41.

~ Julian had to be careful. It was easy to see why so many women trusted Norman Bates. Why they felt at ease with the man who would later kill them. Norman seemed nonthreatening; charming even. Even tempered and very kind. He wanted to hear as well as listen and was excessive with flattery and was mannered; but only when he wanted to be.

He was exactly the type to draw victims in and make them think they were safe. That they had found a friend, a lover and someone to confide in.

"I want to thank you." Norman said as he and Doctor Romero were alone in the run down art room. The two of them drawing with charcoal; Norman's work good and Julian's bad.

"For what?" Julian asked adjusting his glasses and wishing he was better at drawing. He was trying to sketch a river and not be reminded of his days on a crew team in college. Those were not good memories. He'd never been good at arts and crafts, just like he'd been miserable on the rowing team at Columbia. It had been those experiences he wished he could be like everyone else. He wished he could have been happy and not worry so much. Wished he could draw without worrying about it being perfect. Worrying about the end result and not being the best.

That was why Julian couldn't enjoy things that made people with simpler minds happy. He couldn't let go and enjoy the moment. He had to be better and hated others for not pulling their weight or for doing something as simple as drawing with such ease.

"For talking to me about Rebecca." Norman said sketching a realistic bird in flight with intricate feathers. "It felt good to talk abut her to someone who… wouldn't judge me. Who wouldn't look at me like I was a monster. I mean, I know I'm a monster, I know it was wrong, but at the time, it was all I could do." Norman explained.

Julian peeked at Norman's bird drawing. The level of mastery involved. He must have spent the last twenty-five years perfecting his birds in paper instead of taxidermy.

As for sleeping well, that was something Doctor Romero hadn't done last night. He'd finally gotten ahold of a completed autopsy report on Rebecca Hamilton and it was disturbing. It was rare that killers like Norman had disturbed him. He'd interviewed child killers after all. Sexual predators and sadists who tortured their victims for years. The photographs of Rebeca's body, stripped and laid out on the gurney, a complete finding of what had been done to her in an effort to keep her with Norman seemed to take the cake.

He saw that body when he closed his eyes. Saw her rotting face. A face that Norman would have seen whenever he visited her like it was a normal thing to do.

"I don't think you're a monster." Julian lied.

"That's not what Doctor West says. He says I'm never getting out." Norman said carefully.

Julian refused to look at Norman Bates. He refused to comfort him or say a word. He wouldn't fall into this trap either. It was another clever trap set in an attempt to make him feel sorry for him. Norman bates was good at making people feel sorry for him. It's how he lured his victims in.

"Why don't we talk about the other girls?" Julian asked instead. "About Penny? About Madeline?"

Norman looked angry.

"I hardly remember what they looked like anymore." he said bitterly. "I hardly remember their faces. Its' like a blankness. Maybe if I had their pictures."

"I can't do that." Julian said.
"Then I guess you don't want me to remember them." Norman said. That means coming out in him. That cruelty that he had learned in order to survive here.

"You've sketched them." Julian pointed out. "Doctor West reported you used to sketch them all the time."
"But I don't know if it's really them or not." Norman said. "Time, its' like it erodes them away."

"Tell me what you do remember. Lets start with Penny. You knew her only briefly." Julian said.

"She was a teenager." Norman said. "Madeline had left me, I wanted the company."

Julian itched to say that Madeline hadn't left him but kept silent.

"How did you meet her?" Julian asked.

"At the motel." Norman said. "She was a little rough around the edges but I thought she could be taught. I knew she wasn't happy with her family. That was obvious. She wanted to talk to me; and it was easy to convince her to trust me. It was always easy to have those lost girls come to me. They search so desperately for someone to trust, you know?"

Julian felt his blood run cold. There he was. There was the killer he'd been searching for. Maybe he had felt grief and sorrow for Rebecca but it was clear he'd hunted Penny like any predator would a vulnerable animal.

"Why did you want her?" Julian asked.

"I was lonely. Like I said." Norman said honestly. "I thought, if she cleaned up well, and was trained right, she could replace Madeline. She wasn't as pretty as Madeline but she was young and young people can change."

"What did you want to train her to do?" Julian asked. His hand shook as he traced the line of his dirty looking river.

"Oh, simple things women like to do." Norman said with a faint smile. "Keep the house. Dress nicely for me. That's very important. Cook good dinners. Be submissive in the bedroom. I hate these, disgusting women who act so… vulgar. Prancing around without clothes on. Spreading their legs without being told to and acting like they enjoy it. It's not proper. It's filthy. I really thought Penny would work out. But once I got her back to the house, she showed me her true colors. Showed me she wasn't a nice girl."

"Then what happened?" Julian asked.

"Mother came downstairs. Took care of her. I don't know what she did with her, but I was told her body was found in the bay. It's just as well. Penny was a runaway and she wasn't a virgin. She couldn't have stayed with me." Norman explained heartlessly.

"You mentioned Mother doing it. Did you ever draw Mother, Norman?" Julian asked.

Norman looked annoyed.

"I don't like to think about her." he said.

"Why?"

"She's a sick old woman."
"How can a sick old woman kill a young healthy girl like Penny?" Julian asked.

Norman looked angry and then his face turned calm.

"Because the other doctors say I did it. That Mother isn't real but I know she's real. She came back to me and she's still here. She's just… hiding." he said.

"When did she come back to you? Where did she go?" Julian asked. He felt a little afraid now and he'd never been afraid of one of his killers before. Not even of Wes D. Anderson who butchered his entire family and tried to choke a foolish Doctor Romero who came to interview him.

"She'd been tricked by some man." Norman said bitterly. "She'd run off with him, but she came back. She was just… a lot meaner than before. She didn't like Rebecca. It was hard, keeping both women in the house. So I had Mother stay in her room."

"It must have been hard keeping both women in the house." Julian agreed.

His mind whirled to the possibility that Norman has kept another woman prisoner in that house and it wasn't just in his mind.

"Did Mother ever try to leave again?" Julian asked.

"No." Norman said easily. "No. Mother stayed in her room. I told you she was a sick old woman."

Julian nodded. None of the missing persons reports were of an elderly old woman. Still, the idea Norman might have held a woman prisoner, might have held Rebecca prisoner in the house was terrifying.

~ Norman, as a thank you to Julian for letting him have new paper back books, had let him borrow his art portfolio. A large thing he'd only been allowed to keep in the art room and had been collecting for the past twenty-five years. It was thick with hundreds of sketches and detailed drawings that must have taken months to do. All in charcoal and devoid of color.

The skill level of the artist was masterful. He'd mostly drawn animals and landscapes. Things he saw in her dreary, boring world. The detail of feathers and movement was beautiful and showed compassion for the living creatures.

Julian glanced at the exquisite pictures and then turned to the beginning of Norman's work to see the progression. It was always good to see how a person started, not where he ended up. Where a person started from was far more telling than where they ended up.

He'd drawn several juvenile sketches of the old house at first. Always from the same angle of looking up at it. Large, cumbersome concrete steps that Julian noticed were still there in the overgrown weeds of the empty lot. Steps that now looked strange leading up to nowhere. Now he could picture the elegant, yet creepy house that had once been there. That lonely old house on a hill without trees or anything to keep it company.

He's sketched in stunning detail with perfect lines and shadow, the house and the motel. Even his mother's old and beloved Mercedes in the drive. A car Norma Romero still owned and refused to get rid of.

He drew the motel in the rain, and at night. The large pole lights casting down on the concrete steps and a single light on in the upstairs window of the house. A solitary figure in the window. Just one person in that house alone. The blaring neon sign out front advertising 'Bates Motel' seeming to radiate off the page at him in black and white. Norman had even drawn the details of his office with the taxidermy animals. He drew the inside of the house with the shadows that hugged the walls like spiderwebs. Julian could see Norman was found of drawing shadows. That he was attracted to the darkness. He could see the only bright spot of the interior of the house was the large stain glass window in the hallway. It seemed lit up like fire despite the fact everything was in dark charcoal. He drew the print of the faded wallpaper and obsolete pictures on the wall. He drew the kitchen with its' ancient refrigerator and tacky table and chairs. Even going to the trouble of recreating the linoleum floor pattern.

Such detail from memory because Norman wanted so desperately to jump back into that place. Go and live in that picture, in that house again. To be in that world where he was safe and protected. So, not knowing what else to do, he drew them. Drew his safe place and it comforted him.

He drew them all empty because it was all he knew. He only knew loneliness.

Julian saw he finally sketched peoples faces. Blank faces at first to practice with the hair and was slightly ill to recognize his mother's hair style. The short slight wavy bob she wore and abandoned when he was born as too much upkeep. She'd worn her hair longer even since but he'd recognize her shorter hairstyle in Norman's sketches.

Norman was trying to recreate his mother's hairstyle. Drawings of eyes were painstakingly done and rejected until he had a pair that were just right. He'd worked on a nose, a nose that was a little wide in the middle, a little slimmer on the tip. A very unusual nose because Julian knew it was the same as his own.

Norman had worked to recreate his real mother the same way Doctor Frankenstein had assembled his monster. Piece by piece. Her face slowly coming together until it was a passable representation of Norma Bates, later Norma Romero. He'd made her gaze look a little too sexual; too suggestive and alluring. It was as if she were model for perfume or some other item men would find enticing.

Julian felt uncomfortable to see his youthful mother looking back at him in such a way when he flipped back to the completed page, but it was defiantly her.

Norman had done the same for all the important women in his life. Madeline seeming to have been given the most devotion. Norman drawing her in very matronly dresses that went past her knees. Then, there were the obscene pictures folded inside the ordinary sketches of eyes. The casual observer wouldn't have noticed them.

Beautifully detailed sketches of Madeline lying down obediently on a bed. Her dress up, panties pulled down, breasts exposed and fear in her eyes. Her face still shockingly beautiful though. The pose of her body suggesting it wasn't an assault but that she was enjoying what was happening.

Had Norman remembered his improvised porno stash was in here? Had he wanted Julian to find it?

Julian put the picture of Madeline aside. It was disturbing, yes but no worse than the other drawings men like this did in prisons.

The sketches of Rebecca was different. Her face was all wrong from the live woman in the picture. During her time in the freezer, Rebecca Hamilton's face had started to collapse and distort and Norman transferred that onto drawings of his friend in various evening dresses. He liked to draw Rebecca as a Miss America winner with a crown on her head. Her face strange and almost melting. Her eyes rotted away and now two black holes were staring out in the macabre pageant.

After Rebecca, came a large bedroom that could only be the master bedroom. There was big bed, an antique vanity that he recognized as his mother's. She'd had it since before he'd been born and he was never allowed to touch anything on it. Especially after she'd found out he'd been relocating her jewelry when he was ten.

It had to have been his mother's old bedroom in the old house. Complete with her bedroom slippers on the floor.

Except that wasn't Norma Romero sitting in the rocking chair by the tall window. That was some kind of creature with glowing eyes and a hunched back. That was a monster who grinned fiendishly at him with crooked teeth and dark matted hair. Who's entire body looked like it was apart of a swamp and was used to hiding in the darkness; in the shadows.

That was the 'Mother' Norman blamed the killings on. That was the creature who haunted him. Who cackled at detectives and doctors when Norman had been arrested. Who'd spoken with Julian on the phone when he was ten and said Norman 'was sleeping'.

Norman Bates didn't mean their real mother at all. He meant this hideous creature that still lurked in his mind. Medicated and dormant all this time but still dangerous.

This was the only picture of 'Mother' Julian could find. The last time Norman would draw the house he once lived in. The rest were birds and squirrels and flowers without sexual parts.

He didn't draw faces anymore. Just people's hands or a nice table with fruit. He liked to draw dogs and goats. Harmless things; happy animals who existed in great detail.

Julian noted that Norman never drew the house again, although when he did draw his animals in landscapes, they were always alone. Never a mother and doe as he would expect. There was a loneliness to everything he did. Rebecca was always drawn as a solitary beauty queen, Norma Bates was always a single subject, Madeline was always featured at the only star of the drawing. Indeed the 'Mother' creature was alone in her squalid condition. No one was ever given company and Norman never drew himself.