The Shrinking Man (3 page)

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 leveled 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 “hour-glass.” 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 week
snow. 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.

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 lawnmower 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.

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-colored 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 vinelike 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.