PSYCHO
by Robert Bloch
First published in 1959
10% of this book is dedicated to HARRY ALTSHULER,
who did 90% of the work
ONE
Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.
It sounded as though somebody was tapping on the windowpane.
He looked up, hastily, half prepared to rise, and the book slid from his hands to his ample lap. Then he realized that the sound was merely rain. Late afternoon rain, striking the parlor window.
Norman hadn't noticed the coming of the rain, nor the twilight. But it was quite dim here in the parlor now, and he reached over to switch on the lamp before resuming his reading.
It was one of those old-fashioned table lamps, the kind with the ornate glass shade and the crystal fringe. Mother had had it ever since he could remember, and she refused to get rid of it. Norman didn't really object; he had lived in this house for all of the forty years of his life, and there was something quite pleasant and reassuring about being surrounded by familiar things. Here everything was orderly and ordained; it was only there, outside, that the changes took place. And most of those changes held a potential threat. Suppose he had spent the afternoon walking, for example? He might have been off on some lonely side road or even in the swamps when the rain came, and then what? He'd be soaked to the skin, forced to stumble along home in the dark. You could catch your death of cold that way, and besides, who wanted to be out in the dark? It was much nicer here in the parlor, under the lamp, with a good book for company.
The light shone down on his plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair as he bent his head to resume reading.
It was really a fascinating book—no wonder he hadn't noticed how fast the time had passed. It was The Realm of the Incas, by Victor W. Von Hagen, and Norman had never before encountered such a wealth of curious information. For example, this description of the cachna, or victory dance, where the warriors formed a great circle, moving and writhing like a snake. He read:
The drumbeat for this was usually performed on what had been the body of an enemy: the skin had been flayed and the belly stretched to form a drum, and the whole body acted as a sound box while throbbings came out of the open mouth—grotesque, but effective. [Reprinted by permission of the author.]
Norman smiled, then allowed himself the luxury of a comfortable shiver. Grotesque but effective—it certainly must have been! Imagine flaying a man—alive, probably—and then stretching his belly to use it as a drum! How did they actually go about doing that, curing and preserving the flesh of the corpse to prevent decay? For that matter, what kind of a mentality did it take to conceive of such an idea in the first place?
It wasn't the most appetizing notion in the world, but when Norman half closed his eyes, he could almost see the scene: this throng of painted, naked warriors wriggling and swaying in unison under a sun-drenched, savage sky, and the old crone crouching before them, throbbing out a relentless rhythm on the swollen, distended belly of a cadaver. The contorted mouth of the corpse would be forced open, probably fixed in a gaping grimace by clamps of bone, and from it the sound emerged. Beating from the belly, rising through the shrunken inner orifices, forced up through the withered windpipe to emerge amplified and in full force from the dead throat.
For a moment, Norman could almost hear it, and then he remembered that rain has its rhythm too, and footsteps–
Actually, he was aware of the footsteps without even hearing them; long familiarity aided his senses whenever Mother came into the room. He didn't even have to look up to know she was there.
In fact, he didn't look up; he pretended to continue his reading, instead. Mother had been sleeping in her room, and he knew how crabby she could get when just awakened. So it was best to keep quiet and hope that she wasn't in one of her bad moods.
"Norman, do you know what time it is?"
He sighed and closed the book. He could tell now that she was going to be difficult; the very question was a challenge. Mother had to pass the grandfather clock in the hall in order to come in here and she could easily see what time it was.
Still, no sense making an issue of it. Norman glanced down at his wrist watch, then smiled. "A little after five," he said. "I actually didn't realize it was so late. I've been reading–"
"Don't you think I have eyes? I can see what you've been doing." She was over at the window now, staring out at the rain. "And I can see what you haven't been doing, too. Why didn't you turn the sign on when it got dark? And why aren't you up at the office where you belong?"
"Well, it started to rain so hard, and I didn't expect there'd be any traffic in this kind of weather.
"Nonsense! That's just the time you're likely to get some business. Lots of folks don't care to drive when it's raining."
"But it isn't likely anybody would be coming this way. Everyone takes the new highway." Norman heard the bitterness creeping into his voice, felt it welling up into his throat until he could taste it, and tried to hold it back. But too late now; he had to vomit it out. "I told you how it would be at the time, when we got that advance tip that they were moving the highway. You could have sold the motel then, before there was a public announcement about the new road coming through. We could have bought all kinds of land over there for a song, closer to Fairvale, too. We'd have had a new motel, a new house, made some money. But you wouldn't listen. You never listen to me, do you? It's always what you want and what you think. You make me sick!"
"Do I, boy?" Mother's voice was deceptively gentle, but that didn't fool Norman. Not when she called him "boy." Forty years old, and she called him "boy": that's how she treated him, too, which made it worse. If only he didn't have to listen! But he did, he knew he had to, he always had to listen.
"Do I, boy?" she repeated, even more softly. "I make you sick, eh? Well, I think not. No, boy, I don't make you sick. You make yourself sick.
"That's the real reason you're still sitting over here on this side road, isn't it, Norman? Because the truth is that you haven't any gumption. Never had any gumption, did you, boy?
"Never had the gumption to leave home. Never had the gumption to go out and get yourself a job, or join the army, or even find yourself a girl—"
"You wouldn't let me!"
"That's right, Norman. I wouldn't let you. But if you were half a man, you'd have gone your own way."
He wanted to shout out at her that she was wrong, but he couldn't. Because the things she was saying were the things he had told himself, over and over again, all through the years. It was true. She'd always laid down the law to him, but that didn't mean he always had to obey. Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed. There had been other widows, other only sons, and not all of them became enmeshed in this sort of relationship. It was really his fault as much as hers. Because he didn't have any gumption.
"You could have insisted, you know," she was saying. "Suppose you'd gone out and found us a new location, then put the place here up for sale. But no, all you did was whine. And I know why. You never fooled me for an instant. It's because you really didn't want to move. You've never wanted to leave this place, and you never will now, ever. You can't leave, can you? Any more than you can grow up."
He couldn't look at her. Not when she said things like that, he couldn't. And there was nowhere else for him to look, either. The beaded lamp, the heavy old overstuffed furniture, all the familiar objects in the room, suddenly became hateful just because of long familiarity; like the furnishings of a prison cell. He stared out of the window, but that was no good either—out there was the wind and the rain and the darkness. He knew there was no escape for him out there. No escap
e anywhere, from the voice that throbbed, the voice that drummed into his ears like that of the Inca corpse in the book; the drum of the dead.
He clutched at the book now and tried to focus his eyes on it. Maybe if he ignored her, and pretended to be calm
But it didn't work.
"Look at yourself!" she was saying (the drum going boom-boom-boom, and the sound reverberating from the mangled mouth). "I know why you didn't bother to switch on the sign. I know why you haven't even gone up to open the office tonight. You didn't really forget. It's just that you don't want anyone to come, you hope they don't come."
"All right!" he muttered. "I admit it. I hate running a motel, always have."
"It's more than that, boy." (There it was again, "Boy, boy, boy!" drumming away, out of the jaws of death.) "You hate people. Because, really, you're afraid of them, aren't you? Always have been, ever since you were a little tyke. Rather snuggle up in a chair under the lamp and read. You did it thirty years ago, and you're still doing it now. Hiding away under the covers of a book."
"There's a lot worse things I could be doing. You always told me that, yourself. At least I never went out and got into trouble. Isn't it better to improve my mind?"
"Improve your mind? Hah!" He could sense her standing behind him now, staring down. "Call that improvement? You don't fool me, boy, not for a minute. Never have. It isn't as if you were reading the Bible, or even trying to get an education. I know the sort of thing you read. Trash. And worse than trash!"
"This happens to be a history of the Inca civilization—"
"I'll just bet it is. And I'll just bet it's crammed full with nasty bits about those dirty savages, like the one you had about the South Seas. Oh, you didn't think I knew about that one did you? Hiding it up in your room, the way you hid all the others, those filthy things you used to read—"
"Psychology isn't filthy, Mother!"
"Psychology, he calls it! A lot you know about psychology! I'll never forget that time you talked so dirty to me, never. To think that a son could come to his own mother and say such things!"
"But I was only trying to explain something. It's what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could just look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better."
"Change, boy? Nothing's going to change. You can read all the books in the world and you'll still be the same. I don't need to listen to a lot of vile obscene rigmarole to know what you are. Why, even an eight-year-old child could recognize it. They did, too, all your little playmates did, way back then. You're a Mamma's Boy. That's what they called you, and that's what you were. Were, are, and always will be. A big, fat, overgrown Mamma's Boy!"
It was deafening him, the drumbeat of her words, the drumbeat in his own chest. The vileness in his mouth made him choke. In a moment he'd have to cry. Norman shook his head. To think that she could still do this to him, even now! But she could, and she was, and she would, over and over again, unless—
"Unless what?"
God, could she read his mind?
"I know what you're thinking, Norman. I know all about you, boy. More than you dream. But I know that, too—what you dream. You're thinking that you'd like to kill me, aren't you, Norman? But you can't. Because you haven't the gumption. I'm the one who has the strength. I've always had it. Enough for both of us. That's why you'll never get rid of me, even if you really wanted to.
"Of course, deep down you don't want to. You need me, boy. That's the truth, isn't it?"
Norman stood up, slowly. He didn't dare trust himself to turn and face her, not yet. He had to tell himself to be calm, first. Be very, very calm. Don't think about what she's saying. Try to face up to it, try to remember. She's an old woman, and not quite right in the head. If you keep on listening to her this way, you'll end up not quite right in the head, either. Tell her to go back to her room and lie down. That's where she belongs.
And she'd better go there fast, because if she doesn't, this time you're going to strangle her with her own Silver Cord—
He started to swing around, his mouth working, framing the phrases, when the buzzer sounded.
That was the signal; it meant somebody had driven in, up at the motel, and was ringing for service.
Without even bothering to look back, Norman walked into the hall, took his raincoat from the hanger, and went out into the darkness.
TWO
The rain had been falling steadily for several minutes before Mary noticed it and switched on the windshield wiper. At the same time she put on the headlights; it had gotten dark quite suddenly, and the road ahead was only a vague blur between the towering trees.
Trees? She couldn't recall a stretch of trees along here the last time she'd driven this way. Of course that had been the previous summer and she'd come into Fairvale in broad daylight, alert and refreshed. Now she was tired out from eighteen hours of steady driving, but she could still remember and sense that something was wrong.
Remember—that was the trigger word. Now she could remember, dimly, how she'd hesitated back there about a half-hour ago, when she came to the fork in the road. That was it; she'd taken the wrong turn. And now here she was, God knows where, with this rain coming down and everything pitch-black outside—
Get a grip on yourself, now. You can't afford to be panicky. The worst part of it was over.
It was true, she told herself. The worst part was over. The worst part had come yesterday afternoon, when she stole the money.
She had been standing in Mr. Lowery's office when old Tommy Cassidy hauled out that big green bundle of bills and put them down on the desk. Thirty-six Federal Reserve notes bearing the picture of the fat man who looked like a wholesale grocer, and eight more carrying the face of the man who looked like an undertaker. But the wholesale grocer was Grover Cleveland and the undertaker was William McKinley. And thirty-six thousands and eight five-hundreds added up to forty thousand dollars.
Tommy Cassidy had put them down just like that, fanning them casually as he announced he was closing the deal and buying a house as his daughter's wedding present.
Mr. Lowery pretended to be just as casual as he went through the business of signing the final papers. But after old Tommy Cassidy went away, Mr. Lowery got a little bit excited. He scooped up the money, put it into a big brown Manila number ten envelope, and sealed the flap. Mary noticed how his hands were trembling.
"Here," he said, handing her the money. "Take it over to the bank. It's almost four o'clock, but I'm sure Gilbert will let you make a deposit." He paused, staring at her. "What's the matter, Miss Crane—don't you feel well?"
Maybe he had noticed the way her hands trembled, now that she was holding the envelope. But it didn’t matter. She knew what she was going to say, even though she was surprised when she found herself actually saying it.
"I seem to have one of my headaches, Mr. Lowery. As a matter of fact, I was just going to ask if it was all right if I took the rest of the afternoon off. We're all caught up on the mail, and we can't make out the rest of the forms on this deal until Monday."
Mr. Lowery smiled at her. He was in good humor, and why shouldn't he be? Five per cent of forty thousand was two thousand dollars. He could afford to be generous.
"Of course, Miss Crane. You just make this deposit and then run along borne. Would you like me to drive you?"
"No, that's all right, I can manage. A little rest—"
"That's the ticket. See you Monday, then. Take it easy, that's what I always say."
In a pig's ear that's what he always said: Lowery would half kill himself to make an extra dollar, and he'd be perfectly willing to kill any of his employees for another fifty cents.
But Mary Crane had smiled at him very sweetly, then walked out of his office and out of his life. Taking the forty thousand dollars with her.
You don't get that kind of an opportunity every day of your life. In fact, when you come right down to it, some people don't seem to get a
ny opportunities at all.
Mary Crane had waited over twenty-seven years for hers.
The opportunity to go on to college had vanished, at seventeen, when Daddy was hit by a car. Mary went to business school for a year, instead, and then settled down to support Mom and her kid sister, Lila.
The opportunity to marry disappeared at twenty-two, when Dale Belter was called up to serve his hitch in the army. Pretty soon he was stationed in Hawaii, and before long he began mentioning this girl in his letters, and then the letters stopped coming. When she finally got the wedding announcement she didn't care any more.
Besides, Mom was pretty sick by then. It took her three years to die, while Lila was off at school. Mary had insisted she go to college, come what may, but that left her carrying the whole load. Between holding down a job at the Lowery Agency all day and sitting up with Mom half the night, there wasn't time for anything else.
Not even time to note the passing of time. But then Mom had the final stroke, and there was the business of the funeral, and Lila coming back from school and trying to find a job, and all at once there was Mary Crane looking at herself in the big mirror and seeing this drawn, contorted face peering back at her. She'd thrown something at the mirror, and then the mirror broke into a thousand pieces and she knew that wasn't all; she was breaking into a thousand pieces, too.
Lila had been wonderful and even Mr. Lowery helped out by seeing to it that the house was sold right away. By the time the estate was settled they had about two thousand dollars in cash left over. Lila got a job in a record shop downtown, and they moved into a small apartment together.
"Now, you're going to take a vacation," Lila told her. "A real vacation. No, don't argue about it! You've kept this family going for eight years and it's about time you had a rest. I want you to take a trip. A cruise, maybe."
So Mary took the S.S. Caledonia, and after a week or so in Caribbean waters the drawn, contorted face had disappeared from the mirror of her stateroom. She looked like a young girl again (well, certainly not a day over twenty-two, she told herself) and, what was more important still, a young girl in love.