Psychomania: Killer Stories Read online

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  Psychomania!

  Ed. by Stephen Jones

  No copyright 2014 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  CONTENTS

  ROBERT BLOCH

  Introduction

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Prologue: Screams in the Dark

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  I Tell You It’s Love

  REGGIE OLIVER

  The Green Hour

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  The Secret Laws of the Universe

  BASIL COPPER

  The Recompensing of Albano Pizar

  DAVID A. SUTTON

  Night Soil Man

  BRIAN HODGE

  Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella

  SCOTT EDELMAN

  The Trembling Living Wire

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Case Conference #1

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  The Undertaker’s Sideline

  JOEL LANE

  The Long Shift

  BRIAN LUMLEY

  The Man Who Photographed Beardsley

  LISA MORTON

  Hollywood Hannah

  PAUL McAULEY

  I Spy

  MIKE CAREY

  Reflections on the Critical Process

  DAVID J. SCHOW

  The Finger

  LAWRENCE BLOCK

  Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes

  JAY RUSSELL

  Hush ... Hush, Sweet Shushie

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Case Conference #2

  R. CHETWYND-HAYES

  The Gatecrasher

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  The Tell-Tale Heart

  DENNIS ETCHISON

  Got to Kill Them All

  MARK MORRIS

  Essence

  MICHAEL KELLY

  The Beach

  ROBERT BLOCH

  Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Case Conference #3

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  See How They Run

  CONRAD WILLIAMS

  Manners

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  Bryant & May and the Seven Points

  HARLAN ELLISON®

  All the Birds Come Home to Roost

  RIO YOUERS

  Wide-Shining Light

  NEIL GAIMAN

  Feminine Endings

  PETER CROWTHER

  Eater

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Case Conference #4

  PETER CROWTHER

  Mister Mellor Comes to Wayside

  MICHAEL MARSHALL

  Failure

  KIM NEWMAN

  The Only Ending We Have

  RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON

  Kriss Kross Applesauce

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Epilogue: A Little Piece of Sanity

  Case Notes

  ~ * ~

  In memory of

  Robert Bloch

  (1917-94),

  a kind and gracious man

  who always held on to

  that heart of a small boy

  ~ * ~

  ROBERT BLOCH

  Introduction

  IN 1958 I wrote a novel called Psycho, wherein my heroine was suddenly and shockingly killed while taking a shower.

  So much for cleanliness.

  In 1960 Alfred Hitchcock filmed my novel. It follows the plot of the book faithfully, though in a few cases the movie dramatizes or lengthens events I merely report in the novel. One example, of course, is the shower sequence. I startled readers with a shockingly abrupt murder. Hitchcock jolted audiences by prolonging it. Each of us employed the tempo most effective for our medium.

  But neither the film nor the novel is a story about a girl being killed while taking a shower. Psycho is a story about the killer - a character named Norman Bates.

  And Norman Bates is a character. To mislead my mystery readers I created him as middle-aged. Hitchcock achieves deception visually by depicting him as a dozen years younger. Again, our intentions were identical, and appropriately executed for the medium in which we worked. But despite the disparity in age, and dialogue changes supplied by the scriptwriter adapting the book, the basic character of Norman Bates remains unchanged, right down to my last line, and the film’s.

  Hitchcock’s shower sequence is masterful indeed, but in the past thirty-odd years it has been constantly surpassed in gory, graphic detail, which Hitchcock was adroit enough to convey through suggestion.

  Some of the more explicitly violent films are admittedly frightening - and/or nauseating and revolting. Many of their on-screen atrocities are perpetrated by serial killers who do away with victims by the most fiendish methods which low-budget or hi-tech can devise. Moreover, many of these choppy-chappies prove to be immortal: after meeting gruesome (and usually, quite noisy) fates, they tend to come back to life at the drop of a sequel.

  But despite the miracles of modern make-up and special effects, it’s Norman Bates who has apparently emerged as a symbol of the serial killer - not because he’s super-ugly or supernatural, but because he’s seemingly just your average face in the crowd until an alternate personality takes over. He could be anybody. Or somebody. Somebody you know.

  I refer, of course, to the original Norman - not to the retreads offered in subsequent sequels on-screen, or even a prequel in which character becomes self-caricature.

  It’s the inevitable self-caricature element which makes many of today’s “mad slasher” films meaningless. When characters are unbelievable their deeds lack credibility. And the films (or books, for that matter) offer a series of momentary shocks but leave no lasting imprint on our long-term memory. Short jabs for people with short attention-spans.

  To be effective in this genre, the writer or director must aim not for the reader’s/viewer’s eyes, but for their imaginations. And for emotional rather than mere visceral impact, it is important that the story is more than a dramatized body-count. Whatever the medium, its audiences must be led to care about the victims as human beings - and to understand the “psycho” as a human being too.

  Which means that the films that endure must offer us something more memorable than a loud soundtrack, zoom-shots, jump-cuts and an endless chain of crudely contrived examples of death-by-special-effects.

  Hopefully, with these criteria in mind, it is possible to evaluate the contents of this book. Fiction and films have come a long way from the standard mystery/horror offerings where the most kindly and intelligent cast-member was finally fingered as the culprit and instantly turned into a raving maniac.

  Today, even Hannibal Lecter manages to keep a civil tongue in his head. It’s just his teeth we have to watch out for.

  The same, of course, could be said for Count Dracula, but in the out-and-out supernatural fantasy the monsters generally advertised their identities or concealed them only clumsily. The problem with the real-life psychopath or sociopath, as well as with many outright dangerous sufferers from psychoses, is that they’re not always easily recognizable. They can - and all too frequently do - live just down the street, or even next door. Some may knock on your front door or (worst-case scenario) even move in with you.

  Correction: that’s not the worst-case scenario after all. Because for some there comes a time when they catch their first glimpse of a psycho by looking into a mirror.

  And for many of us who don’t necessarily catch a full glimpse, there’s always the possibility on occasion of seeing a glimmer.

  Th
ere’s still a great deal which society doesn’t know about the problems of psychopathology and psychosis. Perhaps books and films may eventually impel us to learn a little more about our psychos. And ourselves.

  ROBERT BLOCH

  <>

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  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  Prologue: Screams in the Dark

  IT WAS AN old building, fashioned from weathered red brick and held together with mortar that was crumbling almost as quickly as the minds of many of those confined within. The corridors echoed with the nickering whispers of a thousand lonely souls, condemned to reside in the ever-lengthening shadows that would one day coalesce and consume the building in a darkness of never-ending despair. The anaemic green paint on the walls had cracked and split as if in empathy with the patients’ sanity, the greying plaster beneath saturated with over a century’s worth of screams from the lost and the forgotten.

  There were over a hundred rooms, not all with padded walls, not all with three sets of locks to keep their residents within and the staff safely without, not all with red discs on their foot-thick steel doors to indicate that on no account were they to be opened without at least three members of staff present.

  Not all.

  But most.

  ~ * ~

  “This is an asylum for the criminally insane.”

  Robert Stanhope’s eyes widened at these words, spoken by the much older, and far better dressed, man sitting on the other side of the huge, ornate writing desk. It was one thing to have driven here through the pouring rain, the huge rambling complex of Victorian buildings rising from the moors as he approached like some beast in waiting, the bars on the windows and the signs everywhere forbidding those without permission to come any further, but it was another entirely for the institution’s director to be quite so blatant about its purpose. Now, having been shown through a maze of corridors, each with a pair of locked doors at either end that had to be negotiated in keeping with the building’s security regulations, he was finally here.

  He eyed the man sitting opposite. Dr Lionel Parrish’s hands were clasped neatly on the cherry-red leather of the desktop, a pale blue silk handkerchief arranged meticulously in the breast-pocket of the jacket of the blue pinstripe suit he was wearing. The man’s demeanour radiated authority, and with only a single sentence he managed to make Stanhope feel partly guest but mainly intruder.

  The younger man presumed Parrish’s ensuing silence meant he was intended to respond.

  “Yes,” he said, drawing out the word in a way he hoped suggested he was politely disagreeing. After all, it was possible he was being tested. “At least, my understanding is that’s what they used to be called. Nowadays there are more reasonable, understanding, tolerant terms for places like this.”

  He looked around the vast, dark study, the shelves filled with medical tomes, the filing cabinets beside the door behind him crammed to bursting with case files. “And for the patients they treat,” he added with a smile.

  Dr Parrish leaned back in his swivel chair. The creak made Stanhope jump. “I have been the director of this institution for a long time,” Parrish said eventually, “and I have been a doctor for far longer than that. And one of the many things I have learned during my career is that it doesn’t matter how frequently one renames something, the word or phrase one uses will, gradually but inevitably, take on the same stigma with the general public as that which preceded it.”

  He folded his hands behind his head. The chair creaked even more ominously as he leaned back further, but his gaze never left the young man opposite. “Lunatic. Insane. Psychotic. Disturbed. Challenged. Different. Special. Crazy.” He seemed to be enjoying saying each word. “It doesn’t matter what you call them so long as you have no misconceptions about what you are actually dealing with.” The director narrowed his eyes. “The patients in this place are dangerous, Mr Stanhope. Exceedingly dangerous. You may have come here with very high ideals about kindness and understanding, about hope and optimism, but up there ...” he gestured above him “... you will find nothing and no one to respond to those ideals, except to use them against you.”

  Stanhope’s hands twitched. This wasn’t how he had anticipated the meeting starting off at all. “I’m aware that these patients can be violent,” he said. “After all, they wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “Not all of them are violent,” said Parrish. “Some of them are dangerous in other ways. A few are exceedingly manipulative, and will have the coldest heart bleeding for them while they gently slit your throat. Others will turn you against yourself without you even realizing it. There are some very, very clever people in here, young man. Engineers who have devoted their lives to devising new kinds of torture devices, teachers who have delighted in driving their own students to suicide. We have one man upstairs who, before he was caught, managed to manufacture an entire orchestra’s worth of instruments from the flesh and bones of his many victims.”

  “Are there any doctors who are patients?” Stanhope could not help but ask.

  “That last one is a doctor,” Parrish replied with a small smile. “We do have one or two others. No psychiatrists, though, which is interesting, don’t you think?”

  All Stanhope could do was nod. In the silence that followed, he fancied he could hear a very faint wailing coming from somewhere upstairs, before Parrish eventually nodded at the dictating machine Stanhope had placed on his desk.

  “Shall we get started on this interview of yours, then?” the director asked.

  Stanhope raised his eyebrows. “I was under the impression we had already begun,” he said.

  Parrish snorted, picked up the little tape player and squinted at the tiny see-through plastic window in its casing. The wheels of the cassette mechanism were indeed going round. “Good grief, no,” he said, pushing the stop button and setting the tape to rewind. Stanhope, taken aback by this, reached out for the device, but Parrish held it away from him.

  “Before we properly begin, Mr Stanhope, I would like you to answer a question for me,” said the director, his manner confrontational now that he had realized the recorder had been switched on without his permission.

  Stanhope suppressed a shudder and forced a nod. “Go on,” he said.

  “At what point in your own medical career did you decide that you couldn’t stand the patients any more?”

  Stanhope’s eyes widened as Parrish continued.

  “Did you really think I wouldn’t have done some research of my own before agreeing to let you in here? I am well aware that before you decided to pursue a career writing tabloid-friendly articles for, shall we say, the less-discerning members of the general public, you were a member of this profession yourself.” He reached into his right-hand desk drawer and produced a collection of clippings of some of Stanhope’s more hysterically headlined articles. “I know you call yourself a medical journalist because that sounds slightly more reputable than the type of tabloid degenerate I sometimes get asking me for an interview, but you are a journalist nevertheless. So ...” He steepled his fingers and pushed himself away from the desk a little. The chair creaked again and Stanhope was no more prepared for it this time than he had been the first. “Tell me.”

  “I got my medical degree,” said Stanhope, coughing to clear the frog that had suddenly taken up residence in his dry throat, “worked in a couple of junior training posts in various specialities, but then I decided that I preferred writing, so that’s what I did.”

  “That’s what you did.” Parrish repeated the words slowly and deliberately, savouring them with all the liquid menace of someone who knows that they have only been given a tiny fragment of the true story. For now.

  Stanhope nodded. “I’d had a few articles published in the British Medical Journal, Healthcare Matters, International Ageing—”

  “Comics,” said Parrish with a dismissive wave of his hand, “and ones that don’t pay well either, if at all.”

  “I
know, which is why I realized that if I wanted to make a living at it, I’d need to broaden my horizons.”

  “That’s how you would refer to it, is it?” said Parrish. “Broadening your horizons?”

  “It’s as good a way as any,” said Stanhope, starting to get riled by the man’s attitude. Usually it was he who was the one asking the questions, he who was the one probing and investigating, causing his interview subject the maximum of discomfort to elicit the juiciest information. But, he supposed, that was one of the reasons he had accepted the invitation. An interview with the director of Crowsmoor Institution regarding the alleged mistreatment of its inmates would do his career a world of good, and it wouldn’t hurt his bank account or his ego, either. But it obviously wasn’t going to be easy.