The Shrinking Man Read Online Free

back.”
    “You’re angry and hurt, Scott. That’s why you won’t go back.”
    “I won’t go back because it’s pointless!” he shouted.
    They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then she said, “Scott, do you really believe I’d hold my own security above your health?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “
Do
you?”
    “Why talk about it?” he said.
    The next morning, Saturday, he received the sheaf of application papers from the life-insurance company and tore them into pieces and threw the pieces into the wastebasket. Then he went for a long, miserable walk. And while he was out he thought about God creating heaven and earth in seven days.
    He was shrinking a seventh of an inch a day.
    It was quiet in the cellar. The oil burner had just shut itself off, the clanking wheeze of the water pump had been silenced for an hour. He lay under the cardboard box top listening to the silence, exhausted but unable to rest. An animal life without an animal mind did not induce the heavy, effortless sleep of an animal.
    The spider came about eleven o’clock.
    He didn’t know it was eleven, but there was still the heavy thudding of footsteps overhead, and he knew Lou was usually in bed by midnight.
    He listened to the sluggish rasping of the spider across the box top, down one side, up another, searching with terrible patience for an opening.
    Black widow. Men called it that because the female destroyed and ate the male, if she got the chance, after one mating act.
    Black widow. Shiny black, with the constricted rectangle of scarlet on its egg-shaped abdomen; what was called its “hour-glass.” A creature with a highly developed nervous system, possessing memory. A creature whose poison was twelve times as deadly as a rattlesnake’s.
    The black widow clambered over the box top under which he was hiding and the spider was almost as big as he. In a few days it
would
be as big; then, in another few days, bigger. The thought made him sick. How could he escape it then?
    I have to get out of here! he thought desperately.
    His eyes fell shut, his muscles clamping slowly in admission of his helplessness. He’d been trying to get out of the cellar for five weeksnow. What chance had he now, when he was one sixth the size he’d been when he had first been trapped there?
    The scratching came again, this time
under
the cardboard.
    There was a slight tear in one side of the box top; enough to admit one of the spider’s seven legs.
    He lay there shuddering, listening to the spiny leg scratching at the cement like a razor on sandpaper. It never came closer than five inches from the bed, but it gave him nightmares. He clamped his eyes shut.
    “Get out of here!” he screamed. “Get out of here, get
out
of here!”
    His voice rang shrilly underneath the cardboard enclosure. It made his eardrums hurt. He lay there trembling violently while the spider scratched and jumped and clambered insanely around the box top, trying to get in.
    Twisting around, he buried his face in the rough wrinkles of the handkerchief covering the sponge. If I could only kill it! his mind screamed in anguish. At least his last days would be peaceful then.
    About an hour later, the scratching stopped and the spider went away. Once more he became conscious of his sweat-dewed flesh, the coldness and the twitching of his fingers. He lay drawing in convulsive breaths through his parted lips, weak from the rigid struggle against horror.
    Kill him? The thought turned his blood to ice.
    A little while later he sank into a troubled, mumbling sleep, and his night was filled with the torment of awful dreams.

C HAPTER
F OUR
    His eyes fluttered open.
    Instinct alone told him that the night was over. Beneath the box it was still dark. With an indrawn groan in his chest, he pushed up from the sponge bed and stood gingerly until he shouldered the cardboard surface. Then he edged to one corner and, pushing up hard, slid the box top away from his bed.
    Out in the other world, it was