The Shrinking Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

throws and the wooden bar caught between two strips of latticework shelf. He pulled himself up.
    Stretched out limply on the shelf, he lay there panting. Then, after a few minutes, he sat up and looked down at what to him was a fifty-foot drop. Already he was tired, and the climb had barely started.
    Far across the cellar the pump began its sibilant chugging again, and he listened to it while he looked up at the wide canopy of the tabletop a hundred feet above.
    “Come on,” he muttered hoarsely to himself then. “Come on, come on, come on, come on.”
    He got to his feet. Taking a deep breath, he flung the stick up at the next joining place of leg and twining strip.
    He had to leap aside as the throw missed and the wood fell toward him heavily. His right leg slipped into a gap in the latticework and he had to clutch at the crosspieces to keep from plunging to the floor below.
    He hung there for a long moment, one leg dangling in space. Then, groaning, he pulled and pushed himself to a standing position, wincing at the pain in the back muscles of his right leg. He must have sprained it, he thought. He clenched his teeth and hissed out a long breath. Sore throat, sprained leg, hunger, weariness. What next?
    It took twelve muscle-jerking throws of the wooden bar to get it into the proper opening above. Pulling back until the thread grew taut in his grip, he dragged himself up the thirty-five foot space, teeth gritted, breath steaming out between them. He ignored each burning ache of muscle while he climbed; but when he reached the crotch, he wedged himself between the table leg and strip and half lay, half clung there, gasping for air, muscles throbbing visibly. I’ll have to rest, he told himself. Can’t go on. The cellar swam before his eyes.
    He had gone to visit his mother the week he was five-feet-three. The last time he’d seen her, he’d been six feet tall.
    Dread crawled in him, colder than the winter wind, as he walked up the Brooklyn street toward the two-family brownstone where his mother lived. Two boys were playing ball in the street. One of them missed the other’s throw. The ball bounced toward Scott, and he reached down to pick it up.
    The boy shouted, “Throw it here, kid!”
    Something like an electric shock jolted through his system. He flung the ball violently.
    The boy shouted, “Good throw, kid!”
    He walked on, ashen-faced.
    And the terrible hour with his mother. He remembered that.
    The way she kept avoiding the obvious, talking about Marty and Therese and their son, Billy; about Louise and Beth, about the quietly enjoyable life she was able to live on Marty’s monthly checks.
    She had set the table in her impeccable way, each dish and cup in its proper place, each cookie and cake arranged symmetrically. He sat down with her, feeling hollowly sick, the coffee scorching his throat, the cookies tasteless in his mouth.
    Then, finally, when it was too late, she had spoken of it. This thing, she said—he was being treated for it?
    He knew exactly what it was she wanted to hear and he mentioned the Center and the tests. Relief pressed out the extra worry lines in the rose-petal skin of her face. Good, she said, good. The doctors would cure him. The doctors knew everything these days; everything.
    And that was all.
    As he went home, he felt dazedly ill, because of all the reactions she might have shown to his affliction, the one she had shown was the last one in the world he could have imagined.
    Then, when he got home, Louise cornered him in the kitchen, insisting that he go back to the Center to finish the tests. She’d work, they’d put Beth in a nursery. It would work out fine. Her voice was firm in the beginning, obdurate; then it broke and all the withheld terror and unhappiness flooded from her.
    He stood by her side, arm around her back, wanting to comfort her but able only to look up at her face and struggle futilely against the depleted feeling he had at being so much shorter than she.