The Note

"Callie! You just got lucky girl, you are headin' out this morning to work on your first solo piece. No more junior overseers, you are on your own."

"Thank you sir. I won't let you down."

"You better not Cal' I got a lot restin' on this story."

This was what I heard when I walked in the office this morning. My fast-talking Senior Overseer had placed me with my first real story.

I was a Freshie into my job, having only completed minor essays on music reviews, although I was handpicked at the age of three to become a journalist.

God knows why, but it happened to every child at that age, this being the only proof that human kind has developed at all. My only sister wasn't given a profession and strangely enough she was dead by the age of eight.
It happened to most kids, so it didn't bother me so much. It was just a part of every day life, and I didn't miss her.

Anyway, I had only been working at the paper for around six months. The fact that I was given a solo piece so early was monumental. My Junior Overseer had confided in me once that he had been working here three years straight before he was given anything to do on his own.
I considered myself incredibly lucky until I asked the inevitable question,

"What's the case about?"

My Senior Overseer, Joshua Wilkins, looked at me strangely before answering.

"It's on the alarming death rates at the national psychiatric hospital. I chose you for this as you seemed to be...ah...most well equipped to handle the situation."

I understood exactly what he had meant by this. He chose me because I was the hard-ass of the office.
As I mentioned before, I don't even miss my sister although we had been twins, but there is slightly more to my story.
Ever since the age of five, I have been physically incapable of crying. I don't even remember crying in my entire life span, the only reason I know that I have is because my mother told me once.
I am a physical barrier to any emotional feelings. I have never had a relationship as I don't understand them, I have watched as countless relatives where being buried due to mysterious ailments that took their lives early, and never shed a tear nor asked why.
During my training for my job here, every person was given a human E.Q. test and I scored well below average, and I never cried whilst watching "The Titanic" that my flatmates had rented.

Joshua had chosen me because this was going to be a particularly grizzly case and he knew, that out of all of us, I would do the job thoroughly with the detached mindset that was required of journalists.

"I understand, I will leave right after I have read the briefing on the case."

*

Three hours later I was on a shuttle to Sacred Soul Psychiatric Hospital in the centre of the city.
Why they placed a psycho hospital in the middle of the city was totally beyond me, I thought to myself. Would it not just give one the feeling of being in a large glass cage examined by the many passers by?

Once walking up to the hospital though, I realised that my "Glass Cage" theory was far off the mark.
To say that the hospital was a glass cage was like to call a solid brick, water.

The immense building looked like a ridiculous rock that had grown straight out of the ground into an enormous cube.
A huge structure awashed with a sickly grey colour, a few minuscule windows dotted here and there and a minute dot of a front door.
The shape was exactly that, a cube. All straight lines, all angles and all box.

I reckoned that if a perfectly sane person sent here was , they would soon become the opposite with the sense of foreboding dripping from each severe point of the building.
Even unemotional I suppressed a shudder as I approached the sleeping giant of a Hospital.
Cautiously, I opened the main door, which had no fancy automatic opening technology into an equally grey waiting room.

That was when I met him.