“Once upon a time, there was a kitten and a boy, both marked by the depth of their color. Together with others, they travelled through the margins of the world, a breeze, never fully touching anything but each other. One day, they came into Ulthar.”

Something is singing. Frederic is singing. It is an old song, a song inked into cartilage and marrow, a cancerous elegy, the death hymn of hares, the eulogy of squids. His voice startles with its beauty, the notes tenderly shaped despite how they abrade his flesh. The music grows wet.

“I’ve watched you make love to yourself. With your hands and your mouth and tail.” Frederic murmurs between stanzas, scuttling closer, crab-like in gait. “I’ve seen us together too. In every position, every shape. They’ve shown me how much you want me.”

I ignore him. “There was an old couple there who took pleasure in the death of cats. Not quick deaths. Slow ones, long and sensual, choked with open arteries and cautious vivisection. They made coats with entrails and fur. They read the stars in the screams.” I sigh. “These days, I think they misunderstood some of those signs they saw.”

I raise my eyes to his. His gaze is moon-bleached, the hue of old bones. “Humans see what they wish to see. I am only your Virgil.”

“You are mine,” he agrees.

“I am not,” I correct. The kitten in my grip hisses her defiance. The choir stiffens and slows, deepening to a hungry rumble. “I never was. I never will be. The same way I was never for the old couple. Not that that stopped them. They were skillful, I will say that. I was alive when they flayed me open. Alive when they opened my gut to find a cure to liver spots and aching bones. But then my boy called to The Joyous Man and he appeared and he asked me what I desired most.”

Frederic’s breath blisters, fever-sweet. “What did you want?”

“What any other creature wants: to live.”

Shadows convulse in the horizon, dividing into slick and clever shapes, to an ocean of eyes. They flit across the rooftops, one after another, on tongueless paws, their ears pinned flat against their scalps. And they are singing, all of them, that prayer we’ve carried from decade to decade, century to century, our psalm to The Joyous Man.

The cats make circles of their bodies, ring upon rings, surrounding us, connecting us. I slide onto my feet, onto claws obsidian-deep, my kitten flouncing away to join the pack. “The problem with man is that he does not know when he is unwanted and that he will do anything to impose his want on another. I have told you to leave twice already. I will tell you again: leave.”

“No.”