Robert Bloch's Psycho

by Chet Williamson

  Still obeying Mother, Norman went to his sink. In the dim light coming through the open slot in the door, he looked down at his bare chest and arms. Dried blood was all over his hands, some on his arms, and a bit on his chest and belly, but fortunately none had gotten on his uniform pants. He washed all the blood away with soap and warm water, and watched as the pink liquid went down the drain. Then he examined himself again. Mother noticed that he had some blood left around his fingernails and cuticles, and he scrubbed them until they were clean enough for her.

  Then he dried himself thoroughly with a hand towel too small to hang oneself with, and put on his shirt.

  Now lie down and rest, Norman. You’ve had a very busy day.

  Thank you, Mother. Thank you … for helping me.

  That’s what a mother’s for.

  Norman lay there in the room, his eyes open. For a long time he thought about what Dr. Reed had done to him, and he remembered one evening, just a few years ago, when he and Mother had been watching television. There was an old silent movie on—German, he thought—about a doctor who hypnotized a sleepwalker and had him kill people. In a way, that was what Dr. Reed had done with him. That wasn’t right.

  It certainly wasn’t, Norman. I won’t let anyone fool you like that ever again. And I won’t let anyone take me away from you, either. We’ll always be together, just the way we both want it. We just won’t listen to their lies. We won’t listen to a single word they say.

  That’s good, Mother. That’s good. I think I can sleep now.

  We can both use some rest. Good night, Norman.

  Good night, Mother.

  20

  TO: Cosmo Danvers, MPH, MD, PhD

  FROM: Peter Harrison, MD, PhD

  REGARDING: The Ollinger Sanitarium

  DATE: July 7, 1918

  My dear Dr. Danvers:

  Attached is the report of what was found in the final inspection of the Adolph Ollinger Sanitarium. We have already discussed this face-to-face, so the report will serve as a formality. The members of the state board unanimously agree that the report should not be made public in order to save the families of patients from even more pain than they have already incurred. There is no point in revealing the more sensationalistic aspects of this affair. On the contrary, the board has prepared a public statement intended to quash many of the rumors which have circulated.

  We intend to state that the deaths of Ollinger and his remaining patients were due to the Spanish influenza, and that the patients’ bodies were found in their rooms, Ollinger’s in his bed. The remains will be returned to the families. Ollinger, having no family of which we know, will be buried in the local cemetery.

  As for the building itself, I understand that plans are to close off the cellar room in which all the bodies were found. The stench which remains makes it uninhabitable, and there is no way to air it. As for the passageways which are said to exist, we have so far found no access to them.

  That the building should have a commercial use at this time seems unlikely, since it is far from any major city. The consortium which financed and still owns it is planning to put it up for sale, though there seems no immediate plan to market it aggressively. I suspect that many of these investors, who had family members as patients there, might even prefer to see it go to wrack and ruin, and be forgotten. Indicative of this is the fact that they have done nothing with the building’s contents.

  Considering what has occurred there, I know of few concerned who would not be willing to see it crumble into rubble over the years …

  * * *

  When Dick O’Brien brought Norman Bates’s breakfast, he knew something was wrong. Norman was sitting on his bed, looking down at the floor, just the way he had done when he had first come to the hospital.

  When Dick put the tray of food on Norman’s small table, Norman didn’t sit down in his chair, look up, or acknowledge Dick’s presence in any way. Uh-oh, Dick thought. That was bad. He called Norman’s name several times, but there was no response. Dick left the tray and exited the room, locking the door firmly behind him.

  He went to Dr. Reed’s office, but Reed wasn’t there. His overcoat was hanging in his closet, so Dick assumed he was somewhere in the building and went to look for him.

  He didn’t find him. Dick checked with Dr. Steiner, but Steiner hadn’t seen Reed that morning. When Dick told Steiner about Norman Bates, Steiner went immediately to Norman’s room, while Dick looked in the parking lot to see if Reed’s car was there. It was.

  Several attendants scoured the building looking for Dr. Reed, but no one found him. By that time, Dr. Steiner had finished his visit to Norman Bates. Norman had been completely uncommunicative, and Dr. Steiner couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection between Norman’s condition and Dr. Reed’s disappearance. Obviously Norman had suffered some overwhelming trauma, for him to return to his previous state.

  Dr. Steiner too had come to the end of his tether. He sat alone at his desk and considered how four people had disappeared from the hospital. One could have been an escape, the double disappearance an elopement, the other a fleeing war criminal. Far-fetched, but not impossible.

  But now Dr. Felix Reed had disappeared. His car was there, his office untouched, no evidence of foul play found. But he was gone.

  Dr. Steiner looked at the telephone for a long time before he finally picked it up and called Captain Banning, then Sheriff Jud Chambers.

  * * *

  When the lawmen got there, they both reacted as if this was a scene they’d already played too many times. Captain Banning started organizing troopers and attendants for another thorough search of the facility, a search that was going on when Marie Radcliffe and Ben Blake arrived for their evening shift.

  Once they learned what had happened and Marie had seen what Norman Bates had once again become, she went directly to Dr. Steiner, who was still with Captain Banning and Sheriff Chambers. In front of the others, she told him about finding in Dr. Goldberg’s office the petrified wood she had given Norman.

  “I told Dr. Reed,” she said, “but no one else, and he was going to ask Norman about it, but he didn’t tell me what Norman said.”

  “So what are you saying?” Banning asked. “You thinking this prisoner had something to do with Goldberg’s disappearance? Or Reed’s?”

  “I … don’t know. Maybe.”

  Dr. Steiner shook his head. “Even if he could have gotten out of his locked room, the ward attendant on duty would have seen him.”

  But Marie pleaded until they went with her to Norman’s room. While Ben took Norman into the hall, the two policemen and Dr. Steiner went through his room, looking everywhere, including behind the padding that covered the walls. “Well,” Banning chuckled when they had finished their examination, “unless he went through a brick wall, there’s no way he could’ve gotten out of here.”

  That the now nearly catatonic Norman Bates was cleared of having anything to do with Felix Reed’s disappearance did nothing to relieve the tension in the state hospital. No one could think of any reason whatsoever for Reed to have run off in the night without coat, automobile, or anything else one might deem necessary. The entire building was searched top to bottom, as were the grounds, in the event that Reed had gone for a walk and had an attack of some sort.

  Reed’s office was searched, as was his apartment, but nothing was found that shed any light on his absence. The searchers, highway patrolmen more accustomed to traffic stops than detective work, overlooked the top shelf of the closet.

  Inquiries were made, and people were asked if he had been seen at Delsey’s, where it had been his habit to get a meal and a beer between ending his workday and going home, but he had not been in that night. Still, there was no evidence of foul play.

  Dr. Felix Reed remained missing, as did Ronald Miller, Myron Gunn, Eleanor Lindstrom, and the man the hospital staff had known as Dr. Isaac Goldberg. Though a number of people, including Dr. Steiner, Marie Radcliffe, and Captain Banning,
questioned Norman Bates, he gave no answers, nor did he indicate in any way that he even heard the questions.

  In the weeks and months to come, Dr. Nicholas Steiner was made permanent superintendent of the state hospital, and Ray Wiseman and Nurse Wyndham, respectively, became head attendant and head nurse. Dr. Elliot Berkowitz took over as Norman Bates’s therapist, but by the time his residency ended, he had been unable to bring Norman out of the amnesic fugue state to which he had returned, passive to the point of catatonia.

  Marie Radcliffe and other nurses fed him every meal as they had before. He would open his mouth and eat, but he would not pick up a utensil or a cup. Marie tried to return the piece of petrified wood to him, but he seemed to have no idea what it was, or who she was. Even though she told herself that Norman must have dropped it in the hall and Dr. Goldberg had picked it up, she only believed it half the time, and, in spite of Norman’s passivity, was always on the alert for any unexpected movement on his part.

  The entire hospital seemed to share Marie’s state of tension for a long time afterward. Only when two more psychiatrists came on staff, and several months went by with no further incidents, did relative calm return to the facility. It was reinforced by Dr. Steiner’s disapproval of any cruel or sadistic behavior on the part of the staff, and his reluctance to use shock therapies on any but the most otherwise hopeless cases, one of whom eventually proved to be Norman Bates.

  Norman underwent two treatments, neither of which had any positive effect, and Dr. Steiner ordered that the therapy be abandoned in Norman’s case.

  * * *

  Several months after Dr. Felix Reed’s disappearance, two custodians cleaned out his office in preparation for the psychiatrist who was to replace him. The police had already searched the office, and Dr. Steiner had removed the patient case files and any other pertinent hospital business from Reed’s papers. What was left was a small box of personal effects that was mailed to Reed’s father, a widower in Topeka, who had declined the offer of his son’s books.

  The custodians were told to take them to the staff library, where they would be sorted and either retained or discarded. If the books were in poor condition, the custodians were to take them directly to the incinerator.

  The two men took them by the armful off Reed’s shelves and loaded them onto a cart. Most of the books seemed to be in good condition, and they threw only a few, beat-up paperbacks, or hardcovers whose bindings were detached, into the wheeled barrel they had brought for the junk.

  There were some old newspapers and magazines on the shelf in the closet, and it was while they were removing them that one man noticed the upper shelf. He reached up and felt around with his fingers, made a sound of disgust, and looked at his hand.

  What appeared to be a dark brown mold clung to his fingertips. He wiped it on his uniform pants, then got a chair to more easily reach the top shelf. What he had first touched was Adolph Ollinger’s deteriorating leather-bound journal, tucked inside of which were the old floor plans and the personal notes that Felix Reed had written about the case of Norman Bates.

  “These must’ve been up here forever. The leather’s rotting away, don’t get it on ya,” the custodian said as he gingerly handed a pile of books down to his colleague. “They’re in lousy shape, and the old magazines too—just throw ’em in the barrel.”

  A half hour later, the contents of the barrel were dumped into the incinerator. Several minutes after that, they were nothing but ash.

  EPILOGUE

  While Norman Bates lay on his bed late one Friday night, locked in his room and in himself, a twelve-year-old boy named Adam was sitting on the davenport in his living room, watching a silent movie on Horror Theater. It was the first time he’d been allowed to stay up late alone, and he was huddled against the arm of the davenport, a knitted wool afghan tucked up around his shoulders. He was wearing both pajamas and a bathrobe, but the afghan made him feel safer, knowing that he could pull it up over his face if he had to. So far, he hadn’t. Having his dad’s reading lamp on helped too.

  The movie was called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and was about this doctor who was using a somnambulist (the word was new to Adam, but he figured it meant a sleepwalker) to murder people for him. When Cesare the Somnambulist opened his eyes for the first time, Adam thought he was going to have to go to the bathroom, but he didn’t. That was the worst part. From then on he wasn’t really scared, not even when Cesare grabbed the girl from her bed and looked like he was going to kill her before he just ran away with her.

  The ending was kind of confusing, but the doctor at the asylum wasn’t really the bad guy after all, and the guy who’d been telling the story was a patient himself, and he’d made it all up, and just thought the doctor was this evil Caligari.

  When it was over, Adam turned off the TV and sat there thinking about the movie. It was amazing, he thought, that this crazy guy could have made up this whole story in his head and believed it. It was the first time in Adam’s life that he fully realized that people could be sick in their minds as well as their bodies, and the idea kindled something inside him. In the days and months ahead, he would begin to consider becoming a doctor who studied and cured the illnesses of the mind.

  But Norman Bates, free only in his dreams, would have to wait in darkness for another twenty years until Adam Claiborne grew up, became a psychiatrist, came to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, sat across from Norman, and helped to release him into the light once more.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Brendan Deneen, my editor, for so ably guiding this journey.

  Thanks to Sally A. Francy, and Richard Henshaw for entrusting me with a fictional character that has grown beyond iconic.

  Thanks to Nicole Sohl, and Bruce Kilstein for all their help.

  Thanks to my wife, Laurie, and son, Colin, for their constant love and support.

  Thanks to Mom and Dad, who, in 1960, let a little kid buy a very special paperback with a screaming woman and a rocking chair on the cover.

  And thanks, most of all, to the author of that novel, the primum mobile himself, Robert Bloch, for creating not only Norman Bates, but an entire new genre of fiction as well.

  ALSO BY CHET WILLIAMSON

  The Night Listener and Others

  Hunters

  Defenders of the Faith

  Figures in Rain

  The Searchers: Siege of Stone

  The Searchers: Empire of Dust

  The Searchers: City of Iron

  Second Chance

  Reign

  Dreamthorp

  Lowland Rider

  McKain’s Dilemma

  Ash Wednesday

  Soulstorm

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHET WILLIAMSON’s parents took him to see the film of Robert Bloch’s Psycho when he was twelve, and he has been a reader and disciple of Bloch ever since. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, and many other magazines and anthologies. A collection of his stories received the International Horror Guild Award. He has twice been a final nominee for the World Fantasy Award, the MWA’s Edgar Award, and six times for the HWA’s Stoker Award. He has narrated over thirty audiobooks. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9
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  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Chet Williamson

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  ROBERT BLOCH’S PSYCHO: SANITARIUM. Copyright © 2016 by Sally A. Francy. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Cover design by Ervin Serrano

  Cover photographs: man by Eugene Sergeev / Shutterstock; corridor by Oliversved / Shutterstock

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-06105-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-6677-5 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466866775

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  First Edition: April 2016