They put a good two and a half hours into the practice session, going on to sight-read Brecken’s new arrangements once the playlist for the upcoming gig was finished, and finishing up with a couple of familiar pieces, “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” and “O Holy Night,” which everyone but Donna had played together the year before. By that time even Walt, who had the stamina of a bulldozer, was ready to call it quits.
“Are you free tonight?” Rosalie asked Brecken. “It’s dance night at Admiral Benbow’s, and the rest of the night has strawberry daquiris and tacky videos written all over it.”
“I’ve got plans,” Brecken told her. “But thanks.” It was true that she had plans—off past Rosalie’s shoulder, Jay caught Brecken’s gaze and grinned—but there was also the little matter of the twenty dollar cover charge at Admiral Benbow’s, which was rather more than her budget would cover now that she had a shoggoth to feed.
“Anybody else?” said Rosalie then.
“I wish.” Donna finished putting her violin away. “Way too much reading to get done before class on Monday.” Walt mumbled something along the same lines, and Jamal simply gave her a wry look and went over to the coatrack on the far side of the room, where he’d stashed his coat and the black driving cap he usually wore.
Rosalie rolled her eyes. “Okay, whatever. See you all soon.” She bundled up in a loud red ruana, shook her braids free, got the strap on her harp case settled over one shoulder, and headed out the door. After she left, Jamal came back from the coatrack and glanced toward the door. “Poor little rich girl,” he said. “She doesn’t have a clue.”
Brecken sent a sulfurous look his way. He met her gaze squarely, and after a moment she looked away, nodded unwillingly, and put her flute case into her tote bag.
She and Jay left the Student Union Building together a few minutes later, went to his apartment long enough to get their instruments safely stowed out of the cold, and then headed out again and prowled the charity shops on Dexter Street, where he frowned over old books and bought three. Then they headed for the grocery and returned to his apartment, where Brecken fixed beef stroganoff and green salad for the two of them, and after dinner let him lead her again to his unmade bed. She left him sleeping as usual, picked her way as quietly as she could out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street, huddled into her coat against the cold as she hurried over to Prospect Street. Their lovemaking left her feeling emptier than usual, and not even thinking about music shook the bleak mood that followed her all the way home.
The apartment seemed smaller and shoddier than ever when she let herself in and turned on the light. She put down the tote bag, took off her coat and hat, slumped on the futon, and then remembered her uncanny guest. After a moment of indecision, she dragged herself to her feet, went into the kitchenette, and whistled down into the space beneath the sink, using the shoggoth’s latest name: ♪Far From Home? I’m back.♪
A long silence followed, and Brecken felt a sudden pang of dismay. Had Sho gone somewhere else, she wondered—or had the man who called himself John Metzner tracked her to her hiding place after all? Then, muffled by the floor, a quiet whistle sounded: ♪I am glad♪. When Sho flowed up through the gap in the flooring, Brecken felt a little less empty. The little rituals of the evening, as she fixed the shoggoth mac and cheese for dinner, brewed a cup of herb tea for herself, put in an hour of hard piano practice, and studied until her eyelids drooped, seemed a little less pointless in Sho’s presence.
Me and my strays, she thought. Well, why not? I’m kind of a stray myself. That cheered her as she settled down under the quilts and drifted off to sleep, into dreams where shoggoths and strange angles gave way to utter darkness, and to whispered words she could not recall when morning came.
FIVE
A Source of Sanctuary
UNLESS SHE HAD A gig to play, Sundays were quiet days for Brecken. Church had been an occasional thing in her childhood, and once she’d heard the news about Mrs. Macallan she’d never gone back, despite her grandmother’s attempts to attract her to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Trenton, and Uncle Jim’s less subtle efforts to talk her into going to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Harrisonville. Even so, some dim sense of sanctity still clung to the day. Every Sunday morning she set aside whatever music she was practicing for lessons or classes or Rose and Thorn, and played pieces by her favorite Baroque composers for hours at a stretch; every Sunday afternoon she wrote a letter to her mother, who (so the prison chaplain wrote to Brecken) rarely got any other mail; and only when evening arrived did Brecken leave the quiet hours behind and get back to work on her classes and her assigned music. It was appropriate, she thought later, that it was on a Sunday that she learned what had happened to Sho’s people.
While Brecken practiced, Sho listened in attentive silence—♪It is very pleasant,♪ she’d piped later, ♪like voices at a distance♪—and slipped over onto the dreaming-side when Brecken settled down to write her weekly letter. When she was mostly done with the letter, Brecken glanced at the shoggoth, watched pale eyes surface one at a time, unseeing, and sink back down again. I’ve made a new friend, she wrote, a girl about my age, very shy, who goes by the nickname Sho. She’s been through some hard times recently. We like the same kind of music, and I think we’ll be seeing a lot of each other from now on. She wrote a few more sentences about other things, then signed the letter, slipped away from Sho as gently as she could, got up from the futon and fetched stamp and envelope. As she settled back down on the futon, though, a convulsive shudder went through Sho, and four eyes blinked open at once.
♪It is well with you?♪ Brecken asked.
♪Yes. No.♪ The eyes focused on Brecken, though it took a few moments. ♪I dreamed about—about what happened—about how my people died.♪
♪I’m sorry.♪
♪It is necessary. I—I cannot sing for them until I have dreamed of them, and—and it will take much dreaming.♪
Brecken took that in, then gathered up all her courage, and asked, ♪Would it help to talk about what happened?♪
The shoggoth was silent for some minutes. ♪Yes,♪ she said finally. ♪I wish another to know.♪ Pale eyes looked up at Brecken, then closed, and another silence passed.
♪It was a day like others,♪ Sho piped then. ♪It was cold and there was little food, so we were all in the place we called the low chamber, well inside the hill, where warmth rose up from within the earth. Most were far over on the dreaming side, but I could not be still. I do not know why. I slid out from among my broodmates and the others and went to a place I knew, where a pool of water gathered and then flowed away through a gap in the stone.
♪I stayed there for a time, though it was warmer in the low chamber. Before I thought of going back, I heard a sound I had never heard before, once and then again, like this.♪ Her speech-orifice managed a fair imitation of the rumbling of thunder, or the sound of a distant explosion. ♪I did not know what it was, and I started back to the low chamber to ask my broodmother and the elders. I heard voices, though I could not tell what they said. And then—♪
She began to tremble violently, and a sharp scent tinged the air around her. Brecken, guessing what she was feeling, put her arms around the shoggoth, and the trembling slowed.
♪Then I saw fire.♪ Sho’s whistle was low and edged with dread. ♪I heard the sound again, and mixed with it, voices of my people as they died. I—I heard my—my broodmother cry out, ‘Broodlings, flee!’ and then her—her—her—♪ She could not go on. Brecken closed her eyes, waited for the next words.
♪Her voice became the shriek of one who dies,♪ Sho said finally. ♪She—she burned then, I think. I fled because she told me to, and the only place I could flee was into the pool of water. Down below the water, by the gap in the stone, I found a hiding place, and I hid there and did not move. I could see the water above me and the cavern above that, a little. After a while I saw some of your people in the cavern. I thought they were looking for me, to burn
me, and so I was very still until they went away. Then I slid through the gap at the bottom of the pool and followed the water down. I did not know where that led, but I wanted to find a safer place.
♪But the water took me to another opening, and that led outside the hill. I did not go out through it for a long time, because there were noises. After everything was quiet I went out, because I was hungry, and we gathered food from places around the hill sometimes. The place I came out was very close to this place, and I smelled the things outside that have food in them, and so I fed and then looked for a place to hide, and found it under this place.
♪I stayed on the dreaming-side all that day, for I had eaten little, and then once the dark came back I smelled the food you left, and I was very hungry, and I climbed up here and ate it. You came in suddenly and made it light, and I was sure you would kill me, but then you spoke to me and said you would not harm me. I was so frightened, I did not know what to think or what to do, so I fled and hid below, and—and you sang with the dark thing with many voices and then with the long bright thing, and then you made it dark and went to the dreaming-side, as though you wished me to know I did not need to fear you.
♪And I—♪ The whistled voice broke again. ♪I went back into the hill while you dreamed here. I hoped there might be others still alive, and—and I was wrong.♪ Her voice rose, shrill and shaking: ♪They had all burned, all of them, my broodmother and all my broodmates and all the others, from the eldest to the smallest broodling—♪
The whistle trailed off into silence. Brecken closed her eyes, tried not to think about what must have waited for Sho under Hob’s Hill. Within the circle of her arms, Sho trembled.
♪Then I came back to this place,♪ Sho said finally. ♪I could not bear to stay in the hill, and there was no food, and you had spoken kindly to me. By the time I left the hill it was light already, and I was terrified, but I could not bear to stay in the hill, so I came here in the light beneath the empty sky and—and found that you had left food and water in the place where you had seen me. So I fed and drank, and hid again in the place below, and listened when you came back and sang again. And another day came, and again you left food and water. So I resolved that I would speak with you when you returned, and—and you—and you were kind to me. You have said that this is a thing you do, and I believe that, but I still wonder that I see these things waking and not dreaming.♪ She huddled down. ♪The rest you know.♪
A long silence passed by. ♪The dweller in darkness told me to abide here,♪ Sho said then, ♪and I will do that, but I am afraid that they will hurt you if they find me.♪
♪I know,♪ said Brecken. ♪But I couldn’t live with myself if you left here and got caught.♪
The shoggoth considered her for a time. ♪Will you dwell in this place until you die?♪
The question took Brecken by surprise. ♪No,♪ she said after a moment. ♪But until summer, certainly, and maybe longer.♪
♪And when you leave—♪
♪We’ll work out some way to keep you safe,♪ Brecken said. Later, thinking back, she realized that it was the first time she’d referred to herself and Sho as “we.”
THE ELEVATOR SEEMED TO take longer than usual to rise to the top floor of Gurnard Hall. Rosalie chattered on, but Brecken couldn’t keep track of what she was talking about for more than a few seconds at a time. She’d spent most of the evening before practicing the bourrée, even though she knew it by heart. When the elevator finally grumbled to a stop and the door lurched open, she followed Rosalie down the hall, clutching her tote bag as though it could shield her from the next fifty minutes of Composition I.
She sat down, reminded herself that it couldn’t be worse than some of the wedding gigs she’d played, and glanced around. Julian Pinchbeck was already there, of course—she wondered from time to time if he slept in Gurnard Hall—and so was the girl with the pink hair: Molly, she reminded herself, and tried without success to call her last name to mind. She wondered where the other members and instruments of Molly’s heavy metal band were, and then noticed that the case sitting next to her chair pretty clearly held an acoustic guitar. She sat back, let herself relax a little. The thought of trying to play her bourrée on the heels of five or ten minutes of heavily amplified headbanger music had been weighing on her more than a little.
The rest of the class trickled in and took their seats, and Professor Toomey came in, sat in his chair, glanced to one side, the other. “Good morning,” he said. “We have quite a full playlist today, so we’ll begin right away. One reminder—ten per cent of your grade is your comments on the student compositions you hear in this class. Anyone have any trouble finding the comment form on the class website? No? The first piece is ‘Obsidian Ellipsoids’ by Julian Pinchbeck. Julian, if you’d like to begin?”
As Julian stood, beamed, and went to the piano, Brecken woke her smartphone, accessed the class website, and tapped the button marked COMMENT FORM. The form came up, and she typed in the name of the piece, stumbling momentarily over the spelling of “ellipsoids.” Be fair, she reminded herself. Just because you don’t like postspectralism doesn’t mean it can’t be good.
Unfortunately for her resolve, it wasn’t good. Julian played with stiff florid gestures, striking poses and tossing his head back from time to time, but the scattered notes, long silences, and occasional loud chords that made up the piece never quite managed to amount to anything but random noise. She bit her lip, typed in some comments she hoped would be helpful, then sat there listening and tried to think of something else to say. A few moments later Julian finished up with a loud diminished-ninth chord that set her teeth on edge.
She joined the polite applause as the piano fell silent and Julian went back to his seat. The professor said, “Next is ‘Marty’s Blues’ by Molly Wolejko. Molly?”
Molly unfolded herself from her seat, took a well-used twelve-string guitar out of the case, pulled the piano bench away from the piano, and settled on it. The guitar nestled up to her like an old friend. She struck a minor chord, another, and then all at once launched into a driving twelve-bar blues tune. It wasn’t classic blues, there were dissonances no old-time bluesman would have tolerated, but it spoke a musical language that wasn’t too far from theirs. Brecken, who’d grown up hearing that language in her grandparents’ house, closed her eyes and let herself bask in the tune for a verse and a half, then abruptly remembered that she had to comment on the piece and fumbled her way through a few sentences of praise as Molly wound it up.
The applause this time wasn’t merely polite, and Professor Toomey’s habitual bland expression had something like a smile playing at its edges. “Next,” he said after the clapping died down, “is ‘Bourrée in B flat’ by Brecken Kendall. Brecken?”
She made herself leave her chair, started toward the piano, and then remembered that her music was still in her tote bag. Flustered, she retrieved it, got the bench back in place, steadied herself, and began to play.
The first few notes sounded tentative, but after that the habits she’d learned playing at badly planned weddings and shopping malls full of cranky children came to her rescue. The room and the people in it faded out of her awareness, and only the music remained, bright and elegant as sun on water. Twice through the first part, twice through the second, dancing around the tonic, the B flat into which it would all finally resolve, closing on a perfect cadence she’d managed to weave into a repetition of the opening phrase: then it was done, and she blinked, took her music and stood up.
The applause she got fell somewhere between polite and enthusiastic. Well over half of the students clapped dutifully, but it was the others that made Brecken falter as she turned away from the piano and start back to her seat. Some of them applauded with gusto; the thin brown-haired guy in back who’d brought up fugues a week before was one of those and so, to Brecken’s considerable surprise, was Molly Wolejko. Then there were the ones who weren’t clapping at all, those who gave her flat hard looks as she returne
d to her chair, or Julian Pinchbeck, who shot a venomous glance her way and then looked somewhere else.
The look that mattered, though, came from Professor Toomey. The bland expression was still there, but something deeper down contradicted it. His unreadable gaze caught hers, and he nodded his approval.
Brecken sat down in her chair and glanced at Rosalie, who was giving her an odd baffled look. That troubled her at least as much as the others, and she tried to concentrate on the student compositions that followed. There were two of them, one avant-garde jazz, one that would have made a good jingle for a chewing gum commercial. She listened to both and did her best to make some sort of helpful response on the comment form, and as the clock showed twenty past the hour and the class ended, she realized that she didn’t remember a single detail of either one.
Two elevators were working, for a change, and so it was only a few minutes later that she and Rosalie stood in The Cave. “Coffee,” Rosalie said in a fake-zombie voice. “Must have coffee.” Then, in her own voice: “Maybe that’ll get me through the next week. Come on.” She led the way toward a double door in one wall, and Brecken followed.
A forgotten fashion in university planning had equipped half a dozen Partridgeville State buildings with coffee shops on the ground floor, and Gurnard Hall was one of them. With bare concrete walls, no windows, and hanging lamps splashing down a stark white glare from above, Vivaldi’s had all the charm of a small-town morgue. Posters in aluminum frames on the walls, announcing such cultural happenings as Partridgeville could boast, contended with the bleakness of the café and lost. Even so, the place was crowded as Brecken and Rosalie got in line.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 8