Psycho-Paths

by Robert Bloch

  Trotting up the front steps to the porch, Craig noticed for the first time, six weeks after summer’s death, a remnant of Mom’s flower bed. It was bickering with un-trimmed grass and weeds as if she’d been reincarnated among the dismal stems. To be close to Josh and their father. She’d loved them both, Craig realized, with the inexpressible fury of frustration at Dad giving her such sons—but God knew she had tried expressing it, tried harder than he’d ever seen anybody else try anything. To transfer her disappointment, transform it into real feeling for Joshua, and Dad.

  He’d sensed that she knew shortly after his own infancy that it was fruitless to waste her emotions on him.

  Now he yearned to dig Dad’s unpowered ancient mower from his cluttered garage and mow down everything on Winthrop Avenue. Climbing the crumbling steps, he could almost imagine that the half-dead growths were fawning in apology against his ankles, waiting for him to pause so they might inject their needling poisons. But he couldn’t really imagine it because he was virtually incapable of imagining anything—unless it was a soundly workable plan for a wholly reachable, pragmatic goal. Even psychology books did not tell him whether that was just a fault of his DNA—his special genetic makeup—or if it was logical to place part of the blame on Mom.

  “Don’t leave the door open,” Dad said when he’d squinted up at Craig, recognized him. He turned and withdrew into the slowly splitting shell of a house on the brown paper slippers he’d always preferred. He was much shorter than Craig this evening. “It’s done, isn’t it?”

  Craig, just inside the door, held back. He hadn’t closed the door. “Josh is ensconced safely. It’s taken care of.” He realized that the tic that began when he was leaving Josh, and Colindale, hadn’t subsided and it was working away hectically in one temple, adding a sense of agitation. Craig loathed being agitated. It made him doubt himself. It might cause mistakes of judgment. “You’d like it there. It’s quiet, like here; Joshua mentioned that himself.” Don’t thank me, then, for doing what you’ve lacked the guts to do for thirty-five years.

  “Oh?” The old man was about to lower himself into his chair, the one he’d sat in as long as Craig was able to remember. He was staring across the tiny front room with a belated expression of relief. Dad had never been quick, but his brain was sodden now—with memories an honest fool would have been glad to leave behind. He certainly wasn’t going to leave anything else. “That’s good.”

  “Better!” Craig inched forward, pulling the door partway to. He smiled. “It’s a fine idea I had, Dad. Fine!”

  Josh’s phrase. The old man shoved tears into his eyes from some forgotten well, apparently touched. Then he dropped with a plop into the chair, his chair, and cleared his throat. Momentarily devoid of expression, he made Craig picture Joshua’s blank face and reminded him of how near death Dad was. “If you say so, Craig.” Almost inaudibly. They were the same words he’d uttered with such mindless monotony to Mom and Aunt Dorothy and Doctor Ben. Now, though, Dad was reaching a finite point with each of his dreary recollections dragged from his senseless existence. With every neurotic tear, every banal remark, it could be the last. This was the one time Craig had found his father a subject of interest, and it was amusing to perceive that it was because he saw Dad as a kind of cistern. One that had contained only so much murky liquid, after all; and now it was finally being emptied.

  “I do say so,” Craig responded with a nod. “And I said so many years back when you and my mother were wasting your time and money on Larkin—on behalf of a psychotic who was always in everyone’s way, even his own. Did you know, my father, that I began to study psychology not to find ways of coping with Joshua but because I hoped to learn why you and my mother found him so much more interesting than I? Can you recall the good grades I brought home to you—how I eschewed all friendship, required nothing but my studies and my hobby of psychology?”

  Dad struggled forward in his chair. “I’d rather you wouldn’t talk about your big brother that way, Creggie.”

  “Did you know, Daddy, that I chose a career in law after discovering certain facts about myself—facts that were beyond wonderful Doctor Ben?” He kept his laugh level. “Why, neither you nor Mom even asked why a boy who was fascinated by psychology would enter the law instead!”

  “Do close the door all the way, son,” Dad said. He gestured feebly, soothingly, for Craig to sit beside him. Craig remained standing. “We were always proud of you, Creggie. I—”

  “No.”

  “We were,” Dad nodded firmly. “But surely you understood that—”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Startled, the elder Addams looked up fast. His son was leaning over him, the axe-blade nose pressed close. Craig’s long fingers supported his thin frame on the chair arms.

  “Yes, Dad, I understood—that you and my mother discussed both your sons behind closed doors, at night. That Mom sensed something might be wrong with me, too, and you always agreed with anything she said. Josh and I were listening at that door, our father, kneeling on the floor outside your room while I held my hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t hear his damn voices and spoil it—spill his guts about the fact that both Josh and I wanted to kill you and Mom but just didn’t know where we’d live after that!” Abruptly, he clutched his father by the jaw, lifted it to make sure Dad was staring straight into his clear, dry eyes. “You said maybe I was crazy, too, but differently—that since I had control of myself, I might turn out all right!”

  “But Mom and I found out we were wrong, son,” Dad argued,—“about you being crazy. Doctor Ben kept seein’ both of you boys and he said you definitely weren’t a psycho.” He swallowed with difficulty. “Only reason I ever wondered about you was ’cause you didn’t have no playmates ’cept Joshie, and you never laughed or cried. . .you didn’t want to be picked up and hugged, you didn’t need us.” His eyelids batted. “But you were always awful good t’your brother. Always, Creggie.”

  “I certainly was. Yes.” Nodding, Craig released Dad, straightened. “Always.” He smiled. “He was so convenient. . .”

  The old man had relaxed minimally but that remark kept him leaning forward. Craig saw the imprint of his fingertips in the sallow cheeks. “What does that mean, Craig? ‘Convenient’?”

  He gave a shrug, half turned toward an array of family photographs on the mantel. Three with Josh and he together, young. Four shots of Joshie, alone. One of Craig on graduation day from college. He wasn’t counting the pictures. He had known how many of each of them had been placed there for years.

  “Remember that cat ol’ Josh got the blame for when he was nine and I was six?” He kept his inflections casual. “Our dog—remember Shadow, Dad? I was nine, Joshie was twelve.” He saw an expression take shape in Dad’s face that he liked. In the past, it had been there only when his older brother’s latest act of minor savagery was reported. “I had the idea for those. Not Josh, our father.” It was really sinking in to Dad now. “Actually, I didn’t kill anything that personally affected you or Mom for a long while. There was no reason. Josh enjoyed it so much, and I liked watching him do it. It made us close.” Craig chuckled. “When Doctor Ben got around to talking with Josh about those things, he always said his ‘voices’ commanded him to kill. And he really believed it, Dad.” Craig rested his doubled fists on his hips, grinning. “For a long time it was a giggle. Being one of Joshua’s voices.”

  “You suggested he do those awful things. . .that your poor brother should kill?”

  Craig, bobbing his head hugely, gave him a perfect imitation of Josh.

  Dad pointed. “Your mother’s parakeet, Happy. It got strangled, left on the bottom of its cage.” He was leading up to a question, finally got it out: “You?”

  Craig bowed. “Moi.”

  The old man was a piece of chalk with moving lips. “Our second Sh-Shadow. . .old Shad—he died last year, run over by a car.” He twisted his head in a horror of disbelief. “You loved him too, I thought. Surely, you didn’t. . .?”
>
  Craig felt his grin slip away. “I didn’t love the mutt but I didn’t kill him either.” He forced his lips to turn up at the corners. “I was giving Josh a ride so I let him take the wheel. For Shad.”

  Then Craig leaped at Dad. The weight of his body thrust the old man and his chair back, almost over. Craig caught, supported both, kept them from going the rest of the way. There was no carpeting in front of the mantel. Conspiratorial of manner, he leaned toward his father’s frightened face. “Ask me about more of them,” he urged. His voice would not have been audible even as far away as the front door.

  “But there aren’t any more,” Dad whispered. He shrank away from the hot breath, his eyes wide. “We didn’t have no other pets.”

  “Well, then,” Craig pressed, “ask me about more deaths. . .in the family.”

  Momentarily, Dad ceased to breathe.

  “No, wait.” Craig let go of the tilting chair with his left hand, allowed it to tip itself, shaking, onto the remaining leg. “Why not start outside the family? But not with pets; with people.”

  Dad gasped. “Are you sayin’ you just talked Joshie into those things? And he’s not really. . .crazy? But you are, after all?”

  Fireworks—for an instant—exploded before Craig’s vision. He said tensely, “No, Daddy,” and made himself return his hand to the chair, bring it forward until it was almost righted. A sigh. “You don’t win the dream of a lifetime. Your Joshie is mad as a hatter, and I—I am certainly not a psycho. That’s one of the few facts in this world that Ben Larkin got right.” A skyrocket soared in front of his eyes and he let himself go as if he had been detonated. Craig pushed the chair, hard. Watched. Liked. “I killed Doctor Ben, our father! He didn’t make a mistake in the number of pills he took, like everybody thought—Daddy, he had help!”

  The chair, spinning as if Dad had given it life over the years, threw him from it. He was stunned by much more than the fall when he did not try to sit, or rise. Physically, he might have. He just looked at his second son, appalled. Terror began.

  Craig watched him with a solid start on an erection, on full arousal. He wasn’t shocked by it. Seeing Josh take life and then taking it directly, himself, had been a regular charge. Just about the only thing that had ever excited Craig. But this was Dad, father-the-authority-figure—even if it was hard to believe, seeing the skinny wreck sprawled on his own living room floor—and Craig had never felt so charged. Splotches of red warred with liver spots up and down Dad’s limbs—he was a checkerboard! Anytime now he’d beg for Craig to hold the door for him, and the answer to that was obvious!

  “Larkin told you you shouldn’t keep Josh at home, but he felt sorry for him. Like you, like my mother.” Between two fingers Craig raised the framed photo depicting his own young face. He wore a mortar board in the picture and clearly remembered how that moment should have established for everyone who the superior Addams was, that it was the fully functioning son who deserved attention, praise. And never got it. Raising the photograph to shoulder level, he let it drop.

  There was a tinkling sound as the glass shattered. Then Craig peered back at Dad, who had followed the procedure with his eyes and understood. “Josh was going to be committed—and then my mother fell ill. Remember? So good Doctor Ben asked you to wait, even talked me into coming back to stay until she died. So”—he emitted a consciously pitiable sigh—“I came.”

  Dad stared at him, hard. “Why?”

  “Well, hell, it would have really looked bad if I hadn’t, right?” Craig picked up his brother’s earliest framed picture, carefully. “I stayed here like a good boy, watching Mom get sicker and sicker, making sure Joshie went to the toilet and washed up afterward.” Stooping, he rested the photograph of Josh on the rug, an arm’s length from Dad, as though it had slipped from his hand. Identification, he thought. “But you didn’t give a damn about anything but that frustrated tyrant, that hypocritical old bitch who talked behind our backs. You never even thanked me for being here.”

  “Don’t you talk like that about my wife,” Dad said and groped for Craig’s ankles.

  And he was like the weeded remnant of flowers rising from the ground around the front steps to cling and infect Craig with toxins from a past he hadn’t understood—despite the times he’d tried, wanted to feel the same things others felt. Now it was too late. His cancer-riddled father was there to be mowed down. Fertile land had to be cleared for Craig to have a chance.

  “Listen, Daddy.” He stared down with his heart thumping but did nothing to make the old man release his legs. “Are you listening?” He saw a tear-filled eye glance up the length of his body. “J returned home because Larkin signed the papers for Josh. It was a deal, a trade. Then it became obvious that I couldn’t let my career simply go down the tubes, and that’s when I made him take those extra pills.”

  “We both knew there was something wrong with you,” Dad said accusingly.

  “Dad, I killed him for all the crazies like Josh who were being held back by stupid family feelings, by useless sentiment. It made sense!”

  Dad relinquished his hold on Craig’s ankles, tried to get to his knees. It was clear that he was eager to move away from his younger son. “You disgusting psycho,” he said.

  “No!” Putting his smile in place, shaking his head sadly, Craig thrust out a hand to his father. “How many times must I explain, Dad? A psychopath can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.” Dad crawled one foot from the down-thrust arm. “I always know the difference, I’m always on the side of what’s real—solid and true! I know it when I lie. I know it when I have to hurt someone—and when I kill, Daddy, I explain why I’m doing it. If there’s time.” He caught up with the old man. Smiling crookedly, he reached out to assist Dad to his knees. “Of course, sometimes I murder someone because it’s fun, but not usually.”

  “Is that why you killed that nice old doctor?” Dad asked, peering into his face.

  “No. . .” Craig replied. He shook his head thoughtfully. It was nice, fine, finally having a chat with his father. “I wanted to kill him for years. But I did it for entirely sound reasons. Once you signed the papers, too, I planned to prevent Josh from being a nuisance any longer. To put him where no one would believe him if he discussed our good times. But Mom got ill, Larkin interfered. Dad, he was starting to learn about—people like me. So that was a rational murder, believe me.”

  “You’re heartless.” Shuddering, Dad’s gaze scanned the room. The front door remained ajar but this wasn’t a nice neighborhood any more and mostly shouts and screams were ignored. Both of them knew that. He looked back at Craig, steadily. “I’m afraid you have no soul, Creggie.”

  That surprised Craig, intrigued him as did all things pertaining to him. “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe not.” He was steadying the kneeling father by the arms. “Perhaps I had one, or a part of a soul, until I took Doctor Ben’s life. After that even, maybe.” He put his head forward to search for his father’s eyes. “Obviously, I came here to kill you tonight and put the blame on Josh. You’re a nuisance now, too—that’s a fact, don’t try to deny it! And I’m too busy to wait until you die. Now, murdering one’s own dad would definitely cost anyone his soul.” He gave his father a blazing smile. “In reality, though, I doubt that I’ve had a soul to lose since the night when I put a pillow over my mother’s face and killed her.”

  The old mouth shaped a circle that could have been the start of a gasp or a shriek or even an anticipation of the perpetual pain it represented.

  Having said all he meant to say, Craig turned the face’s circle into a jagged line. The exacting arc of his swinging leg ended with his heel striking Dad’s chin with immense precision and power. It lifted Dad almost to his full height, then shot him back against the mantel.

  When the body sagged limply to the floor, Craig was there. He stomped the sick face with the same foot, over and over. As if giving vent to a madman’s tantrum. When stickiness coated the sole of Joshua Addams’s shoe and the whol
e exercise was becoming exhausting, Craig leapt up and down on the dead face with both feet till it could not have been recognized—not that that was part of the plan.

  Autumn silence seeped through the house like last breaths escaping. Winded but openly enjoying the unique relief that the enactment of each step of a plan provided, Craig removed his brother’s shoes, left them where they lay. It took a few seconds to get a pair of his own from the closet in the room where he’d stayed during Mom’s final illness, another few to put them on.

  He hoped Josh somehow knew about it. Almost laughing, he went to their father’s phone to dial Daniel Florry at his home. This would be the last time in any way that he and Josh participated in anything. The relationship was the only one that had brought Craig Addams fulfillment of any kind. It had seemed honest, devoid of social pretense. Purposeful. With no love lost.

  Getting the Colindale administrator to meet him there immediately was no more than a question of bluff, lie, and threat—valuable and easily wielded tools throughout Craig’s life. More than a few pretty women had caved in before them, if not exactly lived to rue the day. Lightly suggesting that Florry let him into Colindale through a fire exit close to the new wing was a nice touch that enhanced the likelihood of nobody important seeing him there. If they did, he’d take their lives.

  Phone back in cradle and car gloves back in pocket, Craig went to the front door, stood in the doorway to appraise matters. Josh’s undamaged snapshot rested just out of their father’s reach while Craig’s own photo, the frame bent, lay in broken glass. Very fine. A psychotic clearly had heard he was to be removed from the house the next day, imagining his father was siding with his younger brother (of all things!) and he’d felt resistive, vengeful. Neighbors might say it was a good thing Craig hadn’t been there too, a fine thing.

  Grinning, Craig pieced it together. A senile old lady, a preoccupied and busy nurse, Dad, and Daniel Florry—they were those who’d known Josh came to Colindale that day. No one else. Tomorrow, two bodies would draw gasps of horror. If Aunt Dorothy or a neighbor happened upon Dad, Joshua would be missing and the only suspect. If a Colindale employee found Florry first, they’d either assume an Alzheimer’s patient had flipped out or, if anyone recalled noticing Joshie there, that he had killed Dan during a “phase”—then gone home to revenge himself upon Dad for committing him! Craig would reluctantly have to seek police protection from a psycho who might be wandering around anywhere, out to kill him too!