Guillermo del Toro: The Shape of Water

THEY SWAY AT the top of the fire escape, overweight with the creature between them. Elisa wears the quickest of coverings, her ratty pink bathrobe and the first shoes she saw, Julia’s silver-encrusted specials, which she grabbed like talismans, and sure enough she slips, her top half pitching over the guardrail. The creature, draped in a blanket that barely hides him, pulls her from the brink. Below, Elisa sees the Pug. Also below, a car wreck, a goliath green machine wedged between alley walls, blocking the Pug’s only exit path. Directly beneath them, out of view, she hears the knob of the Arcade Apartments being throttled, then the loud whacks of a shoe kicking the door, then a blast so loud all the raindrops freeze in place for one second, red light from the gunpowder flash transforming each drop into the blood of an expiring world.

The man’s footsteps race upstairs. Giles, in turn, pulls Elisa down the fire-escape stairs. Their descent is the opposite of their inchworm climb with the creature a week ago, a madcap scramble, feet slipping and bodies colliding. Elisa can only tuck her head into the creature’s neck and hold on to Giles’s sopping sweater. He leads them onward, fast, undaunted. His new hair is slicked to his head and the paintbrush in his breast pocket bleeds green through his shirt. Her heart, if punctured, would bleed green, too, she thinks.

They reach the alley with broken hearts, but not one broken bone.

“We’ll have to go on foot!” Giles cries over the downpour. “Just a few blocks! We can make it! No discussion! Go, go!”

The alley is its usual minefield of potholes. Elisa has never cared until now, when every other step plunges one of them shin-deep into oily water. There’s no time to unbuckle the silver heels. They progress like damaged pistons, one up, one down. It’s taking them far too long. Finally, they are at the crashed car, blinded by its headlights. Elisa crawls over the scrunched hood, then helps Giles hoist the creature. Giles is last, gathering the fallen blanket, wrapping it back around the creature, and shoving them onward. Elisa throws a look back at Mr. Arzounian, who gawks from the sidewalk, a hand pressed to his broken nose, perhaps believing that the strangest film he ever screened has come to life.

STRICKLAND SMELLS DEUS Brânquia. The memory floods back from the Amazon. The Gill-god’s scent of brine and fruit and silt. In Occam’s labs, antiseptic cleaners had blotted it out, and that had been a mistake. How stupid are humans to rob themselves of their most critical defensive sense? He knows who’s to blame. The janitors. Their soap, bleach, and ammonia weren’t wiping away the crud of this world. It was hiding a second world, an ascendant one, unless Strickland moves fast and puts an end to it.

Two apartment doors. He picks the first one. Doesn’t bother with hands or feet. He points the Beretta, fires at the knob. The door is of lousier quality than Delilah Brewster’s. The middle third of it disintegrates into sawdust. Strickland boots away the sharp-edged clingers and shoulders inside, gun raised, as prepared as he was at the bottom of the pile in Yeongdong to murder anything that breathes.

Deus Brânquia, colossal, beatific, resplendent, lords from the center of the cramped, dusty apartment. Strickland was wrong that he was ready. He isn’t. He screams, and falls to his knees, and fires, and screams, and fires, and screams. Bullets pass right through Deus Brânquia. The Gill-god doesn’t react. The gun goes hot in Strickland’s hands. His arms tremble from the discharges. He throws himself back against the wall and covers his face. Deus Brânquia gazes down at him, patient and unchanged.

Strickland wipes rain from his eyes, begins to understand. This Deus Brânquia isn’t real. Not in the sense of a thing that he can kill. It’s a painting. Bigger than life, disorienting in detail. It is Deus Brânquia, somehow, as if painted with Deus Brânquia’s blood and scales upon a rock dredged from Deus Brânquia’s grotto. Strickland angles his head and the picture of the Gill-god seems to lift its arms, offering embrace. Some kind of visual trick. Strickland rejects the memory. It barges in anyway. His chasing of Deus Brânquia to the fateful bayou. His cornering of it in a cave. How it had reached out to Strickland, accepting his violence, anger, and confusion, understanding the obligation Strickland felt to the god he called General Hoyt. Strickland, in reply, had harpooned Deus Brânquia. Until now, he’d never noticed that he’d impaled himself on the harpoon’s other end, binding the two of them forever, wound to wound.

ELISA CAN’T DENY that it is a form of miracle. The night she has no choice but to walk in public with the creature at her side is a night so brutally beset by sheeting rain that the streets are empty. Rogue automobiles idle in parking lots, drivers hoping to wait out a storm that they must suspect won’t ever end. Woeful loners huddle under bus-station carapaces or store awnings watching the water rise ever higher over their shoes. The sidewalks are impassable, so Elisa and Giles walk along the highest available ground, the center of the road, the creature supported between them, his gills opened to the rain.

She can barely walk under the soaked housecoat. Giles, though revived in spirit, is still old. They are not going quickly enough. The man in the Arcade Apartments will catch them. Elisa throws a look behind her, waiting to hear the crunch of the ruined Cadillac rolling after them like a tank or see Richard Strickland part curtains of rain, grinning lazily, saying to her, once again: I bet I could make you squawk. Just a little?

If not Strickland, some good citizen will approach to help, and all will be lost just the same. Elisa looks about frantically, hair spitting rain. One more miracle is all they need. An abandoned car with the keys in the ignition, a maniac bus driver still running his route. Elisa starts signing to Giles: “Too slow.” He isn’t looking. She reaches past the creature, drags the sign across Giles’s arm. He pats her hand, but it’s not a response. He’s trying to get her attention. He pulls to a sudden halt. The creature pitches, and Elisa nearly topples in her silver heels. Stopping is a terrible idea; she glares at Giles. But he is staring at the curb, eyes wide open against the downpour.

To their right, a dark mass gathers in the gutter. Mud, Elisa thinks, coughed up by inundated sewers. But the mass is moving. Swimming through cascades of rain. Scrabbling over wet pavement. Elisa identifies the creatures with a dull shock. Rats, pouring out of the flooded sewers. Far off, a horrified observer screams. The rats tussle past one another, pink tails twitching, spreading across the road like tar, wet pelts winking in the streetlights. Elisa looks left and it’s the same, a black ripple of rodents. She feels Giles clutch at her hand and she holds her breath as the rats encircle them. The madness intensifies: The rats stop en masse, holding a five-foot distance, black eyes staring, noses twitching. Hundreds now, waiting for a signal.

“I confess, my dear,” Giles says, “I do not know what to do.”

Elisa feels the creature stir from beneath the soaked blanket. A single huge, taloned hand emerges, and though his body heaves in a struggle for breath, the hand is steady. It makes a smooth, curling gesture, a benediction, the rain gathering in his scaled palm. The field of soaked rats undulate in a collective shiver, one small body to the next, and a strange scritching noise rises to compete with the beat of rain. It is the scrape, Elisa realizes, of a thousand minuscule legs backpedaling across pavement. She wipes rain from her eyes, but there is no mistaking it.