The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  IT TOOK ONLY TWO weeks to get a response back from Miskatonic—typical, Professor Toomey told her, of smaller private universities in those days of falling enrollment. The news was good: her application had gotten her past the first hurdle, and the next involved coming to Arkham to audition for a place in the composition program. One of the dates they offered her was during Partridgeville State’s spring break, which was convenient, and she could choose three pieces to play rather than being assigned pieces by the judges, which was promising; on the other hand, they wanted three of her own compositions to judge, which set her nerves on edge. She replied at once and then emailed Professor Toomey and June Satterlee, asking for advice. After that she tried, with limited success, to put it all out of her thoughts.

  During those same days, she started work on a piece of music more ambitious than any she’d yet attempted, a Theme and Variations in G, based on a bit of melody that had come to her one crisp bright morning when the sun splashed through fragmentary clouds onto Hob’s Hill. Between her counterpoint class and a not very systematic reading of the books she’d salvaged from Hancock Library, she’d caught some sense of the possibilities that opened up once the notes between the melody and the bass line found their own voices and started weaving melodies across one another. Sensing the possibilities was one thing, she found, and making them work was quite another; even so, it came together well enough that she emailed Professor Toomey to let him know she’d be playing it as her midterm project in Composition II.

  Weekends were different, since she’d begun playing at the First Baptist Church. The first time she’d gone down early on a Sunday the big front doors were open, and Carl Knecht was waiting inside. He greeted her with the formalities of an older time, and took her to meet the Reverend Meryl T. Gann, who was tall and thin and always smiled, whose hair gleamed like a silver helmet, and whose conversation seemed to consist of nothing but moral platitudes. The hymns were simple enough that she could have dispensed with practicing them, but she’d practiced them anyway, and the incidental music she’d chosen—Bach, mostly—more than made up for the blandness. The sermons the Reverend Meryl preached were of a piece with her conversation, a sequence of vague sentiments that never quite seemed to amount to anything; the mostly gray-haired congregation seemed to enjoy it, but Brecken decided after about five minutes that it would be a good idea to bring classwork with her to church.

  It wasn’t while the Reverend Meryl was preaching that she felt close to whatever eldritch powers were invoked in the churches of the Old Independent Liberal Baptist Conference of New Jersey. When the organ filled the great echoing space with music, she felt those powers stir, but paradoxically it was in certain intervals of silence that she felt them most strongly. Something she didn’t recognize sent echoes of itself through the dim space and the fabric of the church, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the service. What it was remained a mystery to her.

  The rest of her weekends she turned her back on the world and devoted her time to music and to Sho: mostly to Sho, all things considered, though Mrs. Macallan’s flute, the piano, and her composition notebook all attracted a certain share of her time. One Saturday evening after dinner they ended up talking about Darren, and that quickly landed Brecken in difficulties as she tried to explain sexual orientation in a language that had no words for gender. Partway through the explanation, though, Sho suddenly huddled down and said, ♪I understand. It is like sharing moisture with those who are not broodmates.♪ That left Brecken as baffled as Sho had been, until she figured out from Sho’s embarrassed explanations that the sharing-of-moisture was subject to taboos among shoggoths, and that was one of them.

  ♪It happened,♪ Sho piped slowly, ♪but no one wished to talk about it, except to speak ill of those who did it.♪ Then, with obvious distress: ♪Please do not think that matters to me, that you and I are not of the same budding. You are my broodsister. I do not care what they would have thought. I would not care even if they were all still alive inside the hill today.♪

  ♪And you’re my broodsister,♪ Brecken reassured her. ♪There are human customs, and my people would speak ill of me if they knew about us, and I don’t care either.♪ She reached for Sho, pseudopods reached up in answer, and the rest of the conversation went unsaid.

  So the days went past. All in all, it was a good time for her, except for the dreams.

  EXACTLY WHEN THE DREAMS began, she wasn’t sure. Sometime in the first few weeks of the new semester, though, she’d begun to wake up suddenly in the middle of the night with her heart pounding, and fragments of fearful imagery dissolving into the night air around her. She’d put that down to the stress she was under—bad dreams had been familiar companions of hers from childhood on—but these didn’t come and go as her nightmares usually did. They seemed to gain strength, night after night, leaving her more tired and frayed each morning.

  In her waking hours she went to classes, met with Darren to talk about the music theory of another time, studied for her classes, worked on her theme and variations, nestled into Sho’s shapeless curves. Whenever Brecken slept, though, day or night, the dreams waited for her. Eventually they became clear enough that she could remember fragments of them: a voice speaking words, a face that now and again almost seemed familiar. As more time passed she thought she recognized the face and the voice, because they reminded her uncomfortably of Jay. What made that all the more unsettling was that Jay himself was waiting in The Cave every morning when she got there, and stared at her intently as she walked past.

  Was he somehow sending the dreams to her? The idea seemed absurd at first, but scraps and hints she’d found in The Secret Watcher made her wonder whether his studies might have taught him to do something of the kind. Finally, the night before she was scheduled to play her Theme and Variations in G for her composition class, she talked to Sho about it.

  ♪That may be,♪ Sho replied in a worried tone. ♪I do not know what knowledge your people have about that, but it was known among mine. There were writings only a few of the elders were permitted to read. It happened once in the time of my broodmother’s broodmother that one who lived under the hill read those writings and tried to do a thing taught in them, and something came for her and took her away and no one knows what happened to her. It happened once long before then, that one did the same thing, and used the knowledge to make another die, and the elders judged her and walled her up in a little cavern and left her to starve.♪

  Sorcery, Brecken thought. The word appeared too often for comfort in the pages of The Secret Watcher. When it came time for bed, despite Sho’s comforting presence, it took her hours to get to sleep, and when she did she plunged at once into the nightmare.

  That was the night that she finally saw the face in the dream clearly. It was Jay’s, as she’d thought, with the smile she hated twisting it, and it was repeating the same words over and over. Come back to me, it said. You have to come back to me. You’re going to come back to me.

  She jerked awake from the dream, shuddering. Around her, strange angles loomed out of the darkness. It took a long moment before they settled back into the familiar walls and furniture of her apartment, lit dimly by the faint glow of the alley streetlight. From the stillness, it was sometime in the small hours of the morning. She felt exhausted, she needed sleep desperately, but the thought of trying to get back to sleep left her cold with fright.

  Awareness stirred dully. That’s what Jay’s trying to do to me, she thought. Wear me down until I’m so exhausted and confused that I go back to him, because that’s the only way I can get some rest. In the darkness, it was all too easy to imagine herself doing as he wished, becoming a thing of his rather than a person. Numb terror seized her, the archaic dread of sorcery, and she remembered words of Sho’s—♪The world has no eyes.♪ It had never before sunk in just how much terror hid behind those words, how vulnerable her life was in a universe that did not know or care that she existed.

  Time passed—how much
time, she had no idea—and then she noticed that she seemed to be standing beside the futon, looking down at herself and Sho. The apartment surrounded her, but beyond it lay a darkness that blotted out everything. The darkness turned and regarded her.

  There is an alternative.

  It was not a voice. That was the strangest thing about it. It was not a voice and it did not speak words, but somehow she understood it.

  There is an alternative, it repeated, if you are willing to take it.

  Her eyes opened, though she didn’t remember closing them. She was lying on the futon again, curled up against Sho, and the only darkness that surrounded her was the ordinary kind, shot through with dim gleams from the alley streetlight.

  An instant later, something surfaced in her mind. It felt oddly like a memory, but she was certain she hadn’t read the page that stood out clearly in her mind. She knew in that same instant what the not-voice was asking her to do. The thought of doing it terrified her, but not enough to accept the only other choice she could find, the choice of submitting to the nightmares and to Jay. After a moment, she extracted herself from Sho’s curves, slipped out from under the quilts.

  The shoggoth stirred. ♪Is it well with you?♪

  ♪I don’t know,♪ she whistled. ♪Maybe.♪ She turned on a light, went to the dresser and got out her copy of The Secret Watcher. Her fingers shook, but they seemed to find the right place by themselves. ♪I’m going to try something.♪

  The printed text on that page gave the words of something called the Vach-Viraj incantation; a note neatly handwritten in the margin gave instructions for using it. She read through both twice, then nerved herself up and went to the center of the room. It took her a moment to recall which way was north, but then she faced that way and traced in the air the strange pattern the book called the Sign of Koth. Another quick glance at the book, and she pointed to the center of the Sign, and began tracing a circle around herself counterclockwise while repeating the incantation: “Ya na kadishtu nilgh’ri stell-bsna Nyogtha...” Her voice wavered, she stumbled over the words, and the whole rite felt useless, worse than useless—

  And then her finger returned to the center of the Sign she’d traced.

  It was as though a wall had suddenly dropped into place between her and the nightmares: not a perfect wall, nor an unbreachable one, but the change was welcome enough that she sagged with relief. She turned to Sho. ♪Can you feel it?♪

  ♪Yes,♪ the shoggoth whistled at once. ♪What did you do?♪

  ♪I think it’s sorcery,♪ Brecken said. ♪I’m going to do it again.♪

  The second time the words came more easily, and the barrier felt more solid. She did it a third time just to be sure, and by then, though she could still feel the nightmares waiting in the distance, she was so sleepy she could barely find the energy to put the book away and turn out the light before she nestled down next to Sho again. I think I’m going to be okay now, she tried to say, but sleep took her before she could begin to whistle.

  TWELVE

  The Secret of the Sorcerers

  BRECKEN SURFACED SLOWLY FROM sleep, feeling—what was the shoggoth word?— ♪sheltered.♪ Sho lay curled protectively around her, the quilts felt warm, and sunlight slanted down at a steep angle through the windowshades. From the street, traffic murmured low.

  She stretched, kissed the nearest of Sho’s curves, and then settled back down on the futon, thinking about what had happened. As far as she could tell, she’d had no dreams at all after she’d used the Vach-Viraj incantation, and she’d slept for—how many hours had it been?

  She craned her neck to see the clock in the kitchenette, let out a wordless cry and scrambled out from under the quilts. Sho came back to the waking-side in a hurry, half a dozen eyes blinking open all at once. ♪It is well with you?♪

  ♪Yes, but it’s very late.♪

  ♪I know,♪ Sho admitted.

  Brecken turned to face her. ♪You let me sleep.♪

  ♪You were so very tired.♪

  Brecken knelt and gave the shoggoth a kiss. ♪I know. It’s just that I have to be at class very soon.♪

  Scrambling into clothes, getting her hair to behave, and packing her tote bag took only a few minutes, and then she was out the door and hurrying toward campus. She got to Gurnard Hall with only a few minutes to spare, dashed through The Cave and caught the elevator. It stopped on the sixth floor, and Professor Toomey got on. Breathless and flustered, she glanced at him; he gave her a wry look in response; neither of them said anything. The elevator door hissed open, and they went to the door; he motioned for her to go ahead of him, and she hurried across the room to her usual seat next to Rosalie, who glanced at her and then pointedly looked away.

  Before either of them could speak, Toomey had reached the podium. “Okay,” he said, “the same drill as before. You all know quite a bit more about composition now than you did last semester, and I want to see that reflected in your comments. Any questions? No? Our first piece today is ‘Fantasia in B,’ by Marcia Kellerman. Marcia?”

  By the time two other students had played their midterm projects, Brecken had ample time to catch her breath, force her attention away from the events of the night, and review the score of her Theme and Variations in G. When the professor called her up, she started for the piano, went back for her sheet music, finished the interrupted journey.

  Settling onto the piano bench felt like entering a different world, a place where things made sense and the confusions of everyday life lay far off. That was common enough for her; what was unfamiliar was the distance that seemed to open up around her even before she began to play, separating her from the opinions of her classmates. She felt—there was only one word for it in any language she knew—♪sheltered.♪ Was it the work of the Vach-Viraj incantation, or something else? She did not know, but it exhilarated her.

  She turned to face Professor Toomey. “Do you mind if I say something before I start?” He gestured, inviting the words, and she turned the other way, facing the class. “A lot of people in the music department here have asked me whether I’m going to keep on writing the kind of music I love, and some of them have been really pretty nasty about it. Here’s the answer.” She pivoted back to the keyboard, raised her hands, and brought them down in the first of the three sforzando chords that opened the piece.

  From there the music took over. She flung herself into it, let each movement choose its own pace and tone—mellow for the statement of the theme, somber for the first variation, quick and precise for the second, hard and fast for the third. She could feel the music straining, reaching out for something she didn’t yet know how to help it grasp; the feeling was powerful enough in the flurry of fast notes at the beginning of the third variation that she stumbled and had to recover, but the fierce allegro that followed came readily to her fingers, and the rest of it flowed smoothly enough to the final cadence.

  A moment of silence followed, and then the applause began. She got up, managed to remember the sheet music, faced the class, and walked back to her chair. Julian and some of his cronies weren’t clapping, but they weren’t glaring at her, either, the way they’d done earlier; they looked away, with taut hard expressions. The others applauded, and it wasn’t just Molly and Darren who clapped enthusiastically.

  Long afterward, thinking back on the year when she’d become a composer, Brecken came to think of that short walk from the piano to her chair as the turning point, the moment when she pushed past her own fears and the disapproval of her classmates to start on her own path once and for all. At the time, it didn’t seem anything like so important. It mattered to her that she’d played a piece of her own, played it well, and that she’d told the others in so many words that they weren’t going to be able to bully her into giving up her music and the bright trembling joy that filled her when she composed, but her future still held so many unknowns that her one small triumph that morning didn’t feel that significant.

  It wasn’t until she and Rosal
ie headed downstairs again and got coffee at Vivaldi’s that she realized what else had changed that morning: Jay had been nowhere in sight when she’d crossed The Cave. Curiosity made her glance around the space, looking for him, before she headed off to her 1:30 class, but he wasn’t there. She shrugged, went to the elevator.

  THE DAY AFTER SHE played her midterm project, she spent as little time on campus as she could. Word of her composition had clearly spread through the music department, and The Cave was full of cold silences that even Rosalie’s chatter couldn’t break. In her orchestral arrangement class, where she took detailed notes on the proper handling of woodwinds, she tried not to notice Professor Kaufmann’s gaze as it flicked across her like a whip, or the glances and whispers that followed her all the way out from the classroom to the doors of Gurnard Hall. All in all, she was glad to return to the privacy of her apartment and Sho’s company.

  It helped that an email from June Satterlee was waiting for her when she got there. Most of it was polite talk about the audition process, but it ended:

  I don’t know if you’ve yet made any arrangements for a place to stay when you come up to Arkham. If not, I have a guest room that you’d be welcome to use if you like, and my house is only a few blocks from campus, which might be convenient. Let me know.

  Below the signature, again, the sign .v. appeared again. Brecken pondered that, but there was only one answer she could make and she knew it. That evening, before sitting down at the piano for a long practice session, she wrote back, accepting the offer gratefully. As before, she put the answering sign .x. under her own signature.