The Shrinking Man

by Richard Matheson

He limped slowly past the silent steel tower, which was an oil burner; past the huge red serpent, which was a nozzle-less garden hose clumsily coiled on the floor, past the wide cushion whose case was covered with flower designs; past the immense orange structure, which was a stack of two wooden lawn chairs; past the great croquet mallets hanging in their racks.

He’d thought about it a thousand times in the past year and a half, trying to visualize it. He’d never been able to. Invariably, his mind had rebelled against it, rationalizing: the injections would start to work now, the process would end by itself, something would happen. It was impossible that he could ever be so small that… Yet he was; so small that in six days he would be gone.

The despair had never really gone. How could it? For no matter what adjustment he thought he was making, it was obviously impossible to adjust, because there had never been a tapering or a leveling off. The process had gone on and on, ceaseless.

Why did he run from the spider? Why not let it catch him? The thing would be out of his hands then. It would be a hideous death, but it would be quick; despair would be ended. And yet he kept fleeing from it, and improvising and struggling and existing. Why?

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.

somehow, days seemed longer now. It was as if hours were designed for normal people. For anyone smaller, the hours were proportionately magnified.

In six days reality would be blotted out for him—not by death, but a hideously simple act of disappearance. For what reality could there be at zero inches?

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.

Why, then? Was it part of his previous resolution to follow the descent to its very end? If so, it was pointless now. No one else would know of it.

It’s only a spider, he told himself. It’s not a master tactician.

For a moment the entire grotesque spectacle of it swept over him forcibly—the insanity of a world where he could be killed trying to climb to the top of a table that any normal man could lift and carry with one hand.

He looked out across the broad vista of the cellar kingdom in which he lived. Far across—almost a mile away—he saw the cliff edge, the stacked lawn chairs, the croquet set.

Then, impulsively, he laid his cheek against her shoulder. Wrong move, his mind said instantly. It made him feel even smaller, like a young boy leaning on his mother. He stayed there, though, thinking it would be too obviously awkward if he straightened up immediately.

And he’d rather have died than tell her that the weight of her arm across his shoulders was hurting him.

Poets and philosophers could talk all they wanted about a man’s being more than fleshly form, about his essential worth, about the immeasurable stature of his soul. It was rubbish.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction. Mostly it hurt….

He still lived, but was his living considered, or only an instinctive survival? Yes, he still struggled for food and water, but wasn’t that inevitable if he chose to go on living? What he wanted to know was this: Was he a separate, meaningful person; was he an individual? Did he matter? Was it enough just to survive?

He thought again of the newspaper stories, and of how sick it had made him to become a spectacle, how it had driven him into nerve-screaming wrath, making him maniacal with fury against his plight. Until, at the peak of that fury, he had sped to the city and told the paper he was breaking his contract, and stormed away in a palsy of hatred.

“Thanks, mister.” It was a form of masochism, Scott knew, this playing the role of boy to its very hilt.

“You see,” he asked, “what I mean to say, dear boy? Do you?” Scott looked out the window. I’m tired, he thought. I want to go to bed and forget who I am and what’s happening to me.

“You’re not going to beat me,” he said, he hadn’t the slightest idea to whom. His teeth jammed together and it was defiance and a challenge that he hurled. “You’re not going to beat me!” He grabbed up handfuls of the soggy cracker and carried it up to the dry safety of the first black metal shelf of the water heater.

Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures. Responsibility in the jungle world was pared to the bone of basic survival. There were no political connivings necessary, no financial arenas to struggle in, no nerve-knotting races for superior rungs on the social ladder. There was only to be or not to be.

To love someone when there was nothing to be got from that person; that was love.

Far up—so far he had to squint to see—was its face: nose like a precipitous slope that he could ski on; nostrils and ears like caves into which he could climb;

It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t know what he was going to do when he got out in the yard. If it was so cold, wouldn’t he freeze to death?

In a matter of days it would all be over. He would be gone. Why all this exertion, then? Why this pretense at continuing an existence that was already doomed?

Pretty much true shrinking or not. Death.

If the spider came… Well, what did it matter? It reminded him of a time, long before, when he had been with the Infantry in Germany. He’d been so tired that he’d gone to sleep without digging a foxhole, knowing it might mean his death.

“Scott,” she said. Falsely applied affection, he thought. “Sit down. Staring out the window won’t help Marty’s business.” He spoke without turning. “You think that’s what I’m worried about?” “Isn’t it? Isn’t it what we’re both—” “It isn’t,” he cut her off coldly. Coldness in a little boy’s voice sounded bizarre—as if he were acting out a part in a grade-school play, unconvincing and laughable.

“I swear to God, if you don’t get rid of that goddam cat, I’ll kill it!” Fury from a doll, his voice not manlike and authoritative, but frail and uncompelling. “Scott, she’s not hurting you.” He dragged up a sleeve. “What’s that? Imagination?” He pointed to a ragged scar. “She was frightened when she did that.” “Well, I’m frightened too! What does she have to do, rip open my throat before you get rid of her?”

He spent that day in the living room, staring at the same page of the book he was supposedly reading.

There was another point, he decided, a point below that at which a man either laughed or broke. There was one more step down to the level of absolute negation. He was there now. He didn’t care about anything. Beyond the simple plane of bodily function, there was nothing.

I’m going to die anyway, what’s the difference? I’ll die. Who cares? He stopped, biting his lip savagely. No, that was the old way. It was the childish way, the “I’ll punish the world by dying” attitude.

It would have been so much better if his brain had lost its toxic introspections long before. Much better if he could have concluded life as a true bug instead of being fully conscious each hideous, downward step of the way. Awareness of the shrinking was the curse, not the shrinking.

He wondered what would happen if he died now. Would his body keep shrinking?

There’s no point! he wanted to scream. Why shouldn’t he go down the hole? Why not, like some grotesque, latter-day Alice, plunge into yet another world?

And that was it; the search was over at last. An insect spray hideously altered by radiation. A one-in-a-million chance.

Brahms. To lie like a mote, an insignificance in a cellar, listening to Brahms. If life itself were not fantastic, that moment could be labeled so.

Every day it’s going to be the same, he thought; sandwiches and coffee in the cellar, a good-by peck on the head, exit, door lowering, lock snapping shut.

Drunk I am and drunk I mean to stay, he thought. He wondered why it had never occurred to him before.

“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?”

He stopped before the looming mass of the carton. Once, he thought, he had kicked open its side himself. At the time, it had been an act of rage, of frustration turned to acid fury. How odd that an ancient fury was making it easier for him now; that it had, indeed, saved his life more than once. For hadn’t he got two thimbles from that carton, one that he’d put under the water tank, and another that he’d put under the dripping water heater? Hadn’t he got the material for his robe from the carton?

He had walked through the glittering unreality of another carnival, overjoyed with a life that built such wonders overnight on empty lots.

Something wicked

On his side, he saw a six-legged dog; (two of the legs atrophied stumps), a cow with skin like a human being’s, a goat with three legs and four horns, a pink horse, and a fat pig that had adopted a thin chicken. He looked over the assemblage, the faint smile wavering on his lips. Monster show, he thought. And then the smile faded. Because it had occurred to him how remarkable an exhibit he would make, posed, say, between the chicken-mothering pig and the dead two-headed cow. Scott Carey, Homo reductus.

He felt his skin alive with strange, electric pricklings. He couldn’t help himself; he moved up the last two steps and stood before the door. Breath stopped. It was his world, his very own world—chairs and a couch that he could sit on without being engulfed; tables he could stand beside and reach across instead of walk under;

He saw the words that were on the door: “Mrs. Tom Thumb.” He stood there staring at her with a strange, black hunger.

“Nothing,” he said. Then, almost immediately, “I want to stay. I’m going to stay.” “Stay where, Scott?” she asked. He swallowed quickly, angrily. Why did he have to feel like a fool, like an unimportant fool? It had seemed so vital before; now it seemed absurd and trashy.

“There’s a woman,” he said, not looking up at her. She was silent. He glanced up at her. In the light of a distant street lamp he could see the glow of her eyes. “You mean that midget in the sideshow?” He shuddered. The way she said it, the sound in her voice, made his desire seem vile.

Even this woman will one day be as… be beyond me. But now—for now, Lou—she’s companionship—and affection and love. All right, and love! I don’t deny it, I can’t help it. I may be a freak but I still need love

He wrote so persistently that in a matter of weeks he had brought himself up to date on his life as the shrinking man.

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.