by Robert Bloch
The bedspread was tucked in tightly at the bottom and hung perfectly over the sides. But the top was out of line. It had been tucked in, yes, but quickly, carelessly, so that an inch of the double pillow showed; the way a spread is tucked in when a bed has been made in a hurry—
She ripped the spread down, pulled back the covers. The sheets were a smudgy gray and covered with little brown flecks. But the bed itself, and the pillow above it, bore the faint yet unmistakable indentation made by a recent occupant. She could almost trace the outline of the body by the way the undersheet sagged, and there was a deep depression in the center of the pillow where the brown flecks were thickest.
There are no ghosts, Lila told herself again. This room has been used. Bates didn’t sleep here—his own bed offered sufficient evidence of that. But somebody had been sleeping, somebody had been staring out of the window. And if it had been Mary, where was she now?
She could ransack the rest of the room, go through the drawers, search downstairs. But that wasn’t important at the moment. There was something else she had to do first, if she could only remember. Where was Mary, now?
Then she knew.
What was it Sheriff Chambers had said? That he found Norman Bates down in the woods behind the house, gathering firewood?
Firewood for the furnace. Yes, that was it. The furnace in the basement—
Lila turned and fled down the stairs. The front door was open and the wind howled in. The front door was open, because she’d used the skeleton key, and now she knew why the term bothered her, it was because of the skeleton of course, and she knew why she had been so angry, too, ever since finding the earring. She had been angry because she was afraid, and the anger helped to hide the fear. The fear of what had happened to Mary, what she knew had happened to Mary, down in the cellar. It was because of Mary that she was afraid, not for herself. He had kept her here all week, maybe he’d tortured her, maybe he’d done to her what that man was doing in that filthy book, he’d tortured her until he found out about the money, and then—
The cellar. She had to find the cellar.
Lila groped her way along the downstairs hall, into the kitchen. She found the light, then gasped at the tiny furry creature crouched on the shelf before her, ready to spring. But it was only a stuffed squirrel, its button eyes idiotically alive in the reflection of the overhead light.
The basement stairs were just ahead. She fumbled at the wall until her hand brushed over another switch. The light went on below, just a faint and faltering glow in the darkened depths. Thunder growled in counterpoint to the clatter of her heels.
The bare bulb dangled from a cord directly in front of the furnace. It was a big furnace, with a heavy iron door. Lila stood there, staring at it. She was trembling now, she admitted that to herself; she could admit everything now. She’d been a fool to come here alone, a fool to do what she had done, a fool to do what she was doing now. But she had to do it, because of Mary. She had to open the furnace door and see what she knew would be inside. God, what if the fire was still going? What if—
But the door was cold. And there was no heat from the furnace, no heat from within the dark, utterly empty recess behind the door. She stooped, peering, without even attempting to use the coal-poker. No ashes, no smell of burning, nothing at all. Unless it had been recently cleaned, the furnace hadn’t been used since last spring.
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 —
It 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.
&nb
sp; 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 discharge
d 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.
“So he brought her back, actually brought her back from the grave and gave her a new life. He put her to bed at night, dressed her and took her down into the house by day. Naturally, he concealed all this from outsiders and he did it well. Arbogast must have seen the figure placed in the upstairs window, but there’s no proof that anyone else did, in all those years.”
“Then the horror wasn’t in the house,” Lila murmured. “It was in his head.”
“Steiner says the relationship was like that of a ventriloquist and his dummy. Mother and little Norman must have carried on regular conversations. And the adult Norman Bates probably rationalized the situation. He was able to pretend sanity, but who knows how much he really knew? He was interested in occultism and metaphysics. He probably believed in spiritualism every bit as much as he believed in the preservative powers of taxidermy. Besides, he couldn’t reject or destroy these other parts of his personality without rejecting and destroying himself. He was leading three lives at once.
