“You need me to drive you back, or…?” Romy asked, practically shouting over Nirvana’s Drain You.

“Subway,” Zachary replied, curt as always.

“You couldn’t have done that in the first place, sunshine? Had to waste my time?” She wouldn’t tell him, but Romy doesn’t have many friends. She has two, in fact; one of them being a bartender midtown that doesn’t matter right now, and the other being the man beside her. She could say she has fourteen friends, but pin-ups of women on calendars aren’t much for conversation and general merriment. They’re still probably more loose-lipped than Zachary here, though.

The man in the floral shirt hefted his guitar case over his shoulder. He stood on the curb, stretched, and gave Romy and her metallic red chariot a half-hearted wave. “Broke.”

In his life, Zachary has paid for public transport exactly once. He paid 16 whole dollars to go four stops to a bar in midtown, and swore he’d never waste a week’s cup ramen fund ever again. From then on, he jumped over the balustrades and forced his way through the turntables to the blatant surprise of the subway workers, who really didn’t want to haggle with a man who looks as don’t-fuck-with-me as Zachary does. One of them had tried, a perky young attendant in a skirt that was far too short for regulation; he’d blatantly ignored her the whole ride as she tried to check his ticket in a voice that was less like birdsong and more like the screeching of a cockatoo.

At least, that was until the station nearest Zachary’s apartment hired Dennis Hawky. Zachary really doesn’t like Dennis Hawky. Mr. Hawky wasn’t scary, or dangerous, he was just Annoying. With a capital A. He was a wannabe news reporter, and looked exactly like that certain news reporter we all know. No, not Will Ferrell. The one from the comic books. The one who wore the red and blue latex suit and swung through New York.

Bear with me here, because I’m not going to describe Mr. Hawky again, it’s up to you to remember him when the time comes.

Hawky was in his early twenties, but could’ve passed for that one highschool student who liked books more than people and was probably in the math club. Pale skin, brown hair, and glasses thicker than bullet-proof-glass. Dressed like a drowned Victorian boy. Probably had an uncle named Benjamin. And he really liked Zachary. Not friendly, or romantically, but in the way a dog smells out a truffle. The way a reporter smells out a big scoop. He knew Zachary was suspicious, he could smell the danger and mystery on him as if it were extra-strong cologne, and Hawky was not afraid to ask questions. He had all the time in the world to haggle and follow and pry his way into your insecurities. He was like a particularly motivated Jehovah’s Witness, or AVON salesperson.

Hawky had taken a side-job as ticket-checker at Zachary’s local subway station purely so he could get closer to him. He had a hunch, and he was going to follow it even if it lead him off the side of a cliff.

Zachary did not want to run into Mr. Dennis Hawky twice in one day. Especially not today.

The reality was, Zachary didn’t know if he was coming back from his summons to West 32nd Street. He was going to meet with Them. And if They were going to dispose of him today, he certainly didn’t want Dennis fucking Hawky to be the last person he’d spoken to.

He’d decided that if he did live, he’d brave the subway. There was no point in telling Romy to wait for him if he was never going to come back.

Romy’s car zoomed away with the sound of screeching rubber and screeching Kurt Cobain. Which was which, Zachary had no idea.

Zachary’s phone was old, battered, and didn’t have a sim card in it, but at least it didn’t have buttons. It did, however, have music on it (pirated, of course), and it was one of the few things Zachary would never part with. He put earbuds in.

Tainted Love was playing.

The city’s business district was like a factory, manufacturing something but no-one knew what it was. The people marched along, the streets like conveyor belts, going on forever and branching off into buildings and offices and shops. Everyone looked so… boring. Armies and armies of identical ants. They were like NPC’s, all dressed the same because they had no character creation screen, no choice. Zachary himself was an ant, perhaps one missing a leg or an antennae or two and getting strange looks from the others’ beady segmented eyes, but an ant nonetheless.

‘…Sometimes I feel I’ve got to, run away I’ve got to, get away from the pain you drive into the heart of me…’

Zachary walked in silence along the slate sidewalk, women decorated with pearls and cubic zirconia staring at him like he’d grown three heads. A particular young mother with a ginger bob cut covered her child’s eyes as he strode past, hunched over like some infernal monster, like Frankenstein or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, one hand holding the guitar strap slung over his shoulder and the other shoved deep into the abyss of his jean pocket.

One moustache-toting man whispered something about calling the authorities to his clean-shaven partner. To them, Zachary could’ve been all manner of criminal; a drug addict, a member of the mafia, a cold-blooded killer. He almost felt offended, but had to remind himself that they were right.

People had every reason to be scared of him. Zachary pushed aside his conscience, buried it away and locked it up and threw away the key somewhere far inside of him where it wouldn’t rear its ugly, bulbous little head again. It’s strange, that you can refer to a lizard or frog or fish as ‘cold-blooded’ and see them the same way you’d see any other creature (unless, of course, you had a particular hatred for lizards or frogs, which is frankly hard to imagine, even though imagining is my job), but the moment it was applied to a person they became ruthless, cutthroat and apathetic.

Zachary liked frogs and lizards and fish. Snakes, even.

‘…The love we share, seems to go nowhere, and I’ve lost my light, I toss and turn I can’t sleep at night…’

It was a short walk to number 6, West 32nd Street, a short walk that Zachary knew well. Past a café that only sold avocado brioche and piccolo lattes, past several office buildings whose windows had been painted over with matte black spray paint, one of which emanated a pungent smell of ozone.

(For those of you wondering what ozone smells like, it smells like rain. You all must know that particular stench that fills your nostrils before and after rain, sort of metallic, sort of like chemicals, sort of like a swimming pool. That’s ozone.)

The building in question was dark, 66-storey, Howard-Roark-ish monolith, with black tinted windows and black walls, black tiles but blindingly, heavenly white lights that refracted back into your eyes no matter how hard you tried avoid them. A sense of unease settled over Zachary as the sliding doors greeted him with their familiar, rubbery squelch.

‘…Once I ran to you… now I run from you… This tainted love you’ve given, I give you all a boy could give you…’

Everyone felt uneasy when they entered number 6, West 32nd Street. It was the building’s trademark, so to speak. It was like every tile had a hidden eye that was watching you, like unseen people whispered from behind every pane of glass, urging you to shiver, tempting you to throw up. Like the singular decorative palm by the reception was going to shrink away at your touch, or follow you as you passed like a haunted portrait.

There was a woman standing behind the reception desk, a laptop lighting her face with that faint, curious blue. She clicked the end of a ballpoint pen continuously, the sound echoing through the empty space followed by the eerie flicker of the fluorescent lights. She was a very normal looking woman. Zachary would’ve assumed she was a librarian, if Zachary was in the habit of assuming things, which he wasn’t. The brown bun, the thin glasses perched delicately on the end of her curved nose. On her neck was a small, white patch, like a band-aid.

A patch that we all know by now.

‘…Take all my tears and that’s not nearly all! Oh, tainted love… oh… tainted love…’

Zachary stepped into the conveniently-waiting elevator which included exactly one young, effeminate man in a blue dress shirt and exactly one discarded Cherry Ripe wrapper which annoyed him slightly, but Zachary wasn’t enough of a good Samaritan to pick up others’ trash, so he let it linger in the corner of his eye. The young man drooled slightly, saliva doing a stringy free dive off his bottom lip, and that same white square was stuck on his cheek, the glue stretching distorting his skin slightly.

For some reason, all the buttons on the elevator’s display had been pushed, the 66 separate, silver circles glowing with red backlight. What was it that AC/DC had said? ‘It’s a long way to the top…?’

There was a sound. A sound Zachary could not describe, save for it hurt his ears, even with earphones in. Like it was coming from inside, from his brain. The calm, chiming elevator music gave way to a moment of radio static, and then a voice like a choir of other ethereal, hollow voices stacked atop one another.

“These Great Old Ones… were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape, for did not this star-fashioned image prove it, but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for them…”

“Lovecraft was a bit wrong, wasn’t he, Zach? All that talk about stars and voodoo orgy cults and Cyclopean cities coming up from the ocean like Atlantis…” Zachary instantly recognized the voice, and felt a familiar hand brush lightly against his shoulder.

It was one of Them.

Don’t let that scare you, though, this one is arguably the best of Them. His name is Amal. He appears to be of middle-eastern or south-east-Asiatic descent, with richly tanned skin and a mop curly dark-brown hair tied in a rough bun atop his head. He wears entirely black, a tight-fitting dress shirt buttoned up under his chin, and black trousers that hug his thighs but flare awkwardly at the ankles. His hands are heavily tattooed with characters that Zachary believes could be Korean or Hindu or perhaps even Satanic in nature but are most likely something else entirely. He’s about shoulder-height on Zachary, and appears to be in his late teens despite having witnessed creation itself.

Amal is a friend. Probably Zachary’s closest friend. Zachary quite literally owes this odd little man (or, odd little man-shaped entity, to be exact) his life.

“He was racist,” Zachary mumbles, his earphones becoming some infernal macramé of black wire as he fed them into his pocket. He’d never been much for reading (any word longer than three syllables tended to give him a headache), much less one for such outlandish fiction as Lovecraft’s, but Amal had once loaned him a copy of his Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos many years ago, and he had yet to return it. Lovecraft had… interesting views on eldritch beings, to say the least. Far too many tentacles, and they are most certainly not born from bile and tears.

“It was the 1920’s, everyone was racist,” Amal said, purposefully breathing a haze of grey smoke into the face of the motionless, probably catatonic young man in the corner. Amal is always smoking. No-smoking signs will magically disappear or rewrite themselves into ‘Designated Smoking Area’ signs as he passes. He’d fallen into the habit of tobacco (and sometimes, not tobacco) smoking in the 1880’s and was still enamored with the act some hundred and fifty years later. “How’s life been treating you, Zach?”

“Shit.” Zachary could’ve used some elaborate metaphor about how life was water and he was a cactus, fed to the brim and about to literally explode, but decided ‘shit’ was both easier to say and understand. He lowered his voice until you could barely hear it over the metallic rumble of the elevator, slowly travelling upwards. “Aren’t you omnipotent? Why ask me if you already know?”

“Omnipotence gets a bit dull after a few millennia of it. No fun, knowing all the answers.” Amal shifted his shirt cuffs, wringing his black-nailed hands together.

A moment of silence. Well, not silence… the elevator door squelched open twice, and the man in the corner let out a ghost-like moan and spat on the floor.

“Are They going to kill me?” Zachary asked. No point in having a personal all-seeing entity and not asking a few questions. Like putting the lid back on a genie’s lamp, really.

The little man-shaped Lovecraftian horror by his side made a face. A face somewhere between a smirk and a frown. The red lights on the elevator panel flashed blue, then green, then a slightly different shade of red, but close enough for someone with no knowledge of color theory. “You’re the main character, Zach. They can’t kill you. Not yet, this is only the first chapter.”

Technically this is the 6th chapter, actually.

Amal’s yellow, catlike eyes cast upwards, towards something Zachary wasn’t seeing with his mortal eyes, but Amal could perceive, stuck in the gaps between reality, between this dimension and the dimension you’re in now, like weeds creeping through cracks in broken concrete. “Okay, technically this is the 6th chapter. Happy now?” He exhaled another breath of silvery smoke, and turned back to Zachary. “They won’t kill you. They might as well, though.”

“Exciting,” Zachary said, his voice monotone and gruff.

“I know you too well, Zach. You won’t be able to do this one. You’re too soft.”

That was something Zachary had never been called. Zachary was not soft. His hands had killed men and his eyes watched as they writhed beneath him in agony. He’d taken parents from their children, watched them weep and mourn their loss, and on one memorable occasion (though Zachary would try his hardest not to remember it), cover them in their loved ones’ brain matter. All so he could stay alive, prolong his wretched little life on this wretched little planet in this wretched little corner of the cosmos.

Zachary was not soft. He was selfish.

But no amount of selfishness can make one argue with an omniscient, unimaginable horror.

“Well, I really must be going. Don’t want the family to realize I’m here.” Amal breathed and opaque curtain of smoke that filled the elevator until Zachary was forced to cough and splutter, beg for air. “Toodle-oo.”

When the smoke and the forced tears in Zachary’s eyes cleared, Amal was gone, and the elevator had come to a stop. There was a sharp sound like a bell, and the doors slid open like the ominous, black-wrought, gargoyle-encrusted gates to Hell itself.

He was on the 66th floor, of number 6, West 32nd Street.