Guillermo del Toro - The Shape of Water

The rats are parting, creating a path to let them pass.

The creature drops his hand and slumps so heavily that Elisa and Giles have to snap together to keep him from collapsing.

“‘It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast,’” Giles quotes, his voice trembling. “W. C. Fields.” He swallows, nods at the road ahead. “Together, then, we go. Into the fray.”

MOLTEN TEARS BLAZE down Strickland’s face, already burned from the Caddy’s steam. He will not become a human again. Changing would be crawling back into the womb, voiding his whole history, confessing to a purposeless life. Impossible, no matter how badly he might want it. The monkeys shriek and he does what they say, forcing himself to look at Deus Brânquia. Mere paint, mere canvas. He stands, finds equilibrium. Yes, that’s right. If he has to, he’ll yank off another two fingers, a whole arm, his own head, anything to see the blood flow and prove which one of them is real.

Strickland passes through the splintered door into a hallway uproarious with rain, and faces the second apartment. Best to save bullets. Six or seven kicks and he’s inside. It’s worse than Lainie’s unpacked boxes. It’s a slovenly hole fit for vermin. That’s all Elisa Esposito is. The second the Negro told him how Elisa had been raised in an orphanage, he should have known. No one has ever, will ever, or should ever want her.

He follows her smell into a cluttered bedroom. The wall over the bed is covered with shoes, many of which, to his shame, he recognizes. His cock responds, and he wants to rip it off the same as he did his fingers. Maybe later, when he comes back to watch the whole building burn. Deus Brânquia’s smell is thick here, too. He hurries to the bathroom, finds a tub varnished in luminous scales. Little air-freshener trees cover every inch of wall. What in the holy hell happened here? The idea he’s beginning to form disgusts him.

Strickland teeters into the main room. His vision spirals. They’re not here. Somehow the asset got away. The Beretta grows heavy in his hand. It pulls him to the right, to the right, in one circle, then another. He’s spinning. The detritus of Elisa’s world, the world he once wanted, swirls into an ugly brown. He glimpses something, has just enough sense left to notice it. He has to jam the gun against a rattletrap table to halt the nauseating rotations.

A day-by-day calendar. Inked across today’s date are the words MIDNIGHT—THE DOCKS . Strickland checks the clock above the table. Not quite twelve. There’s still time. Still time if he can stop spinning, if he can run in a straight line. He snatches a phone from its cradle on the table, dials with a finger that looks long and insectile next to its missing brethren. Fleming picks up. Strickland tries to tell him to divert the containment crew, coming all the way from Occam, to the docks just down the street. He can’t tell if his instruction succeeds. His voice no longer sounds like his own.

“****** ******** ** *** *****! ******* **** *** ******! ***, ***, ***!”

THE RATS WERE all she noted at first because they so outnumbered the rest. By the time she sets her foot on the jetty, her dazed eyes have accepted other subterrestrial dwellers among the palpitating legion, predators and prey alongside one another in a cross-species peace that imitates that of Elisa and the creature. Matted squirrels, red-eyed rabbits, ponderous raccoons, sewage-stained foxes, bounding frogs, scampering lizards, glissading snakes, and, squirming beneath them all, a layer of worms, centipedes, and slugs. Insects churn above the rolling rodentia, a black stripe that persists even through the driving rain. On the periphery, overland animals have begun to arrive, too. Dogs, cats, ducks, a single mysterious pig, drawn forth as if to bow before a god that they, in their beastly hearts, had always awaited.

The animals peel from the jetty to let the trio pass. The pier is as short as Elisa remembers, maybe forty feet, though that is plenty. The thirty-foot depth mark has been far surpassed; only the top of the stanchion is visible. The river level is mere inches below the jetty and it bucks in the storm, spilling across the planks. Here it is, then. All elements are aligned. Yet Elisa stands still, rain drilling into her flesh. Her breaths come in scraping jags; she realizes that they resemble the creature’s labored pull of air through his flapping gills. She feels a hand on her wet back.

“Hurry,” Giles whispers.

She cries, but so does the sky; the whole universe sobs, the people and animals and land and water, all weeping for a unity nearly sealed between two divergent worlds, but that could not, in the end, be sustained. Elisa’s arms dangle at her sides and she feels the cool, damp scales of the creature’s hand slide against hers. They are holding hands. For one final time, they are joined. Elisa looks at his beautiful face through the prison bars of rain. Great onyx eyes gaze back, betraying no inclination to take to water, despite how the absence will kill him. He will stand here forever if that’s what she wants.

So she walks. To save his life, she walks. One step, two steps, wading through the sloshing water. Over the storm’s blast, she can make out the chattering retreat of the beasts, as well as the splashing footsteps of Giles, her sole follower. Forty feet doesn’t take long. Elisa finds herself at the end, the very end. The square toes of her silver shoes align to the edge of the jetty. The creature’s feet line up as well, his toe claws jutting over the perimeter. Inches below, black water spumes. Elisa takes a deep, salty breath and turns to him. Gusts of apocalyptic wind catch her pink bathrobe and rip free the belt, and the coat flutters about her naked body like butterfly wings.

He glows green. His light lanterns through the rain, pulsing like a lighthouse. Even now, Elisa’s breath is stolen away. She tries to smile. She nods at the water. The creature surveys the depths; his green glows brighter and she sees his gills yawn in yearning. He looks back at her, liquid coursing from his face. Can he cry? She believes he can, though his sobs do not come from his chest. Thunder rumbles from above: That is his cry. He releases her hand, slowly, gingerly. He signs her name, his favorite word, E-L-I-S-A, then folds his own webbed hand so that he can gesture the index finger from his chest to the water. He then turns the finger in a counterclockwise circle.

The signs, though clumsy, read: “Go alone?”

The broken parts of Elisa’s heart break further. For how long has the creature been the last of his kind? How long has he swum alone? She can’t let herself be deterred. She nods, points at the water. He signs again, a pinching gesture: “No.” She flings her arms downward in frustration. He keeps signing, faster now, he’s learned so much: “I need”—but she doesn’t let him finish, she can’t bear it, she needs, too, but their needs can’t matter, and she pushes him, and his body twists toward the water, nearly falling. His blue eyeshine swirls with green. His shoulders curl inward. He stares down at the water. He turns to face it. She is glad, for she doesn’t want him to see her fingers, which, though kept at her side, act on their own, signing, “Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay.”

“Elisa,” Giles cries. “Elisa!”

THE VERÃO, THE dry season, is over. The wet season, with its secret name, its secret purpose, has returned. There is no mistaking it. Rats, lizards, snakes, flies, a world made wholly of living, breathing things. They glint evil eyes, open fanged mouths. They come at him. The monkeys in his head shriek their orders, each of them just as secret. He’s a loyal solider. He is the asset, their asset. He roars and runs, kicking and thrashing against rabid squirrels clinging to his pants, manic rats biting into his calves. They can’t stop him. He, Jungle-god, delivers punishment, cracking brittle skulls beneath his heels, throttling tiny, squealing necks with his hands.