Who: Luke Crain and OTA What: Contemplating Where: Not far from Lou's When: Saturday Warnings: TBD/narrative includes mention of death and drug use Status: OPEN
Tomorrow was Mother's Day. Luke had mixed feelings about the day. His mother had died when he was just six, he barely remembered her. At least, he barely remembered her before Hill House. He remembered Hill House as sure as he'd been there only yesterday. He remembered his mother's decent into madness, and he remembered how she tried to get him to drink the poison tea. The tea that Abigail drank, causing her to foam at the mouth and die right in front of him.
His mother was dead soon after too, though not from the tea. From the madness that was Hill House. That madness had gotten to Luke, too. But he'd fought it with the innocence of childhood, and later with the numbing factor of drinking and drugs. How many times had he been in and out of rehab? How much had he stolen from his brother and sisters? From his aunt who raised them all after their mother's death and their father's own madness kept him from raising his own children?
He paused outside of Lou's, and he knew he must have looked like some kind of tourist, trying to decide if the destination was worth checking out. Part of him wanted to do it. He could envision himself sidling up to the bar, ordering a drink. Instead he muttered to himself, counting to seven because seven was his special number. "It has to be seven," he'd told Nellie when they were just kids, still in their own private house of horrors. Seven for the seven members of the Crain family. Three of them were gone, only two of them were in Madison.
And it still had to be seven. Seven kept the monsters away. Seven represented Luke's hold on whatever sanity he had left.