by R. L. Stine
Other Books by R.L. STINE
SERIES:
• Goosebumps
• Fear Street
• Rotten School
• Mostly Ghostly
INDIVIDUAL TITLES:
• It’s the First Day of School…Forever!
• The Haunting Hour
• The Nightmare Hour
• Zombie Town
• The 13th Warning
• The Creatures from Beyond Beyond
• Three Faces of Me
• My Alien Parents
THE ADVENTURES
OF SHRINKMAN
THE ADVENTURES
OF SHRINKMAN
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2000 Parachute Press
Cover illustration by Tim Jacobus
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
A Parachute Press Book
Published by Amazon Publishing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612183282
ISBN-10: 161218328X
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the Author
• R.L. STINE •
People always ask me where I get my ideas. Most of the time I don’t know how to answer that question. But I know where I got the idea for The Adventures of Shrinkman. I stole it—from myself.
When my brother Bill and I were kids, our parents measured our height every month. We stood as tall as we could with our backs to the wall. They used a yardstick and made a pencil mark at the top of our heads.
Sometimes I tried to cheat by standing on tiptoe. But they always caught me. I don’t know why Bill and I thought this was so much fun. But we really enjoyed seeing the pencil marks go up the wall as we grew taller.
One day when I was ten or eleven, my mom stared at the pencil mark she had just made. Her eyes went wide. “I don’t believe it. You’re an inch shorter.”
I gasped. “Huh?”
Bill laughed. “You shrunk!” he cried.
“Let me see it,” I said. I spun around to examine the mark on the wall.
Then Bill and Mom burst out laughing. They were playing a joke on me.
I didn’t think it was funny. I began to think: What if I DID begin to shrink?
At age ten, I was already writing stories. I went to my room, sat down in front of my big black typewriter, and started to write a story about a shrinking boy. I wrote it like a comic book with drawings and thought balloons.
I loved to read comic books when I was a kid. And I tried to draw my own. Then I’d show them to my friends. I remember my friends really liked the one I wrote about kids who shrink down to the size of insects.
I also remember that Bill and I weren’t the only kids who liked to measure our height. Most kids thought a lot about whether they were going to be short or tall. Most kids want to be about the same as everyone else in their class. They don’t want to stand out by being taller or shorter than everyone else.
I think this is one reason why stories about giants and little people have been popular for many, many years.
I remember one movie that came out when I was a teenager that captured all my fears about shrinking. It was called The Incredible Shrinking Man.
In this film, a man is sunning himself on a boat when a strange mist floats over him. He is sprinkled with glitter. Later he is sprayed by bug spray while driving his car. And soon after that, he starts to shrink.
To his horror, he gets smaller and smaller. When he is three feet tall, the whole nation becomes interested in him. When he reaches six inches tall, he’s forced to live in a dollhouse. But he isn’t safe there. The family cat has its eyes on him. The cat is hungrily determined to break in and grab him.
That was really scary.
The next year, Hollywood brought out a movie that was an answer to The Incredible Shrinking Man. This film was called Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
In this film, a woman drives through an enormous radioactive bubble and starts to grow. Soon she is fifty feet tall—big enough to frighten the whole town and get revenge against her no-good husband. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that scary, but it was pretty funny.
My all-time favorite shrinking movie is Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The nutty scientist father accidentally shrinks his two kids and two kids next door down to the size of insects.
He doesn’t see them. He sweeps them up and dumps them in the trash. Now the tiny kids battle horrible danger as they try to make their way through the jungle of grass, across the backyard, and back to their house.
The film is hilarious and terrifying at the same time, which is why I like it so much.
After seeing so many movies and TV shows about people shrinking or growing into giants, I decided to write my own. That’s why I came up with The Adventures of Shrinkman.
I remembered how much I liked to draw comics in fifth grade. So I made Danny a comic book artist. He draws comics about a popular movie superhero named Shrinkman. But it all becomes too real for Danny when he actually begins to shrink.
Why is this happening to him? He hasn’t a clue. But he has an even more terrifying question: Is he going to shrink smaller and smaller until he disappears forever?
Megan Burleigh turned away from her beakers and test tubes and squinted her dark brown eyes at me. She frowned and the dimples in her round cheeks grew deeper.
“What are you doing, Danny?” she asked. “Drawing another comic strip about that shrinking guy?”
I leaned over the lab table, penciling in a long flowing cape. “His name is Shrinkman,” I said, sighing. “Not That Shrinking Guy.”
Megan calls him that just to be annoying. She knows I’m obsessed with two things—basketball and Shrinkman. She knows that I draw Shrinkman comics whenever I have a spare moment.
And she hates it.
Megan doesn’t like it that I can do something she can’t do. Megan is the most competitive person I’ve ever met. She likes to win. She likes to be the best at everything.
“What is the point of being a loser?” she says.
My name is Danny Marin, and I’m not a loser. I’m just different from most fifth graders.
When I’m not out practicing my slam dunk, I like to stay in my room for hours drawing Shrinkman comics. If I go slow and concentrate, I can draw Shrinkman almost as well as Duke Barnes. Duke is the artist who created him.
I go to all the Shrinkman movies, too. I guess my favorite is Shrinkman vs. Mister Big. I also loved the special effects in A Little Surprise for Shrinkman, although the ending was dumb.
I mean, you can’t keep Shrinkman in a jelly jar. He’d get big again and break the glass.
I wrote a letter
to Duke Barnes about that, but he didn’t answer me.
My parents say I can go to art school this summer. I’m only eleven now. But if I keep practicing, maybe I’ll get good enough by the time I’m twenty or so to take over the comic strip. Or at least help Duke Barnes with it.
That would be so cool.
“Danny, we’re supposed to be working on our Science Fair projects,” Megan said. She held a test tube up to the light and studied it. It was half-filled with a purple liquid.
“I am working on my project,” I replied, filling in Shrinkman’s cape. “But I don’t see the point, Megan. Everyone knows you’re going to win the competition and walk home with the thousand-dollar prize.”
“Of course I am.” She brushed her honey-blond hair off the shoulders of her blue tank top. “I really really really desperately want to win that money.”
She poured the purple liquid into the lab sink. It made a fizzy sound as it disappeared down the drain.
“You can’t draw a comic for a science project,” she said. “Mr. Clarkus definitely won’t allow it.”
Mr. Clarkus is the science teacher at Baker Elementary School. He looks like a big, sloppy whale. His blubber belly is always hanging out from his shirt.
He doesn’t like me. I think it’s because he overheard me calling him Clarkus the Carcass.
Everyone calls him that. But I’m the one he overheard saying it. I’ve been getting C-minuses in science ever since.
Megan was pouring a clear liquid into a boiling, bubbling blue liquid. “What’s your project?” I asked her, sniffing hard. It smelled kind of sour.
Her dark eyes flashed. She made a zipping motion over her lips. “I can’t tell.”
“Excuse me? What do you mean you can’t tell?”
“It’s a secret mixture that will amaze the world. If I tell you what it is, it will spoil the surprise.”
I laughed. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”
The liquid fizzed over the glass beaker. A grin spread over her face. “Of course I know what I’m doing; I told you, my great-great-grandmother was a witch.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, sure.”
She sneered at me. “At least I’m not trying to pass off a comic strip as a science project.”
I held the drawings up to show her. “It’s very scientific. See? Shrinkman makes himself tiny enough to enter a human brain. Then, as he travels through each part of the brain, I explain how it works and what it does.”
Megan shook her head. “It’s totally lame.”
“It’s a good project,” I insisted. “I described it to Clarkus the Carcass, and he said—”
Uh-oh.
First I saw the wide shadow roll over me. Then I saw Mr. Clarkus standing beside the lab table.
Frowning. His eyes cold. His teeth gritted tightly.
He heard!
I gasped—and swallowed my gum.
It stuck in the back of my throat. I started to choke. Megan slapped me hard on the back. But the gum didn’t move.
I wheezed, choking, struggling to suck in air.
Megan handed me a glass of water off the table. I tilted it to my lips, and drank it down.
There. Finally. The gum went down. I could breathe.
I sucked in several deep breaths, waiting for my heart to stop racing.
“Danny, are you okay?” Mr. Clarkus asked, studying me with his cold, marble blue eyes.
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Then come with me,” he said, motioning to the lab door with his pale, blubbery hand. “I think you and I need to have a talk.”
“What did Mr. Clarkus want to talk to you about?” Megan asked.
I groaned. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
It was the next afternoon, a Saturday, and Megan and I were walking to the Baker Cineplex to see the new Shrinkman movie—Shrinkman’s Biggest Adventure.
I’d already seen it twice. But I wanted Megan to see it.
My dad is the projectionist at the Baker Cineplex. That means he shows the films in all eight theaters.
It’s a pretty hard job. He has to keep moving from theater to theater to make sure the film is in focus and everything is running right.
You’d think they’d let me into the movies for free since Dad works there. But I have to pay like everyone else.
We crossed Mill Street, and the theater came into view on the next corner. A few kids sat on the curb outside the ticket office. But there wasn’t a long line.
The Shrinkman movies aren’t really very popular. I don’t know anyone besides me who goes to see them three or four times. A lot of kids say that a superhero who can shrink down to the size of a bug is dumb. He gets so small you can barely see him.
That’s because the special-effects budgets on the movies aren’t very high. They don’t have much money to make it look real.
You need a good imagination to appreciate Shrinkman movies.
As we made our way to the theater, Megan poked me playfully in the ribs. “So? What did he say to you?”
I stopped. “You mean Carcass? He told me that nicknames can be cruel. That I should call people by their real names.”
Megan’s eyes burned into mine. “And what else?”
I sighed. “He said my science project was lame. He said I had to think up a better one.”
I hated the I-told-you-so smile on Megan’s face. She is a good friend, but sometimes I’d like to punch her really hard.
“He said if I don’t shape up and start getting better grades, he’s going to tell Coach Gray to cut me from the basketball team.”
Thinking about it made me angry. I stepped away from her. “Do we have to talk about this?” I said. “I don’t really want to think about Carcass now. Can’t we just enjoy the movie?”
She shrugged. “No problem.”
We bought tickets and made our way inside. Megan bought a huge bucket of popcorn. She’s so competitive, she always has to have the biggest popcorn bucket they sell. She also bought an enormous bag of Twizzlers.
I wasn’t feeling hungry—but I stopped when I saw a vending machine, almost hidden in the dark shadows against the wall.
I stepped up to it, and my eyes scanned the blue lettering against the black surface of the machine. Shrinkman Cola.
“Cool!” I exclaimed.
I bent down and gazed into the little window on the front of the machine. Behind the glass, I could see a blue and black bottle with the familiar Shrinkman logo. Shrinkman Cola.
I had to try it.
I pulled a dollar from my wallet and slid it into the chrome slot.
The machine clinked and clunked. And a bottle rolled out at the bottom.
Megan rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe you bought that, Danny. Will you buy anything with the word Shrinkman on it?”
“Probably,” I replied.
I twisted off the top of the Shrinkman Cola bottle. The dark liquid fizzed up to the rim of the opening.
Before it spilled over, I raised it to my mouth and took several long swallows.
“Yuck—!”
I wanted to spit.
“This tastes gross!” I cried. I groaned and made a disgusted face. “It’s kind of bitter. It—it tastes totally weird!”
Megan laughed. “Maybe that’s why they hid the drink machine way back here in the corner.”
I kept swallowing, trying to get the horrible taste from my mouth. “What was Duke Barnes thinking?” I cried. I tossed the half-full bottle into a trash basket. “Yuck.”
We went into the theater and took seats in the third row. I chewed up four of Megan’s Twizzlers, but it didn’t help get rid of the rotten Shrinkman Cola taste.
I turned to the back and searched for my dad in the projection booth. The lights were on back there, but I couldn’t see him.
The theater lights dimmed. The Coming Attractions flashed onto the screen. I’d seen them all before. I wished I could fast-forward through them and get to the movie.
When Shrinkman’s Biggest Adventure finally started and Shrinkman flew across the screen in his dazzling blue cape, I raised my feet to the seat in front of me and settled back to enjoy the film.
“His cape is one-size-fits-all,” Megan whispered.
Ha ha. Did she have any idea how lame her Shrinkman jokes were?
I grabbed a big handful of popcorn from her bucket and stared straight ahead at the screen.
The movie was even better the third time.
The big scene where Shrinkman hides in the gangster boss’s shirt pocket was totally awesome. And when Shrinkman shrinks to the size of a watermelon seed and starts climbing up the gangster’s nose, everyone in the theater cheered and screamed.
Everyone except Megan, that is.
“You didn’t think it was awesome?” I asked, walking up the aisle as the closing credits ran.
She shrugged. “It was okay. But it’s all a little hard to believe.”
We stopped at the steps that led up to the projection room. Megan’s dark eyes studied me. I could see she was thinking hard.
“Danny, don’t you think Shrinkman is kind of a waste of time?”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Well…you could be out practicing basketball,” she replied. “The team is really counting on you…”
“What does Shrinkman have to do with basketball?” I asked. “I practice for basketball all the time. But Shrinkman is a lot more important. He’s—”
“But if you got serious about basketball and really worked hard, the Tigers could win the city championship this year!” Megan declared.
I shook my head. “There’s more to life than winning,” I said. “Is that all you think about? Just winning, winning, winning?”
“Well, of course.” She turned and started up the stairs, her blond hair bouncing behind her.
I followed after her, thinking about basketball. I practice a lot, I told myself. I’m not going to let the team down.