The Shrinking Man (6 page)

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Authors: Richard Matheson

BOOK: The Shrinking Man
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“Will you stop interrupting me?”

“You said disposition! What are we—bric-a-brac to be disposed of?”

“I’m trying to be realistic about this!”

“You’re trying to be cruel about it! Just because I didn’t know that you—”

“Oh, stop it, stop it. I can see there’s no point in trying to be realistic.”

“All right, we’ll be realistic,” she said, face tense with repressed anger. “Are you suggesting that I leave you and take Beth with me? Is that your idea of being realistic?” His hands twitched in his lap.

“And what if they don’t find it?” he said. “What if they
never
find it?”

“You think I should leave you, then,” she said. “I think it might be a good idea,” he said. “Well, I don’t!”

And she was crying, hands spread across her face, tears trickling out between the fingers. He sat there feeling numbed and helpless, looking at her trembling shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Lou,” he said. He didn’t sound it.

She couldn’t answer; her throat and chest were too tight with breath-shaking sobs.

“Lou. I…” He reached out a lifeless hand and put it on her leg. “Don’t cry. I’m not worth that.”

She shook her head as if at a great, unanswerable problem. She sniffed and brushed at her tears.

“Here,” he muttered, handing her the handkerchief from his robe
pocket. She took it without a word and pressed it against her wet cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “It’s me. I got angry because I felt foolish and—stupid.”

And now, he thought, he was inclined in the other direction—toward self-castigation, toward self-indulgent martyrdom. The mind troubled was capable of manifold inversions.

“No.” She pressed his fingers briefly. “I had no right to—” She let the sentence hang. “I’ll try to be more understanding.”

For a moment her gaze rested on the white-skinned patch where his wedding ring had been. Then, with a sigh, she rose.

“I’ll get ready for bed,” she said.

He watched her walk across the room and disappear into the hallway. He heard her footsteps, then the clicking of the lock on the bathroom door. With slow-motion actions he got on his feet and went into the bedroom.

He lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling.

Poets and philosophers could talk all they wanted about a man’s being more than fleshly form, about his essential worth, about the immeasurable stature of his soul. It was rubbish.

Had they ever tried to hold a woman with arms that couldn’t reach around her? Had they ever told another man they were as good as he—and said it to his belt buckle?

She came into the bedroom, and in the darkness he heard the crisp rustle of her robe as she took it off and put it across the foot of the bed. Then the mattress gave on her side as she sat down. She drew her legs up and he heard her head thump back softly on her pillow. He lay there tensely, waiting for something.

After a moment there was a whispering of silk and he felt her reaching hand touch his chest.

“What’s that?” she asked softly.

He didn’t say.

She pushed up on her elbow. “Scott, it’s your
ring,”
she said. He felt the thin chain cutting slightly into the back of his neck as she fingered the ring. “How long have you been wearing it?” she said.

“Since I took it off,” he said.

There was a moment’s silence. Then her love-filled voice broke over him.

“Oh, darling!” Her arms slipped demandingly around him, and suddenly he felt the silk-filmed heat of her body pressing against him. Her lips fell searchingly on his, and her fingertips drew in like cat claws on his back, sending spicy tingles along the flesh.

And suddenly it was back, all the forced-down hunger in him exploding with a soundless, body-seizing violence. His hands fled across her burning skin, clutching and caressing. His mouth was an open shiver under hers. The darkness came alive, a sabled aura of heat crawling on their twining limbs. Words were gone; communication had become a thing of groping pressures, a thing felt in their blood, in the liquid torments rising, sweetly fierce. Words were needless. Their bodies spoke a surer language.

And when, too soon, it had ended and the night had fallen black and heavy on his mind, he slept, content, in the warm encirclement of her arms. And for the measure of a night there was peace, there was forgetfulness. For him.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

He clung to the edge of the open cracker box, looking in with dazed, unbelieving eyes.

They were ruined.

He stared at the impossible sight—cobweb-gauzed, dirty, moldy, water-soaked crackers. He remembered now, too late, that the kitchen sink was directly overhead, that there was a faulty drainpipe on it, that water dripped into the cellar every time the sink was used.

He couldn’t speak. There were no words terrible enough to express the mind-crazing shock he felt.

He kept staring, mouth ajar, a vacuous look immobile on his face. I’ll die now, he thought. In a way, it was a peaceful outlook. But stabbing cramps of hunger crowded peace away, and thirst was starting to add an extra pain and dryness to his throat.

His head shook fitfully. No, it was impossible, impossible that he should have come so far to have it end like this.

“No,” he muttered, lips drawing back in a sudden grimace as he clambered over the edge. Holding on, he stretched out one leg and kicked a cracker edge. It broke damply at his touch, jagged shards of it falling to the bottom of the box.

Reckless with an angry desperation, he let go of the edge and slid down the almost vertical glossiness of the wax paper, stopping with a neck-snapping jolt. Pushing up dizzily, he stood in the crumb-strewn box. He picked up one and it disintegrated wetly in his hands like dirtengrained mush. He picked it apart with his hands, searching for a clean piece. The smell of rot was thick in his nostrils. His cheek puffed out as a spasm shook his stomach.

Dropping the rest of the scraps, he moved toward a complete
cracker, breathing through his mouth to avoid the odor, his bare feet squishing over the soaked, mold-fuzzed remains.

Reaching the cracker, he tore off a crumbling fragment and broke it up. Scraping green mold from one of the pieces, he bit off part of it.

He spat it out violently, gagging at the taste. Sucking in breath between his teeth, he stood shivering until the nausea had faded.

Then abruptly his fists clenched and he took a punch at the cracker. His vision was blurred by tears, and he missed. With a snarled curse he swung again and punched out a spray of white crumbs.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled, and he kicked the cracker to bits and kicked and flung the pieces in every direction like soggy rocks.

He leaned weakly against the wax-paper walls, his face against its cool, crackling surface, his chest expanding and contracting with short, jerking breaths. Temper, temper, came the whispered admonition. Shut up, he answered it. Shut up, I’m dying.

He felt a sharp-edged bulge against his forehead and shifted position irritably.

Then it hit him.

The other side of the wax paper. Any crumbs that had fallen there would have been protected.

With an excited grunt he clawed at the wax paper, trying to tear it open. His fingers slipped on the glossy smoothness and he thudded down on one knee.

He was getting up when the water hit him.

A startled cry lurched in his throat as the first drop landed on his head, exploding into spray. The second drop smashed across his face with an icy, blinding impact. The third bounced in crystalline fragments off his right shoulder.

With a gasp, he lunged backward across the box, tripping over a crumb. He pitched over onto the carpet of cold white mush, then shoved up quickly his robe coated with it, his hands caked with it. Across from him the drops kept crashing down in a torrent, filling the box with a leaping mist that covered him. He ran.

At the far end of the box he stopped and turned, looking dizzily at the huge drops splattering on the wax paper. He pressed a palm against his skull. It had been like getting hit with a cloth-wrapped sledge hammer.

“Oh, my God,” he muttered hoarsely, sliding down the wax-paper wall until he was sitting in the mush, hands pressed to his head, eyes closed, tiny whimperings of pain in his throat.

He had eaten, and his sore throat felt much better. He had drunk the drops of water clinging, to the wax paper. Now he was collecting a pile of crumbs.

First he had kicked an opening in the heavy wax paper, then squeezed in behind its rustling smoothness. After eating, he’d begun to carry dry crumbs out, piling them on the bottom of the box.

That done, he kicked and tore out handholds in the wax paper so he could climb back to the top. He made the ascent carrying one or two crumbs at a time, depending on their size. Up the wax-paper ladder, over the lip of the box, down the handholds he had formerly ripped in the paper wrapping of the box. He did that for an hour.

Then he squeezed his way behind the wax-paper lining, searching for any crumbs he might have missed. But he hadn’t missed any except for one fragment the size of his little finger, which he picked up and chewed on as he finished his circuit of the box and emerged from the opening again.

He looked over the interior of the box once more, but there was nothing salvageable. He stood in the middle of the cracker ruins, hands on hips, shaking his head. At best, he’d got only two days’ food out of all his work. Thursday he would be without any again.

He threw off the thought. He had enough concerns; he’d worry about it when Thursday came. He climbed out of the box.

It was a lot colder outside. He shivered with a hunching up of shoulders. Though he’d wrung out as much as possible, his robe was still wet from the splattering drops.

He sat on the thick tangle of rope, one hand on his pile of hard-won cracker crumbs. They were too heavy to carry all the way down. He’d have to make a dozen trips at least, and that was out of the question. Unable to resist, he picked up a fist-thick crumb and munched on it contentedly while he thought about the problem of getting his food down.

At last, realizing there was only one way, he stood with a sigh and turned back to the box. Should use wax paper, he thought. Well, the
hell with that; it was going to last only two days at the most.

With a straining of arm and back muscles, feet braced against the side of the box, he tore off a jagged piece of paper about the size of a small rug. This he dragged back to the edge of the refrigerator top and laid out flat. In the center of it he arranged his crumbs into a cone-shaped pile, then wrapped them up until he had a tight, carefully sealed package about as high as his knees.

He lay on his stomach peering over the edge of the refrigerator. He was higher off the floor now than he’d been on the distant cliff that marked the boundary of the spider’s territory. A long drop for his cargo. Well, they were already crumbs; it would be no loss if they became smaller crumbs. The package wasn’t likely to open during the fall; that was all that mattered.

Briefly, despite the cold, he looked out over the cellar.

It certainly made a difference, being fed. The cellar had, for the moment anyway, lost its barren menace. It was a strange, cool land shimmering with rain-blurred light, a kingdom of verticals and horizontals, of grays and blacks relieved only by the dusty colors of stored objects. A land of roars and rushings, of intermittent sounds that shook the air like many thunders. His land.

Far below he saw the giant woman looking up at him, still leaning on her rock, frozen for all time in her posture of calculated invitation.

Sighing, he pushed back and stood. No time to waste; it was too cold. He got behind his bundle and, stooping over, pushed the dead weight of it to the edge and shoved it over the brink with a nudge of his foot.

Momentarily on his stomach again, he watched the package’s heavy fall, saw it bounce once on the floor, and heard the crunching noise as it came to rest. He smiled. It had held together.

Standing once more, he started around the top of the refrigerator to see if there were anything he might use. He found the newspaper.

It was folded and propped against the cylindrical coil ease. Its lettered faces were covered with dust and part of the sink’s leaking had splashed water across it, blotting the letters and eating through the cheap paper. He saw the large letters OST and knew it was a copy of the New York
Globe-Post
, the paper that had done his story—at least as much of it as he had been able to endure.

He looked at the dusty paper, remembering the day Mel Hammer had come to the apartment and made the offer.

Marty had mentioned Scott’s mysterious affliction to a fellow Kiwani, and from there the news had drifted, ripple by ripple, into the city.

Scott refused the offer, despite the fact that they needed the money desperately. Although the Medical Center had completed the tests free of charge, there was still a sizable bill for the first series of examinations. There was the five hundred owed to Marty, and the other bills they’d accumulated through the long, hard winter—the complete winter wardrobe for all of them, the cost of fuel oil, the extra medical bills because none of them had been physically equipped to face an Eastern winter after living so long in Los Angeles.

But Scott had been in what he now called his period of furies—a time when he experienced an endless and continuously mounting anger at the plight he was in. He’d refused the newspaper offer with anger. No, thank you, but I don’t care to be exposed to the morbid curiosity of the public. He flared up at Lou when she didn’t support his decision as eagerly as he thought she should have, saying, “What would you like me to do—turn myself into a public freak to give you your security?”

Erring, off-target anger; he’d known it even as he spoke. But anger was burning in him. It drove him to depths of temper he had never plumbed before. Strengthless temper, temper based on fear alone.

Scott turned away from the newspaper and went back to the rope. Lowering himself over the edge with an angry carelessness, he began sliding down the rope, using his hands and feet. The white cliff of the refrigerator blurred before his eyes as he descended.

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