The closing of the door behind her shut out more than the weather; a quick whistled greeting brought a reply—♪Coming Back, I am glad you are here♪—that swept other thoughts into distance. By the time Sho flowed out from under the closet door Brecken had gotten coat, hat and scarf hung up on the coat tree, and dropped to her knees to fling her arms around the shoggoth and press her face into shapeless curves.
She got an email from Professor Toomey that afternoon with links to the colleges he’d mentioned, read it, and filed it for the time being. Later, she remembered Darren’s words, and sent him an email. The answer came back within minutes: Are you free 7pm tomorrow Hancock Library? Something you need to see. Pls don’t mention to anybody else. – DW
She pondered that while dinner cooked. If the email had suggested anywhere less public she’d have worried, but Hancock Library was full of staff and students at all hours, and there was a campus shuttle that could get her home if walking turned out to be too risky. After dinner, she sent back an email promising to be there. Until morning came, that was the last attention she paid to anything outside the walls of the little apartment.
TEN
A Fallen World
AT 7:00 SHARP THE next evening she left the sidewalk on College Street and went to the main doors of Hancock Library. It was a crisp, cold night, with a sky full of stars overhead, and the walk down from the converted garage left her exhilarated. That day she’d only had one class, Intro to Orchestral Arrangement at 2:30, and so she’d been able to spend the whole morning and most of the afternoon in Sho’s company. The intensity of their winter break together had faded a little, but every moment she spent away from her broodsister still felt a little like wasted time.
Once inside the library, she glanced around, uncertain, then spotted Darren at the same moment that he noticed her. He hauled himself out of the chair where he’d been sitting, crossed the room to her. “I’m glad you could make it,” he said in a low voice. “Come on.” Before she could ask any questions he led the way further into the library.
He stopped at a door marked STAFF ONLY in a quiet corner, waited until nobody but Brecken was in sight, tapped on the door once, then twice, then twice again. Moments passed, and then a lock clicked and the door opened. He ducked through it, motioned for Brecken to follow. She gave him an uneasy look—there might be good reasons, of course, not to go into an unfrequented place with a man she didn’t know that well—but she followed him anyway.
On the far side was a cluttered room with metal shelves around the edges and piles upon piles of old hardback books in the middle. Another young man, plump and smiling, with black horn-rimmed glasses and a shock of unruly black hair, closed the door behind them.
“Stan, this is Brecken, who I told you about,” Darren said then. “Brecken, Stan’s a friend of mine. He’s in the library science program, and does work-study here.”
“Did Darren say anything about this?” Stan said, gesturing at the books.
“No.” Brecken glanced from one to the other, uncertain.
“It’s like this.” He turned, walked over to the books. “The director of library services told us right before break that we have to cut our book holdings by twenty-two percent.” His smile crumpled and fell. “Eleven thousand books. This is just part of it.”
Brecken gave him an appalled look. “Why?”
“Nobody knows. We’ve got the shelf space, we’ve got the money, but we’ve got to clear away the quote deadwood unquote, no other explanation given. And the books aren’t even going to be sold. They’re going to be destroyed.”
Brecken opened her mouth, and then remembered the Woodfield Consolidated School District and the way it had gotten rid of its art and music programs, and closed it again.
“It’s going on everywhere these days.” Stan picked up a book from the pile, gave it a sad look. “University libraries, public libraries, you name it.” With a little bleak smile: “I’ve got a new theory about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. I think King Ptolemy just up and decided that nobody would ever actually need all those musty old scrolls.”
“Ow,” said Brecken.
“Yeah,” Stan said. “The one piece of good news is that some of us talked to the librarians, who are just as upset about this business as the rest of us, and they said that if books up and disappear from the sorting room nobody’s going to ask any hard questions. So we’re going to save at least some of the collection by getting it into other hands.”
“There are books on music,” Darren said. “Old books on composition. Do you want the textbook Mozart’s dad used to teach him counterpoint?”
Brecken tried to decide if he was joking. His face denied it. “Please,” she said.
He went over to the heaps of books, glanced at a few volumes, picked up a battered volume with a black cover. “Here you go. The author’s name is Johann Joseph Fux.”
She gave him a sidelong look. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” He came back toward her, grinned his ungainly grin. “So when it comes to music, I definitely have Fux to give.” He made a florid bow, held out the book to her.
Laughing, she curtseyed and took it. A brief glance through the pages, and she was sure she wanted to take it home with her and study it for hours on end.
“You can put the ones you want there so I can scan them and mark them as discarded,” Stan said then, indicating a shelf on one wall. “Darren says you’re studying old music, right? Please take anything you can use.” All at once his voice wavered. “I went into library science because I love books. I want to get them into people’s hands, not—not throw them out.”
He turned sharply away. Darren glanced after him, then turned to Brecken and motioned to the books. “It’s all a mess,” he said, “but I think the music books are mostly on this side. I’ve been here before, with other people—Stan’s already got a couple of hundred books handed out, and we’re going to see to it that nothing worthwhile gets wasted.”
“Are you looking for anything?”
“Old books in Latin and German on music theory, especially if there’s mathematics.”
A memory surfaced. “You said you’re a mathematician.”
He nodded. “I’m finishing up a master’s in mathematics this semester.” He knelt beside the books, pulled out two. “You should look at these.” Then: “Okay, here’s one for me.”
For the next half hour or so the two of them went through the heap of books together, like archeologists searching the ruins of a fallen world. There weren’t that many books on old music, and most of them had nothing she could use, but now and then as she sorted through the volumes or considered things Darren handed her, she found treasures—a history of the fugue with hundreds of examples, three more translations of old texts on counterpoint, a century-old doctoral dissertation that translated and discussed a fifteenth-century textbook of music theory, and more. By the time they finished, Brecken had two dozen books in her stack, and was trying to figure out how best to ferry them home.
“You didn’t drive here?” Darren asked.
“I don’t have a lot of money,” she said, “and a car’s more than I can afford.”
“Okay.” Diffidently: “I can give you a ride, if you want.”
She considered that, and agreed. Maybe five minutes later, they carried four plastic grocery bags of books out the service entrance in back and got them settled in the trunk of a battered green sedan a couple of decades old. “Okay,” Darren said, climbing in behind the wheel as Brecken got in the passenger side. “Give me directions.”
The car pulled out onto Meeker Street a few moments later. “So what’s a mathematician doing taking a composing class?” Brecken asked.
“My field’s historical mathematics.” He slowed as the light at College Street turned red.
“Focusing on the math that people used back in the day to understand music, which is really different from what you get in music theory nowadays. So I’m taking classes in the music
department to make sure I know enough not to talk nonsense.”
“Did you take up piano as part of that that?”
“No, I started taking lessons when I was twelve.” The light changed, and he turned left onto College Street. “Just one of those things. But it’s because I’ve played a lot of Bach that I caught onto what I’m researching.” Another left turn put the car onto Danforth Street, rising up toward the dark rounded mass of Hob’s Hill. “I’m convinced there’s a mathematical structure to Bach’s fugues—not just his, either. There’s the sort of thing they learned from Fux or Zarlino or the other writers on method, and then there’s something else, a deeper structure, that was a trade secret, the sort of thing the Baroque masters used and didn’t talk about.”
“That’s really interesting,” said Brecken. “Is that why you said the fugue you played for the class was derivative?”
That got her a sudden sidelong glance. “Good. Yeah, I used Bach’s math to compose it.”
The car pulled up in front of Mrs. Dalzell’s house. Darren got out with her and handed her the two grocery bags of books from the trunk, but made no attempt to get invited in. As Brecken headed for her door, she could hear his car’s engine as he drove away.
Later that evening, after dinner and a long while curled up with Sho on the futon, she went onto the internet and started looking for news stories about libraries getting rid of books. It took only a few moments to find plenty of details. Stan hadn’t been exaggerating: library systems had been dumping books for years, and to judge by what she read, the pace seemed to be picking up. She shook her head slowly, wondered what was behind it all.
THE NEXT MORNING JAY was in The Cave again, sitting over in one corner by himself, and though he stared at Brecken he didn’t try to talk to her. That was the busy day of her week that semester, and she gave him a wary glance and then hurried on.
He was there the next day, too. By then she had something else to worry about, though, for the same abrupt silences and unreadable looks she’d gotten when she’d come through the door on the first day of Composition II had begun to spread through the rest of Partridgeville State’s music department. She had Intro to Orchestral Arrangement that day, and startled glances and silences followed her from the moment she came in through the glass doors of The Cave, pursued by a wind with snow in its teeth, until she settled into a chair in a classroom on Gurnard Hall’s fifth floor and pulled a notebook and a pen from her tote bag.
Professor Madeline Kaufmann was thin and tense and angular, with fussy clothing and dishwater-blonde hair pulled back hard into a bun. She lectured in a staccato voice, pacing from the podium to the piano on one side of the room, now and then stopping to play a flurry of notes or chords, covering so much so fast that it took Brecken’s undivided attention to keep up with her. By the time the class session was over, four pages of Brecken’s notebook were covered with notes and Brecken herself had a head full of ideas for composition. As she stuffed the notebook into her tote back and got ready to leave, though, Professor Kaufmann said, “You’re Brecken Kendall, right? Do you have anything right now, or can you stay for a few minutes?”
“I can stay,” Brecken answered, trying to suppress a feeling of worry. “What is it?”
“There’s been quite a bit of talk recently about your compositions, you know. I wonder if you’d be willing to play me one or two.” With a thin smile: “To see what the fuss is about.”
Brecken’s heart sank. “Okay,” she said. A dozen other students in the room had stopped in the middle of their own preparations for leaving; the professor gave them a level look, and they hurried out into the hallway. No one closed the door, though.
Brecken went to the piano; a quick scale got her fingers limbered. She considered her options, and then launched into the first of her three sarabandes, the one she thought of as “Voice from a Distance.” As always, the music closed around her, holding her uncertainties and the professor’s reaction at a far distance. The sarabande sparkled and flowed, reached its end, and Brecken paused a moment and then played her new minuet. That was bright and lively enough to raise her mood even in the most uncertain moments, and she finished it smiling.
When she turned to the professor, though, the smile faltered. Professor Kaufmann was considering her with a thin frown. “Those are both very crisply handled,” she said, “but I think you’d be much better advised to put your talent to work on something a little less antiquated. Have you explored the current trends in art music?”
“Yes,” Brecken said. “They don’t do anything for me.”
The professor shook her head briskly. “Take my advice, you can’t afford that kind of thinking. If you want to get anywhere in composition you need to stay on the cutting edge.”
But I don’t want to get anywhere in composition, Brecken thought. I just want to write music. She didn’t say anything of the kind, though, and extracted herself from the room and Professor Kaufmann’s presence as quickly as she could. As she’d guessed, there were half a dozen students in the hall, all of them pretending that they’d been doing something other than listening at the door, and they stared at her as she went by.
When she got down to The Cave, more stares and silences were waiting. Brecken tried to ignore them all, went to the usual table. Donna and Rosalie were in the middle of a heated discussion about something, but dropped it the moment Brecken came into sight. She flopped down on a chair across from them, they exchanged greetings, and a moment’s brittle silence passed. “You know what, girl?” Rosalie said to Brecken then, leaning forward and propping her chin on her hands. “I talked with my cousin Rick about you. He wants to meet you. You could do a lot worse; he’s nice, he’s cute, he’s got a good job—”
Brecken managed to put on a bleak expression. “Ro, please. I’m still getting over one relationship, I’m not ready for another.”
“It’s been a whole month!” Rosalie said. “And of all the people to get torn up over, too.”
Brecken just looked at her, and after a moment she rolled her eyes. “Okay, I get it. But when you’re ready to start dating again, tell me, okay? I’ll give you Rick’s email.”
“The funny thing is,” Donna said then, “you haven’t been acting like somebody who’s getting over a relationship, Breck. You act like you’re in love.”
Brecken managed to keep her reaction off her face. “I think it’s the composing,” she said after a moment. “It’s like I had an empty place in me, and now it’s full.”
It was the right thing to say, she knew that at once, because Rosalie rolled her eyes and then started talking about something else. After a while both of them had to leave for classes. Brecken started for Hancock Library, then stopped in the middle of the plaza, reminded herself that she didn’t have any classwork that needed library time, and headed home. All the way up Danforth Street, she fretted about Donna’s words, and tried to think of some way to distract her friends from any clue that might lead them to Sho.
THAT FRIDAY WAS BRECKEN’S birthday, and true to form, Aunt Mary sent a cloyingly cute birthday card with a department store gift certificate in it. Brecken looked up the chain online, and to her immense surprise discovered that it was not only still in business, it had a store in the Belknap Creek Mall. That afternoon she played the flute in Mrs. Macallan’s memory for close to three hours, and for once it felt like a celebration of her teacher’s life instead of an elegy for a useless death. Later, though a birthday cake seemed extravagant, she baked thumbprint cookies with apricot jam in the dents, and she and Sho had their own very private celebration thereafter.
Saturday she walked out Dwight Street to the mall, threaded her way through the mostly empty parking lot, and spent a good two hours going through the bargain bins in the women’s clothing section of the store, finding everything they had in her size and then deciding which of them she could stand being seen in. By the time she got to the cash register she had a good-sized armload of practical clothing and one sheer extravagan
ce, a lovely dark red dress with tiny gold seed beads sewn on it in a sunburst pattern.
Her route from there went back past empty storefronts to the food court where Rose and Thorn played the semester before, and as Brecken neared the court she heard music: a flute’s high voice, a cello played in a style she thought she recognized. When she reached the food court, sure enough, Walt Gardner was the cellist and the flautist was Barbara Cormyn. The music was bland and sweet, and though the two of them were capable enough, there was something hollow where the life and soul of the music should have been.
Brecken stopped for a few moments, listening, and then walked past. Walt saw her and turned scarlet, and his playing faltered for a moment. Barbara glanced at him and then spotted Brecken, but neither her expression nor the sound of her flute wavered at all. Her big blue eyes gazed at Brecken in vague surprise, and the cold mechanical thing Brecken had seen behind her eyes showed again, registered her existence, and lost interest. Brecken was glad when the doors of the mall closed behind her and the music gave way to the earnest sounds of wind and traffic.
Other than that, she had nothing to take her away from the apartment that weekend. Rosalie tried to get her to come to Admiral Benbow’s Friday night for dancing, but Brecken begged off. The promised Saturday practice sessions hadn’t yet materialized, either, so except for the clothes she wore to the mall, a flannel nightgown and a baggy sweater were the most she put on at any point from Thursday evening to Monday morning. She slept poorly and her dreams were troubled, but the daylight hours were pleasant enough that they made up for it.
Once she got home Saturday she neglected everything but Sho; Sunday she found time for music, the weekly letter to her mother, and a long afternoon working on counterpoint assignments, though the latter two also counted as time with Sho, since she’d done all of it curled up on the futon with cool black iridescence up close against her.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 17