♪Your body has special places for so many things,♪ Sho said then, shyly. ♪I am wondering if it has special places for this too.♪
♪Y-yes. Yes, of course.♪
♪Will you show me?♪
Heart pounding, Brecken pulled off her nightgown with shaking hands, and showed her.
LATER—HOW MUCH LATER, Brecken had no idea then or afterwards—they lay still again, curled around each other under the quilts in a single damp shape, so intertwined that Brecken was no longer entirely sure where her body ended and Sho’s began. The rich dark scent of Sho’s passion and the salty musk of her own blended, intoxicating, and through it Brecken caught another of Sho’s scents, the washed-mushroom odor of simple happiness.
The light fixture overhead still shone, casting dim rainbow splashes of itself on the few parts of Sho that reached out from underneath the quilts, for Brecken hadn’t been able to muster the fortitude to leave the futon even for the few moments it would have taken to go to the switch. Her mind circled around an unfamiliar word that Sho had piped in her ear, soft as a whisper, at one intense moment. It was related to the word for broodmate, that was clear, but there was a cadence at the end that intensified other words. Broodsister, maybe, was the closest she could get in translation: an endearment, possibly more.
Sho was still on the waking-side, her eyes opening and closing slowly, looking at her with what Brecken had come to recognize as a dazed delighted look. What her own face looked like just then, Brecken didn’t try to guess. The word repeated itself over and over in her mind, and she guessed dimly what it would mean if she spoke it aloud to Sho. A rush of affection as the shoggoth brushed her skin with a drowsy pseudopod settled the issue, and Brecken repeated the word in a quiet whistle.
A dozen eyes opened at once, then closed as pseudopods drew Brecken close. A moment later a sharp repeated tremor began to shake Sho’s form. Were those the shoggoth equivalent of tears? Brecken did not know, but she wrapped her arms tight around Sho anyway, pressed her face into the shoggoth’s surface. Somehow, despite the vast differences between them, the motion seemed to communicate.
LATER STILL, BRECKEN WOKE to find the first traces of daylight filtering in through the blinds. She lay still for a time, watched a very few of Sho’s eyes drift open and shut with glacial slowness, then untangled herself gently from her broodsister and slipped out from under the quilts. Cold air stung against her bare skin as she crossed the room, turned off the light.
She turned and, despite the cold, stood there for a time watching Sho as she dreamed. Her scent and Sho’s, mingled inextricably, brought a cascade of fresh memories with every breath. Old habits of thought tried to convince her that she should be shocked and horrified by what they’d done, and failed.
Now that it’s happened, she asked herself then, is it what you wanted? She had no answer. All she knew for certain was that she’d crossed over a line, and there would never be a way back. She glanced down at herself, considered the soft curves and gawky angles of her body. It would not have surprised her unduly just then if she’d found herself beginning to sprout tentacles, but improbable as it seemed, nothing had changed that she could see.
As she started back to the futon, the bells of the First Baptist Church rang in the distance, announcing the sunrise service. Listening, Brecken remembered the words Sho had drawn from the notes of the bells tolling the hour, and the familiar sequence of the carillon stretched and shifted into a theme: the opening theme of a movement, Brecken knew at once, a largo to balance the allegretto first movement of her concerto. In the moments that followed, the rest of the movement sketched itself out in her mind.
She went to the end table beside the futon, stood there irresolute for a moment, then sighed. I’m tired of fighting it, she told herself, but she didn’t feel tired; she felt light, trembling, newborn. Pulling her composing notebook out from under a stack of books and finding a pen felt like the first steps out of cold echoing darkness into greenery and sun. She wriggled back into her flannel nightgown and settled back on the futon. Tucking her feet up under her, she got the quilts settled in place and shifted toward Sho, who flowed drowsily against her.
The pen scratched in the silence of the dawn, and after a moment a luminous eye peered up at her. ♪It is well with you?♪
♪It is very well,♪ Brecken whistled. ♪So well I don’t know words for it. And with you?♪
♪Today my name is Brought Out Of The Empty Places,♪ Sho said simply.
♪I’m so glad.♪ Brecken paused, and thought of one way she could welcome the future the two of them had just set in motion. ♪Today my name is Embraced.♪
Sho trembled. ♪Broodsister, broodsister—♪
Brecken put an arm around her, held her close. The trembling stilled, and after a time Sho slipped back over to the dreaming-side. Brecken looked down at her, dizzied by the intensity of the feelings the shoggoth wakened in her. Then, moving slowly so the movements of hand and pen did not disturb Sho, she let herself fall into the condition of fire.
NINE
Winter Symphonies
SIXTEEN DAYS SLIPPED BY between Christmas Eve and the first day of classes in the new semester. That was what the calendar said, at least, but afterwards Brecken never could sort out what happened on which day, or whether there had been separate days or nights at all, for the time slipped past in curves as perfect and shapeless as Sho’s. She’d kept up the shoggoth habit of giving herself temporary names each day, but she couldn’t even remember for sure which names she’d given herself, much less in which order: had she been Laughs At Falling Snow before In A Circle or afterwards, or had she taken either name during those days at all?
Twice, certainly, she’d put on street clothes, bundled up against the weather, and trudged the four blocks to Meeker Street to do her laundry at the laundromat and restock her cupboards and fridge from the First National grocery. A few cars picked their way along the black and icy streets, a few stray pedestrians huddled into their coats as they passed her by, but she saw no one she knew, no one she wanted to see, until the door of the little apartment spilled yellow light onto the snow and let her back into her own space and Sho’s welcoming presence.
At least four times she’d made the much shorter trip to the mailbox out front to mail letters to her mother and pick up the few letters she received. Once, too, on New Year’s Eve, she’d made the traditional good-luck foods her grandmother used to fix, rice and beans for health, corn bread for happiness, boiled greens for money, bacon for plenty, and served them up for the two of them, wishing devoutly that the rite would give the two of them some protection against the dangers that surrounded them.
Then there was the day not long after Christmas when she got out her laptop, booted it up, ignored the little icon that told her about all the emails that had come in that she hadn’t gotten around to reading, went straight to the Partridgeville State website and logged onto the page where she could change her schedule for the new semester. Four clicks deleted MSE 242, Introduction to Music Education II, and MSE 266, Psychology of Music Education; four more got her into MUS 331, Counterpoint, and MUS 365, Introduction to Orchestral Arrangement—she’d worried that one or both of those might be full up, but the changes went through without a hitch. She let out a ragged breath, logged off, shut down the laptop before the thought of those unread emails had time to work on her.
Maybe it was the best decision she’d ever made and maybe it was the worst, but it was her decision and she’d resolved not to turn back. She couldn’t bear the thought of feeding the misery she’d witnessed at Partridgeville High, and Rohrbach’s assurance that she’d get used to it sickened her, not least because she dreaded the possibility that he might turn out to be right, that time and familiarity might numb her to the wretchedness that goal-oriented instruction meant when it was applied to human beings. The other road led to the condition of fire and it drew her, a moth to its flame; if that means I spend my life flipping burgers, she told herself in a fl
ash of defiance, that’s what it means.
Aside from those interruptions, though, the sixteen days from Christmas to the Sunday before classes folded and flowed together into one warm dancing blur. Brecken spent days at a time wearing nothing but a flannel nightgown with a baggy sweater over it, between those intervals when she wore nothing at all, when fumbling and soft whistles taught her how to coax shudders of delight from Sho’s body, and taught Sho how to do the same with hers. There were times when she drifted off to sleep in a tangle of limbs and pseudopods in the middle of the afternoon, or pattered around the kitchenette in bare feet at four in the morning cooking a dinner for two, and there were times upon times upon times, at all hours, when she and Sho lay all atangle on the futon under heaped quilts and the rest of the world stayed far away.
Words bedeviled her now and again. One dark morning, as sleet drummed on the windows, she wondered for a while whether the fact that she’d fallen in love with the shoggoth made her a lesbian, since Sho was after all female. Then it occurred to her that she didn’t want a woman in her bed, or for that matter a man; she wanted Sho. With that settled, she wondered drowsily for a while whether that made her a shoggothsexual or simply a Shosexual, before she simply fell asleep.
Another time, when Sho was far over on the dreaming-side and Brecken sat watching her in a warm shoggoth-colored daze, thinking at stray intervals about doing something else but never quite getting around to it, she found herself wondering if what she and Sho had done an hour before really counted as sex, and whether it meant the same things to Sho that it did to her. The question had no straightforward answer. The things she did to delight Sho had nothing in common with human sex, nor did the things Sho did to give her pleasure, the little pseudopods like tongues or fingers dancing on her sensitive places, have much in common with the things she’d done with Jay or the boyfriends she’d had in high school. She guessed that none of it was much like the ordinary sharing-of-moisture between shoggoth broodmates, either, but it somehow worked for them both, the giving as well as the receiving. Competing words in English and the shoggoth language knotted in her mind, until finally she laughed, shook her head, nestled against Sho, and let the words go spinning away somewhere else as a sleepy pseudopod flowed around her and drew her down into soft darkness.
Another language, the language of music, offered her better ways to talk about the things that mattered to her, and a good fraction of those sixteen days went into the attempt. Sometimes she played Baroque pieces on the piano, sometimes it was the flute that called her, and there were also times that she and Sho improvised duets that suggested entire new worlds of music to Brecken, but she also spent hours curled up on the futon with the composition notebook open in front of her, staring at nothing in particular while music shaped itself in her mind.
The second movement of the concerto took many hours, but it wasn’t alone. A minuet in C came together over the course of a single afternoon, though it took days more to make it sound exactly the way she wanted; a piano etude in D minor helped her work out a way of handling harmonies she liked; then, one at a time, she composed three sarabandes in G, using three of Sho’s temporary names as themes—to the two of them, those pieces would always be “Voice From A Distance,” “I Fold Around Myself,” and “Two Different Colors.” Brecken wondered from time to time if she’d ever be able to share those titles and their meanings with anyone else.
That was on her mind now and again, as the sixteen days flowed seamlessly to their close. Part of her wanted to run out into the streets of Partridgeville and tell everyone she met how beautiful and sweet and caring Sho was, and part of her wanted to clutch that knowledge to herself forever as a secret, but in the world to which she’d have to return once classes began, the latter was the only option she had. She thought with wary amusement about what Mrs. Dalzell would think, or Professor Toomey, or Rosalie, if they found out that their tenant or student or best friend had fallen in love with a shoggoth—and back behind that was the cold memory of thunder beyond Hob’s Hill, the knowledge that there were people somewhere in the world whose only answer to Sho would be the destroying fire.
The last night before classes started again, as traffic grumbled on the nearby streets and the neighborhood woke up from winter break, they talked about that. It all seemed distant and abstract, though Brecken knew well enough that the little circle of sheltering darkness the two of them had made for each other could too easily be shattered by their own carelessness, or by any of a hundred unforeseeable happenings. There had been no further sign of anyone hunting for Sho, but Brecken remained wary.
Later, she fixed cheese polenta for the two of them. As it cooked, Sho piped, ♪May I have apricot jam on mine? I think it would be very good.♪
Brecken gave her a startled look, but she’d already gotten used to the oddities of Sho’s tastes. After all, she thought, she likes Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread. She tried not to think about the last time she’d tasted Aunt Mary’s cooking, and whistled back, ♪Of course.♪
As they sat on the floor and shared their meal, she watched Sho quiver with pleasure and smelled freshly washed mushrooms in the air. Unnecessarily, she asked, ♪How is it?♪
♪Very good,♪ said Sho. ♪Very very good. In all the world there is only one thing I know that delights me more.♪
♪Oh?♪
♪You.♪
Brecken laughed, bent to kiss her surface, felt a pseudopod brush her cheek and leave a little spot of moisture there.
Later still, as they nestled down together under the covers, it occurred to Brecken that the sixteen days just past should have felt like a dream. They didn’t; they felt as though she’d woken up fully for the first time in her life, and was about to sink back into restless slumber. The thought unraveled as she fell asleep, and gave way to a curious dream where she stood in a dark place surrounded by curves and angles, and spoke in whispers with the darkness.
THE NEXT MORNING DAWNED cold and blustery, with flurries of wet snow spattering down from a sky the color of iron. Brecken dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, put on makeup for the first time in weeks, then perched on the futon and packed her tote bag with everything she’d need for the day’s classes. Halfway through the process she thought of her cell phone and got it out of her purse. It was turned off, and she realized after a blank moment that she hadn’t turned it on since that last wretched practice session with Rose and Thorn. With a frustrated sigh, she woke the thing, gave it a dismayed look when it told her that she’d managed to miss nineteen calls and had fifty-three text messages waiting.
♪What is it?♪ Sho asked her.
♪The thing-that-talks has too much to say,♪ Brecken replied.
Six of the calls and twenty-one of the texts were from Rosalie, unsurprisingly enough. Most of the rest were nothing she had to worry about, but three calls and eight texts were from Jay, and that troubled her. She deleted his calls unheard, then opened the first text and read: BRKN PLS TXT ME THX J. The last one, which she opened next, had a slight variation on the same message. She closed it with a scowl and deleted everything he’d written, then gathered up her courage and started reading Rosalie’s texts. The first few were full of outrage at Jay, talk about her holiday trip—she’d ended up going with her family to Guadalajara after all—and more talk about Tom Bannister, who she insisted was really nice but not boyfriend material. The texts that followed hoped that Brecken was all right; the last dozen or so managed, even through the abbreviations, to sound desolate. She hit the REPLY button on the last one, and typed: RO SRY 4 DROPNG OFF URTH M OK NOW C U @ COMP CLS 2DAY?
The answer came back while she was still deleting sales pitches for penis-enlargement pills: OMG OMG OMG THX BRKN SO GLAD UR OK VIV @ 1030 2DAY?
It probably wouldn’t hurt to get to campus early, Brecken decided, and so sent back a text agreeing to be at Vivaldi’s at 10:30. That settled, she finished packing, ate breakfast with Sho, spent half an hour that probably should have gone into study in hugs a
nd whistled endearments, and then put on her warmest coat, hat, and scarf, and left for campus.
Danforth Avenue was a symphony in black and dirty white, given an unfamiliar rhythm by the rattle of tire chains on ice and packed snow as two long lines of cars slogged this way and that. Most of the sidewalk had been shoveled or salted, though, and she made better time than she’d foreseen. The church clock up on Angell Hill hadn’t yet chimed 10:15 when she got to campus and veered left toward the the gray plaza and the stark concrete mass of Gurnard Hall.
The thought of heading through the glass doors and crossing The Cave to Vivaldi’s bothered her more than she’d expected, but she squared her shoulders and told herself that Jay wouldn’t be there, not while he had Barbara Cormyn to keep him occupied. A trickle of other students were heading the same way, and she let herself move with the current, across the wet and salted plaza, and through one of the glass doors into The Cave—
And there he was, sprawled in a chair over by the nearest of the angled pillars, giving her a sudden intent look. She looked away, cut across The Cave toward the doors that led on toward Vivaldi’s, but he was already on his feet, heading toward her. “Brecken—”
She would not look at him. “Go away,” she said, and kept walking.
“Brecken!” He caught up to her, took hold of her arm.
Whether it was the too familiar wheedling tone in his voice or the hand on her arm that did it, she never did figure out, but all at once the bitterness she’d pushed aside for so long came surging up. Anger flared white-hot, and her usual reserve splintered. She rounded on him, shook her arm free. “I said go away. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you. You can go crawl into a ditch and die for all I care. Okay? Now leave me alone.” She turned her back on him and stalked away. In the glass doors ahead, she could see his reflection, silent and staring, a motionless presence amid the bustle of The Cave.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 15