The Shrinking Man

by Richard Matheson

  When he'd finished eating and made the long, cold trek through the black hose passage, he went back to the sponge and pulled off two small pieces for his feet. He ripped out the centres of them and jammed his feet in. The sponge didn't hold very well. He'd have to fasten them with thread.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that the thread not only would fasten his improvised clothing to himself, but could also get into Marty's cuff. If he could get another pin and bend it, and tie it to a length of thread, he could hook the pin into the trousers and hang on until he was upstairs in the house.

  He started to run for the carton under the fuel tank. He stopped and whirled, remembering the piece of thread he'd had when he'd fallen the night before. It must still have a piece of pin fastened to it. He ran to find it.

  It did; what was more, the piece of pin was still bent enough to hook onto Marty's trouser leg.

  Scott ran on the pile of stones and wood by the bottom step, waiting for his brother to come down again.

  Upstairs, he could hear restless, hurried footsteps moving through the rooms, and he visualized Lou moving about, preparing to leave. His lips pressed together until they hurt. If it was the last thing he did, he'd let her know he was alive.

  He looked at the cellar. It was hard to believe that, after all this time, he might be getting out. The cellar had become the world to him. Maybe he'd be like a prisoner released after long confinement, frightened and insecure. No, that couldn't be true. The cellar had been no womb of comfort to him. Life on the outside could hardly be more onerous than it had been down here.

  He ran his fingers lightly over his bad knee. The swelling had gone down considerably; it ached only a little. He touched at the cuts and abrasions on his face. He unwrapped the bandage on his hand, tugged it off and dropped it to the floor. He swallowed experimentally. His throat felt sore, but that didn't matter. He was ready for the world.

  Upstairs, he heard the back door shut and footsteps on the porch. He jumped from the boulder and shook loose the length of thread. Then, picking up the hook, he pressed back against the wall of the step, waiting, his chest wall thudding with heavy heartbeats. Up in the yard, he heard a crunch of shoes on the sandy ground, then a voice saying, "I'm not sure exactly what we have down there."

  His face grew tautly blank, his eyes were like frozen pools. He felt as if his legs were rubber columns under him.

  It was Lou.

  He shrank against the cement as giant shoes stamped down the steps. "Lou," he whispered, and then the two of them blocked off the sun like dark clouds passing.

  They moved around, their heads more than half a mile high. He couldn't see her face, only the great moving redness of her skirt.

  "That box on the shelf is ours," she said, a voice in the sky.

  "All right," said Marty, moving toward the cliff wall and pulling down the carton with the doll arm sticking from it.

  Lou kicked aside the small sponge on the floor. "Let's see, now," she said. "I think…"

  She crouched down, and abruptly Scott could see the massive features of her face as a billboard hanger might see the features of the woman's face he pasted up. There was no sense of over-all appearance; just a huge eye here, an enormous nose there, lips like a rosy-banked canyon.

  "Yes," she said, "this carton under the tank."

  "I'll get it," Marty said, moving up the steps with the first box.

  He was alone with her.

  His gaze leaped up as she stood again. She moved around slowly, giant arms crossed under the mountainous swell of her breasts. There was a twisting agony in Scott's chest and stomach. For there was no denying it; she was beyond him now. Thoughts of trying to tell her he was alive evaporated. They had disappeared the moment he saw her. He was an insect to her; he knew it now with hideous clarity. Even if he managed somehow to attract her attention, it would solve nothing, it would change nothing. He would still be gone tonight, and the only thing accomplished would be that he would have torn open an old wound that might be nearly closed by now.

  He stood silent, like a tiny piece from a miniature charm bracelet, looking up at the woman who had been his wife.

  Marty came down the steps again.

  "I'll be glad to get out of here," Lou told him.

  "I don't blame you," Marty said, walking to the fuel tank and crouching down before it.

  Beth came down the steps, asking, "Can I carry something, Mamma?"

  "I don't think there's anything. Oh, yes, you can take up that jar of paint brushes. I think they're ours."

  "All right." Beth moved to the wicker table.

  Suddenly Scott twitched out of his reverie. He didn't want to tell Lou, but he did still want to get out of the cellar. And he couldn't wait for Marty, he realized. Marty would pass by the step too quickly; there would be no time.

  Pushing away from the step, he raced to the refrigerator, under its shadowing bulk, then under the wicker table. Marty was still squatting by the tank, pulling out the carton. Scott ran beneath the red metal table. Quickly! He ran faster, dragging the thread behind him. Marty stood up with the carton in his arms. He started for the steps.

  There was no time. As Scott rushed out into the open, Marty's immense black shoe was already crashing down before him. With a muscle jerking hitch, he flung the hook at the swishing trouser leg.

  If he had caught a galloping horse, he couldn't have been torn off his feet more violently.

  His cry choked off. Abruptly he was flying through the air, then dipping down, the floor rushing gravely at him. With a twisting of his legs, he flattened out his body, his sponge coat scratching the floor as he flashed over it. The vast leg moved again. Scott, caught in the apex of his swing, was jerked high into the air. The thread grew taut and he was snapped forward again, his arms almost wrenched from their sockets. The cellar whirled by, a flash of light and shadow blended. He wanted to scream but he couldn't. He was swinging again, rocking violently in the air, spun around, his tiny body bulleting toward the steps. A wall rushed at him, disappeared below as he was jerked above it. His feet skidded along the top of the first step, the sponge bits torn away. The violent impact tore him loose, and suddenly he was running at top speed across the cement, heading for the face of the second step. He flung out his arms to ward off the shock. He screamed.

  Then he tripped over a grain of concrete and went sprawling. His legs flew up, his skull cracked against the cement. Pain exploded through his head, white and vivid, then drew in suddenly to a black core, which also exploded, splashing his brain with night. He lay there limply as the shoe of his wife slammed down an inch from his body, then was gone.

  Later, while Marty was driving them to the railroad station, Beth saw the hook and thread sticking to his trouser leg, and, bending down, she plucked it out. Marty said, "I must have picked it up in the cellar," then forgot about it. Beth put it in the pocket of her overcoat, and she forgot about it too.

  7"

  "Put me down!" he screamed.

  He could say no more. Her hand was clamped around his body, binding him from shoulder to hip, pinning his arms, squeezing out his breath. The room blurred by; he started to black out.

  Then the doll-house porch was under his feet, his hand was clutching at the wrought-iron railing, and Beth was looking down at him with half-frightened eyes.

  "I gave you a ride," she said.

  He jerked open the front door and plunged into the house, slamming the door behind him and snapping the tiny hook into its eye. Then he slumped down weakly in the living room, breath a dry rasping in his throat.

  Outside, Beth said defensively, "I didn't hurt you."

  He didn't answer. He felt as if he'd just been almost crushed in a vice.

  "I didn't hurt you," she said, and she began to cry.

  He'd known that the time would come, and finally it had. He could put it off no longer. He'd have to ask Lou to keep Beth away from him. She wasn't responsible.

  He got up weakly and stumbled over to the couch
. He heard Beth going outside again, the floor trembling with her exit. The crash of the front door made him start violently. She'd come in a few moments ago, seen him making the long walk to his house, and picked him up.

  He fell back on the small cushions Lou had made for him. He lay there a long time, staring at the shadowy ceiling and thinking of his lost child.

  She'd been born on a Thursday morning. Lou's labour had been a long one. She'd kept telling him to go home, but he wouldn't. Occasionally he'd go down to the car, curl up on the back seat, and catch a few minutes of shallow sleep, but most of the time he stayed up in the waiting room, thumbing sightlessly through magazines, the book he'd brought to read unopened on the table beside him. Oh, yes, he was going to be smart; no movie melodramatics for him, no floor pacing and mashing of butts beneath heels. For that matter, he couldn't pace the floor even though he would have liked to. The waiting room was only a small alcove at the end of the second-floor hall, and he couldn't walk in the hall because there was too much traffic there.

  So he'd sat in the waiting room, feeling as if there were a bomb in his stomach, primed to explode shortly. There was one other man there, but it was his fourth baby and he was blasé. He actually read a book: The Curse of the Conquistadores. Scott still remembered the title. How could a man sit reading such a book when his wife was writhing and twisting in labour? Or maybe his wife was one of the easy deliverers. As a matter of fact, the man couldn't have read more than three chapters before the baby was born, about one in the morning. The man had shrugged, winked at Scott, and gone home. Scott had cursed softly after him, then sat alone in the waiting room, waiting.

  At seven-one a.m., Elizabeth Louise had put in her appearance.

  He remembered Dr. Arron coming out of the delivery room and starting down the hall toward him, soft-soled shoes squeaking on the tiles. A dozen different horrors had pulsed through Scott's brain. She's dead. The baby's dead. It's misshapen. It's twins. It's triplets. There was nothing in there.

  Dr. Arron had said, "Well, you've got a daughter."

  And he'd been led to the glass window and, inside, a nurse was holding up a blanket wreathed child, and it had black hair and it was yawning, its red little fists twitching at the air. And he'd just managed to brush away the tears before anyone could see.

  He sat up on the couch and stretched out his legs. The pain in his rib box was not so bad now. He'd had trouble breathing for a little while there. He ran exploring hands over his chest and sides. No bones broken; that was sheer luck. Beth had clutched him terribly. Doubtless she'd only meant to make sure she wouldn't drop him, but…

  He shook his head. "Beth, Beth," he murmured. Unseen, he'd been losing her day by day ever since the shrinking began. The loss of his wife had been a clear and certain process; the divorce from his child had been something else again.

  At first there had been the circumstantial separation from her. He was suffering a terrible, unknown affliction, going regularly to doctors, being examined, being installed in a hospital. He had no time for her.

  Then he was home, and worry and dread and the failing of his marriage had kept him from seeing how he was losing her. Sometimes he would hold her in his lap, read her a story, or, late at night, stand beside her bed and look down at her. Mostly, though, he was too absorbed in his own state to see anything else.

  Then physical size had entered into it. As he'd grown shorter and shorter, so had he grown less certain of his authority and her respect. It was not a thing to be lightly conquered. As his size affected his attitude toward Lou, so did it affect his attitude toward Beth.

  The authority of fatherhood, he discovered, depended greatly on simple physical difference. A father, to his child, was big and strong; he was all-powerful. A child saw simply. It respected size and depth of voice. What physically over shadowed it, it almost always respected or at least feared. Not that Scott had gained Beth's respect by trying to make her fear him. It was simply a basic state that existed because he was six feet two and she was four feet one.

  When he had sunk to her height, then gone below it, when his voice had lost depth and authority and become a high-pitched, ineffective sound, Beth's respect, had slackened. It was merely that she could not understand. God knew they had tried to explain it to her, endlessly. But it wasn't explicable, because there was nothing in Beth's mental background comparable to a shrinking father.

  Consequently, when he was no longer six feet two and his voice was no longer the voice she knew, she no longer actually regarded him as her father. A father was constant. He could be depended on, he did not change. Scott was changing. Therefore, he could not be the same; he could not be treated the same.

  And so it had gone, each day her respect waning more. Especially when his jaded nerves began sending him into flurries of temper. She could not understand or appreciate. She was not old enough to sympathize. She could only see him baldly. And, in the actuality of pure sight, he was nothing but a horrid midget who screamed and ranted in a funny voice. To her he had stopped being a father and had become an oddity.

  And now the loss was irreparable and final. Beth had reached the stage where she was a physical menace to him. Like the cat, she had to be kept away from him.

  "She didn't mean it, Scott," Lou said that night.

  "I know she didn't," he answered into the small hand microphone, so that his voice came clearly through the phonograph loud-speaker. "She just doesn't understand. But she'll have to stay away from me. She doesn't realize how frail I am. She picked me up as if I were an indestructible doll. I'm not."

  The next day it ended.

  He was standing, stooped over, in a hay-strewn stable, looking at the faces of Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men as they looked upon the infant Jesus. It was very quiet and, if he squinted, it seemed almost as if they were all alive and Mary's face was gently smiling and the Wise Men were wavering, awed and reverent, over the manger. The animals were stamping in their stalls and he could smell the acrid stable smells and there was the faint, beautiful sound of the infant's gurgling.

  Then a cold wind blew over him, making him shudder.

  He looked toward the kitchen and saw that the door had been blown open a little and the wind was blowing powdery snowflakes across the floor. He waited for Lou to close it, but she didn't. Then he heard the faint, distant drumming of water and knew she was taking a shower. He stepped out of the stable and walked across the crinkled cotton glacier under the Christmas tree, his tiny homemade shoes crunching on the artificial snow. The wind rushed over him again and he shivered fitfully.

  "Beth!" he called, then remembered that she was outside playing. He muttered irritably to himself, then ran across the rug onto the wide expanse of green linoleum. Maybe he could shut it himself.

  He'd barely reached the door when a throaty rumble sounded behind him.

  Whirling, he saw the cat by the sink, head just lifted from a dish of milk, its furry coat wet and dishevelled. There was a heavy sinking in his stomach.

  "Get out of here," he said. Its ears picked up. "Get out of here," he said again, more loudly.

  Another growl wavered liquidly in the cat's throat and it slid forward a predatory paw, claws extended.

  "Get out of here!" he yelled, backing off, the icy wind across his back, snowflakes buffeting like fragile hands at his shoulders and head.

  The cat moved forward as smoothly as sliding butter, mouth open, sabre teeth exposed.

  Then Beth came in the front door and the sudden draft hurricaning across the floor flung the back door toward its frame, scooping Scott along with it. In an instant the door had slammed shut and he had landed in a bank of snow.

  Scrambling up, his clothes feathered with snow, Scott charged back to the door and pounded his fists against it.

  "Beth!" The sound was barely audible to him above the wailing of the wind. Cold snow blew across him in ghost-like clouds. A huge pile of it fell from the railing, crashing down nearby and splattering him with its freezing gran
ules.

  "Oh, my God," he muttered. Frantically he began kicking at the door. "Beth!" he howled. "Beth, let me in!" He pounded until his fists ached and throbbed, kicked until his feet felt dead, but the door remained closed.

  "Oh, my God." The horror of the situation was billowing in his mind. He turned and looked out fearfully at the snow-swept yard. Everything was dazzling white. The ground was a livid desert of snow, the wind blowing powdery mists of it across the high dunes. The trees were vast white columns topped with skeleton white branches and limbs. The fence was a leprous barricade, wind ripping off snowy flesh, exposing the bony pickets underneath.

  Realization came bluntly: if he stayed out here very long, he'd freeze to death. Already his feet felt like lead, his fingers ached and tingled from the cold, his body was alive with shudders.

  Indecision tore at him. Should he remain and try to get in, or should he leave the porch and seek shelter from the snow and wind? Instinct bound him to the house. Safety lay on the other side of the white, panelled door. Yet intelligent observation made it clear that to remain was to risk his life. Where could he go, though? The cellar windows were locked from the inside, the doors were much too heavy for him to lift. And it would be no warmer underneath the porch.

  The front porch! If somehow he could climb the front-porch railing, he might be able to reach the bell. Then he could get in.

  Still he hesitated. The snow looked deep and frightening.

  What if he were swallowed in a drift? What if he got so cold he never reached the front porch?

  But he knew it was his only chance, and the decision had to be made quickly. There was no guarantee that his absence would be noted soon enough. If he stayed here on the back porch, Lou might find him in time. But she might not, too.