Robert Bloch's Psycho (18 page)

Then he returned and continued to undress her while she did the same to him. When they were wearing only underwear, Myron lowered Eleanor to their bed of towels, lay over her, then slipped off her panties, while she helped him with his shorts.

“Dear Lord,” he whispered, “you're so beautiful. I had no idea how much.”

“Oh baby,” she said, pulling him down toward her, “oh, my sweet man…”

They really made love then. It wasn't just sex, as it had been so many times before. She felt something different in him, something new, and she realized with joy that while things might never be what she wanted them to be, they would be much better from now on. When the moment came, she closed her eyes and let the feeling take her. It was wonderful, and she felt Myron shudder at the very same time, shiver like everything in him had poured out at once and left him weak and exhausted.

And lifeless.

Startled, she opened her eyes and in the dim light she saw Myron's face above hers, in a familiar rictus that had always signaled his moment of arrival, but now, she saw, meant something quite different. Blood was trickling from Myron's open mouth, and his eyes were wide in shock. He coughed once, and warm blood splashed into Eleanor's eyes, blinding her, so she didn't see him roll off of her, but nonetheless felt him withdraw from her and list like a mass of dead flesh off her right side, off the pile of towels, flopping onto the cold cement floor.

Eleanor rubbed her eyes and blinked wildly, trying to clear her vision, but Myron's salty blood stung them too badly. She could just make out a human shape standing above her, shadowed against the light from the corridor. Her ears were filled with Myron's gasping as he struggled to breathe, and then words came out in whispers, borne on the shallowest of breaths: “… Oh, Jesus … so sorry … f'give me … f' my … sins … Lord … oh…”

The last sound dropped into the darkness that surrounded Eleanor, and the shape began to descend upon her, shutting off the light from the hall; descend upon her, as Myron had done with his gift of love, but the gift this shadow carried was much, much different.

With a sudden burst of strength, Eleanor threw her body to the side and fell off the pile of towels directly onto Myron. The huffing groan he gave told her he was still alive, and she felt the wetness of his blood as she tried to push herself away from him and scuttle farther from death on her hands and knees. His hand grasped her ankle as though clinging to her meant clinging to life, and she kicked hard with her other leg, felt her heel hit his face, heard the crunch of bone, and for an instant hated herself for having done it. Then self-preservation took control once more, and, now free, she crawled farther into the darkness with no plan but to hide, like a child escaping the bogeyman.

There was no place to hide. She heard footsteps behind her, and pushed herself to her feet, planning to run, but she saw only a dark wall ahead of her. Fight, then. She was naked and vulnerable, but she could fight.

She whirled around, arms raised, fists clenched, ready to strike. But it was already too late. The shadow was in front of her, and she felt one hand grasp her neck and the other hand drive into her soft stomach that long, sharp thing whose shape she had glimpsed. She felt it worm its way up like a living creature inside her, and her fists fell to her sides. When the knife slipped out and the hand released her throat, the rest of her fell as well, down to the hard floor. She died within two seconds of her head striking the cement.

*   *   *

Myron Gunn wasn't so lucky. The knife had entered his back, severing his spinal column and rooting about in his left lung before it was withdrawn. He knew why he was dying. God had sent an angel of death because of Myron's sins, because he had not only betrayed his wife by becoming an adulterer, but also because he had fallen in love with Eleanor, and the thought had come to him, sure and strong, of leaving Marybelle for her. That had been the last straw for Jesus, Myron was certain. You couldn't keep defying the laws of God with impunity. His sins had found him out at last.

He was lying on his back now, looking up into the blackness of the ceiling. It seemed as though dark clouds were gathering up there. Though he could no longer speak, he prayed silently that those clouds would break open into the sunshine of heaven.

But instead, a darker cloud drifted across his view, a black moon that he realized was his killer's head. It descended close to his, only inches away, and then, in spite of all his other pain, Myron felt something tickling at his nostril. At the first prick, he knew it was a knife.

And as the blade slipped up into his nose, he remembered Wesley Breckenridge, and he prayed harder than he had ever prayed before.

*   *   *

The man drove the car down the nearly deserted road, the high beams on. When he saw the sign for the motel he slowed. He'd seen it before, but not at night, and was concerned he might miss the turnoff.

There it was, the long strip of rooms, the office at the one end, and up above stood the house, abandoned now, the windows empty eyes in the gaunt face of peeling boards. He drove the car around the back of the motel and up the gravel drive toward the house. But he didn't stop there.

The driveway went around the rear of the house and stopped at a dilapidated wooden shed that had been used as a garage. The man looked carefully and discerned, just beyond the shed, a pair of grooves in the brown grass, worn nearly flat by tires over the years. The path led into a field. On a clear night, the lights of the car might have been visible from the road, but rain was still pattering down, and a dense fog had formed in the wake of the night's earlier, savage storm, so the man used the low beams, and the rough road was visible if he watched intently.

At last the car reached the edge of the swamp. There was an incline leading down to its miry surface, and the man suspected it was the same place at which Norman Bates had dumped the car belonging to Mary Crane. The man stopped the car several yards from where solid ground turned to quagmire, pushed the “neutral” button on the automatic transmission, pulled the parking brake, and opened all the windows. Then he got out, closed the door, and reached back through the driver's window. He grasped the steering wheel and turned it until the tires were aimed straight ahead into the muck.

He opened the door, took off the parking brake, and pushed the “drive” button, getting out quickly and slamming the door shut. Then he ran behind the already moving vehicle and pushed with all his might, helping the transmission move the car slowly forward toward the thick mire of the swamp. He pushed until the front tires went in, and continued to push as the entire front of the car started to submerge. Not until the tips of his shoes dipped beneath the muddy surface did he stop pushing.

By then, gravity was doing his work for him. The car was going down, though slowly. He watched as the swamp muck poured in through the open windows, making the car even heavier. He had no doubt it would sink fully. It had worked for Norman, so why not for him?

Still, he felt a bit of trepidation, the same tension Norman had felt, no doubt, when the sinking of the car slowed to almost a standstill. It wouldn't be the end of the world if the car was discovered, but it was bound to make things easier if it wasn't.

Ah, it was going down faster now. It was incredible, he thought, how deep the drop-off must be between ground and swamp. Only the top of the trunk was showing. It was as though it was driving down a very steep ramp in the swamp. Finally there were what sounded like a phlegmatic inhalation of breath through a gigantic throat and a series of thick bubbles from displaced air far below, and the car was gone.

The man smiled and pulled up the collar of his waterproof coat as further protection against the rain. His hat had kept his head relatively dry, but he had a long way to walk through the wet, chilly weather. Still, he was glad for the rain. It would certainly erase all the tire tracks by morning.

He hunched his shoulders against the wind and started to walk toward the road.

*   *   *

Norman Bates awoke and switched on the light. Despite the warmth of his room, he was trembling with cold. He'd had another dream, but this one had been less explicit than the previous one about the figure bathed in blood.

In the dream from which he had just awakened, he couldn't recall where it had taken place, but it was certainly not the ovoid room in the earlier dream. All he remembered, all he had
seen,
really, were two faces, faces that were strangely familiar but that he couldn't place. They seemed out of context, somehow, and he thought about when he was a boy and had seen his schoolteacher, Mrs. Hoffman, at the grocery store when he'd gone in with Mother. It didn't make
sense
to see Mrs. Hoffman anywhere other than the schoolhouse, and he had stood there stunned while she smiled down at him and Mother asked what on earth was wrong and why was he acting so moony.

Was it like that now? Norman wondered. But he was sure the faces were from where he was now, the hospital, and not his life before. If it wasn't a different place, then, could it be something else? Could it be…?

Their expressions.

There are certain people whose expressions never change, at least when they're in certain places or doing certain things. There are people, Norman thought, who are so used to acting one way that when you see them acting another way you don't even recognize them.

People who are strong and tough and mean. You wouldn't know who they were when they were terrified, would you? When their faces were trembling and tears were coming from their eyes, like the two faces in the dream. You wouldn't know them. Unless you thought about it …

And those were the reflections that led Norman to the realization that he had seen Myron Gunn and Nurse Lindstrom in his dream. Once he recalled who they were, he remembered the details of the dream more clearly. There had been a nimbus around their heads, a glowing aura of … red, yes, red like the previous dream, and instead of their white uniforms, their necks and shoulders had been bare. But their faces—that was what had been so terrible. To see such strong, unyielding personalities cringing and shuddering,
fearing,
was upsetting to Norman, even though he had no love for either of them.

And perhaps, he conjectured, that was what caused the dream—his
wanting
to see them suffer as they'd made others suffer. He'd never had any personal experience with Nurse Lindstrom, but her attitude had always been chilly toward him, and he'd heard stories in the social hall and the exercise yard about things she did to certain patients who displeased her. Maybe that was why his subconscious mind had placed her in such peril in his dream.

He'd have to tell Dr. Reed about it during their next session. It would be something to talk about with Robert too.

And then he remembered Robert, and what Robert had said to him about Myron Gunn, about how if anyone tried to hurt Norman or his friends, they would be sorry.

How sorry? Norman wondered. Could it be possible that Robert had actually done something to Myron Gunn? Lay in wait for him when he left the hospital? And had Norman seen part of what had happened through that psychic connection Robert had talked about? But then why was Nurse Lindstrom in his dream or vision or whatever it was? Had she been with Myron Gunn at the time? Had Robert hurt them both? Hurt them to try and keep Norman safe?

The thought that people might have suffered for something he'd said to Robert made him sick to his stomach. He didn't like Myron Gunn, but he didn't want any harm to come to him. No, he'd had enough of that. Still, he felt a sense of guilt settle heavily on his shoulders, as though
he
had been responsible, if what had happened in his dream had been reality, and he looked at his hands as if expecting to see them stiffly coated with dried blood.

But Norman's hands were clean, even his cuticles and under his nails. And there came to him the words of that story by Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” that he had read so often as a boy and later as a man:

 … no stain of any kind—no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!

Norman shuddered at the words, looked at his spotlessly clean hands once again, turned off the light, and tried to go back to sleep.

 

10

The following morning the state hospital was abuzz. If one supervisor hadn't shown up for work without calling in sick, it would have been inconvenient enough. But when
two
people, in particular the head nurse and the chief attendant, failed to appear at their usual times, the organizational house of cards threatened to topple.

When he was informed of the no-shows, Dr. Goldberg quickly appointed Senior Nurse Wyndham, a fifteen-year veteran, to oversee the nurses, and Ray Wiseman, who had been an attendant since the hospital had opened in 1939, was chosen to act as temporary head attendant.

Judy Pearson, at Goldberg's request, kept calling both Nurse Lindstrom's and Myron Gunn's homes. Just before 10:00 a.m., Marybelle Gunn answered. No, Myron hadn't come home at all last night, and she had no idea where he was—she'd just been over to her mother's house telling her about it, which was why she hadn't answered the phone. No one answered the phone at Eleanor Lindstrom's house, but Judy tried every ten minutes.

Doctors Goldberg, Steiner, Reed, and Berkowitz met in Goldberg's office, and Goldberg told them that he didn't think the disappearance of Gunn and Lindstrom was a coincidence. “I have long suspected,” he said in his thick accent, made thicker by morning phlegm, “that the relationship between Mr. Gunn and Nurse Lindstrom may have been more than purely professional. As long as I was given no proof of this, and since it did not affect their work, I chose to turn a blind eye. But now, gentlemen, we must don our investigators' deerstalkers as well as our usual hats, and ferret out what our two missing colleagues may have done and where they have gone. It may be something simple, or it may be scandalous, if such a thing as scandal still exists in this most modern world.