Psycho (18 page)

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 spent 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 newspaper 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 discharged 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 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.

"And the point is, he was getting away with it, until—"

Sam hesitated, but Lila finished the sentence for him. "Until Mary came along. And something happened, and he killed her."

"Mother killed her," Sam said. "
Norma
killed your sister. There's no way of finding out the actual situation, but Dr. Steiner is sure that whenever a crisis arose,
Norma
became the dominant personality. Bates would start drinking, then black out while
she
took over. During the blackout, of course, he'd dressed up in her clothing. Afterward he'd hide her image away, because in his mind she was the real murderer and had to be protected."

"Then Steiner is quite sure he's insane?"

"Psychotic—that's the word he used. Yes, I'm afraid so. He's going to recommend that Bates be placed in the State Hospital, probably for life."

"Then there won't be any trial?"

"That's what I came here to tell you. No, there won't be any trial." Sam sighed heavily. "I'm sorry. I suppose the way you feel—"

"I'm glad," Lila said slowly. "It's better this way. Funny, how differently things work out in real life. None of us really suspected the truth, we just blundered along until we did the right things for the wrong reasons. And right now, I can't even hate Bates for what he did. He must have suffered more than any of us. In a way I can almost understand. We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be."

Sam rose, and she walked him to the door. "Anyway, it's over, and I'm going to try to forget it. Just forget everything that happened."

"Everything?" Sam murmured. He didn't look at her.

"Well,
almost
everything." She didn't look at him.

And that was the end of it.

Or
almost
the end.

The real end came quietly.

It came in the small, barred room where the voices had muttered and mingled for so long a time—the man's voice, the woman's voice, the child's.

The voices had exploded when triggered into fission, but now, almost miraculously, a fusion took place.

So that there was only one voice. And that was right, because there was only one person in the room. There always
had
been one person and
only
one.

She knew it now.

She knew it, and she was glad.

It was so much better to be this way; to be fully and completely aware of one's self as one
really
was. To be serenely strong, serenely confident, serenely secure.

She could look back upon the past as though it were all a bad dream, and that's just what it had been: a bad dream, peopled with illusions.

There had been a bad boy in the bad dream, a bad boy who had killed her lover and tried to poison her. Somewhere in the dream was the strangling and the wheezing and the clawing at the throat and the faces that turned blue. Somewhere in the dream was the graveyard at night and the digging and the panting and the splintering of the coffin lid, and then the moment of discovery, the moment of staring at what lay within. But what lay within wasn't really dead. Not any more. The bad boy was dead, instead, and that was as it should be.

There had been a bad man in the bad dream, too, and he was also a murderer. He had peeked through the wall and he drank, and he read filthy books and believed in all sorts of crazy nonsense. But worst of all, he was responsible for the deaths of two innocent people—a young girl with beautiful breasts and a man who wore a gray Stetson hat. She knew all about it, of course, and that's why she could remember the details. Because she had been there at the time, watching. But all she did was watch.