a life of its own.

And Echo Hill is the rarest of places.

Though another institution would later steal the title on a technicality, Echo Hill Penitentiary was in fact the oldest facility of its kind in the country. A place designed not to punish the men — and much later, women — sentenced to its cells, but to encourage penitence and rehabilitation. To take broken people and make them whole and productive again through a combination of prayer, hard labor, and long slow hours of introspection. A place founded on fusing the most modern psychological theories of its time with the oldest sort of religious convictions regarding the power of salvation attained through suffering.

It didn’t take long for that to fall apart. Soon bright ideals gave way to tarnished ones, then tarnished ones were discarded for pragmatic measures, and eventually pragmatism surrendered to simple, unceasing brutality. Echo Hill became a synonym for madness and torture, isolation and horror. When it was finally closed following the great fire of 1973, there were 141 official graves in its cemetery, and rumors of nearly half again as many more unofficial burials on the grounds. For years it sat by itself on its hill, burned and half-fallen, glaring at the city across from it, until a historical foundation raised money to repair it and re-open it as a museum of prison history.

These days, it’s mostly quiet. There are ghosts, of course — some come close enough to the world for the staff and patrons to glimpse. Most, however, simply go about their days inside the high stone walls, clinging to their shadowy existence and doing their best to avoid trouble from both the living and the dead. Sure, people shiver and mutter to themselves about dark presences, but the truth is that if there are accidents, if there are disappearances, if anything at all goes wrong at Echo Hill Penitentiary, there is a perfectly mundane cause behind it.

Most of the time.

• • •

“All I’m saying,” Decker said, leaning forward across the diner table and into Becca’s personal space, “is that we need to go in there and clean house. It’s been left way too long, honestly.” Behind him, his two krewe members nodded. They hadn’t spoken at all the entire dinner, just exchanged glances with Decker and affirmed his positions with nods or small sounds of agreement.

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