“Leave me alone,” he muttered feebly. “Leave me alone.” He drew in a whining breath. His eyes closed.
He twitched, woke.
The oil burner still roared. Was it the same roaring on which he had closed his eyes? Had seconds passed, or hours?
He sat up slowly, lightheaded and shaking. He lifted a trembling hand and touched his forehead. It was still hot. He rubbed the hand across his face, groaning deeply. Oh, God, I’m sick.
Weakly he pushed himself to the rim of the sponge and slid over the edge. His grip was so weak that it broke instantly and he thudded down on his feet, sitting down heavily with a startled grunt.
He sat on the cold cement a long moment, blinking, his torso weaving. His stomach rumbled with hunger. He tried to stand up. He had to lean against the sponge. Breath came from his nostrils in short, hot bursts. He swallowed. I need water. Tears ran down his cheeks. There was no water he could get. He hit the sponge with an impotent fist.
After a few minutes he stopped crying and, turning slowly, stumbled through the darkness until he collided with the box-top wall. It knocked him down. Muttering, he crawled to the box-top side again and, lifting it first with his hands and then with his back, he squeezed out from under.
It was like crawling into a refrigerator. A shudder rippled down his back. He stood up and leaned back against the box top.
It was afternoon; he had slept. Rays of sunlight were visible through the window over the log pile, the window that faced south. Two, three o’clock, he estimated. Another day was half gone; more than half.
He spun around and drove a strengthless punch into the cardboard wall. Pain stung his knuckles. He hit again. Damn you! He leaned his head against the side and rained in enervated blows, feeling the impact of each one leap up his arms, across his shoulders, down his back.
“Pointless, pointless, pointless, point—” In a wild, croaking voice he chanted the word on one breath until no sound came from him. Then his arms flopped to his sides like lengths of wood and he fell against the cardboard, eyes closed, twitching with jerking breaths.
When he finally turned, it was with a mind blanked to everything except water. He started across the floor slowly. I can’t go down to the tank, but I need water, he thought. But there isn’t any water anywhere else. There’s water that drips in the cracker box, but I can’t climb that high. But I need water. He walked, eyes down, hardly seeing. I need water.
He almost fell in the hole.
For a frightening instant, he wavered on the very edge of it. Then he caught himself and stepped back.
He got down on his knees and peered into the dark cavity drilled through the cement floor. It was like looking down a well, except that the well broke off about fifteen feet down and there was nothing but lightless void.
He poised his tilted head over the hole, listening. At first there was only the sound of his own labored breathing. Then, holding his breath, he began to hear another sound. The sound of softly dripping water.
It was a nightmare to lie there on his stomach, racked with thirst, and listen to the drip of unreachable water. His tongue kept stirring in his mouth, seeking to escape the imprisonment of his lips. He kept swallowing endlessly, hardly noticing the jabs of pain it caused.
For one moment he almost dived headfirst into the hole. I don’t care! he thought in a fury. I don’t care if I die!
What kept him from it he didn’t know. Whatever it was, it was below consciousness, for on the surface he was angrily determined to plunge into the well-like hole and find that water.
But he drew back from the hole and got on his knees again. He hesitated. Then he fell forward again and listened to the sound, almost inhaling it like air. He moaned. He pushed to his knees once more, stood dizzily, and then began walking away from the drainage hole. He turned and walked back to the brink of it. He swung a foot over it, staring down into its unseeable depths.
“Oh, God, why don’t you…”
He turned and walked away from the hole on rigid legs, hands clenched into fists at his sides. 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?
He thought it was a red wall at first. He stopped in front of it, staring at it. He prodded it. Not stone or wood. It was the hose.
He walked around its serpentine bulk until he came to one end of it. There he stared into the long, shadowy tunnel curving away from him. He stepped up onto the metal ring and stood in a groove, thinking. Sometimes when you picked up a hose water dripped from the end of it.
With a gasp, he started running clumsily down the smooth-floored tunnel, banging into hard walls where the hose twisted abruptly, racing as fast as he could along the winding labyrinth of it. Until, curving to the right for what seemed to be the hundredth time, he found himself ankle-deep in cold liquid. With a grateful sob, he squatted down and lifted trembling palmfuls of the water to his lips. It tasted stale and it hurt his throat to swallow, but he had never gulped the finest wine so eagerly.
Thank God! he kept thinking. Thank God! All the water I need now. All I need! He grunted, almost in amusement, thinking of the many times he’d climbed down that fool thread to the water tank. What an ass he’d been! Well, it didn’t matter now. He was all right now.
It wasn’t until he began walking back along the tunnel that he realized it had been, at best, a reactive triumph. How different did it make the situation, how better off? His minuscule existence was preserved a little longer, yes. He would see the end of it intact; but the end would come. Was that a triumph?
Or would he see the end of it?
As he emerged into the cellar again, he realized how weak with sickness he was; worse, how weak with hunger. The sickness he might alleviate with rest and sleep, but to hunger there was only one answer.
His gaze moved to the towering cliff.
He stood there in the shadow of the hose, looking up at the place where the spider lived. One piece of food remained in the cellar; he knew that much for sure. One slice of dried-up bread; more than enough to keep him for the last two days. And it was up there.
It came upon him with annihilating simplicity. He hadn’t the strength to climb up there. Even if he could, by some incredible extension of will power, make it up the cliff, there was the spider. And he hadn’t the courage to face the spider again. Not a black, scuttling horror three times the size of him.
His head fell forward. Then that was it; that was the decision he must accept. He stepped away from the hose and started across the floor toward the sponge. What decision was there but that? Was there, after all, a choice? Wasn’t it out of his hands, inexorable? He was three-sevenths of an inch tall. What could he hope to do?
Something made him look again at the cliff face.
The giant spider was running down the wall.
With a body-jarring gasp, Scott fled across the floor. Before the spider had reached the bottom of the cliff, he had squeezed beneath the edge of the box top and climbed onto the sponge. When the spider clambered, black and bulbous, onto the box top, he was waiting for the sound of it, his teeth jammed so hard together that his jaws ached.
There could be no hope of food, then; not with that quivering black cannibal guarding it. He closed his eyes, sobs dragging at his throat, hearing overhead the scratching, scrabbling movements of the spider.
C HAPTER
E LEVEN
As in a dream, delirium-driven, he was back again at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, being tested.
Voice a crispness, voice a hollow waver, Dr. Silver told him that no, he did not have acromicria, as had first been suspected. Yes, there was the bodily shrinkage, but no, his pituitary gland was not diseased. There was no loss of hair, no cyanosis of extremities, no bluish discoloration of skin, no suppressed sexual function.
There were urinary-excretion tests to establish the amounts of creatin and creatinine in his system; important tests, because th
ey would tell much about the functioning of his testes, his adrenals, about the balance of nitrogen in his body.
Discovery: You have a negative nitrogen balance, Mr. Carey. Your body is throwing off more nitrogen than it is retaining. Since nitrogen is one of the major building blocks of the body, consequently, we have shrinkage.
An imbalance of creatinine was causing further involution. Phosphorus and calcium were being thrown off, too, in the precise proportion in which those elements were found in his bones.
ACTH was administered, possibly to check the catabolic breakdown of tissue.
ACTH was ineffective.
There was much discussion about a possible dosage of pituitary extract. “It might enable his body to retain nitrogen and cause the disposition of new protein,” they murmured.
It seemed there was danger, though. The response of the human body to administered growth hormone is not ascertainable; even the best extracts are poorly tolerated and often give abberant results.
“I don’t care. I want it. Can I be worse off?” he said.
Dosage administered.
Negative.
Something was combating the extract.
At last the paper chromatography; the capillary trailing of body elements across paper, the specific gravity of each one causing it to stain a different part of the paper.
And a new element was found in his system. A new toxin.
Tell us something, they said. Were you ever exposed to any kind of germ spray? No, not bacterial warfare. Have you, for instance, ever been accidentally sprayed with a great deal of insecticide?
No remembrance at first; just a fluttering amorphous terror. Then sudden recollection. Los Angeles, a Saturday afternoon in July. He had come out of the house, heading for the store. He had walked through a tree-lined alley, between rows of houses. A city truck had turned in suddenly, spraying the trees. The spray misted over him, burning on his skin, stinging his eyes, blinding him momentarily. He yelled at the driver.
Could that possibly be the cause of all this?
No, not that. They told him so. That was only the beginning of it. Something happened to that spray, something fantastic and unheard of; something that converted a mildly virulent insecticide into a deadly growth-destroying poison.
And so they searched for that something, asking endless questions, constantly-probing into his past.
Until, in a second, it came. He remembered the afternoon on the boat, the mist washing over him, the acid sting on his body.
A spray impregnated with radiation.
And that was it; the search was over at last. An insect spray hideously altered by radiation. A one-in-a-million chance. Just that amount of insecticide coupled with just that amount of radiation, received by his system in just that sequence and with just that timing; the radiation dissipating quickly, becoming unnoticeable.
Only the poison left.
A poison that, without destroying the pituitary gland, destroyed, little by little, its ability to maintain growth. A poison that day by day forced his system to convert nitrogen into excess waste matter; a poison that affected creatinine and phosphorus and calcium and left them as waste to be thrown off. A poison that decalcified his bones so that, soft and pliant, they could shrink, little by little. A poison that nullified any administered hormone extract by causing antihormone action in direct opposition.
A poison that made him, little by little, the shrinking man.
The search over at last? Not really. Because there was only one way to fight a toxin, and that was with an antitoxin.
So they’d sent him home. And while he waited there, they sought the antitoxin that might save him.
***
At his sides, hands folded into gnarled fists. Why, asleep or waking, did he have to think about those days of waiting? Those days when his very body was continuously tensed for the sound of a knock on the door, the sudden stridency of the telephone ringing. It had been a free fall of the mind, taut consciousness never finding a base to settle on, but hanging in constant suspense, waiting.
The countless trips to the post office, where he’d rented a box so he could get two and three deliveries a day, instead of only one. That cruel walk from the apartment to the post office, wanting to run and still walking, his body twitching with his desperate desire to run. Entering the post office, hands numb, heart pounding. Crossing the marble floor, stooping and looking into the box. And, when there were letters, his hands shaking so badly that he could barely slide the key into the lock. Jerking out the letters, gaze stabbing at the return addresses. No letter from the Center. The sudden feeling that life was gone from him, his feet and legs were running into the floor like candle wax.
And when they’d moved to the lake the suffering was even worse, because then he had to wait for Lou to go to the post office—standing at the front window, hands shaking when he saw her come walking back down the street. He would know she had no letter because she walked so slowly, and yet he would be unable, until she actually said so, to believe that no letter had come.
He pitched over on his stomach and bit into the sponge savagely. It was so horribly true that thought was his undoing. To be unaware; dear God, to be joyously unaware. To be able to rip the tissues of his brain away and let them drip like clouded paste from his fingertips. Why couldn’t—
His breath stopped. He reared up sharply, ignoring the sudden throb of pain in his head.
Music.
“Music?” He murmured faintly. How could there be music in the cellar?
Then he knew; it wasn’t in the cellar, but upstairs. Louise was playing music on the radio: Brahms’ First Symphony. He leaned on his elbows, lips parted, holding his breath and listening to the sturdy beat of the symphony’s opening phrase. It was barely audible, as though he stood in the lobby of a concert hall hearing the orchestra through closed doors.
Breath escaped finally, but he did not move. His face was still, eyes unblinking. It was still the same world, then, and he was still a part of it. The connecting sound of music told him so. Upstairs, gigantically remote, Louise was listening to that music. Below, incredibly minute, he was listening too. And it was music to both of them, and it was beauty.
He remembered how, toward the end of his stay in the house, he had been incapable of listening to music unless it was played so low that Lou couldn’t even hear it. Otherwise the music was magnified into a clubbing noise at his ears, giving him a headache. The clatter of a dish was a knife jab at his brain. The sudden cry or laughter of Beth assailed him like a gun fired beside his ear, making his face contort, making him cover his ears.
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.
The music stopped. His gaze jerked up as if he might see, in the darkness, the reason for its stopping.
He lay there, silent, listening to the muffled voice of the woman who had been his wife. His heart seemed to stop. For a moment he was really part of that old world again.
His lips formed the name Lou.
21″
Because the summer ended, the teen-aged girl who had worked at the lake grocery store had to return to school. The opening had been given to Lou, who had applied for it a month before.
Vaguely she’d thought that Scott would take care of Beth when she got a job. But now it was painfully clear that, barely reaching the height of Beth’s chest, he couldn’t take care of her at all. Moreover, he refused to try. So she made arrangements with a neighborhood girl who had left high school. The girl agreed to take care of Beth while Lou was working.
“Lord knows, we won’t have much money left after paying her,” Lou had said, “but I guess there’s no alternative.”
He’d said nothing. Not even when she told him that, as much as she hated to say it, he’d have to stay in the cellar during the day unless he wanted the girl to know who he was; for, obviously, he couldn’t pass for a child. He’d only shrugged hi
s dainty shoulders and left the room without a word.
Before Lou left for work the first morning, she prepared sandwiches and two thermos bottles—one of coffee, one of water—for Scott. He sat at the kitchen table, propped up on two thick pillows, his pencil-thin fingers partially curled around a mug of steaming coffee, his face giving no indication that he heard a word she was saying to him.
“This should last you easily,” she was saying. “Take a book with you; read. Take naps. It won’t be so bad. I’ll be home early.”
He stared at the circles of cream floating like oil drops on the coffee. He twisted the cup very slowly on its saucer. It made a squeaking sound that he knew irritated Lou.
“Now remember what I told you, Beth,” Lou said. “Don’t say a word about Daddy. Not a word. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Beth nodded.
“What did I say?” Lou demanded.
“I don’t say a word about Daddy.”
“About the freako,” Scott mumbled.
“What?” Lou asked, looking at him. He stared into the coffee. She didn’t pursue it; he had fallen into the habit of muttering to himself since they’d moved to the lake.
After breakfast, Lou went down to the cellar with him, carrying one of the lawn chairs for him to sit on. She pulled down her suitcase from a pile of boxes between the fuel tank and the refrigerator and set it on the floor. She put two chair cushions in it.
“There, you can take a nice nap there,” she said.
“Like a dog,” he muttered.
“What?”
He looked at her like a bellicose doll.
“I don’t think the girl will try to come down,” she went on. “Then again, she might be nosy. Maybe I’d better put the lock on the door.”
“No.”
“But what if the girl comes down?”
“I don’t want the door locked!”
“But, Scott, what if—”
“I don’t want the door locked!”
Richard Matheson Suspense Novels Page 12
