The old man sees Strickland and cries, Elisa! But Strickland is coming too fast. The old man does the last thing Strickland expects, rushing him. Strickland has to stop, his foot slipping across the slick planks, the whorling torrent. He’s off-balance. All he can do is swing the Beretta. It cracks the side of the old man’s head. He goes down hard and lands badly, his torso rolling off the side of the jetty and into the raging waters. There is a suspenseful second, the old man trying to grip the wet wood. He can’t do it. He drops headfirst into the barbed waves.
Now Elisa sees him. Strickland rights himself, aims the gun at Deus Brânquia, ten feet away. But his eyes flick toward Elisa. She’s wearing next to nothing, an untied housecoat. And shoes. Of course, shoes. Sparkling silver heels meant to torture him. This temptress, this jezebel, this deceiver. She was the true Delilah all along, distracting him from her scheme. Instead, he’ll make her serve as witness to Deus Brânquia’s end. Starting now, the Gill-god is of the past. And he, Richard Strickland? It’s like the Cadillac salesman said: The future. You look like a man who’s headed there.
He’s satisfied to be right about one thing. He does, at the end, make the mute girl squawk. It’s her only way to warn Deus Brânquia of the bullet about to be fired. She gulps a water-swirled breath and, her neck veins drawing taut, screams. Strickland is certain it’s the first to ever expel from her weakling throat. It’s a little sound, the breaking of whatever is left of her voice box, the same croak the vulture chained to the Josefina made when it choked on Henríquez’s logbook.
The noise is unique enough to pierce the howling squall. Deus Brânquia turns. Lightning strikes, slashing white through the Gill-god’s blue-green glow. But it is too late. Strickland, man of the future, wields a weapon of the future. He squeezes the trigger, once, twice. In gale winds and pelting showers, it sounds tidy. Pop, pop. Two holes appear in Deus Brânquia’s chest. The creature wobbles. Drops to its knees on the jetty’s edge. Blood spouts outward, mixes with rain.
After such an epic hunt, across two continents, against so formidable a foe, it’s disappointing. It is, however, the nature of the hunt. Sometimes, your prey rages in death, becomes legend. Other times, it winks away, becomes nothing stronger than a fairy tale. Strickland shakes the rain from his face, aims at Deus Brânquia’s bowed head, and pulls the trigger.
30
IN THAT INSTANT, Elisa knows the frenzy that makes a man cover a grenade for his fellow soldiers, that makes mothers sacrifice their lives for their children, that makes anyone in love impatient to lose everything so that their loved one can carry on. But there is no opportunity. She raises an arm, as if she could ward off the bullet by gesture alone. It is as far as she gets. Everything happens at once.
Strickland’s body wrenches to the left at the moment of firing. The thin, sharp end of a paintbrush has been impaled through his left foot. Just behind him is Giles, resurfaced and clinging to the edge of the jetty. It is the person who dragged Giles free of the current who has taken the paintbrush from his pocket and stabbed. It is Zelda, incredibly Zelda, materialized here at world’s end, sprawled across the walkway, drenched and muddy, her fist still clenched around the brush, her hand gone green from the drizzling paint.
Strickland reaches for his foot, stumbling to a kneel. Hope punches Elisa in the chest. Then, she realizes, it isn’t hope at all. She falls to her own knees, mirroring Strickland. Her thighs quake and she clenches them with both hands, not wishing to fall any farther. It’s no good. She pitches forward, bracing herself in a push-up pose. River water splashes across her face, over her fingers. The water is black, it is blue, it is purple, it is red. She looks sharply down at her chest. There is a neat bullet hole directly between her breasts. Blood spurts out, onto the planks, and is instantly washed away.
Her elbows are paper. She wilts. Her vision rolls over. She sees an upside-down world: charcoal clouds with lightning-bolt capillaries, a shower of racing rain, police lights flashing against nearby boats, Strickland scrabbling for his gun, Zelda pounding her fists on his back, Giles back on the dock and reaching for Strickland’s ankle. Elisa sees green, and blue, and yellow; then faster, violet, and crimson, and umber; then faster, peach, and olive, and canary; and faster, every color known and unknown, outshining the storm. It is the creature, the magnificent grooves of his body phosphorescent, and he has caught her in his arms, his blood pouring into hers, hers spattering into his, both of them connected by the liquid of life even as both of them are dying.
31
A WAVE NUDGES the Beretta toward the depths, but Strickland is quicker. He crawls for it, seizes it, joins both hands to hold it tight. Now to rid himself of the twin rats nipping at him. He rolls onto his back, kicks the old man in the face. He shoves Delilah Brewster several feet down the jetty. Strickland is bitten all over, spurting blood from his foot, blinded by the downpour. Still he props himself on an elbow, opens his mouth to the rain. It is his rain now. He brings himself to a sitting position, gasping water into his lungs, and cranes his neck.
Deus Brânquia fountains with color. It stares at Strickland through blades of rain, past Elisa, who is cradled in its arms. Slowly, it lowers her to the walkway, where waves lick against her. The Gill-god stands. Strickland blinks, attempts to comprehend. It’s been shot twice in the chest. And yet it stands? And yet it walks? Deus Brânquia continues down the jetty, its body a torch in the night, an infinite thing that Strickland, stupid man, believed he could make finite.
Strickland tries anyway. He fumbles the gun upward, fires. Into Deus Brânquia’s chest. Into its neck. Into its gut. Deus Brânquia wipes a hand across the bullet holes. The wounds dribble away along with the rain. Strickland shakes his head hard enough to spatter water. Is it the freshly filled river that gives it such strength? Is it the gathered beasts supplying their master with life force? He’ll never know. He isn’t meant to know. He’s crying. The same big, ragged sobs he told Timmy he wasn’t ever allowed to cry. He lowers his face to the jetty, ashamed to meet the Gill-god’s everlasting eyes.
Deus Brânquia kneels before him. With a single claw, it hooks the trigger guard of the gun, gently removing it from Strickland’s grip and lowering it to the dock. A spate of black water explodes across the jetty, steals the gun, swallows it down. With the same claw, Deus Brânquia tilts Strickland’s face upward by the tender underside of his chin. Strickland sniffles, tries to keep his eyes closed, but he can’t. Their faces are inches apart. Tears stream down his cheeks, across the bridge of Deus Brânquia’s claw, down the brilliant scales. Strickland opens his mouth and he is glad, here at the end, to hear that his own voice has returned.
“You are a god,” Strickland whispers. “I’m sorry.”
Deus Brânquia cocks its head to the side, as if considering the plea. Then, with a single, casual motion, it moves its claw from Strickland’s chin, touches it to Strickland’s neck, and draws the claw across his throat.
Strickland feels opened. It isn’t a bad feeling. He has been closed to too much, he thinks, and for too long. There is a lightness to his head. He looks down. Blood is jetting from his slit throat, spilling down his chest. It empties him of everything. The monkeys. General Hoyt. Lainie. The children. His sins. What remains is Richard Strickland, the way he began, the way he was born, a vessel containing nothing but potential. He is falling backward. No, it is Deus Brânquia, guiding him down, tucking him into water as soft and warm as blankets. He is happy. His eye sockets fill with rain. Water is all he can see. It is the end. But he laughs as he dies. Because it is also the beginning.
32
GILES SEES CIVILIZATION reassert itself from nature’s wilds. Vehicles with histrionic lights and infant bawls. Men in uniforms and rain gear, sprinting for the docks, hands steadying the jounce of equipment belts. They skid to a halt before the beasts massed at the foot of the jetty, not as many as before, but enough to impress. Civilians have also begun to gather, people who wouldn’t brave a storm like this except to seek out the incredible
colors they saw radiating from the docks, some madman, maybe, launching fireworks in the downpour.
He coughs water from his lungs. He ought to be dead. He recalls striking the river bottom and paddling furiously to resurface, only to be clenched by a riptide and tugged toward the bay. A hand had grasped his wrist, though, pulling him back to the jetty. Their palms should have slipped from each other’s, but this hand had a good texture for gripping, calloused by scouring pads and perpetual pushes of brooms and mops, a hand rather like Elisa’s.
It had been the black woman Giles had glimpsed at the Occam loading dock, their clandestine colluder. How she was here he couldn’t begin to guess, but then again, nothing about the woman added up: round, middle-aged, given to appearing at momentous junctures, driven by some unlimited cache of courage. The second he had a hold on the jetty, she’d unsheathed the paintbrush from his pocket and attacked the man with the gun. Now that man is dead, his throat pumping so much blood even the whipping waves can’t disperse all of it.
Giles struggles to an elbow. The woman pulls his shivering body close to hers. Their heaving breaths equalize as they squint through the spray to watch the creature stand, flick the man’s blood from his claw, and walk on webbed feet to Elisa’s collapsed body, his glorious lights dimming with every step.
“Is she…?” Giles croaks.
“I don’t know,” the woman says.
“Put your hands up!” men shout. The creature takes no heed. He lifts Elisa from the jetty. The shouts change to “Put the woman down!” but these have no better effect. The creature stands in place for a moment, black against the river foam and sterling rain, a tall, strong shape at the edge of America. Giles is too exhausted, too heavied by grief to cry out, but he mouths the word good-bye, both to the creature whose healing touch gave him the strength to resist drowning tonight, and to his best friend, who gave him the strength to resist drowning for the past twenty years.
Without a sound, without a splash, the creature, holding Elisa, dives into water.
Men come at last, their shoes splashing up the jetty. The ones with firearms go all the way to the end, pinning their hats to their heads in the gusty winds while trying to follow the flashlight beams being shone at the waves. The ones with medical kits drop down first beside the dead man, and second beside Giles and the woman. A medic runs his hands over Giles’s head and neck, along his torso.
“Are you hurt?”
“Of course he’s hurt,” snaps the woman holding Giles. “We’re all hurt.”
Giles surprises himself by chuckling. He will miss Elisa. Oh, how he’ll miss her, every night as if it’s morning, every morning as if it’s afternoon, every time his stomach rumbles because he has forgotten to eat. He loved her. No, that isn’t right. He loves her. Somehow he knows that she isn’t gone, nor will she ever be. And this woman? His savior? He might already love her, too.
“You must be Giles,” she says as the medic examines her.
“And you,” he says, “must be Zelda.”
The absurdity of formal introduction under such apocalyptic settings makes both of them smile. Giles thinks of Elaine Strickland, who disappeared before he could tell her everything she had meant to him. He will not make that mistake again. He reaches out, takes Zelda’s hand. Salt water slides between their palms and seals them together. She leans her head against his shoulder as the rain drums against them, melting them, or so it feels, into one being.
“Do you think…” Zelda begins.
Giles tries to help. “That they’re…”
“Down there, I mean,” she offers. “That they might…?”
Neither can finish. That is all right; they both know the question as well as they know that, for them, there will be no definitive answer. Giles squeezes Zelda’s hand and sighs, watching his plume of breath—still strong, he observes—dissipate beneath a shower that he believes might, at long last, be waning. He waits until after they are swaddled in hospital blankets, after they are in the back of the ambulance they insisted upon sharing, after he suspects Zelda has forgotten the question, before he offers his best guess at the answer.
33
ELISA SINKS. POSEIDON’S fist grabs her, rolls her back and forth like a crocodile rolls its prey. Twice she has pushed herself to the surface only to see Baltimore, her homeland, diminish to a piddling twinkle. She is shot, and can’t kick, and slides under for the final time. Down here, it is dark. There is no air. There is only pressure, like dozens of hands pressing her flesh as if to staunch her wounds. Blood escapes anyway, spreading through the water, a scarlet gown to replace the natty bathrobe that has floated away.
Elisa parts her lips, lets cold water pour in.
From blackness he comes. She believes he is a school of glittering fish until each of the million points of light is revealed as one of his scales. He brings his own underwater sun, and by its radiance she watches him move in unimaginable ways. He is not inside the water, but rather part of it, walking straight through it as if down a sidewalk, quite the trick, only to then rebel against gravity, pirouette like a flower caught in the wind. With perfect precision he meets her with a kiss to her head; he wraps his arms around her, enveloping her in his sea-sun. His wide palms slide up her back, crest her naked shoulders, and dive between her breasts. He then wiggles away to hold her by the sides, like she’s a child on a bicycle she’s only starting to learn.
Elisa blinks, her eyelids oaring aside pounds of water. The hole in her chest has been erased. The surprise is that she feels no surprise, only an easy, pleasant approval. She looks up to find the creature has swum off to her right, holding only to her hand. Elisa becomes aware that he is preparing to let go. She shakes her head, her hair aswirl like seaweed. She’s not ready. She brings her free hand close to sign her apprehension, but human appendages are lousy at cutting through water. His hand unleashes hers, and she is falling, falling, falling, though it is tricky to say for sure in so black a void. Perhaps, in fact, she is rising, rising, rising. She kicks her legs. Julia’s beautiful silver shoes tumble past her like exotic fish. She no longer needs them.
He emerges again from the deep. They stand before each other on nothing but water, new and naked, the ocean their Eden. His gills expand and contract. Elisa, too, breathes. She does not understand how, and doesn’t care, for the water-air is wonderful! It tastes like sugar and strawberries, fills her with an energy she’s never felt. She can’t help it: She laughs. Bubbles rollick from her mouth and the creature playfully swats them. She reaches out, caresses his soft gills. She believes she could look at him forever.
And she might. Something inside her is beginning to expand. These are the parts, she realizes, that made the Matron, maybe the only person to know the truth, call her a monster. Elisa feels no hate for the woman; she realizes that, down here, hate has no purpose. Down here, you embrace your foes until they become your friends. Down here, you seek not to be one being, but all beings, and all at once, God and Chemosh and everything in between. The change in her isn’t only mental. It’s physical, of skin and muscle. Yes, she has arrived. She is full. She is perfect.
She reaches out to him. To herself. There is no difference. She understands now. She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other, and all is dark, all is light, all is ugliness, all is beauty, all is pain, all is grief, all is never, all is forever.
34
WE WAIT WE watch we listen we feel we are patient we are always patient but it is difficult the woman we love it takes her a long time it takes her so long to know to see to feel to remember and it is not happy to see her struggle it is not happy to see her with pain but we struggled too we all struggled and the pain and struggle are important the pain and struggle must happen if she is to heal as we all have healed as we have helped heal her and now it is happening it is happening there is understanding and it is beautiful she is beautiful we are beautiful and it is a good sight a happy sight the lines on her neck the lines she thought were scars but are not scars it is a good si
ght to see those lines split open for the gills to open for the gills to spread wide it is a happy sight and now she knows who she is who she has always been she is us and we speak together now we feel together now and we swim into the distance into the end into the beginning and we welcome all who are willing to follow we welcome the fish we welcome the birds we welcome the insects we welcome the four-legs we welcome the two-legs we welcome you ///
come with us
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Guillermo del Toro is the award-winning director of numerous critically acclaimed feature films, such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim. His most recent film, The Shape of Water, received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Film Festival. He is the coauthor of the bestselling Strain Trilogy (with Chuck Hogan), which was turned into a popular television series on FX, and Trollhunters (with Daniel Kraus), the source material for the Netflix series of the same name. You can sign up for email updates here.
Daniel Kraus has landed on Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 Books of the Year (for The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch) and has won two Odyssey Awards (for Rotters and Scowler). His novels have been Library Guild selections, Bram Stoker finalists, and more. He lives in Chicago. Visit him at danielkraus.com, or sign up for email updates here.