Robert Bloch's Psycho

by Chet Williamson

“So much fuss over nothing. You know what probably happened, little brother? I didn’t have it far down enough in my pocket, and when I was leaving, it slipped out, fell on the floor, and I didn’t notice. This Dr. Goldberg came by shortly after, saw it, thought, oh, what a pretty rock, and picked it up. Maybe put it on his desk, and it got knocked off and landed on the floor.” Robert shrugged dramatically. “And now Nurse Marie wants to make a federal case out of it. Ah, women.” He sighed. “You can’t live with ’em, and you can’t kill ’em, know what I mean?” Then he chuckled to show he was joking, Norman thought. Or at least he hoped.

  “Now this Nurse Marie,” Robert said, “she’s the one you like, right? The one who’s nice to you?”

  “Well … she was.”

  “Hmm. That’s too bad. You don’t have all that many friends here.”

  Norman felt a chill prickle the back of his neck. “What do you mean, Robert?”

  “Oh, just that you never know about people. You think you can trust them and then they turn around and stab you in the back. People like that … sometimes they’re actually worse than the ones who come right out and admit they hate you. Because they don’t only break your body, they break your heart.”

  Norman didn’t know what to say. Robert had just told him what he’d been thinking, but didn’t want to admit to himself.

  “Now, as for Dr. Reed,” Robert went on. “I have a feeling that he might be trusted to keep a secret. What do you think?”

  “Yes!” Norman said quickly. Though Nurse Marie might have disappointed him, Dr. Reed continued to be his champion. He knew he could have no better friend in the state hospital. “You wouldn’t ever hurt him, would you, Robert?”

  “Norman,” Robert said, widening his eyes in mock surprise. “I’d never hurt anybody, but especially not Doc Reed.”

  “What about … Nurse Marie?”

  “Little brother, like I just said, I’d never hurt anybody. But if people choose to get wanderlust and decide to hit the road, well, that’s hardly my fault.”

  “Robert…” He picked his words like he was feeling his way through a minefield. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. I wouldn’t want her … to disappear. Like the others.”

  Robert looked at him for a long time without smiling. Then a grin snapped into place. “Whatever you want, Norman. But things usually have a way of working out. You’re a lucky guy, good luck charm or not.”

  “But you … you didn’t do anything to Dr. Goldberg, did you?”

  Robert gave an exasperated sigh and shook his head. “Didn’t you hear the story? Goldberg ran off because the Nazi hunters were after him. He was a Nazi, Norman. See? It just proves what I said about not being able to trust people. A lot of times they’re not what they seem. That’s why we’ve got to stick together. Stand up for each other. I look out for you … you look out for me, right?” He held out his hand. “Like brothers do.”

  Norman took his hand. It was dry and cool and squeezed his own hand firmly. “Like brothers do,” he repeated.

  Deep down, he thought he heard a single word:

  Fool.

  * * *

  Norman was alone in the dark, waiting for Mother to return. He had been expecting her, fearing her, and despite what he had told himself about her being a creation of his own mind, he was sure she would come back.

  He was also afraid for Nurse Marie. Despite her change in attitude toward him, she had done nothing wrong. Anyone in her position would have done the same, and in fact might have gone straight to the police. What Robert had said about her frightened him.

  He hadn’t prayed since he was a little boy, but now in the darkness he closed his eyes and thought, Oh, please … please, if you’re there, don’t let Robert hurt Nurse Marie. Keep her safe.

  He repeated that prayer over and over, until he finally received an answer.

  I will if you let me.

  Norman clenched his teeth. He knew the voice. Mother.

  Don’t shout at me, Norman. Don’t tell me to go away, because I won’t. Not this time.

  You have to, Mother. You’re not there.

  I am, Norman, and you know it, boy. A mother is always there when her son needs her.

  I don’t need you, Mother.

  Oh, yes, you do. Because you’ve been a fool. You believe anything. You believe you have a brother, even though I told you that you didn’t. But you didn’t believe me.

  No. No—you said yourself that maybe he was your son after all. You said that!

  Even mothers can be fooled. But not forever. I watched and I listened, Norman. And eventually I knew. I knew what was going on, all right, even if you didn’t. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. You wanted a brother so much you lied to yourself over and over. And you thought this Robert Newman was your brother. Oh, yes. “New-man,” indeed—new and made-up.

  No! He’s my brother! He’d do anything for me!

  There was silence for a time, then …

  Would he?

  In the silence that followed, a silence that pounded inside Norman’s head, he became aware of a new sound. An ever so subtle rumbling, as of a great weight moving. Then there was a change in the air, and it became cool and dank. Though his eyes were still closed, the black inside of his eyelids seemed to brighten ever so slightly.

  The rumbling stopped. Someone spoke a word that hung like dust in the air. And Norman Bates was no longer himself.

  * * *

  Marie Radcliffe wasn’t at all happy about her assignment, but she understood the reasons for it. When Dr. Steiner had taken the place of Dr. Goldberg, caseloads were shuffled around like cards on a riverboat. Two doctors and a resident now had a workload that had been augmented by a missing and very productive doctor.

  Most of the current case files were in filing cabinets on the first floor, but some older files related to long-term patients were kept in the storage room in the basement, the same room in which Judy Pearson had her upsetting experience. And since those particular older patients were being treated by doctors who hadn’t worked with them before, those older files had to be taken out of storage and correlated with the newer ones, for a full picture of each patient’s case and conditions.

  It was Marie who had been asked to descend into the depths and retrieve the needed files. She had a list of names on her clipboard, but many of the files had been misplaced over the years. Some weren’t in alphabetical order, but those were usually easy enough to locate. The greater problem was with files that held completely different records than those of the names typed on the tabs of the manila folders.

  Usually it was the result of a long-ago doctor having put the wrong contents into the wrong folder, so Marie had to find the folder with the name of the patient and the actual file, and hope that it was a simple switch. What took even more time was the fact that the file cabinets were stuffed to bursting, and couldn’t be easily riffled through. Instead, Marie had to lift out sections and put them on the worktable, keeping them in order while she sought to find the file that might contain the records of the patient she was searching for.

  It was a tedious job, made even worse by its subterranean location and solitude. Marie had heard about Judy’s adventure while retrieving files, but Judy was easily alarmed and was also a repository of every ghost story ever told about the facility. Marie doubted that Judy had seen anyone outside of her imagination. Her theory of Ronald Miller still lurking in the building was ridiculous.

  It wasn’t the thought of Ronald Miller that disturbed her. Rather it was the thought of Norman Bates. The more Marie considered her own pet theory, the more concerned she grew. That Norman could have done the things she suspected him of doing was incredibly unlikely, but still, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever’s left, no matter how improbable, is the truth. Or something like that. She thought she’d once heard it from Dr. Goldberg, or whoever Dr. Goldberg really was.

  She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Dr. Reed to see what Norman had said ab
out the stone, and she couldn’t ask him herself at dinner with Ben there, even if she’d had the courage to. Maybe it was as simple as it falling out of Norman’s pocket in the hall and Goldberg finding it. Maybe her imagination was just as wild as Judy Pearson’s.

  Whatever the answer, everything would be fine tonight. She had locked the door to the storage room from the inside, and Ben had promised to come down and check on her when he had a break. With luck, she’d be done by then and could go back upstairs, away from this oppressive silence, and be among real, live people again, instead of these absurd ghosts of her own mind.

  She laughed aloud and redoubled the intensity of her search.

  * * *

  Fight him, Norman. Fight him, boy.

  “Robert. Are you there?”

  “Yes, Doc. I’m here.”

  No! You hear me, Norman, I know you hear me!

  “You have something to do tonight, don’t you?”

  “I … yes, Doc. I do. I have to protect Norman.”

  Norman! Don’t be an idiot all your life. You’re a bad boy and a bad man. For God’s sake, face the truth. You killed the girl and the detective. You killed those other people too—the crazy one and that mean man and woman, and that doctor too. You killed them all. But you were lucky, boy. You didn’t get caught, not yet. But you have to stop, don’t you understand?

  “And how are you going to protect Norman, Robert?”

  Norman … I’m warning you …

  “I…”

  “Yes, Robert?”

  “I have to … to make that nurse disappear.”

  No, you don’t, Norman. Look at him! LOOK at the man who’s been LYING to you!

  Robert Newman raised his head, but it was Norman Bates who looked into the face of Dr. Felix Reed.

  18

  From the personal notes of Dr. Felix Reed:

  … I’m not sure what to do at this point. The one thing I’m certain of is that Norman Bates has become the linchpin on which I hang my future. Only by bringing him out of his cocoon can I demonstrate to Dr. Goldberg how antiquated his therapies are.

  Since the day I came here, I have been thoroughly disgusted by the nearly medieval treatment given to many of the patients. Cruelty is the modus operandi here, and Goldberg is its most devout practitioner. The heavy dependence on electroshock treatments is appalling if not criminal in itself. While it is true that some of these patients have done monstrous things, that does not give us as physicians and caregivers the right to do such things in return. This is intended to be a place of healing as much as a place of punishment.

  If I can only prove to Goldberg that my less invasive and far kinder treatment works, I believe it could be the cause of massive changes here. Admittedly, it has taken time, but I have been able to reach Norman through nearly daily meetings in which I help him to relax and then simply talk softly with him. It almost approaches hypnotherapy, in which he enters a state of near-sleep. When his defenses are down, the true Norman Bates surfaces, essentially a moral and gentle man. Still, I have found something deeper as well, an anger that threatens to surface, but has not.

  Perhaps my deep interest in him comes from the fact that I can identify with him. I feel that anger myself. What I do not have within me is the power to do something about it. Sometimes, when I’m completely honest with myself, I think that, if I could get away with it, I would simply eliminate some of the people who are the living embodiment of these deeply entrenched and torturous treatments. Progress often comes at a price …

  … Last evening I made quite a discovery when I finally took it upon myself to explore the upper reaches of the closet in my office. The ceiling is high, and so are the shelves. I’d never even thought to look above the shelf provided, I imagine, for storing one’s hat or gloves, and there is no light in the closet itself, but I heard a soft scuttling in the closet and used some matches to see if I could find its source.

  I did find a small hole in the baseboard that might have given entry to a mouse, so I’ll have a janitor set a trap. But far more interesting was my finding a shelf above the hat shelf, which contained several dozen books, magazines, and other items.

  The printed materials, once I managed to get them down by standing on a chair, proved uninteresting, most of the magazines battered issues of Psychological Review, and the books standard texts of the early part of this century. What proved far more rewarding, however, was a journal kept by the original head of the Ollinger Sanitarium, Adolph Ollinger himself, and folded into it were floor plans of the building.

  I stayed up most of the night reading the journal and was amazed to find that the building is honeycombed with passages, now forgotten as far as I know, created in order to aid in one of the most bizarre therapies I’ve ever heard of—terrifying patients into a feeling of guilt that was in turn supposed to cure them. The journal indicates how all too unsuccessful it was.

  The locations of these passages are all clearly indicated on the floor plans, and one of the entrances is actually in what is now my office. From what I read in the details of the journal, I think the room was used as a costume room for the attendants, who played various ghosts that “haunted” the patients.

  I found the entrance hidden by a three-foot-wide bookcase against the inner wall at the end of the room. There is a catch at the back of the top of the bookcase which, when pressed, allows it to slide to the side, revealing a narrow passage leading into darkness. As much as I’d love to explore it, it will have to wait until I bring a flashlight from home tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll place Ollinger’s plans and journal, as well as my own, among the old books on the top closet shelf. I assume they’ll be safe there, as I seem to be the first to have found them in over four decades …

  … Tonight I found that the passage parallels the halls of Wards C and D. While the wall to the right, the Ward D side, is solid brick, there are seemingly entrances to every room in Ward C. That must have been where Ollinger put the cases on whom he wanted to use his “therapy.” A patient room near the end of the corridor is currently empty, so I pressed what looked to be a metal plate on the wall, and was amazed to see a door appear and actually move slowly back into the passage, so that I had to get out of its way or possibly be crushed. They must operate by hydraulics—I don’t know much about the mechanics of such things, but they’re very quiet. A low grinding sound of some sort, and that’s all.

  The door was perfectly made, joined so well to the brick walls that I suspect you can only see the lines in the mortar if you look very closely. I’ll check on this tomorrow. There’s no control from inside the room, so patients couldn’t escape. You could reach into the passage and push the panel so that it would lock you in the room, but there’d be no reason to do that.

  I explored further, and found some narrow spiral staircases to get from one floor to another. There’s one that leads to a passage that opens into two rooms in the cellar. The first is the small storage room, not too far from the laundry, where we keep old records, while the other opens into a room that I had no idea even existed. I don’t know what it was used for, but it’s quite large, with stone walls dripping with moisture, so that it’s damp and almost tomb-like. There are pieces of rusted iron scattered about that look as though they may have been parts of cages. I’d rather not think about that. Its main entrance appears to have been sealed off.

  Up above I discovered another passage that I believe opens into Goldberg’s office, which makes sense. Goldberg’s large office was probably Ollinger’s back then, and the man had to have a way to observe his therapy in action …

  … Several days have passed, and I haven’t told anyone about my discovery. I have, however, begun to consider how I might use my information to my advantage regarding the changes that should be made in this facility. What I have in mind is most definitely a radical procedure, and one that I hardly dare think about, let alone write down. Still, it could prove to be invaluable.

  I have seen in this facility some of the most b
arbaric, callous, and cruel treatment of patients that it has ever been my misfortune to come across. Often I wish that certain people, people whom I cannot personally dismiss, would simply disappear. What I’ve found gives me the power to do that.

  Unfortunately, I don’t believe that I could ever bring myself to kill, and, even if I could, I haven’t the nerve to risk the consequences. But then I realize that I am surrounded by killers, and one in particular who might be useful.

  Could Norman Bates be persuaded to kill again? He overcame the taboo against murder, at least in the killings of his mother and her lover. But it was “Mother” who killed Mary Crane and Arbogast and would have killed Lila Crane as well. If he allowed Mother to take over and use him to kill, might he not allow that again?

  Still, Mother has proven too difficult to deal with. While Norman loved her in his way, he also hated her enough to kill her. There was no way to rehabilitate Mother—it was easier to banish her, and I’ve helped him do that, reach the point where he doesn’t want her back.

  But what about someone else? What if another personality could inhabit Norman? What if I could create another character within him? One he always wanted? He grew up a lonely little boy. What would have made a difference?

  A sibling. Something that every smothered, lonely child wants.

  * * *

  Norman felt a shudder go through his body, a pulse of reclamation as he saw Dr. Reed smiling at him, just a glint of white teeth in the near-darkness.

  “That’s right, Robert. You do have to make Marie disappear. And I’ll show you how.”

  Let Robert back in, Norman. You know what he is now.

  But I’m afraid, Mother. Afraid of what he’ll make me do!

  You don’t have to be afraid anymore, boy. I’m back now, and I’ll take care of you. He won’t hurt your friend, even if she is a little chippie. Now show some gumption and let him in!

  “All right, Doc,” Norman said, and was relieved to find that it was himself talking and not Robert, either inside or outside him.

  That’s a good boy.