Robert Bloch's Psycho

by Chet Williamson

  Norman’s stomach felt queasy. “I’m … not sure.”

  “You really should, you know. Robert’s visiting you tonight. If you don’t eat something, you won’t feel well when he’s here.”

  Norman agreed to try to eat. When Ben returned, Dr. Reed treated and bandaged Norman’s scratch, which had stopped oozing blood. Then Norman lay back on his bed, and they began their session. When they were finished, Norman felt more relaxed.

  Nurse Marie brought his dinner, he ate, then sat in his room and read before Robert arrived. Finally Dr. Reed knocked and entered. “Robert’s here,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  “Sure,” Norman answered, putting down his book and sitting up, and Dr. Reed smiled and disappeared.

  Robert came in a moment later, and Norman heard the door close on them. “Hey, little brother,” Robert said as he gave Norman a hug. Then he sat down and they started to talk. It didn’t take long before the subject of Ronald Miller came up.

  “Dr. Reed told me about your trouble with that guy today,” Robert said, shaking his head. “Man, it’s gotta be tough in here. When I think about that son of a bitch, I just feel like…” He paused. “Is this guy a lot bigger than you are?”

  “He’s … tall,” Norman said, fearing what Robert might be getting at. “But he’s skinny. Still, I couldn’t…”

  “No. No, of course not. But people like that … I mean, they make me realize why people like you go over the edge. So many times I’ve run into idiots like him, and I want to hand them their heads, you know? But I just don’t have the guts, I guess.”

  They sat quietly for a moment. Then Robert said, more softly, “It helps me understand you more when I feel like that, feel that urge to lash out. Sometimes I…” He shook his head. “I can understand what you did.”

  “What I…” Norman was confused. “What I did?”

  “In a way, I respect you, little brother, for having the courage.”

  “To do … what?”

  “To kill people when you felt you had to.”

  The silence sat heavily in the room. Norman thought he could hear his heart beating, faster than before.

  “I didn’t…,” he said. “It was … Mother who killed those people.”

  Robert nodded, and his mouth twisted into a crooked smile. “Sure. It was our mother. But she was inside you, Norman. She may have been the … inspiration, but it was your hands and your mind that killed. Just like it was your hands and mind that killed our mother. And her boyfriend, that Considine guy. Mother didn’t have anything to do with that, did she?”

  “I—” But before Norman could say what he wanted to, he heard her.

  Maybe this is my son after all.

  Mother?

  He sees the truth. He sees that you killed that girl, not me.

  “I have to admit, Norman,” Robert said, “I do respect that.”

  He sees the truth, Norman. The truth about the killings. I’ve told you it wasn’t me, but you’re not man enough to admit what you did, are you?

  Be quiet, Mother!

  You killed me and my lover—yes, my lover, Norman! It wasn’t me inside you then! Have the gumption to face the truth, boy!

  “You had guts, Norman,” Robert said. “Dr. Reed told me all the details. You knew our mother was betraying you, and that Considine was stealing her away, and you had the guts to do something about it.”

  Now this boy has got the gumption to face the truth even if you don’t, Norman!

  Shut up, Mother!

  “And as far as killing the girl, I don’t know why—but you must have had a good reason. She was a criminal, right? She stole all that money? Maybe you didn’t know at the time, but there was probably something about her, wasn’t there? Or did she lead you on and then try and back out? I can understand how that could make you sore.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that, she was—”

  “And the detective, well, hell, he came snooping around, who could blame you for getting rid of him? It may have been wrong, but I understand it, Norman, I do.”

  Robert was looking at him with the most serious gaze Norman had ever seen. After all Robert had said, Norman expected his eyes to be wild, even crazy, but they were coldly sane.

  “I can’t help but think,” Robert said slowly, “that doing what you did—killing in that way—must be somehow … liberating, freeing. When people deserve death, to mete it out to them, that must be … quite satisfying. Is it?”

  “I … don’t know. I don’t really remember … doing it.”

  “Sometimes,” Robert said, “I wish I had the nerve. To see what it’s like.”

  “No,” Norman said. “You don’t want to wish that. Not ever. Why would you want that? Why?”

  Robert didn’t answer for a long time. “Maybe to feel some power, for a change, in this world. Maybe to make a difference.” He smiled. “Maybe to understand my brother a little bit better.”

  “But you have a good life. You have a wife, children, a business. What do you mean, power? And making a difference? You already have! All I’ve done is cause people pain and grief.” Norman leaned toward his brother. “All you have to understand from me is that killing is wrong, Robert. It’s what put me here. If I could go back and make things right, bring people back to life, I’d do it in a second.”

  Robert looked at him, then spoke. “They say that twins are bound. Psychically. Have you ever heard that?”

  Norman nodded. His readings in the field of psychic phenomena had been extensive before his incarceration. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “They say that twins have a closer connection than other people. That if one experiences something highly traumatic, the other can experience aspects of it too, even though they’re far away. It’s as though their minds are bound psychically, maybe bound by blood.”

  “Norman, we’re bound by more than blood. If you were able to kill, then I am too. If you felt it necessary to kill, then I might feel it necessary too.”

  “No…,” Norman said, but the word was weak, dying as it left his mouth.

  “You did do something wrong, but it wasn’t killing alone. It was killing people who were too close to you. You got lucky with our mother and Considine. You got away with that—or would have if it hadn’t been for the others. That’s where you made your mistake. You killed someone who was too close to you—a guest in your motel. And you killed someone else who other people knew was coming to see you. It should have been more random—or at least looked random. It should have been someone with whom you had hardly any connection at all.

  “Norman, if you could go back and make things right? I think you’d do exactly what you did before. But this time, you’d do it more carefully.”

  Oh, God, Norman thought, oh, dear God, this was Mother’s son, all right. This was most certainly his brother.

  6

  Ronald Miller liked the dark. It was his friend and his collaborator. It kept his scarred face from being seen, and it had hidden him from his victims.

  He liked to lie in his darkened cell and remember what he thought of as his past triumphs. He could picture each one in specific detail. He could feel their skin, hear their whimpering moans, recall the sensations that had pleasured him while bringing them pain. He turned the black wall of his cell into a movie theater and replayed the films over and over, whichever one appealed to him most that night.

  And they thought he was crazy. Hell, he wasn’t crazy, he just knew what he liked, and he had to get it some way, didn’t he? The problem was that he liked pretty women, and the pretty ones would never look at him, not with his face. As for whores, forget about it. He’d never seen a single one who didn’t look hard as a hammer, and the ones he could have afforded would probably give you a dose of something that would make your equipment fall off before you could use it again.

  When Ronald talked to the doctors, he blamed his face, and so did they. He told them that when he was a kid, the guy his whore of a mom was living with had gotten drunk, poured rum on
his face, and lit it up with a Zippo. Poor little Ronald had gone through a childhood full of people either cringing from him or making fun of him. No wonder I got all screwed up in the head … no wonder I became a rapist, right, Doc?

  He never actually said those words. He was smarter than that. He just let them think it. It was a perfect case—kid has a lousy childhood, kid grows up sick and twisted, right?

  The thing was, Ronald had a great childhood. His folks weren’t rich, but they were good to him, and they stayed together till his mom died, and then his dad started grieving and drinking until he drank himself to death. But by that time Ronald was long gone. He’d gotten his face burned when he was twenty. He’d broken into the cabin of a woman whose husband was in the war, and before he could get done what he wanted to do, she’d grabbed a kerosene lantern by the bed and smashed it over his head. The fire went everywhere. He managed to get out. She didn’t. The dumb bitch got what she deserved. But the souvenir of that night had been visible on his face ever since.

  Ronald still had dreams about it, about the terror and the awful pain, pain that stayed with him for months and never fully went away. It just made him angrier when he took the women. It made him feel they needed to pay him back with their pain.

  Forget about it for now, he told himself. The image of the fire had intruded, as it sometimes did, upon the more pleasant images, like a black-and-white war newsreel shown in the middle of a happy Technicolor musical. Let’s get back to the good times, Ronald thought, and forced his mind to the happy place.

  Happy for him, anyway. He felt the girl under him, her flesh on the cold stones of the alleyway, but his flesh warm on hers. Ronald’s right hand moved down his body, finding what he wanted as the memories excited him. He was constantly amazed at the details he could remember, even after years. He could swear he heard the scratching of her fingernails on the stones as he held her wrists above her head.

  Or was that scratching?

  The projector bulb inside his head darkened. His right hand stopped moving. He listened.

  Except for the occasional screams of the crazed, the cells were always dead quiet after dark. Other inmates had told him they’d heard things in the depth of the night—footsteps, the sound of breathing, sometimes even voices, or moaning and weeping. Some blamed it on the ghosts who were left over from the days the hospital was a sanitarium. Others swore it was the spirits of the people they themselves had killed.

  But that was their guilt talking. Guilt and the fact that everybody in here except him was crazy as a loon. Ronald had never felt guilty. That wasn’t part of him. If he ever got out, the first thing he’d do after going somewhere far away—maybe even another country—was exactly what he’d been doing when they caught him.

  Still, he could swear he’d heard something.

  He sat up and listened more intently. No. Nothing.

  Ronald stood, walked to the door, and peered through the open slot, through which just enough light was leaking to define the outlines of his few pieces of institutional furniture. The corridor appeared empty, and no sounds came to his ears. None of his fellow nuts were croaking their midnight songs.

  Just his imagination, then. As he trundled back to bed, he wondered if he could re-create his victims’ whimpers as realistically.

  He lay back down in the nearly black cell, and the thoughts of whimpering made him think of that whining pile of crap Norman Bates. To think he’d admired the newcomer at first, before he’d realized what a weepy little baby he was. Amazing that he’d ever had the guts to do what he did. Ronald couldn’t imagine Norman doing what he did. Instead he saw Norman thrashing out with his knife, crying and blubbering as he killed, making a mess of everything, and then dissolving into a puddle of tears.

  No, he had a strong hunch that a knife was the only thing Norman Bates had ever penetrated a woman with. His fantasies about Norman had been just that. And the more he lay there and thought about it, the more Ronald realized that they were the kind of fantasies he himself would like to make reality.

  After all, what did he have to lose? An act of rape and murder couldn’t make him any crazier than they already thought he was, could it? Maybe he’d get a few days or weeks or even months of more extreme punishment, but wouldn’t it be worth it? To get somebody like Nurse Marie, or that little receptionist he saw sometimes when they were taking him between the wings?

  To stab someone while doing what Ronald often did. To feel them die under him while feeling so many other things as well …

  He closed his eyes and imagined something he had never done, and reveled in it. And his imagination was so strong, so overpowering of all his senses, that he didn’t hear again the sound he had heard previously, didn’t sense a change of air in his cell, or the presence of another creature, either ghost or human, near him.

  He didn’t hear or see or feel or smell anything until the blade went into the soft spot of flesh under his heart and then up into it. It was then that his eyes opened to see a deeper darkness hovering above him. He heard the wet sound of his own death as the knife withdrew and his blood and his life began to leave him. He tried to breathe, but had forgotten how.

  The final thing he knew was a pain greater than any even he could imagine, a flash of blazing heat, a bolt of fiery cold, and then he was dead.

  * * *

  Norman Bates had a dream in the early hours before dawn. He dreamed that he was going down a long tunnel. He had no idea if it was wide or narrow, because it was so dark. He was naked, and he kept walking and walking, never bumping into the tunnel’s sides, but still somehow knowing it was a tunnel.

  Finally he saw a light ahead, and he started to walk faster. The light grew brighter, and the tunnel narrowed until it was just the size of a doorway. He walked up to it and looked in.

  Though the light that had come through the doorway had been blindingly bright, the room itself was lit in a red glow, and Norman could see what had made it red. There was blood everywhere.

  The room was ovoid, narrow at the top, widening as the walls came down, then thinning again until there was a narrow gutter at the bottom. Thick red blood coated the room, dripped slowly like molasses from the ceiling and walls, ran down the curved sides and puddled on the floor. Norman could hear the drip … drip … drip in a dozen different places.

  A man stood in the center of the room, his back to Norman. His strong legs straddled the central gutter, whose surface was hidden by the swamp of blood. The man was coated with it as well, so that his naked flesh was deep red. The shape of his torso was the antithesis of the room, wide shoulders curving down to a trim waist, then out again to muscled buttocks. His thick arms were outstretched, and in his right hand Norman saw a long knife pointing upward.

  Though Norman didn’t feel his legs moving, he drew closer to the man, the way one moves in dreams, until he was only a few feet away. Though the blood was dripping all about him, he felt no sense of wetness on his shoulders or head. He seemed encased in a bubble that kept the blood from touching his body or his feet, even though he felt he must be wading ankle deep in it.

  He didn’t want to draw closer to the terrifying apparition of the bloodied man, but he had no choice, and no power to refuse the dream’s demands. The hair on the back of the man’s head was matted with blood, so that it appeared as a textured helmet of shining crimson. Slowly the head turned, and suddenly it was as though the bubble burst around Norman, and the hot rank odor of blood rushed into his nostrils, gagging him.

  And still the head turned, and Norman saw the brow, the chin, the cheek, a tip of nose, the deep red hollow of an eye, a cruel edge of mouth, and he thought he recognized the face, thought he knew, through the lineaments of gore, the identity of the brutal, commanding figure.

  But just as he was about to see the creature full face, the ceiling opened like the sky itself, and torrents of foul, steaming blood flooded down on Norman, blinding him and washing the man from his sight. And now he could feel the drowning tide of blo
od embracing him, choking him, deafening him, and he screamed, over and over again, until his own screaming woke him from the dream and he opened his eyes to the beam of light coming in through the open slot in the locked door.

  * * *

  Oh, what the hell now, Tom Downing thought as he slowly got to his feet. There were screams and there were screams, and by this time he was able to identify most of them.

  Harry Tibbetts, the ax murderer, was good for at least one outburst a month, yelling that the “green men” were in his room again. Tom would have to get whoever else was on night duty in Wards A and B, go into Harry’s room, drag him out of the corner and calm him down before he’d stop yelling.

  And Ralph Vincent would start singing “Rags to Riches” every week at three in the morning. It was the song that was playing on the jukebox when he’d taken his shotgun into the bar and blown away his wife and her boyfriend, then kept reloading and firing at other patrons until an oil worker caught him between reloads and laid him low. Usually he could talk Ralph down without having to unlock his room door, and Ralph would lower the volume and sing to himself quietly in bed instead of sharing it through the slot with the whole corridor.

  Tom Downing was a connoisseur of screams, but this was a new one to him. As he slowly dragged his bulk out of his station chair in the short hallway between Wards C and D, he hoped to hell that it was one time only and didn’t mark the beginning of a new regular. It was sort of easing off now into a frenzied panting, as if the loon had gotten tired of screaming. Tom hoped so as he rounded the corner and went down the corridor known as Ward C.

  Damned if it wasn’t coming from Norman Bates’s room, which surprised Tom. Bates was one of the quiet ones, or had been up till now. Tom went up to the door and tried to peer through the slot, but didn’t put his eyes too close. He’d made that mistake back in ’49 and wound up with a faceful of piss thrown by “Mad Dog” Hennessey, who’d died of cancer a year later with no mourners at all.