Psycho - Three Complete Novels (18 page)

Lila turned away. She saw the old-fashioned laundry tubs, and the table and chair beyond them, next to the wall. There were bottles on the table, and carpentry tools, plus an assortment of knives and needles. Some of the knives were oddly curved, and several of the needles were attached to syringes. Behind them rose a clutter of wooden blocks, heavy wire, and large shapeless blobs of a white substance she could not immediately identify. One of the bigger fragments looked something like the cast she had worn as a child, that time she’d broken her leg. Lila approached the table, gazing at the knives in puzzled concentration.

Then she heard the sound.

At first she thought it was thunder, but then came the creaking from overhead, and she knew.

Somebody had come into the house. Somebody was tiptoeing along the hall. Was it Sam? Had he come to find her? But then why didn’t he call her name?

And why did he close the cellar door?

The cellar door had closed, just now. She could hear the sharp click of the lock, and the footsteps moving away, back along the hall. The intruder must be going upstairs to the second floor.

She was locked in the cellar. And there was no way out. No way out, nowhere to hide. The whole basement was visible to anyone descending the cellar stairs. And somebody would be coming down those stairs soon. She knew it now.

If she could only keep herself concealed for a moment, then whoever came after her would have to descend all the way into the basement. And she’d have a chance to run for the stairs, then.

The best place would be under the stairway itself. If she could cover up with some old papers or some rags—

Then Lila saw the blanket pinned to the far wall. It was a big Indian blanket, ragged and old. She tugged at it, and the rotted cloth ripped free of the nails which held it in place. It came off the wall, off the door.

The door.
The blanket had concealed it completely, but there must be another room here, probably an old-fashioned fruit cellar. That would be the ideal place to hide and wait.

And she wouldn’t have to wait much longer. Because now she could hear the faint, faraway footsteps coming down the hall again, moving along into the kitchen.

Lila opened the door of the fruit cellar.

It was then that she screamed.

She screamed when she saw the old woman lying there, the gaunt, gray-haired old woman whose brown, wrinkled face grinned up at her in an obscene greeting.

“Mrs. Bates!” Lila gasped.

“Yes.”

But the voice wasn’t coming from those sunken, leathery jaws. It came from behind her, from the top of the cellar stairs, where the figure stood.

Lila turned to stare at the fat, shapeless figure, half-concealed by the tight dress which had been pulled down incongruously to cover the garments beneath. She stared up at the shrouding shawl, and at the white, painted, simpering face beneath it. She stared at the garishly reddened lips, watched them part in a convulsive grimace.

“I am Norma Bates,”
said the high, shrill voice. And then there was the hand coming out, the hand that held the knife, and the feet were mincing down the stairs, and other feet were running, and Lila screamed again as Sam came down the stairs and the knife came up, quick as death. Sam grasped and twisted the hand that held it, twisted it from behind until the knife clattered to the floor.

Lila closed her mouth, but the scream continued. It was the insane scream of an hysterical woman, and it came from the throat of Norman Bates.

— 16 —

I
t took almost a week to reclaim the cars and the bodies from the swamp. The county highway crew had to come in with a dredger and hoist, but in the end the job was done. They found the money, too, right there in the glove compartment. Funny thing, it didn’t even have a speck of mud on it, not a speck.

Somewhere along about the time they finished with the swamp, the men who knocked over the bank at Fulton were captured down in Oklahoma. But the story rated less than half a column in the Fairvale
Weekly Herald.
Almost the entire front page was given over to the Bates case. AP and UP picked it up right away, and there was quite a bit about it on television. Some of the write-ups compared it to the Gein affair up north, a few years back. They worked up a sweat over the “house of horror” and tried their damnedest to make out that Norman Bates had been murdering motel visitors for years. They called for a complete investigation of every missing person case in the entire area for the past two decades, and urged that the entire swamp be drained to see if it would yield more bodies.

But then, of course, the newspaper writers didn’t have to foot the bill for such a project.

Sheriff Chambers gave out a number of interviews, several of which were actually printed in full—two of them with photographs. He promised a full investigation of all aspects of the case. The local district attorney called for a speedy trial (primary election was coming in October) and did nothing to directly contradict the written and oral rumors which were circulating in which Norman Bates was portrayed as guilty of cannibalism, Satanism, incest, and necrophilia.

Actually, of course, he had never even talked to Bates, who was now temporarily confined for observation at the State Hospital.

Neither had the rumor-mongers, but that didn’t stop them. Long before the week was out, it was beginning to appear that virtually the entire population of Fairvale, to say nothing of the entire county area south of there, had been personally and immediately acquainted with Norman Bates. Some of them had “gone to school with him when he was a boy” and even then they had all “noticed something funny about the way he acted.” Quite a few had “seen him around that motel of his,” and they too attested to the fact that they’d always “suspected” him. There were those who remembered his mother and Joe Considine, and they tried to establish how they “knew something was wrong when those two were supposed to have committed suicide that way,” but of course the gruesome tidbits of twenty years ago seemed stale indeed as compared to more recent revelations.

The motel, of course, was closed—which seemed a pity, in a way, because there was no end to the number of morbid curiosity-lovers who sought it out. Quite conceivably, a goodly percentage would have been eager to rent rooms, and a slight raise would compensate for the loss of the towels which undoubtedly would have been filched as souvenirs of the gala occasion. But State Highway Patrol troopers guarded the motel and the property behind it.

Even Bob Summerfield was able to report a noticeable increase in business at the hardware store. Everybody wanted to talk to Sam, naturally, but he spend part of the following week in Fort Worth with Lila, then took a run up to the State Hospital where three psychiatrists were examining Norman Bates.

It wasn’t until almost ten days later, however, that he was finally able to get a definite statement from Dr. Nicholas Steiner, who was officially in charge of the medical observation.

Sam reported the results of his interview to Lila, at the hotel, when she came in from Fort Worth the following weekend. He was noticeably reticent at first, but she insisted on the full details.

“We’ll probably never know everything that happened,” Sam told her, “and as for the reasons, Dr. Steiner told me himself that it was mostly a matter of making an educated guess. They kept Bates under heavy sedation at first, and even after he came out of it, nobody could get him to really talk very much. Steiner says he got closer to Bates than anyone else, but in the last few days he appears to be in a very confused state. A lot of the things he said, about fugue and cathexis and trauma, are way over my head.

“But as near as he can make out, this all started way back in Bates’s childhood, long before his mother’s death. He and his mother were very close, of course, and apparently she dominated him. Whether there was ever anything more to their relationship, Dr. Steiner doesn’t know. But he does suspect that Norman was a secret transvestite long before Mrs. Bates died. You know what a transvestite is, don’t you?”

Lila nodded. “A person who dresses in the clothing of the opposite sex, isn’t that it?”

“Well, the way Steiner explained it, there’s a lot more to it than that. Transvestites aren’t necessarily homosexual, but they identify themselves strongly with members of the other sex. In a way, Norman wanted to be like his mother, and in a way he wanted his mother to become a part of himself.”

Sam lit a cigarette. “I’m going to skip the data about his school years, and his rejection by the army. But it was after that, when he was around nineteen, that his mother must have decided Norman wasn’t ever going out into the world on his own. Maybe she deliberately prevented him from growing up; we’ll never actually know just how much she was responsible for what he became. It was probably then that he began to develop his interest in occultism, things like that. And it was then that this Joe Considine came into the picture.

“Steiner couldn’t get Norman to say very much about Joe Considine—even today, more than twenty years later, his hatred is so great he can’t talk about the man without flying into a rage. But Steiner talked to the Sheriff and dug up all the old newspapers stories, and he has a pretty fair idea of what really happened.

“Considine was a man in his early forties; when he met Mrs. Bates she was thirty-nine. I guess she wasn’t much to look at, on the skinny side and prematurely gray, but ever since her husband had run off and left her she had owned quite a lot of farm property he’d put in her own name. It had brought in a good income during all these years and even though she paid out a fair amount to the couple who worked it for her, she was well off. Considine began to court her. It wasn’t too easy—I gather Mrs. Bates hated men ever since her husband deserted her and the baby, and this is one of the reasons why she treated Norman the way she did, according to Dr. Steiner. But I was telling you about Considine. He finally got her to come around and agree to a marriage. He’d brought up this idea of selling the farm and using the money to build a motel—the old highway ran right alongside the place in those days, and there was a lot of business to be had.

“Apparently Norman had no objections to the motel idea. The plan went through without a hitch, and for the first three months he and his mother ran the new place together. It was then, and only then, that his mother told him that she and Considine were going to be married.”

“And that sent him off?” Lila asked.

Sam ground out his cigarette in the ash tray. It was a good excuse for him to turn away as he answered, “Not exactly, according to what Dr. Steiner found out. It seems the announcement was made under rather embarrassing circumstances, after Norman had walked in on his mother and Considine together in the upstairs bedroom. Whether the full effect of the shock was experienced immediately or whether it took quite a while for the reaction to set in, we don’t know. But we do know what happened as a result. Norman poisoned his mother and Considine with strychnine. He used some kind of rat poison, served it to them with their coffee. I guess he waited until they had some sort of private celebration together; anyway there was a big dinner on the table, and the coffee was laced with brandy. It must have helped to kill the taste.”

“Horrible!” Lila shuddered.

“From all I hear, it
was.
The way I understand it, strychnine poisoning brings on convulsions, but not unconsciousness. The victims usually die from asphyxiation, when the chest muscles stiffen. Norman must have watched it all. And it was too much to bear.

“It was when he was writing the suicide note that Dr. Steiner thinks it happened. He had planned the note, of course, and knew how to imitate his mother’s handwriting perfectly. He’d even figured out a reason—something about a pregnancy, and Considine being unable to marry because he had a wife and family living out on the West Coast, where he’d lived under another name. Dr. Steiner says the wording of the note itself would be enough to tip off anyone that something was wrong. But nobody noticed, any more than they noticed what really happened to Norman after he finished the note and phoned the Sheriff to come out.

“They knew, at the time, that he was hysterical from shock and excitement. What they didn’t know is that while writing the note, he’d changed. Apparently, now that it was all over, he couldn’t stand the loss of his mother. He wanted her back. As he wrote the note in her handwriting, addressed to himself, he literally
changed
his mind. And Norman, or part of him,
became
his mother.

“Dr. Steiner says these cases are more frequent than you’d think, particularly when the personality is already unstable, as Norman’s was. And the grief set him off. His reaction was so severe, nobody even thought to question the suicide pact. Both Considine and his mother were in their graves long before Norman was discharged from the hospital.”

“And that’s when he dug her up?” Lila frowned.

“Apparently he did so, within a few months at most. He had this taxidermy hobby, and knew what he’d have to do.”

“But I don’t understand. If he thought he
was
his mother, then—”

“It isn’t quite that a simple. According to Steiner, Bates was now a multiple personality with at least three facets. There was
Norman,
the little boy who needed his mother and hated anything or anyone who came between him and her. Then,
Norma,
the mother, who could not be allowed to die. The third aspect might be called
Normal
—the adult Norman Bates, who had to go through the daily routine of living, and conceal the existence of the other personalities from the world. Of course, the three weren’t entirely distinct entities, and each contained elements of the other. Dr. Steiner called it an ‘unholy trinity.’

“But the adult Norman Bates kept control well enough so that he was discharged from the hospital. He went back to run the motel, and it was then that he felt the strain. What weighed on him most, as an adult personality, was the guilty knowledge of his mother’s death. Preserving her room was not enough. He wanted to preserve her, too; preserve her physically, so that the illusion of her living presence would suppress the guilt feelings.