The Shrinking Man Read Free

then dug her fork into a mound of gravy-topped potatoes.
    “How do we pay for it?” Scott asked. “There’s no medical insurance. I owe Marty five hundred dollars for the tests I’ve already taken.” He exhaled heavily. “And the GI loan may not even go through.”
    “You’re going,” she said.
    “Easily said,” he answered.
    “All right, what would you rather do?” she snapped with the temper of fear in her voice. “Forget it? Accept what the doctor said? Just sit back and—” A sob swallowed her words.
    The hand he put over hers was not a comforting one. It was as cold and almost as shaky as hers.
    “All right,” he murmured. “All right, Lou.”
    Later, while she was putting Beth to bed, he stood in the darkened living room watching the cars drive by on the street below. Except for the murmuring voices in the back bedroom, there was no sound in the apartment. The cars swished and hummed past the building, their headlights probing ahead at the dark pavement.
    He was thinking about his application for life insurance. It had been part of the plan in coming East. First working for his brother, then applying for a GI loan with the idea of becoming a partner in Marty’s business. Acquiring life and medical insurance, a bank account,a decent car, clothes, eventually a house. Building a structure of security around himself and his family.
    Now this, disrupting the plan. Threatening to destroy it altogether.
    He didn’t know at what precise second the question came to him. But suddenly it was terribly there and he was staring fixedly at his upheld, spread-fingered hands, his heart throbbing and swollen in an icy trap.
    How long could he go on shrinking?

C HAPTER
T HREE
    Finding water to drink was not a problem for him. The tank near the electric pump had a minute leak on its bottom surface. Beneath its dripping he placed a thimble he had carried once from a sewing box in a cardboard carton underneath the fuel-oil tank. The thimble was always overflowing with crystal well water.
    It was food that was the problem now. The quarter loaf of stale bread he’d been eating for the past five weeks was gone now. He’d finished the last crunchy scraps of it for his evening meal, washed it down with water. Bread and cold water had been his diet since he’d been imprisoned in the cellar.
    He walked slowly across the darkening floor, moving toward the white, cobwebbed tower that stood near the steps leading up to the closed cellar doors. The last of the daylight filtered through the grime-streaked windows—the one that overlooked the sand hills of the spider’s territory, the one over the fuel tank, and the one over the log pile. The pale illumination fell in wide gray bars across the concrete floor, forming a patchwork of light and darkness through which he walked. In a little while the cellar would be a cold pit of night.
    He had mused for many hours on the possibility of somehow managing to reach the string that dangled over the floor and pulling down on it so the dust-specked bulb would light, driving away the terror of blackness. But there was no way of reaching the string. It hung, for him, a hundred feet above his head, completely unattainable.
    Scott Carey walked around the dull white vastness of the refrigerator. It had been stored there since they’d first moved to the house—was it only months before? It seemed a century.
    It was the old-fashioned type of refrigerator, one whose coils wereencased in a cylindrical enclosure on its top. There was an open box of crackers beside that cylinder. As far as he knew, it was the only food remaining in the entire cellar.
    He’d known the cracker box was on the refrigerator even before he’d become trapped down there. He’d left it there for himself one afternoon long before. No, not so long before, as time went. But, somehow, days seemed longer now. It was as if hours were designed for normal people. For anyone smaller, the hours were proportionately