Robert Bloch's Psycho (24 page)

Marie was, at least. She wasn't sure how Ben felt about her, but thought he seemed as
interested
(if that was the word) in her as she was in him. They hadn't yet slept together, but Marie wanted to. She hadn't actually been with a man in that way, though she'd come close. She hadn't wanted to get pregnant, and, to be honest with herself, she hadn't really felt about anyone the way she felt about Ben Blake.

Ben was the kind of guy with whom she could imagine settling down and even raising a family. He was good-looking, treated her well, was fun and interesting, and they had a lot in common since they worked at the same place. There was always something to talk about.

But, more than that, Ben made her feel like no one else ever had. She felt as though he
wanted
her, not just sexually (though that was a big part of their mutual attraction), but on a more complete level as well.

In short, she really liked this guy—maybe loved him, and she couldn't wait until her break when she could see him again.

*   *   *

As he put on the fifth side of
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,
he thought about Hans Sachs's final aria:

Habt Acht! Uns dräuen
üble Streich':

Zerfällt erst deutsches Volk und Reich …

And in his head he translated the original German into the language of his host country, the land in which he now lived and which he loathed:

Beware! Bad times are nigh at hand:

And when fall German folk and land

In spurious foreign pomp ere long,

No prince will know his people's tongue,

And foreign thoughts and foreign ways

Upon our German soil they'll raise;

Our native art will fade from hence

If 'tis not held in reverence.

So heed my words! Honor your German Masters

If you would stay disasters …

But the disaster had come, hadn't it? And honoring their German Masters hadn't prevented it.

He turned the knob, puffed on his cigar, and sat back down as the tone arm dropped into the groove and the opera resumed. His attention drifted away from the papers on his desk, and he glanced around the office, his gaze falling on the various appurtenances of Judaism, what he thought of as his props.

There was that idiotic menorah, which he had bought in a Buenos Aires pawnshop all those years ago. And there that
verdammt
Star of David. If he only had a dollar for each time someone had said how beautiful it was, that piece of
Scheisse
made up of stones, bearing all the artistry of a brain-damaged ghetto urchin. He flicked his cigar at the symbol, lobbing a chunk of gray ash toward it.

Then he chuckled, let his eyes blur and go out of focus so that the single minor change he'd had made in the piece by a trusted craftsman became apparent. Ah, yes. If it hadn't been for that subtlety, there was no way he could have sat all these years beneath the symbol of the hated
Juden
.

How ironic that he, who held Jews in such contempt, had been forced to live as one for the past sixteen years. And how doubly ironic that in the field of psychiatry in the United States, most of the practitioners were Jews. At least here, far from the cities and their cesspools of racial filth, Jews were few and far between.

At least until that young Berkowitz kike came along, and he had not only to mentor him, but to treat him as a
Bruder
in Jewry. What a farce. He remembered giving Berkowitz a cookie, and took the package out of his drawer. He removed the Oreo at the end of the row, thinking that the Jew's fingers might have brushed it, and dropped it in the wastebasket.

Still, matters could always be worse. Out here, he was respected and treated well. His stolen reputation had done much of the work, and his native German efficiency and craft, that
heil'ge deutsche Kunst
of which Wagner had written and Sachs had sung, had done the rest. After all, he was a psychiatrist, and a good one in his native land. And when those whom he had to fool expected brilliance, that was what they got.

He was paid very well, drove a nice car, smoked dollar cigars, drank good liquor, listened to and collected his fill of the operas, which made his life a joy, and was
safe,
buried as he was in the persona of a victimized Jew, and not in the South American jungles, as were so many of his erstwhile colleagues and friends, friends with whom he had not been in contact since the end of the war.

He had just started to think about some of them when the sound of the Nightwatchman's horn interrupted his reveries as well as Walther's song. In another moment he heard the
Nachtwächter
sing:

Hear, good people, what I say,

The clock has rung the day away,

So tend your fire and tend your light

That no one shall be harmed tonight.

Praise God, the Lord …

He put his cigar safely in the ashtray, sat back in his comfortable chair, closed his eyes, and thanked the
deutsche Gott
for his good circumstances. The papers on his desk could wait for several minutes. Perhaps he would give his mind a break and simply appreciate the music for a time, fade into that half-sleeping, half-waking state in which musical notes seemed to take on physical shapes, and in which the singers seemed to possess him as he possessed them, so that singer and listener were one.

The business of running a hospital left little time for such unalloyed pleasures, but he felt that he was deserving of a self-granted boon every once in a while, as the euphemism went. Americans had so many absurd sayings like that.
Once in a while
meant occasionally, while
once
meant one time only, the opposite of occasionally. Adding
in a while
did nothing to clarify it, so that it now meant “one time only in a period of time.” Idiotic.

Idiotic like so many other Americanisms. Take
make a killing
and
bump off,
he thought.
Make a killing
didn't mean to kill, it meant to make money, while
bump off
meant to kill. So he himself had
bumped off
many in his day, but had never
made a killing.
Just silly.

Enough, he cautioned himself. His eyes were closed in order to enjoy the music more, not to fulminate on the foolishness of the English language. The notes, the magnificent notes and words, those were what he needed to pay attention to, not American
Dummheit
.

He made himself relax and listen more attentively, and in a short time Richard Wagner had borne him away. He felt himself retreating from cares and memories until he fell fully into the music, down and down a sweet black velvet well of sound.

*   *   *

He awoke to silence and darkness. The darkness was strange. Surely his desk lamp had been on when he had fallen asleep. Why then was it now off?

Truth be told, he had never liked the dark. The fear had begun when he was a child, and it still remained. It was a ridiculous thought, but he always had the feeling that the Jews could creep up on you in the dark.

His hand trembled as he reached out for the desk lamp. He found the base, then slid his hand upward until he reached the switch. He turned it, and light flared into his eyes, making him close them again. In that self-imposed darkness, he thought once again about his aversion. He had psychoanalyzed himself many times to find the roots of his fear, and had long ago discovered that it was due to the old Jewish crone who had sold dried fish on
Friedrichstrasse
.

She had terrified him when he was a child. His mother was partly to blame for that, with her stories of Jews stealing Christian children for a number of horrible reasons. One time as they passed the old woman's stand, his mother whispered to him,
Aber ist, das, Fisch?
The thought chilled him.
But is that fish?
Was it? he had wondered. Or did the old woman sell something unthinkable instead?

Her beak of a nose, the hairy wart on her cheek, her near-toothless grinning mouth, gray hairs creeping out like spiderwebs from under her head covering, and her right eye, always weeping with yellow pus—all these haunted his dreams and made him wake screaming, calling for
Licht! Licht!
before the old woman came crawling over the foot of his bed, creeping onto his skinny body, bringing her hideous face up against his in the blackness, wrapping her skeletal fingers around his throat.

His mother, always one for economy, would leave a stub of a candle in his room, just enough to allow him to get back to sleep before it burned out. He always wished the candles were longer.

But the light was on now, and there was no reason to fear. He opened his eyes again, blinking against the bright lamplight. In a moment, he would rise and play the next side of
Die Meistersinger
. Still, he couldn't help but think about the old woman a moment longer, the bogeyman of his youth, and how he had gotten his revenge on her for frightening him so.

Ah, perhaps not on her specifically, but on the Jews, oh, yes. Revenge a thousand times over. Still, as many as he had put into their graves—or up chimneys, he corrected himself—she still haunted him. He still saw her at night in his dreams, in the darkness, creeping up on him, her mouth grinning, her bony fingers reaching out …

And then the lamp went off again. He hadn't touched it.

He froze, and for the first time he felt that someone else was in the room, someone who had first turned off the light, and then, after he had awakened, pulled the plug from the socket. The socket in the wall behind him.

He hadn't looked behind him.

Fingers wrapped around his throat from behind. He tried to hitch in a breath to scream, but the grip on his neck was implacable, fingers that clutched and bit into his throat like fangs, stifling him.

Then he felt something long and cold and sharp drift into the flesh beneath his breastbone, drift like smoke, like music, and a rushing sound filled his head, as of millions of dissonant voices singing at once, and he knew that the old woman and her entire tribe had found him at last.

“Licht … Licht…,”
he whispered, just before he sank into the deepest darkness of all, and his light was gone forever.

 

13

Ben Blake stood at the window of the break room looking out at the rain. He sipped his coffee and thought about Marie Radcliffe. He had been looking forward to seeing her on his current break, but she hadn't shown. Probably got hung up with a patient somewhere. The nursing staff was minimal at night, and when something happened, it was all hands on deck.

Ben was disappointed. He was starting to think that he might be in love with Marie. She had an effect on him like no other woman he'd known. It had started when she'd opened up to him about her father on their first date, and their relationship had grown more intimate ever since. Not in a sexual way, but he thought that might not be far off. He wanted it, of course, but he wanted more. She might, he thought, really be
the one
. Kind and caring, she'd make one hell of a mom, that was for sure, and a great wife too.

Slow down, boy, he thought. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

He was alone in the break room, so he switched off the light in order to see outside, through the windows. Ben loved wild nights like this, with the rain and wind blowing, moon and stars blotted out by heavy clouds. He looked at the horizon, the ridgeline of trees, scarcely visible in the darkness and the storm.

But a sudden motion of gray against black caught his attention. Something near, almost directly below him, glided across the lawn of the exercise yard, and, as his eyes adjusted, he saw it was a person, moving stealthily but quickly. It was either someone in a black hooded windbreaker or a ghost, he thought, but, in spite of all the stories he'd heard about the hospital, he didn't believe in ghosts.

Now, who the hell? Who'd be outside on a night like this?

Then he thought of Ronald Miller. It was a nutty idea, but what if Miller had never left the hospital grounds? What if he'd hung around, as some of the nurses had feared, stealing food, hiding out, waiting for a moment to strike? Even if it
wasn't
Miller, it was suspicious as hell.

Ben considered the direction in which the dark shape was moving, and could think of only one entrance to the hospital there. Behind the building near the right side was a short ramp that led down to a basement door behind which lawn equipment was stored. Once in the relative shelter of those steps, a person could work as long as he wanted on the door lock. No one was getting out from the inside, but from the outside it wouldn't be impossible to jimmy the padlock and break in.

But who the hell would want to break
in
to the crazy house? Maybe, he thought wryly, somebody crazy? Like Ronald Miller?

Ben ran out of the break room and over to the ward where Dick O'Brien was on shift. “Come on—emergency!” he said to Dick, and explained as they ran through the halls and down the basement stairs.

“You really think it could be Miller?” Dick asked, panting as he ran.

“Don't know, but it's
somebody
.”

As they neared the room with the outside door, they stopped running. Ben led the way in, walking slowly and listening. The light from the corridor illuminated the interior of the room just enough so that he could see the shapes of the lawn equipment—mowers and a small lawn tractor. On hooks and racks against the wall was an assortment of hand tools.

They stopped walking and listened intently. At the door, Ben could hear what sounded like someone rubbing metal on metal. There was a sudden snap, as of a hasp breaking, and a rattling sound.