ach of the thousands of times Elisa has seen Giles’s apartment, it has been a world of tweed browns and pewter grays. Now it is bright red. Blood on the floor. On the wall. A bloody handprint on the refrigerator. Elisa entered too speedily to sidestep and now helplessly watches her green shoes track red across rug and linoleum. She grabs Giles’s drafting desk for support, sending two cats bounding. She forces herself to study the blood, tries to determine which direction it leads. But it leads every direction.

Including back out the door. She lopes that way and sees a thin stripe of blood connecting Giles’s door to hers. She bursts into her apartment and there he is, collapsed on the sofa. She rushes to his side, her knees landing on black charcoal sketches accented with red blood. Giles’s face is pale; he blinks in slow motion; he is shivering. His left arm is wrapped, very poorly, in a blue bath towel soaked purple. Elisa looks at the bathroom.

“He’s not here,” Giles croaks.

Elisa holds his face in her hands. He is warm, not cold. She questions him with her eyes, and he responds with a weak smile.

“He was hungry. I startled him. He’s a wild creature. We can’t expect him to act any other way.”

If she’s going to do it, she tells herself, do it fast. She grabs the towel, unravels the sticky fabric from his arm. Running from wrist to elbow is a slash so spiderweb thin that nothing but the creature’s cusped claw could have carved it. It is deep, still bleeding, but not gushing, and Elisa dashes into the bedroom, rips a clean sheet from a shelf, dashes back, and begins winding it. It’s like a cloth whirlpool enveloping the arm in sea foam—even here, even now, she can’t stop seeing water. Giles winces, but his smile hangs on like a cheap mask. He puts a clammy palm to her cheek.

“Don’t fret over me, dear. Go find him. He can’t be far.”

Elisa doesn’t know what else to do. She bolts to the outer hallway, closing the door behind her. It is difficult to see anything but the most garish streaks of blood, but she forces herself and finds a spackle of red tracking a separate path toward the fire-escape stairs. Impossible, she thinks. The creature would be too frightened. Then fanfare blares from the theater below, and it’s not so different, is it, from the records she played in F-1? She runs, crashing down metal steps so fast she feels the vertigo of a plunging elevator, and then she’s tripping through the alley and down the Arcade’s sidewalk, snared by a velvet rope, dazed in the signboard’s brilliance.

In such light, the spots of blood, only a few now, stand out like scattered jewelry. They lead into the theater. Elisa throws a glance at the box office. Mr. Arzounian mans the booth, but he’s yawning, fighting sleep, and Elisa doesn’t falter. She looks at her feet, those emerald green, thick-buckled, Cuban-heeled Mary Janes, not bad for dancing, and tells herself that she is Bojangles with the TV volume turned down, and she dances past Arzounian as she’s danced past so many woolgathering Occam men.

The chafed carpet beneath her shoes gives way to Navajo-motif terrazzo flooring. Elisa cranes her neck to the dusty, muraled dome that, according to Mr. Arzounian, greeted celebrities, politicians, and giants of industry in the forties and fifties, back when the Arcade mattered, back before the upper offices were sacrificed to build a couple of rat-trap apartments. Age and disregard don’t mean something isn’t beautiful; Elisa has come to believe this with all of her heart. The lobby, though, is too bright, and Elisa knows the creature will seek darkness.

Even awash in the film’s coruscating light, Elisa can’t find the back of a single head in any of the theater’s twelve hundred seats. It doesn’t matter: the screen, balcony, and constellations of ceiling lights lend the theater the majesty of a basilica. And hadn’t she worshipped here as a girl? It was here she’d found the raw materials to build a beautiful fantasy life, and it is here where, if she is lucky, she might salvage what is left of it.

It’s with a pious stoop that she slinks down the aisle. These are the final days of The Story of Ruth, the biblical epic about which she knows nothing except its loudest dialogue and every single music cue. Between peering left and right down shadowy ranks of seats, she passes her eyes over the screen, where a sweaty mob of enslaved men pound rock in a quarry under the bug-eyed glower of a giant pagan statue. So this is Chemosh, the name she’s so often heard rumbling up through the floor. If her creature, too, is a god, then he is one far less frightening.

She’s hatching nightmares of him wandering downtown Baltimore when she sees a dark shape floundering between the first and second row. She ducks beneath the projector rays. There he is, knees pulled to heaving chest, arms wrapped around his head. Elisa scurries into the row, stealth abandoned, heels clacking, and the creature hisses, a harsh warning she hasn’t heard since her first approach with the egg. It’s a feral noise, and she stops, fear icing her body, no braver than the countless beasts that once showed their bellies to this superior thing.

Cries of pain caw out, and like the jungle field recordings they blast from speakers, the sound effects of men’s backs whipped while trying to move the stone idol. The creature envelops his head in his hands as if trying to crush his own skull. Elisa lowers herself to her knees and crawls across the gummy floor. The cascading colors of light make kaleidoscopes of the creature’s eyes, and he scuttles back, stumbling to his knees, short on breath.

A deafening crash and Elisa can’t help but look: Chemosh toppled, pinning a screaming slave. The creature responds with a piteous dog-squeak and dog-shiver. Perhaps afraid that he has caused this onscreen pain, he stops retreating and instead reaches out to Elisa. She slides across the floor and wraps him in her arms. He is cold. He is dry. His gills flutter against her neck, coarse as sandpaper. Thirty minutes, Hoffstetler had warned, that’s as long as he’s got. There’s an emergency exit. It feeds right into the alley. She’ll get him out, upstairs, back to safety. She just wants a few more seconds of embracing this beautiful, sad creature who, in this world, can never be safe.