The Shrinking Man (18 page)

He straightened up, smiling in the shadows.

Well, I fooled her, he said. I fooled her and sneaked a whisky bottle down, and she never knew.

He sat there, breathing heavily, thinking about Catherine leaning over the croquet rack, about her halter slipping.

He stood abruptly, banging his head again. He jumped down the steps, ignoring the pain. And I’ll fool her again!

He managed to feel grimly justified as he climbed the box pile clumsily. A drunken, crooked grin on his face, he knocked up the hook on the window and shoved at the bottom of its frame. It stuck. His face got red as he pushed at it. Get out, goddam your stupid bones!

“Son-of-a—”

The window flew out and he flopped across the ledge. The window flew back in and banged the top of his head. The hell with it! His teeth were gritted.
Now
, he dizzily told the world. Now we’ll see. He crawled out into the rain, not fighting at all against the vicious dredging of heat in him.

He stood up and shivered. His eyes fled up to the dining-room window and the rain drizzled in his eyes and ran across his face and spattered on his cheeks. What now? he thought. The cold air and rain were cooling off the surface of impulsion.

Deliberately he walked around the house, staying close to the brick base until he’d reached the porch. Then he ran to the steps and up them. What are you
doing
? he asked. He didn’t know. His mind was not conducting the tour.

He stood on tiptoe and cautiously looked into the dining room. No one was there. He listened but didn’t hear anything. The door to Beth’s room was shut; she must be taking a nap. His gaze moved to the bathroom door. It was shut.

He sank back on his heels and sighed. He licked raindrops from his lips. Now what? he asked again.

Inside the house, the bathroom door opened.

With a start, Scott backed away from the window, hearing footsteps pad across the kitchen floor, then fade. He thought she’d gone into the living room and edged to the window again, pushed up on his toes.

His breath stopped. She was standing at the window looking out at the yard. She was holding a yellow bath towel in front of her.

He couldn’t feel the rain spattering off him, crisscrossing like cold, unrolling ribbons across his face. His mouth hung open. His gaze
moved slowly down the smooth concavity of her back, the indentation of her spine a thin shadow that ran down and was lost between the muscular half-moons of her white buttocks.

He couldn’t take his eyes from her. His hands shook at his sides. She stirred and he saw the glitter of water drops on her, quivering like tiny blobs of gelatine. He sucked in a ragged, rain-wet breath.

Catherine dropped the towel.

She put her hands behind her head and drank in a heavy breath. Scott saw her left breast swing up and stand out tautly, the nipple like a dark spear point. Her arms moved out. She stretched and writhed.

When she turned he was still in the same tense, muscle-quivering pose. He shrank back, but she didn’t see him because the top of his head was barely higher than the window sill. He saw her bend over and pick up the towel, her breasts hanging down, white and heavy. She stood up and walked out of the room.

He sank down on his heels and had to clutch at the railing to keep his legs from going limp beneath him. He half hung there, shaking in the rain, a stark look on his face.

After a minute he stumbled weakly down the steps and around the house to the cellar window. He crawled through and locked the window behind him. He climbed down the hill of boxes, still shuddering.

He sat on the lawn chair, an old sweater wrapped around himself. His teeth were chattering, and he shivered uncontrollably.

Later he took his clothes off and hung them on the oil burner to dry. He stood by the fuel tank in his brown, hightopped shoes, holding the sweater around his shoulders, staring up at the window. And finally, when he couldn’t bear the stillness or the pressure or the thoughts a second longer, he began to kick the cardboard carton. He kicked it until his leg ached and the cardboard side was split almost to the floor.

“But how did you get a cold?” Lou asked, her voice carrying a note of exasperation.

His voice was nasal and thick. “What do you expect when I’m stuck in that damn cellar all day!”

“I’m sorry, darling, but… well, shall I stay home tomorrow so you can stay in bed all day?”

“Don’t bother,” he said.

She didn’t mention that she’d noticed that the whisky bottle was gone from the kitchen cupboard.

If Lou had been able to lock the windows, too, it would have been all right. But knowing he could get out any time he wanted; knowing that he could spy on Catherine, made it an impossible situation.

Hours dragged in the cellar. He might manage to absorb himself in a book for an hour or two, but ultimately the vision of Catherine would flit across his mind and he would put down the book.

If Catherine had come out in the yard more often, it would have been all right. Then, at least, he could look at her through the window. But days were getting colder as September waned, and Catherine and Beth stayed in the house most of the time.

He had taken to bringing a small clock to the cellar. He’d told Lou he wanted to be able to keep track of the time, but what he really wanted was to be able to know when Beth was napping. Then he could go out and peer through the windows at Catherine.

One day she might be on the couch reading a magazine, and there would be no satisfaction. But the next day she might be ironing, and, for some reason, when she ironed she always took off part of her clothes. Another time she might take a shower and, afterward, stand naked at the back window. And once she had lain naked in the bedroom under the skin-purpling glare of Lou’s portable sun lamp. That had been one cloudy afternoon and she hadn’t drawn the shades all the way down. He’d stood outside for thirty minutes and never budged.

Days kept passing. Reading was almost forgotten. Life had become one unending morbid adventure. Almost every afternoon at two o’clock, after having sat in shaking excitement for an hour or more, he would crawl out into the yard and walk secretively around the house, climbing up and peering over the sills of every window, looking for Catherine.

If she were partly or completely nude, he counted the day a success. If she was, as was most often the case, dressed and engaged in some dull occupation, he would return angrily to the cellar to sulk out the afternoon and snap at Louise all evening.

Whatever happened, though, he would lie awake at night, waiting for the morning to come, hating and despising himself for being so impatient, but still impatient. Sleep grew turgid with dreams of Catherine; dreams in which she grew progressively more alluring. Finally he even gave up scoffing at the dreams.

In the mornings he would eat hastily and go down to the cellar for the long wait until two o’clock, when, heart pounding, he would crawl out through the window again to spy.

The end of it came with shocking suddenness.

He was on the porch. In the kitchen, Catherine was standing naked under Lou’s open bathrobe, ironing some clothes.

He shifted his feet, slipped, and thumped down on the boards. Inside, he heard Catherine call out, “Who’s there?”

Gasping, he jumped down the step and started running around the house, looking over his shoulder in fright, to see a frozen-faced Catherine standing at the kitchen window, gaping at his fleeing childlike form.

All that afternoon he stood shivering behind the water tank, unable to come out because, even though she hadn’t seen him go into the cellar, he was sure she was looking in through the window. And he cursed himself and felt sickly wretched thinking about what Lou would say to him and how she would look at him when she knew.

He lay still under the box top, listening to the scratching clamber of the spider over the cardboard.

He moistened his lips with a sluggish tongue and thought of the pool of cold water in the hose. He felt around with his hand until it closed over a fragment of damp cracker; then he decided he was too thirsty to eat and his hand drew back again.

For some reason the sound of the spider’s crawling didn’t bother him too much. He sensed that he was beyond stark disruption, lying in the shallows of emotion, spent and quiescent. Even memory failed to hurt. Yes, even the memory of the month they’d discovered the antitoxin and injected him three times with it—to no avail. All past laments were undone by the drag of present illness and exhaustion.

I’ll wait, he told himself, until the spider is gone, and then I’ll go through the cool darkness and walk over the cliff and that will be the end of it. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll wait until the spider’s gone and then I’ll go over the cliff and that will be the end of it.

He slept, heavily, motionlessly. And, in his dream, he and Lou were walking in September rain, talking as they went. And he said, “Lou, I had an awful dream last night. I dreamed I was as small as a pin.”

And she smiled and kissed his cheek and said, “Now, wasn’t that a foolish dream?”

Thunder woke him. His fingers shriveled in abruptly, his eyes jerked open. There was an instant of blank suspension, consciousness hanging submerged beneath the shock of sudden awakening. His eyes stared mindlessly; his face was a pale, unmarked tautness, mouth a dash embedded in beard.

Then he remembered; and the scars of worry and defeat gouged across his brow and around his eyes and mouth again. Staring became sightlessness behind fallen lids, his hands uncurled. Only the faint murmur in his throat acknowledged the pain it was to lie in thunder.

In five minutes the oil burner clicked off, and the cellar became a vast, heavy silence.

With a grunt he sat up slowly on the sponge. The headache was almost gone. Only when he grimaced did it flare minutely. His throat still hurt, his body felt encrusted with aches and twinges, but at least the headache was gone and—he felt his forehead—the fever had abated somewhat. The able ministrations of sleep, he thought.

He sat weaving a little, licking his dry lips. Why did I sleep? he wondered. What had drugged him when he’d decided to end it all?

He wormed his way across the sponge and, holding on to the edge, dropped to the floor. Pain shot up his legs, faded. If only he could believe there had been purpose in his helpless sleep; that it might have been the act of a watching benevolence. He could not. More than likely it had been cowardice that had sent him off to sleep instead of to the cliff’s edge. Even wanting to, he could not honor it with the title “will to live.” He had no will to live. It was simply that he had no will to die.

At first he couldn’t lift the box top, it had become so heavy. That
told him what he’d meant to verify at the ruler; that overnight he had shrunk another fraction and was now only two-sevenths of an inch tall.

The cardboard edge scraped across his side as he dragged himself out from beneath it. It pinned his ankle so that he had to bend over and work at it with his hands. Free at last, he sat on the cold cement, letting the waves of dizziness settle. His stomach was a flagon of air.

He didn’t measure himself; there was no point in it. He walked slowly across the floor looking to neither one side nor the other. On unsteady legs he headed for the hose. Why had he slept?

“No reason.” He framed the words with his cracked lips.

It was cold. Gray, cheerless light filtered through the windows. March fourteenth. It was another day.

After the half-mile walk, he clambered over the metal lip of the hose and trudged along the black tunnel, listening to the echo of his scuffing sandals. His feet kept coming loose from the strings, and the robe dragged heavily along the rubber floor.

Ten minutes of walking through the twisting, lightless maze brought him to the water. He crouched in its shallow coldness and drank. It hurt to swallow, but he was too grateful there was water to care.

As he drank, there crossed his mind a brief vision of himself holding a hose much like this one, carrying it outside, connecting it to the faucet, playing a glittering stream of water across the lawn. Now, in a similar hose, he crouched, less than one fifth of its width, a mote man sipping dribblets of water from a hand no bigger than a grain of salt.

The vision passed. His size was too common now, too much a reality. It was no longer a phenomenon.

When he had finished drinking, he walked back out of the hose, shaking his feet to get the water off his sandals. March forth, he thought, march forth to nothingness. March fourteenth, he thought. In a week the first day of spring would come upon the Island.

He would never see it.

Out on the floor again, he walked back to the box top and stood beside it, one palm braced against it. His gaze moved slowly over the cellar. Well? he thought. What happened now? Did he crawl under the box top, lie down again and sleep once more, a surrendering sleep? His teeth raked slowly across his lower lip as he looked at the cliff that went up to the spider’s land.

Avoid it.

He started walking around the cement block, searching for cracker crumbs. He found a dirty one, scraped off its surface, and kept walking, chewing ruminatively. Well, what was he going to do? Go back to his bed, or—