This was worse; far worse.
Month after month would go by—almost a year of them still if the doctors didn’t stop it. A year of living together day by day, while he shrank. Eating meals together, sleeping in the same bed together, talking together, while he shrank. Caring for Beth and listening to music and seeing each other every day, while he shrank. Each day a new incident, a new hideous adjustment to make. The complex pattern of their relationship altered day by day, while he shrank.
They would laugh, unable to keep a long face every single moment of every single day. There would be laughter, perhaps, at some joke—a forgetful moment of amusement. Then suddenly the horror would rush over them again like black ocean across a dike, the laughter choked, the amusement crushed. The trembling realization that he was shrinking covering them again, casting a pall over their days and nights.
“Lou.”
She turned to face him. He leaned over to kiss her, but he couldn’t reach her lips. With an angry, desperate motion he pushed up on one knee on the couch and thrust his right hand into the silky tangle of her hair, fingertips pressing at her skull. Pulling back her head with a tug, he jammed his lips on hers and forced her back against the pillow.
Her lips were taut with surprise. He heard her knitting thud on the floor, heard the liquid rustle of silk as she twisted slightly in his grip. He ran a shaking hand across the yielding softness of her breasts. He pulled away his parted lips and pressed them against her throat, slowly raking teeth across the warm flesh.
“Scott!” she gasped.
The way she said it seemed to drain him in an instant. A barren chill covered him. He drew back from her, feeling almost ashamed. His hands fell from her body.
“Honey, what is it?” she said.
“You don’t know, do you?” He was shocked by the trembling sound of his own voice.
His hands went up quickly to his cheeks and he saw in her eyes that she suddenly knew.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, bending forward. Her warm lips pressed at his. He sat there stiffly. The caress and the tone of voice and the kiss—they were not the passionate caress and tone and kiss of a woman who craved her husband’s want. They were the sounds and touches of a woman who felt only loving pity for a poor creature who desired her.
He turned away.
“Honey, don’t,” she begged, taking hold of his hand. “How could I know? There hasn’t been a bit of lovemaking between us in the last two months; not a kiss or an embrace or—”
“There wasn’t exactly time for it,” he said.
“But that’s the whole point,” she said. “How could I help but be surprised? Is it so odd?”
His throat contracted with a dry, clicking sound. “I suppose,” he said, barely audible.
“Oh, honey.” She kissed his hand. “Don’t make it sound as if I—turned you away.”
He let breath trickle out slowly from his nostrils.
“I guess it . . . would be rather grotesque, anyway,” he said, trying to sound detached. “The way I look. It’d be like—”
“Honey, please.” She wouldn’t let him finish. “You’re making it worse than it is.”
“Look at me,” he said. “How much worse can it get?”
“Scott. Scott.” She pressed his small hand to her cheek. “If only I could say something to make it all right.”
He stared past her, unable to meet her eyes. “It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Oh, why don’t they call? Why don’t they find it?”
He knew then that his desire was impossible. He’d been a fool even to think of it.
“Hold me, Scott,” she said.
He sat motionless for a few seconds, chin down, the fixed dullness of his eyes sealing the mask of defeat that was his face. Then he drew back his right hand and slid it behind her; it seemed as if the hand would never reach her other side. His stomach muscles flexed in slowly. He wanted to get up from the couch and leave. He felt puny and absurd beside her, a ludicrous midget who had planned the seduction of a normal woman. He sat there stiffly, feeling the warmth of her body through the silk. And he’d rather have died than tell her that the weight of her arm across his shoulders was hurting him.
“We could . . . work it out,” she suggested in a different voice. “We—”
His head twisted back and forth in erratic motions as though he were looking for escape. “Oh, stop it, will you? Let it go. Forget it. I was a fool to . . .”
His right hand pulled back and clamped tensely on the knuckles of his left hand. He squeezed until it hurt. “Just let it go,” he said. “Let it go.”
“Honey, I’m not just saying it to be nice,” she protested. “Don’t you think I—”
“No, I don’t! ” he answered sharply. “And you don’t, either.”
“Scott, I know you’re hurt, but . . .”
“Please forget it.” His eyes were shut, and the words came softly, warningly through clenched teeth.
She was still. He breathed as though he were suffocating. The room was a crypt of futility to him.
“All right,” she whispered then.
He bit his lower lip. He said, “Have you written your parents?”
“My parents?” He knew she was staring at him curiously.
“I think it might be wise,” he said, holding his voice in careful check. He shrugged ineffectually. “Find out about staying with them. You know.”
“I don’t know, Scott.”
“Well . . . don’t you think it’s a good idea to make some recognition of the facts?”
“Scott, what are you trying to do?”
He lowered his chin to hide the quick swallowing movement in his throat. “I’m trying,” he said, “to plan some disposition of you and Beth in the event—”
“Disposition! What are we—”
“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 read
y 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 to 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 asked.
“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 icy 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.
Chapter Six
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 dirt-engrained 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 waxpaper 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 fistthick crumb and m
unched 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.
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 69