The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  Outside, the morning air was cold and damp, tinged with salt from the harbor. The slopes of Hob’s Hill blazed red and gold with autumn colors, and for some reason three more identical gray SUVs with tinted windows were driving slowly around the neighborhood, as though looking for something. She walked down Danforth Street past the usual morning traffic, cut across the lawn in front of Mainwaring Hall, crossed the concrete plaza to Gurnard Hall, and reached The Cave half an hour before her composition class began. She veered past a knot of students debating some detail of the latest postmodern reinterpretation of music theory, and crossed to the table by the concrete wall. “Hi, Ro.”

  Rosalie glanced up at her from a chair tipped back precariously against the wall. “Hi, girl. Where were you last night? I tried to call you around eight.”

  “Over at Jay’s,” Brecken admitted.

  A momentary silence told her what Rosalie thought of that—no surprise there. “Well, you missed a good time. You’ve haven’t met Barbara Cormyn, have you?” Before Brecken got halfway through shaking her head, Rosalie had turned to another young woman nearby. “Barb, this is Brecken Kendall, my BFF. Music education track, plays a mean flute, and perfect pitch.”

  Barbara Cormyn was a willowy blonde with big blue eyes that seemed stuck in a look of perpetual surprise. She shook Brecken’s hand. Perfect pitch, imperfect everything else, Brecken wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Rosalie chattered on. “You know the jazz singer Olive Kendall?” Brecken gave her an embarrassed look, but she went on anyway: “That’s her grandmother.” She turned to Brecken.

  “Barb’s performance track, plays half the instruments that exist.”

  “Oh, stop,” Barbara said. “Reeds and piano, mostly.” She had a breathy high-pitched voice that made her sound like a movie star.

  “And flute, and guitar,” said Rosalie, grinning. “And I don’t know what else.”

  Barbara rolled her eyes, turned toward Brecken. “That’s really wild, that you’re Olive Kendall’s granddaughter. Did you get to study with her at all?”

  “I’m not much of a vocalist,” Brecken admitted, “so mostly I learned from Grandpa Aaron. He was her pianist—that’s how they met.”

  “That’s sweet,” Barbara said. “Rosalie was telling me about the Rose and Thorn Ensemble—you’re both in that, right? I’d love to hear you play.”

  “I don’t know what Jay’s got booked for us next,” Brecken said. She glanced at Rosalie, who looked away with an irritated expression. “I’ll find out, though.”

  “Will you? That’d be great.” The soft blue eyes didn’t lose any of their surprised expression, but something moved beneath that, precise and implacable as machinery.

  “There won’t be a lot until winter break,” said Rosalie then. “You know how it goes.”

  “Well, yes. Are you going to be here all break?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Rosalie. “My folks are trying to talk me into going to Guadalajara with them, but I’m going to make a career in music. You got to live your dream, right?”

  “That’s the spirit.” The soft eyes turned to Brecken. “You?”

  “I’ll be here,” Brecken said. She hoped the other girl wouldn’t ask why—she didn’t want to have to explain to a stranger why neither of her parents could give her a place to stay for the holidays. Fortunately, Barbara simply nodded and smiled.

  “I’ll probably see you around then. I’ll be here.” Then, glancing at her cell phone: “Gotta run. It was nice meeting you, Brecken.”

  Brecken said something polite and watched her hurry off.

  “ANYTHING,” SAID PROFESSOR Toomey. “Absolutely anything at all.” He leaned forward, propped his chin on long folded hands; his long brown face creased in an amused smile. Most of the students in the room gaped at him as though he’d sprouted a second head. His eyes moved this way and that, unreadable, surveying them all.

  Composition I met on the top floor of Gurnard Hall, in an architect’s afterthought of a room with odd angles everywhere and equally odd acoustics. A baby grand piano sat over to one side of the space; chairs scattered at random across the smooth concrete floor made up the rest of the furnishings. Tall windows on one end of the room looked out toward Hob’s Hill.

  “There’s a lot of structure to the craft of composition,” the professor went on. “That’s important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. There’s also your own personal voice, your own personal vision. We’re going to give some time to that. All of you know your way around music; all of you know at least one kind of music inside and out—otherwise you wouldn’t be in this class. That’s why the assignment for your first original composition is wide open. Any style, any form, any genre, any tradition—whatever. Compose a short piece in it. That’s your assignment.”

  Dead silence filled the room for a moment. Then, inevitably, Julian Pinchbeck broke it: a stocky young man in a sports jacket, chinos, and loafers, with a booth-tanned face and blond hair he’d painstakingly trained to billow up like Leonard Bernstein’s. “So something really far out on the bleeding edge, like postspectralism, would be acceptable.”

  “Yes,” said the professor.

  “How about metal?” That was from a tall young woman with bright pink hair, dressed in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans, whose name Brecken hadn’t gotten around to learning, whose talent she admired and whose music she couldn’t stand.

  “Yes.”

  Half a dozen other fashionable musical genres got named and approved in the next few minutes. Then, in a gap, a thin tense voice from the back row asked, “What about a fugue?”

  Heads turned. “Yes,” said Professor Toomey, before anyone else could speak.

  That conjured up an even deeper silence.

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing,” the professor said then. “You’re not just going to compose a piece, remember. You’re going to perform it, right here, for the class to critique. If you need backup musicians, get them. If you need instruments other than that—” His gesture indicated the piano. “—bring them. That’s up to you. Performances will begin one week from today, first come, first served; those of you who’ve gotten something scheduled with me before class starts that day will get an extra five points. Without composing this and your final project and performing both of them here, you can’t pass this class. Got it? Excellent.” His smile gleamed again. “That’s all. See you Thursday.” He got to his feet, glanced around the room again, left the classroom.

  As soon as he was gone, Julian Pinchbeck stood up and sent a glare toward the back of the room. “A fugue? Are you serious?”

  “The professor said anything,” said the voice from in back. Brecken turned in her seat, glimpsed the speaker between two heads : tall and rangy, his lean face hunched toward his shoulders, dull brown hair in an unfashionable cut. “Tell me how that excludes fugues.”

  Pinchbeck rolled his eyes. “That’s not the point. As a musical form, the fugue is stone cold dead. Its possibilities got used up centuries ago.”

  “In your opinion,” said the young man in back.

  “It’s not just my opinion,” Pinchbeck snapped back. His voice always rose in pitch when he got pedantic, and it was rising now. “Composers dumped the fugue in the late eighteenth century because it couldn’t say the things that needed to be said. Going back to it now is a total waste of time.” Three other students started talking at once, but Pinchbeck’s voice rose above them: “Classical music is dead. It doesn’t speak to anyone any more.”

  “In your opinion,” the young man in back repeated.

  Brecken glanced from one to the other, uncertain. She’d heard a hundred times, more, the same rhetoric Pinchbeck used: classical music is dead, it doesn’t speak to anyone any more—

  Rosalie, shaking her head, pushed through the crowd, grabbed Brecken’s sleeve. “Come on,” she said. “They’ll be at it all day.” Brecken let herself be pulled toward the doors.

  It speaks to me. The words
she hadn’t said followed her out into the hallway.

  Two of the three elevators that reached Gurnard Hall’s top floor were out of order, and the third had a crowd waiting around the door. Rosalie glanced at Brecken, motioned with her head toward the stair, and Brecken followed. Plenty of others were headed the same way. The big metal door, painted an impressively ugly shade of blue, swung open.

  Memory stirred as Brecken started down the stairs: a great E flat major chord bursting out of the near-darkness of an opera house on an afternoon twelve years past. She’d been sitting between her grandparents, shocked into alertness by the music, the harsh details of a troubled childhood washed away for a moment by the sound.

  Footfalls echoed in the stairwell, beating a leaden bass rhythm on concrete. Voices raised in conversation carried on an ungainly melody line above them. Brecken barely noticed the sounds. In her mind, an orchestra played the adagio measures at the start of the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. She’d listened, puzzled and fascinated. Then—

  All at once the second violins took off scampering in a flurry of notes as adagio gave way to allegro. The first violins leapt in to join them after four measures, the bassoons, the violas and the cellos after seven more. She’d sat there with her mouth open, clutching the arms of the seat, scarcely daring to breathe, the effervescent delight the music brought seemed that fragile. Then the whole orchestra took up the same theme fortissimo, crashing over her like a wave, and she’d sat there shaking in sheer exhilaration, all but drowning in the impossible glory of it.

  After it was all over, they’d gone to an old-fashioned café half a dozen blocks from the opera house—it had been a Sunday matinee, the kind where opera companies park second-string vocalists to give the regular cast a break, but if the old gods of nature in all their eldritch might had risen up singing in the opera house, they couldn’t have had a greater impact on Brecken’s world. There, in a window booth over sandwiches and fries, with the promise of an ice cream sundae hovering in the near future, her grandmother asked her what she’d liked best about The Magic Flute. Was it the comical bird-man Papageno? Was it the romance between Tamino and Pamina, the majesty of the wise Sarastro, the perilous beauty of the Queen of the Night?

  Then her grandparents had listened with raised eyebrows as Brecken tried to explain, within the narrow limits of a seven-year-old’s vocabulary, that it was the music, not the story or any of the characters, that had shaken her to her core. They’d given each other startled looks—she remembered, with almost photographic clarity, the expressions on their faces.

  “Earth to Brecken?” Rosalie said then. They were at the bottom of the stairwell, with other students streaming past them into daylight. Brecken blinked, managed an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I was thinking.”

  “I figured,” said Rosalie. They went out the door onto the bleak gray square, and Rosalie asked, “Got anything scheduled tonight?”

  “Homework and practicing,” said Brecken. “Of course.”

  Rosalie laughed. “I know, dumb question. If you finish up before eight or nine, give me a call, okay?”

  Brecken promised that she would, and said something polite. Rosalie did the same and headed off at a sharp angle.

  It speaks to me, Brecken repeated to herself, and all at once glimpsed the perfect answer to Julian Pinchbeck’s smug dismissals. Since she could do anything for that first composition assignment, why not compose a short piece in one of the standard Baroque forms, a declaration of loyalty and love to the music that mattered most to her?

  Enticing, the idea hovered in the air around her. As she considered it, she recalled the sequence of notes headed I will not harm you, the one she’d picked up from the photocopies and whistled at the thing she hadn’t seen in the kitchenette the night before. Her pace slowed to a standstill as she turned it over in her thoughts. It really would make a fine theme for a bourrée, she decided. If only she knew the bourrée form well enough—

  Then, all at once, she realized that she did know it well enough. All the Baroque pieces she’d practiced and played, all the music theory she’d studied in high school and in her freshman year, had already handed her the tools. It was just a matter of using them—and if there were details she needed to learn, she knew where to find them.

  Yes, she thought. I can do this. She turned, set off for Hancock Library.

  THE LOAF OF ZUCCHINi bread was gone when Brecken got back to her apartment, the bowl of water was nearly empty, and a very faint trace of the acrid scent hung in the air. She stared for a moment, then shrugged and put the plate and bowl in the sink. If something was getting into the apartment to eat the zucchini bread, she decided, at least it wasn’t leaving a mess.

  She had more important things to think about, though, and plopped down on the futon as soon as she’d shed her coat and sorted out the contents of her tote bag. A notebook full of staff paper made a prompt appearance, along with a mechanical pencil. All the way up Danforth Street she’d had fragments of her bourrée playing in her head, and getting them written down before she lost them was the one thing that mattered.

  By the time she’d copied down everything she remembered, she’d already decided to arrange the bourrée for piano—it would work as a flute solo, no question, but the melody begged for richer harmonies and a bass line. At first she could only see a few of the ways the fragments fit together, how the bass notes she’d sketched out for one passage in the first part could be developed to fill gaps in some of the other passages, how the middle notes could weave their own textures between the melody and the bass. She wrote, erased, scratched out false starts, and then all at once she could see the bourrée as a whole, turned to the next blank page, and wrote it out from beginning to end in such a rush that she snapped the pencil lead four times.

  Now, for the test that mattered.

  She was on her feet and halfway to the piano before she realized she’d left the notebook sitting on the futon. Retrieving it, she sat on the bench, stretched her fingers, shook out her hands, drew in a deep breath, and began playing. She stumbled hard the first time through the first part, pushed through, and then caught the rhythm of the bourrée and played the rest of it without trouble. A second time through, a third, and it sounded exactly the way she’d imagined it, filled the little apartment with its own bright elegance.

  The last notes faded into silence. Brecken sat on the piano bench for some minutes afterward, feeling a little dazed, a little—what? She couldn’t find words. It was done; it was—

  Hers. Not hers like something she owned, hers like a breath, a voice, a child.

  She shook herself, then, and finally thought to glance at the clock on the kitchenette wall. It was almost eleven o’clock. Somehow four hours had slipped by while she’d been writing the bourrée. It was far too late to call Rosalie, of course, so she got up unsteadily from the piano bench, went to the kitchenette, and split the next half hour between cooking a pot of rice, heating up red beans and collard greens from bowls in the refrigerator, and washing two breakfasts’ worth of dishes. Eventually a good-sized bowl of red beans and rice and a smaller bowl of buttered greens accompanied her back to the futon.

  Once both bowls were empty, she sat back, tried to clear her head. She ought to put in another hour of piano practice, she told herself, but it felt just then as though every drop of music had been wrung out of her. Instead, once she’d emailed Professor Toomey to tell him she had a piece finished for the composition class assignment, she pulled the futon out flat and got the quilts spread out on it. She had to struggle to find the energy to get ready for bed, and once she lay down and pulled the quilts over her, she fell asleep almost at once.

  She had a curious dream somewhere in the small hours, though. In the dream, as in reality, she was curled up on the futon in her apartment, her quilts heaped over her, and she happened to be looking through the darkness toward the kitchenette. Something dark and shapeless crouched there, gazing at her with pale phosphorescent
eyes.

  “MY COUSIN RICK EMAILED ME a link to the website,” Rosalie said. She was wearing an even louder blouse than usual, and Brecken suspected she’d chosen it to match her mood. “The idea is the meaning of your family name predicts your future.”

  Donna rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  “No, seriously, give it a chance. Do you know what your name means?”

  “It’s the Italian word for ‘German,’” said Donna. “What it means is that one of my dad’s ancestors took a wrong turn in the Alps somewhere. I’m not going to repeat the mistake.”

  Rosalie sighed, turned to Brecken. “Help me, okay? Do you know what Kendall means?”

  “No,” Brecken admitted, “and that’s not what it was originally. Grandpa Aaron changed the spelling. It used to be Kandel—that’s a Jewish name, but I don’t know the meaning.”

  “Your grandfather was Jewish?” Donna asked.

  Brecken nodded. “Grandpa Aaron was a Jewish pianist from Brooklyn, Grandma Olive was a black jazz singer from St. Louis, so of course it was love at first sight. They started out doing gigs together, then got married and had my dad. My mom’s Irish and Armenian on one side and nobody’s quite sure what on the other.”

  “Wow,” said Donna. “How do you even decide what church you’re going to get married in? Or synagogue, or whatever it would be?”

  “Your whole family’s Italian?” Brecken asked.

  Donna nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yeah. Not just all Italian, all from Abruzzo, and most of ‘em from the town of Pescara. My aunt Giannina gets teased all the time for being a foreigner because her family’s from Chieti, which is like from here to Mount Pleasant.”