The Wolf -Chapter III: South Peak

III: South Peak

1.
Mary Lindell stared out from behind her desk at the falling snow outside the glass double doors. She hated the cold, and the winter, and the place. South Peak, as far as she was concerned, was hell frozen over.
She had to wonder how, exactly, she had come to be here. Not even a year ago she was bussing tables to pay for college, and now her years of higher education in the field of sociology and psychology had paid off with a desk job.
The irony was, of course, that she was the front desk secretary of a mental institution.
And of course, it had only been two years. The stress, it turned out, was too much for her, not to mention the student loans, and she’d dropped out.
It was Mackey that got her here, Mackey who had called her just days after she’d put in an application. “Mary!” he had said. “Mary, we could use somebody like you, with your experience! We have an opening, and it’ll pay three times what you’re getting now! You must come work for us!”
Hadn’t that sounded nice? Three times her current paycheck, how on earth could she resist? Except her current paycheck hadn’t been much, so of course the new one didn’t need to be much more; and now she was stuck in the lobby of a mental institution, taking calls all through the night, and when she’d commented on how odd it was for a secretary to work over nights, Mackey had stated simply, “The crazy house tends to draw the crazies.”
And the truth of it was she did get more calls than she would rationally expect during the late hours of the day. Of course she never talked to anyone; she stated where they were calling to and asked how she could help, and they almost always replied that they needed to talk to someone, and then she would connect them. So it was generally a very boring job, a very brainless job, and one that could easily be done by a machine. So, insofar as that was concerned, she was at least a little bit grateful that she even had a job at all.
The clock hung just above the double doors ticked to 4 o’clock in the AM, and Mary stood up. Break time, she thought, though why she needed a break from sitting down was a question she would never be able to answer.

2.
Outside, Mary regarded the falling snow with distaste, but bore it long enough to smoke a cigarette.
She looked across the parking lot, the scattered street lights catching on the snow and causing the world to look brighter than it ought by rights should. Everywhere beyond the immediate vicinity of the South Peak Mental Institution was forest, and though this was a recently built facility (or rebuilt, she had heard some stories, though she remembered no specifics), the area around it was prosaic at best. The main road was paved, but the few others that led to God knew where else were composed only of scattered rocks and dirt. This was hick country, and boy did Mary know it.
The parking lot itself was beginning to look just as white as everywhere else, but in a couple hours it would be plowed up before it got a chance to melt and ice over. Two whole floors of the building were dedicated to sane residents, and maintenance crews were almost always on call. Resident floor cleaners, resident snow plowers, resident secretaries; the only people who didn’t live there, it seemed, were the doctors and the psychiatrists; the people who did the work that the place was known for. But, she knew little of standard procedure in regards to insane asylums, or mental facilities, or crazy houses, whatever you wanted to call them; either way, she just pegged it to being remote and left it at that. As far out as this place was (the nearest town, Alcudda, had a population of 562, and was forty miles away), the parking lot managed to fill up every day. Now, however, only a few vehicles remained in the “designated resident parking area." The rest was empty.
Except, she noticed, at the far end of the lot, close to where the main road opened up to the facility. There a dark colored jeep was idling, and though the lights were on in the cabin, Mary was too far away to tell what the person on the inside was doing.
But there was at least one person in there, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that he (no woman would ever idle their car in the parking lot of a mental institution, if Mary knew anything it was that) was looking right at her. A chill ran down her spine, and she dearly wanted to go back inside, but her cigarette was only half done, and God knew when she’d get a chance to run back into town to pick up another pack.
This she told herself, not consciously aware that she was blocking out memory of the coin-op cigarette dispenser in the resident lounge, which she visited every day. So it was for many of the non-crazies who resided at South Peak; a haze had fallen over them, though they had yet to notice it.
This was, of course, to the benefit of the people who ran the place.
“The crazy house tends to draw the crazies,” Mary told herself as she dropped the butt of her cigarette on the ground, crushing it beneath her heel. How time flies, she thought. Only a moment ago it seemed she had been worried about wasting a cigarette. Only a moment ago it had been just half burned, and since then she could not have taken more than a single puff, but sure as the clothes on her back it lay on the ground but a filter, the last of its embers choking in the cold, drowning in it, and she had her hand on the door, ready to make way for the body guiding it to go back inside.
Just as Mary made to return to her desk and her boring job, her eyes glanced upward. The snow was coming down as hard as it ever could, and would surely only get worse through the night; but somehow there was a break in the clouds, and she would not have noticed it except that, showing through them was the moon, so close to being full that she almost would have said that it was. But her first response was, “Two days.”
She didn’t understand how she could know that, had never cared much to know the specifics of the lunar calendar (did not, in fact, know that there was such a thing), but by the time she was back inside the slip of the moon had left her mind entirely, and she recalled only stepping out and smoking a cig and stepping back in.
The idling jeep and the two-days-away full moon may as well have never been there at all, and this was for the best. Because this was not the first time that she had seen that idling jeep, nor would it be the last, though that time was certainly coming; in fact, it was only two days away.