“I have a question for you in return.” I wet my lips, coax them into a smile. “If I were to tell you that I planned to walk home right now, without surrendering my phone number or a promise to see you again, would you allow it?”

Frederic scans the night. The cityline is as jagged as an old boxer’s knuckles; hard angles that tear into stuttering rooftops, a maze of winding paths scarred by war-gutted architecture. And in between the ruin and the stones walk the cats. Hundreds of cats. An ocean of eyes pouring through spaces too alien to fathom.

“Absolutely not. That would be ungentlemanly. What if you get jumped by someone?”

“Ulthar is not a place where such would happen.” An indelible truth.

He hooks a sly arm around my elbow, angles his own just so to mime gallantry. I glance up at his face and the smile that burns there, incandescent and indifferent, plump with predatory glee. “Just in case, you know?”

Physical contact extorts revelation. I catch a sliver of his life; visions of refracted color, vials of alcohol, a rainbow of pharmaceuticals, and women. So many women. Spread open, face down, white skin and brown skin tangling into perpetuity, faceless and nameless, flesh to violate over and over and over.

Ah, one of those.

There is a noise in the air that reminds me of the sea, a white hiss, as of foam breaking on the rocks or too many mouths opened in hymn. “You should leave.”

“But you’re here.” He retorts.

“You don’t take no for an answer, do you?”

His skin exposes an alphabet of petty sins when he strokes my arm, a liberty he takes with the slyest of smirks. The air shudders and just for a moment, the distant song is loud enough to drown. Frederic’s smile ascends to pleasure: “Never.”

two

It is said that in Ulthar we have outlawed the murder of cats.

It is also said that in Ulthar we worship pagan gods and that we conduct our businesses in threes.

Many things are said about Ulthar but as is the case with these matters, all of it is both fiction and fact. Veracity can only be found in careful dissection, a grain of sand lodged in coils of viscera. And even then, all myths stem from reality so what is truth but a lie held culpable for its existence?

I am certain that Frederic had articulated a different account of our first encounter and that, somewhere in that boundless space commanded by the dreams of machines, there are still people marvelling over his facility at orchestrating one-night stands. But we did not sleep together. Not that first night. Nor anytime during the evenings that followed, one after another, washed in the lipid-yellow glow of the college coffeehouse, a comedy of tepid conversations.