The Shrinking Man Read online

  Now this, disrupting the plan. Threatening to destroy it altogether.

  He didn't know at what precise second the question came to him. But suddenly it was terribly there and he was staring fixedly at his upheld, spread-fingered hands, his heart throbbing and swollen in an icy trap.

  How long could he go on shrinking?

  Chapter Three

  Finding water to drink was not a problem for him. The tank near the electric pump had a minute leak on its bottom surface. Beneath its dripping he placed a thimble he had carried once from a sewing box in a cardboard carton underneath the fuel-oil tank. The thimble was always overflowing with crystal well water.

  It was food that was the problem now. The quarter loaf of stale bread he'd been eating for the past five weeks was gone now. He'd finished the last crunchy scraps of it for his evening meal, washed it down with water. Bread and cold water had been his diet since he'd been imprisoned in the cellar.

  He walked slowly across the darkening floor, moving toward the white, cobwebbed tower that stood near the steps leading up to the closed cellar doors. The last of the daylight filtered through the grime streaked windows, the one that overlooked the sand hills of the spider's territory, the one over the fuel tank, and the one over the log pile. The pale illumination fell in wide gray bars across the concrete floor, forming a patchwork of light and darkness through which he walked. In a little while the cellar would be a cold pit of night.

  He had mused for many hours on the possibility of somehow managing to reach the string that dangled over the floor and pulling down on it so the dust-specked bulb would light, driving away the terror of blackness. But there was no way of reaching the string. It hung, for him, a hundred feet above his head, completely unattainable.

  Scott Carey walked around the dull white vastness of the refrigerator. It had been stored there since they'd first moved to the house, was it only months before? It seemed a century.

  It was the old-fashioned type of refrigerator, one whose coils were encased in a cylindrical enclosure on its top. There was an open box of crackers beside that cylinder. As far as he knew, it was the only food remaining in the entire cellar.

  He'd known the cracker box was on the refrigerator even before he'd become trapped down there. He'd left it there for himself one afternoon long before. No, not so long before, as time went. But, somehow, days seemed longer now. It was as if hours were designed for normal people. For anyone smaller, the hours were proportionately magnified.

  It was an illusion, of course, but, in his tininess, he was plagued by manifold illusions; the illusion that he was not shrinking, but the world enlarging; the illusion that objects were what they were thought to be only when the person who thought of them was of normal size.

  For him, he couldn't help it, the oil burner had virtually lost its role of heating apparatus. It was, almost actually, a giant tower in whose bowels there roared a magic flame. And the hose was, almost actually, a quiescent viper, sleeping in giant, scarlet coils. The three-quarter wall beside the burner was a cliff face, the sands a terrible desert across whose hills crawled not a spider the size of a man's thumbnail, but a venomous monster almost as tall as he was.

  Reality was relative. He was more forcefully aware of it with every passing day. In six days reality would be blotted out for him, not by death, but a hideously simple act of disappearance.

  For what reality could there be at zero inches?

  Yet he went on. Here he was scanning the sheer face of the refrigerator, wondering how he might get up there and reach the crackers.

  A sudden roar made him jump and spin around, his heart thudding.

  It was only the oil burner leaping into life again, the rumble of its mechanism making the floor beneath him tremble, sending numbing vibrations up his legs. He swallowed with effort. It was a jungle life he led, each sound a warning of potential death.

  It was getting too dark. The cellar was a frightening place when it was dark. He hurried across the chilled expanse of it, shivering under the tentlike robe he had made by poking a head hole in a piece of cloth, then ripping the edges into dangling strips and tying them into knots. The clothes he had been wearing when he had first tumbled into the cellar now lay in dirty heaps beside the water heater. He had worn them as long as he could, rolling up sleeves and cuffs, tightening the waistband, keeping them on until their sagging volume hampered movement. Then he had made the robe. He was always cold now except when he was under the water heater.

  He broke into a nervous, hopping walk, suddenly anxious to be off the darkening floor. His gaze flew for a moment to the cliff edge high above and he twitched again, thinking he saw the spider clambering over. He'd started to run before he saw that it was only a shadow. His run slowed again to the erratic, jerky walk. Adjust? he thought. Who could adjust to this?

  When he was back under the heater, he dragged a box top over his bed and lay down to rest underneath its shelter.

  He was still shivering. He could smell the dry, acrid odour of the cardboard close to his face, and it seemed as if he were being smothered. It was another illusion he suffered nightly.

  He struggled to attain sleep. He'd worry about the crackers tomorrow, when it was light. Or maybe he would not worry about them at all. Maybe he'd just lie there and let hunger and thirst finish what he could not finish, despite all dismays.

  Nonsense! he thought furiously. If he hadn't done it before this, it wasn't likely that he could do it now.

  64"

  Louise guided the blue Ford around the wide, graded arc that led from Queens Boulevard to the Cross Island Parkway. There was no sound but the valve knocking rumble of the motor. Idle conversation had faded off a quarter-mile after they'd emerged from the Midtown Tunnel. Scott had even jabbed in the shiny radio button and cut off the quiet music. Now he sat staring glumly through the windshield, vision glazed to all but thought.

  The tension had begun long before Louise came to the Centre to get him.

  He'd been building himself up to it ever since he'd told the doctors that he was leaving. For that matter, the blocks of anger had been piling up from the moment he'd entered the Centre. Dread of the financial burden had constructed the first one, a block whose core was the dragging weight of further insecurity. Each nerve-spent, fruitless day at the Centre had added more blocks.

  Then to have Louise not only angrily upset at his decision, but unable to hide her shock at seeing him four inches shorter than herself-it had been too much. He'd scarcely spoken from the moment she'd entered his room, and what he had said had been quiet, withdrawn, each sentence shackled by reserve.

  Now they were driving past the understated richness of the Jamaica estates. Scott hardly noticed them. He was thinking about the impossible future.

  "What?" he asked, starting a little.

  "I said, did you have breakfast?"

  "Oh. Yes. About eight, I guess."

  "Are you hungry? Shall I stop?"

  "No."

  He glanced at her, at the tense indecision apparent on her face.

  "Well, say it," he said. "Say it, for God's sake, and get it off your chest."

  He saw the smooth flesh on her throat contract in a swallow.

  "What is there to say?" she asked.

  "That's right." He nodded in short, jerky movements. "That's right, make it sound like my fault. I'm an idiot who doesn't want to know what's wrong with himself. I'm-"

  He was finished before he could get started. The undertow of nagging, unspoken dread in him swallowed all attempts at concentrated rage. Temper could come only in sporadic bursts to a man living with consistent horror.

  "You know how I feel, Scott," she said.

  "Sure I know how you feel," he said. "You don't have to pay the bills, though."

  "I told you I'd be more than willing to work."

  'There's no use arguing about it," he said. "Your working wouldn't help any. We'd still go under." He blew out a tired breath. "What's the difference anyway? They didn'
t find a thing."

  "Scott, that doctor said it might take months! You didn't even let them finish their tests. How can you-"

  "What do they think I'm going to do?" he burst out. "Go on letting them play with me? Oh, you haven't been there, you haven't seen. They're like kids with a new toy! A shrinking man, Godawmighty, a shrinking man! It makes their damn eyes light up. All they're interested in is my 'incredible catabolism.' "

  "What difference does it make?" she asked. "They're still some of the best doctors in the country."

  "And some of the most expensive," he countered. "If they're so damned fascinated, why didn't they offer to give me the tests free? I even asked one of them about it. You'd've thought I was insulting his mother's virtue."

  She didn't say anything. Her chest rose and fell with disturbed breath.

  "I'm tired of being tested," he went on, not wanting to sink into the comfortless isolation of silence again. "I'm tired of basal-metabolism tests and protein-bound tests; tired of drinking radioactive iodine and barium powdered water; tired of X rays and blood cultures and Geiger counters on my throat and having my temperature taken a million times a day. You haven't been through it; you don't know. It's like a, an inquisition. And what the hell's the point? They haven't found a thing. Not a thing! And they never will. And I can't see owing them thousands of dollars for nothing!"

  He fell back against the seat and closed his eyes. Fury was unsatisfying when it was levelled against an undeserving subject. But it would not disappear for all that. It burned like a flame inside him.

  "They weren't finished, Scott."

  "The bills don't matter to you," he said.

  "You matter to me," she answered.

  "And who's the 'security' bug in this marriage, anyway?" he asked.

  "That's not fair."

  "Isn't it? What brought us here from California in the first place? Me? Because I decided I just had to go into business with Marty? I was happy out there. I didn't-" He drew in a shaking breath and let it empty from his lungs. "Forget it," he said. "I'm sorry, I apologize. But I'm not going back."

  "You're angry and hurt, Scott. That's why you won't go back."

  "I won't go back because it's pointless!" he shouted.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then she said, "Scott, do you really believe I'd hold my own security above your health?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Do you?"

  "Why talk about it?" he said.

  The next morning, Saturday, he received the sheaf of application papers from the life insurance company and tore them into pieces and threw the pieces into the wastebasket. Then he went for a long, miserable walk. And while he was out he thought about God creating heaven and earth in seven days.

  He was shrinking a seventh of an inch a day.

  * * *

  It was quiet in the cellar. The oil burner had just shut itself off, the clanking wheeze of the water pump had been silenced for an hour. He lay under the cardboard box top listening to the silence, exhausted but unable to rest. An animal life without an animal mind did not induce the heavy, effortless sleep of an animal.

  The spider came about eleven o'clock.

  He didn't know it was eleven, but there was still the heavy thudding of footsteps overhead, and he knew Lou was usually in bed by midnight.

  He listened to the sluggish rasping of the spider across the box top, down one side, up another, searching with terrible patience for an opening.

  Black widow. Men called it that because the female destroyed and ate the male, if she got the chance, after one mating act.

  Black widow. Shiny black, with the constricted rectangle of scarlet on its egg-shaped abdomen; what was called its "hourglass." A creature with a highly developed nervous system, possessing memory. A creature whose poison was twelve times as deadly as a rattlesnake's.

  The black widow clambered over the box top under which he was hiding and the spider was almost as big as he. In a few days it would be as big; then, in another few days, bigger. The thought made him sick. How could he escape it then?

  I have to get out of here! he thought desperately.

  His eyes fell shut, his muscles clamping slowly in admission of his helplessness. He'd been trying to get out of the cellar for five weeks now. What chance had he now, when he was one sixth the size he'd been when he had first been trapped there?

  The scratching came again, this time under the cardboard.

  There was a slight tear in one side of the box top; enough to admit one of the spider's seven legs.

  He lay there shuddering, listening to the spiny leg scratching at the cement like a razor on sandpaper. It never came closer than five inches from the bed, but it gave him nightmares. He clamped his eyes shut.

  "Get out of here!" he screamed. "Get out of here, get out of here!"

  His voice rang shrilly underneath the cardboard enclosure. It made his eardrums hurt. He lay there trembling violently while the spider scratched and jumped and clambered insanely around the box top, trying to get in.

  Twisting around, he buried his face in the rough wrinkles of the handkerchief covering the sponge. If I could only kill it! his mind screamed in anguish. At least his last days would be peaceful then.

  About an hour later, the scratching stopped and the spider went away. Once more he became conscious of his sweat-dewed flesh, the coldness and the twitching of his fingers. He lay drawing in convulsive breaths through his parted lips, weak from the rigid struggle against horror.

  Kill him? The thought turned his blood to ice.

  A little while later he sank into a troubled, mumbling sleep, and his night was filled with the torment of awful dreams.

  Chapter Four

  His eyes fluttered open.

  Instinct alone told him that the night was over. Beneath the box it was still dark. With an indrawn groan in his chest, he pushed up from the sponge bed and stood gingerly until he shouldered the cardboard surface. Then he edged to one corner and, pushing up hard, slid the box top away from his bed.

  Out in the other world, it was raining. Gray light sifted through the erratic dripping across the panes, converting the shadows into slanting wavers and the patches of light into quiverings of pallid gelatine.

  The first thing he did was climb down the cement block and walk over to the wooden ruler. It was the first thing he did every morning. The ruler stood against the wheels of the huge yellow lawnmower, where he'd put it.

  He pressed himself against its calibrated surface and laid his right hand on top of his head. Then, leaving the hand there, he stepped back and looked.

  Rulers were not divided into sevenths; he had added the markings himself. The heel of his hand obscured the line that told him he was five sevenths of an inch tall.

  The hand fell, slapping at his side. Why, what did you expect? his mind inquired. He made no reply. He just wondered why he tortured himself like this every day, persisting in this clinical masochism. Surely he didn't think that it was going to stop now; that the injections would begin working at this last point. Why, then? Was it part of his previous resolution to follow the descent to its very end? If so, it was pointless now. No one else would know of it.

  He walked slowly across the cold cement. Except for the faint tapping, swishing sound of rain on the windows, it was quiet in the cellar. Somewhere far off there was a hollow drumming sound; probably the rain on the cellar doors. He walked on, his gaze moving automatically to the cliff edge, searching for the spider. It was not there.

  He trudged under the jutting feet of the clothes tree and to the twelve-inch step to the floor of the vast, dark cave in which the tank and water pump were. Twelve inches, he thought, lowering himself slowly down the string ladder he'd made and fastened to the brick that stood at the top of the step. Twelve inches, and yet to him it was the equivalent of 150 feet to a normally sized man.

  He let himself down the ladder carefully, his knuckles banging and scraping against the rough concrete. He should have
thought of a way to keep the ladder from pressing directly against the wall. Well, it was too late for that now; he was too small. As it was, he could, even with painful stretching, barely reach the sagging rung below, the one below that… the one below that.

  Grimacing, he splashed icy water into his face. He could just about reach the top of the thimble. In two days he would be unable to reach the top of it, probably unable, even, to get down the string ladder. What would he do then?

  Trying not to think of ever-mounting problems, he drank palmfuls of the cold well water; drank until his teeth ached. Then he dried his face and hands on the robe and turned back to the ladder.

  He had to stop and rest halfway up the ladder. He hung there, arms hooked over the rung, which to him was the thickness of rope.

  What if the spider were to appear at the top of the ladder now? What if it were to come clambering down the ladder at him?

  He shuddered. Stop it, he begged his mind. It was bad enough when he actually had to protect himself from the spider without filling the rest of the time with cruel imaginings.

  He swallowed again, fearfully. It was true. His throat hurt.

  "Oh, God," he muttered. It was all he needed.

  He climbed up the rest of the way in grim silence, then started on the quarter-mile journey to the refrigerator. Around the hulking coils of the hose, by the tree-thick rake handle, the house-high lawn-mower wheels, the wicker table that was half as high as the refrigerator, which was, in turn, as high as a ten-story building. Already hunger was beginning to send out lines of tension in his stomach.