Haunt: Volume 2

Lorina Gingham's Last Night at Cult Evermind (Part 1 of 4)

Weekend Two - Friday Night, Continued

September 23, 2022

POV: Seven Wonders Park

Lorina Gingham waited on the steps outside her group home.

The afternoon sun beat down on her long, brown bushy hair, which she used to shade her wan face. Lorina, a woman of about 25 years, claimed to be 18. It was not a deliberate lie but more of a modified truth. She didn't count the last seven years because they didn't belong to her.

Imprecise about her age, she also seemed to belong to a different era, wearing a near ankle-length, modest blue calico dress with puffed sleeves that would have fit in well on a stage production of Oklahoma! She had five such dresses - in different pastels, all hand-made. She didn't use makeup. An expression of bewilderment usually rested on her face. In public, she was frequently mistaken for a Mennonite.

However, on her lap was a smartphone. On this, she played a choose-your-own-adventure game of various romantic stories. Currently embroiled in "Loving the High School Bully," about a shy girl who discovers the school bad boy 'Iceal' (an odd name due to mistranslation, probably) is secretly a sensitive teddy bear underneath his bad boy exterior. If Lorina made all the right game choices, she'd get to put her avatar in the deluxe prom dress, and Lorina meant to have it.

She waited for her ride to her first day at Haunt. Aside from her smartphone, she had a clear plastic tote bag holding a bottle of water, a black sock, a whistle and a flashlight.

None of her housemates could give her a ride that day - and Lorina was not permitted a driver's license of her own. Not that she had a car, anyway. Only two of the six group home residents did.

The MarcusHome program ran several group homes for "young adults in need." Lorina's was for women aged 18-32 who needed some help transitioning from institutionalization back to full freedom, and they either had no families to turn to or their families had long ago given up. There were two group home supervisors, a very lovely middle-aged married couple, Jo and Joe, who ensured all the boxes were checked: that the women were going to work, taking their meds, seeing their probation officers, making their doctor appointments. Lorina found her housemates to be very agreeable; they had all seen a lot of crazy shit, so Lorina's eccentricities were hardly an issue. Three of the women were transitioning out of incarceration for non-violent crimes; the other three, like Lorina, had been in a different sort of facility.

Despite the heat of the afternoon, October was just around the corner. Halloween decorations were scattered around the neighborhood, ghosts and skeletons dangled from trees, and pumpkins dressed front porches. Lorina found them quite pretty and looked forward to the jack-o-lantern painting party the group home planned for mid-October.

Finally, a sunshine-orange Jeep Wrangler appeared at the end of the street. In its windows were numerous cat decals.

The Jeep barely had time to stop before Lorina jumped inside the passenger seat, tossing her small backpack next to Georgia's much more prominent designer bag.

"Oh, Georgia, thank you so much!" Lorina spoke with an unusual accent for Missouri - a hybrid of upper-crust New Englander and the high society of Victorian London. The average midwesterner would just call it a "British accent." A linguist would note that Lorina's mixture of specific accents was just a woman doing a pretty damned good imitation of the accents she'd learned from watching a lot of Masterpiece Theater.

A woman like this fit right into Haunt.

She continued, "You're so terribly kind to help me. I don't know how I shall repay you."