The Shrinking Man Page 3

  He stood, head pulled back, looking up at the refrigerator. If there had been clouds floating by its cylinder top, its mountain-peak remoteness could not have been more graphically apparent to him.

  His gaze dropped. He started to sigh, but the sigh was cut off by a twitching grunt. The oil burner again, shaking the floor. He could never get used to it. It had no regular pattern of roaring ignition. What was worse, it seemed to be growing louder every day.

  For what seemed a long time he stood indecisively, staring at the white piano legs of the refrigerator. Then he stirred himself loose from bleak apathy and drew in a quick breath. There was no point in standing there. Either he got to those crackers or he starved.

  He circled the end of the wicker table, planning.

  Like a mountain peak, the top of the refrigerator was attainable by numerous routes, none of them easy. He might try to scale the ladder, which, like the lawn mower, lay against the fuel-oil tank. Reaching the top of the tank (an Everest of achievement in itself), he could move to the huge cardboard boxes piled beside it, then across the wide leather face of Louise's suitcase, then up the hanging rope to the refrigerator top. Or he could try climbing the red cross-legged table, then jump across to the cartons, move across the suitcase again, and up the rope. Or he could try the wicker table which was right next to the refrigerator, achieve its summit, then climb the long perilous length of the hanging rope.

  He turned away from the refrigerator and looked across the cellar at the cliff wall, the croquet set, the stacked lawn chairs, the gaudily striped beach umbrella, the olive coloured folding canvas stools. He stared at all of them with hopeless eyes.

  Was there no other way? Was there nothing to eat but those crackers?

  His gaze moved slowly along the cliff edge. There was the one dry slice of bread remaining up there; but he knew he couldn't go after it. Dread of the spider was too strong in him. Even hunger couldn't drive him up that cliff again.

  He thought suddenly, Were spiders edible? It made his stomach rumble. He forced the thought out of his mind and turned again to face the immediate problem.

  He couldn't manage the climb unaided, and that was the first hurdle.

  He walked across the floor, feeling the chill of it through his almost worn sandals. Under the shadows of the fuel tank, he climbed between the ragged edges of the split carton side. What if the spider is in there waiting? he thought. He stopped, heartbeat jolting, one leg inside the box, the other leg out. He drew in a deep, courage-stiffening breath. It's only a spider, he told himself. It's not a master tactician.

  Climbing the rest of the way into the musty depth of the carton, he wished he could really believe that the spider was not intelligent, but driven only by instinct.

  Reaching for thread, his hand touched icy metal and jerked back. He reached again. It was only a pin. His lips twitched. Only a pin? It was the size of a knight's lance.

  He found the thread and laboriously unrolled about eight inches of it. It took an entire minute of pulling, jerking, and teeth gnawing to separate it from its barrel-sized spool.

  He dragged the thread out of the carton and back to the wicker table. Then he hiked over to the pile of logs and tore from one of them a piece the size of his arm from elbow to fingertips. This he carried back to the table and fastened to the thread.

  He was ready.

  The first throw was an easy one. Twisting vine like around the main leg of the table were two narrower strips about the thickness of his body. At a point three inches below the first shelf of the table these two strips flared out from the leg, angling up to the shelf, then turning again and, three inches above the shelf, twining about the main leg again.

  He flung the wood up at the space where one of the strips began jutting out from the leg. On his third attempt the wood sailed through the opening and he pulled it back carefully so that it was wedged between leg and strip. He then climbed up, feet braced on the leg as he ascended, body swung out at the end of the tautened thread.

  Reaching the first point, he hauled up the thread, worked the wooden bar loose, and prepared for the next stage of his climb.

  Another four throws and the wooden bar caught between two strips of latticework shelf. He pulled himself up.

  Stretched out limply on the shelf, he lay there panting.

  Then, after a few minutes, he sat up and looked down at what to him was a fifty-foot drop. Already he was tired, and the climb had barely started.

  Far across the cellar the pump began its sibilant chugging again, and he listened to it while he looked up at the wide canopy of the tabletop a hundred feet above.

  "Come on," he muttered hoarsely to himself then. "Come on, come on, come on, come on."

  He got to his feet. Taking a deep breath, he flung the stick up at the next joining place of leg and twining strip.

  He had to leap aside as the throw missed and the wood fell toward him heavily. His right leg slipped into a gap in the latticework and he had to clutch at the crosspieces to keep from plunging to the floor below.

  He hung there for a long moment, one leg dangling in space. Then, groaning, he pulled and pushed himself to a standing position, wincing at the pain in the back muscles of his right leg. He must have sprained it, he thought. He clenched his teeth and hissed out a long breath. Sore throat, sprained leg, hunger, weariness. What next?

  It took twelve muscle jerking throws of the wooden bar to get it into the proper opening above. Pulling back until the thread grew taut in his grip, he dragged himself up the thirty-five foot space, teeth gritted, breath steaming out between them. He ignored each burning ache of muscle while he climbed; but when he reached the crotch, he wedged himself between the table leg and strip and half lay, half clung there, gasping for air, muscles throbbing visibly. I'll have to rest, he told himself. Can't go on. The cellar swam before his eyes.

  He had gone to visit his mother the week he was five-feet-three. The last time he'd seen her, he'd been six feet tall.

  Dread crawled in him, colder than the winter wind, as he walked up the Brooklyn street toward the two-family brown-stone where his mother lived. Two boys were playing ball in the street. One of them missed the other's throw. The ball bounced toward Scott, and he reached down to pick it up.

  The boy shouted, "Throw it here, kid!"

  Something like an electric shock jolted through his system. He flung the ball violently.

  The boy shouted, "Good throw, kid!"

  He walked on, ashen-faced.

  And the terrible hour with his mother. He remembered that.

  The way she kept avoiding the obvious, talking about Marty and Therese and their son, Billy; about Louise and Beth, about the quietly enjoyable life she was able to live on Marty's monthly checks.

  She had set the table in her impeccable way, each dish and cup in its proper place, each cookie and cake arranged symmetrically. He sat down with her, feeling hollowly sick, the coffee scorching his throat, the cookies tasteless in his mouth.

  Then, finally, when it was too late, she had spoken of it. This thing, she said, he was being treated for it?

  He knew exactly what it was she wanted to hear and he mentioned the Centre and the tests. Relief pressed out the extra worry lines in the rose petal skin of her face. Good, she said, good. The doctors would cure him. The doctors knew everything these days; everything.

  And that was all.

  As he went home, he felt dazedly ill, because of all the reactions she might have shown to his affliction, the one she had shown was the last one in the world he could have imagined.

  Then, when he got home, Louise cornered him in the kitchen, insisting that he go back to the Centre to finish the tests. She'd work, they'd put Beth in a nursery. It would work out fine. Her voice was firm in the beginning, obdurate; then it broke and all the withheld terror and unhappiness flooded from her.

  He stood by her side, arm around her back, wanting to comfort her but able only to look up at her face and struggle futilely against th
e depleted feeling he had at being so much shorter than she. All right, he'd told her, all right, I'll go back. I will. Don't cry.

  And the next morning the letter arrived from the Centre, telling him that "because of the unusual nature of your disorder, the investigation of which might prove of inestimable value to medical knowledge," the doctors were willing to continue the tests free of charge.

  And the return to the Centre; he remembered that. And the discovery.

  Scott blinked his eyes into focus.

  Sighing, he pushed himself to a standing position, one supporting hand holding onto the table leg.

  From that point on, the two twining strips left the leg entirely and flared up at opposing angles, paralleled by bolstering spars until they reached the bottom side of the tabletop. Along each upward sweep, three vertical rods were spaced like giant banisters. He would not need the thread any more.

  He started up the seventy-degree incline, first lurching at the vertical rod and, catching hold of it, pulled himself up to it, sandals slipping and squeaking along the spar. Then he lunged up at the next spar and pulled himself to it. By concentrating on the strenuous effort he was able to blank away all thoughts and sink into a mechanical apathy for many minutes, only the gnawing of hunger tending to remind him of his plight.

  At last, puffing, breath scratching hotly at his throat, he reached the end of the incline and sat there wedged between the spar and the last vertical rod, staring at the wide overhang of the tabletop.

  His face tightened.

  "No." The mutter was crusty, dry sound as his pain-smitten eyes looked around. There was a three-foot jump to the bottom edge of the tabletop. But there was no handhold there.

  "No!"

  Had he come all this way for nothing? He couldn't believe it, wouldn't let himself believe it. His eyes fell shut. I'll push myself off, he thought. I'll let myself fall to the floor. This is too much.

  He opened his eyes again, the small bones under his cheeks moving as he ground his teeth together. He wasn't going to push himself off anything. If he fell, it would be in jumping for the edge of the tabletop. He wasn't going down on his own volition under any circumstances.

  He clambered along the top of the horizontal spar just below the tabletop, searching. There had to be a way. There had to be.

  Turning the corner of the spar, he saw it.

  Running along the under edge of the tabletop was a strip of wood about double the thickness of his arm. It was fastened to the tabletop with nails a trifle shorter than he was.

  Two of these nails had pulled out, and at that point the strip sagged about a quarter of an inch below the tabletop edge. A quarter of an inch, almost three feet to him. If he could jump to that gap he could catch hold of the strip and have a chance to pull himself up to the top of the table.

  He perched there, breathing deeply, staring at the sagging strip and at the space he'd have to jump. It was at least four feet to him. Four feet of empty space.

  He licked his dry lips. Outside, the rain was falling harder; he heard its heavy splattering at the windowpanes. Swirls of greying light swam on his face. He looked across the quarter-mile that separated him from the window over the log pile. The way the rain water ran twistingly over the glass panes made it appear as if great, hollow eyes were watching him.

  He turned away from that. There was no use in standing here. He had to eat. Going back down was out of the question. He had to go on.

  He braced himself for the leap. It may be now, he thought, strangely unalarmed. This may be the end of my long, fantastic journey.

  His lips pressed together. "So be it," he whispered then, and sprang out into space.

  His arms banged so hard on the wooden bar that they were almost numbed beyond the ability to hold. I'm falling! his mind screamed. Then his arms wrapped themselves around the wood and he hung there gasping, legs swinging back and forth over the tremendous void.

  He dangled there for a long moment, catching his breath, letting feeling return to his arms. Then, carefully, with agonizing slowness, he turned himself around on the bar so that he faced the spar arrangement. That done, he dragged himself up to a sitting position on the bar, holding on overhead for support. He sat there, limbs palsied with exhaustion.

  The last step to the tabletop was the hardest.

  He'd have to stand up on the smooth, circular top of the bar and, lurching up, throw his arms over the end of the tabletop. As far as he knew, there would be nothing there to hang onto. It would be entirely a matter of pressing his arms and hands so tightly to the surface that friction would hold him there.

  Then he'd have to climb over the edge.

  For a moment the entire grotesque spectacle of it swept over him forcibly, the insanity of a world where he could be killed trying to climb to the top of a table that any normal man could lift and carry with one hand.

  He let it go. Forget it, he ordered himself.

  He drew in long breaths until the shaking of his arm and leg muscles slackened. Then slowly he eased himself up to a crouch on the smooth wood, balancing himself by holding onto the bottom edge of the tabletop.

  The bottoms of his sandals were too smooth. He couldn't grip the wood well enough. As cold as it was, he'd have to take them off. Gingerly he shook them off one at a time and, after a moment, heard the faint slap as they struck the floor below.

  He wavered for a moment, steadied himself, then drew in a long, chest-filling breath. He paused.

  Now.

  He lunged up into empty air and slapped his arms across the end of the tabletop. A broad vista of huge, piled-up objects met his eyes. Then he began slipping, and he clutched at the wood, digging his nails into it. He kept sliding toward the edge, his body moving into space, dragging him.

  "No," he whimpered in a strangled voice.

  He managed to lurch forward again, fingertips scraping at the wood surface, arms pressing down tightly, desperately.

  He saw the curving metal rod.

  He was hanging a quarter of an inch from his fingers. He had to reach it or he'd fall. Leaving one hand down, splinters gouging under its nails, he raised the other hand toward the rod.

  Look out!

  His raised hand slapped down again and clawed frantically at the wood. He began slipping back again.

  With a last, frenzied lunge, he grabbed for the curving rod and his hands clamped over its icy thickness.

  He dragged himself, kicking and struggling, over the edge of the tabletop. Then his hands dropped from the metal- which was the hanging handle of a paint can and he collapsed heavily on his chest and stomach.

  He lay there for a long time, unable to move, shaking with the remains of dread and exertion, sucking in lungfuls of the cold air. I made it, he thought. It was all he could think. I made it, I made it!

  As exhausted as he was, it gave him a warming pride to think it.

  Chapter Five

  After a while he got up shakily and looked around.

  The tabletop's expanse was littered with massive paint cans, bottles and jars. Scott walked along their mammoth shapes, stepping over the jagged-toothed edge of a saw blade and racing across its icy surface to the tabletop again.

  Orange paint. He strode past the luridly streaked can, the top of his head barely as high as the bottom edge of the can's label. He remembered painting the lawn chairs during one of the many hours he'd spent in the cellar before his last, irrevocable snow-caked plunge into it.

  Head back, he gazed up at an orange-spotted brush handle sticking out of an elephantine jar. One day, not so long ago he'd held that handle in his fingers. Now it was ten times as long as he was; a huge, knife pointed length of glossy yellow wood.

  There was a loud clicking noise and then the ocean like roar of the oil burner filled the air again. His heartbeat raced, then slowed once more. No, he'd never get used to its thundering suddenness. Well, there'd be only four more days of it, anyway, he thought.

  His feet were getting cold; there was no time t
o waste. Between the barren hulks of paint cans he walked until he'd reached the body-thick rope that hung down in twisted loops from the top of the refrigerator.

  A stroke of fortune. He found a crumpled pink rag lying next to a towering brown bottle of turpentine. Impulsively he drew part of it around himself, tucked it under his feet, then sank back into the rest of its wrinkled softness. The cloth reeked of paint and turpentine, but that didn't matter. The held-in warmth of his body began surrounding him comfortingly.

  Reclining there, he squinted up at the distant refrigerator top. There was still the equivalent of a seventy-five foot climb to make, and without footholds except for those he could manage to find on the rope itself. He would, virtually, have to pull himself all the way up.

  His eyes closed and he lay there for a while, breathing slowly, his body as relaxed as possible. If the hunger pangs had not been so severe, he might have gone to sleep. But hunger was a wavelike pressure at his stomach walls, causing it to rumble emptily. He wondered if it could possibly be as empty as it felt.

  When he discovered himself beginning to dwell on thoughts of food, of gravy-dripping roasts and broiled steaks inundated with brown-edged mushrooms and onions, he knew it was time to get up. With a last wiggle of his warmed toes, he threw off the smooth covering and stood.

  That was when he recognized the cloth.

  It was part of Louise's slip, an old one that she'd torn up and thrown into the rag box. He picked up a corner of it and fingered its softness, a strange, yearning pain in his chest and stomach that was not hunger.

  "Lou." He whispered it, staring at the cloth that had once rested against her warm, fragrant flesh.

  Angrily he flung away the cloth edge, his face a hardened mask. He kicked at it.

  Shaken, he turned from the cloth, walked stiffly to the edge of the table, and grabbed hold of the rope. It was too thick to get his hands around; he'd have to use his arms. Luckily, it was hanging in such a way that he could almost crawl up the first section of it.