Psycho (18 page)

"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.

SEVENTEEN

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.

The bad man had really committed the murders and then he tried to blame it on her.

_Mother killed them_. That's what he said, but it was a lie.

How could she kill them when she was only watching, when she couldn't even move because she had to pretend to be a stuffed figure, a harmless stuffed figure that couldn't hurt or be hurt but merely exists forever?

She knew that nobody would believe the bad man, and he was dead now, too. The bad man and the bad boy were both dead, or else they were just part of the dream. And the dream had gone away for good.

She was the only one left, and she was real.

To be the only one, and to know that you are real--that's sanity, isn't it?

But just to be on the safe side, maybe it was best to keep pretending that one was a stuffed figure. Not to move. Never to move. Just to sit here in the tiny room, forever and ever.

If she sat there without moving, they wouldn't punish her.

If she sat there without moving, they'd know that she was sane, sane, sane.

She sat there for quite a long time, and then a fly came buzzing through the bars.

It lighted on her hand.

If she wanted to, she could reach out and swat the fly.

But she didn't swat it.

She didn't swat it, and she hoped they were watching, because that _proved_ what sort of a person she really was.

Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly. . . .

THE END

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