The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

with a leaping mist that covered him. He ran.
    At the far end of the box he stopped and turned, looking dizzily at the huge drops splattering on the wax paper. He pressed a palm against his skull. It had been like getting hit with a cloth-wrapped sledge hammer.
    “Oh, my God,” he muttered hoarsely, sliding down the wax-paper wall until he was sitting in the mush, hands pressed to his head, eyes closed, tiny whimperings of pain in his throat.
    He had eaten, and his sore throat felt much better. He had drunk the drops of water clinging, to the wax paper. Now he was collecting a pile of crumbs.
    First he had kicked an opening in the heavy wax paper, then squeezed in behind its rustling smoothness. After eating, he’d begun to carry dry crumbs out, piling them on the bottom of the box.
    That done, he kicked and tore out handholds in the wax paper so he could climb back to the top. He made the ascent carrying one or two crumbs at a time, depending on their size. Up the wax-paper ladder, over the lip of the box, down the handholds he had formerly ripped in the paper wrapping of the box. He did that for an hour.
    Then he squeezed his way behind the wax-paper lining, searching for any crumbs he might have missed. But he hadn’t missed any except for one fragment the size of his little finger, which he picked up and chewed on as he finished his circuit of the box and emerged from the opening again.
    He looked over the interior of the box once more, but there was nothing salvageable. He stood in the middle of the cracker ruins, hands on hips, shaking his head. At best, he’d got only two days’ food out of all his work. Thursday he would be without any again.
    He threw off the thought. He had enough concerns; he’d worry about it when Thursday came. He climbed out of the box.
    It was a lot colder outside. He shivered with a hunching up of shoulders. Though he’d wrung out as much as possible, his robe was still wet from the splattering drops.
    He sat on the thick tangle of rope, one hand on his pile of hard-won cracker crumbs. They were too heavy to carry all the way down. He’d have to make a dozen trips at least, and that was out of the question. Unable to resist, he picked up a fist-thick crumb and munched on it contentedly while he thought about the problem of getting his food down.
    At last, realizing there was only one way, he stood with a sigh and turned back to the box. Should use wax paper, he thought. Well, thehell with that; it was going to last only two days at the most.
    With a straining of arm and back muscles, feet braced against the side of the box, he tore off a jagged piece of paper about the size of a small rug. This he dragged back to the edge of the refrigerator top and laid out flat. In the center of it he arranged his crumbs into a cone-shaped pile, then wrapped them up until he had a tight, carefully sealed package about as high as his knees.
    He lay on his stomach peering over the edge of the refrigerator. He was higher off the floor now than he’d been on the distant cliff that marked the boundary of the spider’s territory. A long drop for his cargo. Well, they were already crumbs; it would be no loss if they became smaller crumbs. The package wasn’t likely to open during the fall; that was all that mattered.
    Briefly, despite the cold, he looked out over the cellar.
    It certainly made a difference, being fed. The cellar had, for the moment anyway, lost its barren menace. It was a strange, cool land shimmering with rain-blurred light, a kingdom of verticals and horizontals, of grays and blacks relieved only by the dusty colors of stored objects. A land of roars and rushings, of intermittent sounds that shook the air like many thunders. His land.
    Far below he saw the giant woman looking up at him, still leaning on her rock, frozen for all time in her posture of calculated invitation.
    Sighing, he pushed back and stood. No time to waste; it was too cold. He got behind his bundle and, stooping