Psycho - Three Complete Novels (2 page)

“That’s the real reason you’re still sitting over here on this side of the road, isn’t it, Norman? Because the truth is that you haven’t any gumption.
Never
had any gumption, did you, boy?

“Never had the gumption to leave home. Never had the gumption to go out and get yourself a job, or join the army, or even find yourself a girl—”

“You wouldn’t let me!”

“That’s right, Norman. I wouldn’t let you. But if you were half a man, you’d have gone your own way.”

He wanted to shout out at her that she was wrong, but he couldn’t. Because the things she was saying were the things he had told himself, over and over again, all through the years. It was true. She’d always laid down the law to him, but that didn’t mean he always had to obey. Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed. There had been other widows, other only sons, and not all of them became enmeshed in this sort of relationship. It was really his fault as much as hers. Because he didn’t have any gumption.

“You could have insisted, you know,” she was saying. “Suppose you’d gone out and found us a new location, then put the place here up for sale. But no, all you did was whine. And I know why. You never fooled me for an instant. It’s because you really didn’t
want
to move. You’ve never wanted to leave this place, and you never will now, ever. You
can’t
leave, can you? Any more than you can grow up.”

He couldn’t look at her. Not when she said things like that, he couldn’t. And there was nowhere else for him to look, either. The beaded lamp, the heavy old overstuffed furniture, all the familiar objects in the room, suddenly became hateful just
because
of long familiarity; like the furnishings of a prison cell. He stared out of the window, but that was no good either—out there was the wind and the rain and the darkness. He knew there was no escape for him out
there.
No escape anywhere, from the voice that throbbed, the voice that drummed into his ears like that of the Inca corpse in the book; the drum of the dead.

He clutched at the book now and tried to focus his eyes on it. Maybe if he ignored her, and pretended to be calm—

But it didn’t work.

“Look at yourself!” she was saying
(the drum going boom-boom-boom, and the sound reverberating from the mangled mouth).
“I know why you didn’t bother to switch on the sign. I know why you haven’t even gone up to open the office tonight. You didn’t really forget. It’s just that you don’t
want
anyone to come, you hope they
don’t
come.”

“All right!” he muttered. “I admit it. I hate running a motel, always have.”

“It’s more than that, boy.”
(There it was again, “Boy, boy, boy!” drumming away, out of the jaws of death.)
“You hate
people.
Because, really, you’re
afraid
of them, aren’t you? Always have been, ever since you were a little tyke. Rather snuggle up in a chair under the lamp and read. You did it thirty years ago, and you’re still doing it now. Hiding away under the covers of a book.”

“There’s a lot worse things I could be doing. You always told me that, yourself. At least I never went out and got into trouble. Isn’t it better to improve your mind?”

“Improve your mind? Hah!” He could sense her standing behind him now, staring down. “Call
that
improvement? You don’t fool me, boy, not for a minute. Never have. It isn’t as if you were reading the Bible, or even trying to get an education. I know the sort of thing
you
read. Trash. And worse than trash!”

“This happens to be a history of the Inca civilization—”

“I’ll just bet it is. And I’ll just bet it’s crammed full with nasty bits about those dirty savages, like the one you had about the South Seas. Oh, you didn’t think I knew about
that
one did you? Hiding it up in your room, the way you hid all the others, those filthy things you used to read—”

“Psychology isn’t filthy, Mother!”

“Psychology, he calls it! A lot
you
know about psychology! I’ll never forget that time you talked so dirty to me, never. To think that a son could come to his own mother and
say
such things!”

“But I was only trying to explain something. It’s what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could just look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better.”

“Change, boy? Nothing’s going to change. You can read all the books in the world and you’ll still be the same. I don’t need to listen to a lot of vile obscene rigamarole to know what you are. Why, even an eight-year-old child could recognize it. They
did,
too, all your little playmates did, way back then. You’re a Mamma’s Boy. That’s what they called you, and that’s what you were. Were, are, and always will be. A big, fat, overgrown Mamma’s Boy!”

It was deafening him, the drumbeat of her words, the drumbeat in his own chest. The vileness in his mouth made him choke. In a moment he’d have to cry. Norman shook his head. To think that she could still do this to him, even now! But she could, and she was, and she
would,
over and over again, unless—

“Unless, what?”

God, could she read his
mind?

“I know what you’re thinking, Norman. I know all about you, boy. More than you dream. But I know that, too—what you dream. You’re thinking that you’d like to kill me, aren’t you, Norman? But you can’t. Because you haven’t the gumption. I’m the one who has the strength. I’ve always had it. Enough for both of us. That’s why you’ll never get rid of me, even if you really wanted to.

“Of course, deep down you
don’t
want to. You need me, boy. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

Norman stood up, slowly. He didn’t dare trust himself to turn and face her, not yet. He had to tell himself to be calm, first. Be very, very calm. Don’t think about what she’s saying. Try to face up to it, try to remember.
She’s an old woman, and not quite right in the head. If you keep on listening to her this way, you’ll end up not quite right in the head, either. Tell her to go back to her room and lie down. That’s where she belongs.

And she’d better go there fast, because if she doesn’t, this time you’re going to strangle her with her own Silver Cord—

He started to swing around, his mouth working, framing the phrases, when the buzzer sounded.

That was the signal; it meant somebody had driven in, up at the motel, and was ringing for service.

Without even bothering to look back, Norman walked into the hall, took his raincoat from the hanger, and went out into the darkness.

— 2 —

T
he rain had been falling steadily for several minutes before Mary noticed it and switched on the windshield wiper. At the same time she put on the headlights; it had gotten dark quite suddenly, and the road ahead was only a vague blur between the towering trees.

Trees? She couldn’t recall a stretch of trees along here the last time she’d driven this way. Of course that had been the previous summer and she’d come into Fairvale in broad daylight, alert and refreshed. Now she was tired out from eighteen hours of steady driving, but she could still remember and sense that something was wrong.

Remember
—that was the trigger word. Now she
could
remember, dimly, how she’d hesitated back there about a half-hour ago, when she came to the fork in the road. That was it; she’d taken the wrong turn. And now here she was, God knows where, with this rain coming down and everything pitch-black outside—

Get a grip on yourself, now. You can’t afford to be panicky. The worst part of it was over.

It was true, she told herself. The worst part was over. The worst part had come yesterday afternoon, when she stole the money.

She had been standing in Mr. Lowery’s office when old Tommy Cassidy hauled out that big green bundle of bills and put them down on the desk. Thirty-six Federal Reserve notes bearing the picture of the fat man who looked like a wholesale grocer, and eight more carrying the face of the man who looked like an undertaker. But the wholesale grocer was Grover Cleveland and the undertaker was William McKinley. And thirty-six thousands and eight five-hundreds added up to forty thousand dollars.

Tommy Cassidy had put them down just like
that,
fanning them casually as he announced he was closing the deal and buying a house as his daughter’s wedding present.

Mr. Lowery pretended to be just as casual as he went through the business of signing the final papers. But after old Tommy Cassidy went away, Mr. Lowery got a little bit excited. He scooped up the money, put it into a big brown Manila number ten envelope, and sealed the flap. Mary noticed how his hands were trembling.

“Here,” he said, handing her the money. “Take it over to the bank. It’s almost four o’clock, but I’m sure Gilbert will let you make a deposit.” He paused, staring at her. “What’s the matter, Miss Crane—don’t you feel well?”

Maybe he had noticed the way
her
hands trembled, now that she was holding the envelope. But it didn’t matter. She knew what she was going to say, even though she was surprised when she found herself actually saying it.

“I seem to have one of my headaches, Mr. Lowery. As a matter of fact, I was just going to ask if it was all right if I took the rest of the afternoon off. We’re all caught up on the mail, and we can’t make out the rest of the forms on this deal until Monday.”

Mr. Lowery smiled at her. He was in good humor, and why shouldn’t he be? Five percent of forty thousand was two thousand dollars. He could afford to be generous.

“Of course, Miss Crane. You just make this deposit and then run along home. Would you like me to drive you?”

“No, that’s all right, I can manage. A little rest—”

“That’s the ticket. See you Monday, then. Take it easy, that’s what I always say.”

In a pig’s ear that’s what
he
always said: Lowery would half kill himself to make an extra dollar, and he’d be perfectly willing to kill any of his employees for another fifty cents.

But Mary Crane had smiled at him very sweetly, then walked out of his office and out of his life. Taking the forty thousand dollars with her.

You don’t get that kind of an opportunity every day of your life. In fact, when you come right down to it, some people don’t seem to get
any
opportunities at all.

Mary Crane had waited over twenty-seven years for hers.

The opportunity to go on to college had vanished, at seventeen, when Daddy was hit by a car. Mary went to business school for a year, instead, and then settled down to support Mom and her kid sister, Lila.

The opportunity to marry disappeared at twenty-two, when Dale Belter was called up to serve his hitch in the army. Pretty soon he was stationed in Hawaii, and before long he began mentioning this girl in his letters, and then the letters stopped coming. When she finally got the wedding announcement she didn’t care any more.

Besides, Mom was pretty sick by then. It took her three years to die, while Lila was off at school. Mary had insisted she go to college, come what may, but that left her carrying the whole load. Between holding down a job at the Lowery Agency all day and sitting up with Mom half the night, there wasn’t time for anything else.

Not even time to note the
passing
of time. But then Mom had the final stroke, and there was the business of the funeral, and Lila coming back from school and trying to find a job, and all at once there was Mary Crane looking at herself in the big mirror and seeing this drawn, contorted face peering back at her. She’d thrown something at the mirror, and then the mirror broke into a thousand pieces and she knew that wasn’t all;
she
was breaking into a thousand pieces, too.

Lila had been wonderful and even Mr. Lowery helped out by seeing to it that the house was sold right away. By the time the estate was settled they had about two thousand dollars in cash left over. Lila got a job in a record shop downtown, and they moved into a small apartment together.

“Now, you’re going to take a vacation,” Lila told her. “A real vacation. No, don’t argue about it! You’ve kept this family going for eight years and it’s about time you had a rest. I want you to take a trip. A cruise, maybe.”

So Mary took the
S.S. Caledonia,
and after a week or so in Caribbean waters the drawn, contorted face had disappeared from the mirror of her stateroom. She looked like a young girl again (well, certainly not a day over twenty-two, she told herself) and, what was more important still, a young girl in love.

It wasn’t the wild, surging thing it had been when she met Dale Belter. It wasn’t even the usual stereotype of moonlight-on-the-water generally associated with a tropical cruise.

Sam Loomis was a good ten years older than Dale Belter had been, and pretty much on the quiet side, but she loved him. It looked like the first real opportunity of all, until Sam explained a few things.

“I’m really sailing under false pretenses, you might say,” he told her. “There’s this hardware store, you see—”

Then the story came out.

There was this hardware store, in a little town called Fairvale, up north. Sam had worked there for his father, with the understanding that he’d inherit the business. A year ago his father had died, and the accountants had told him the bad news.

Sam inherited the business, all right, plus about twenty thousand in debts. The building was mortgaged, the inventory was mortgaged, and even the insurance had been mortgaged. Sam’s father had never told him about his little side investment in the market—or the race track. But there it was. There were only two choices: go into bankruptcy or try and work off the obligations.

Sam Loomis chose the latter course. “It’s a good business,” he explained. “I’ll never make a fortune, but with any kind of decent management, there’s a steady eight or ten thousand a year to be made. And if I can work up a decent line of farm machinery, maybe even more. Got over four thousand paid off already. I figure another couple of years and I’ll be clear.”