“Sure,” Brecken replied.
“You’re the one who’s composing classical stuff, right?”
“Baroque, actually.” She faced him, noted the hint of a swagger in his posture and the way his eyes strayed to the other students he’d been talking with.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the music I love,” Brecken said.
He rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, come on,” and launched into one of the overfamiliar arguments she’d been fielding all semester—afterwards, she couldn’t even remember which one. Her protest simply brought a couple of the young man’s friends into the argument. Before long there were half a dozen of them, more, mouthing the same tired reasons that she’d heard so many times before, insisting that she had to stop writing the music she loved and instead start writing the same things that every other young composer was writing just then.
“Look,” Brecken said finally, exasperated beyond endurance. “I know that I’m going to spend my life flipping burgers or something. I know that maybe three people in the history of forever are going to want to listen to my music. I know that I’m going one way and the rest of music is going somewhere else. I understand all that, and I’m good with it, okay? So why can’t you just back off and let me write the music that matters to me?”
That got her a moment of silence. Then, from past them, Molly Wolejko’s voice:
“Because they’re a bunch of meek little conformists.”
One of the young men spun around to face her. “That’s total bullshit.”
Her answer was a contemptuous snort. “Look at you,” she said, stepping closer, hands on her hips. “You’re seniors, aren’t you? Eight on one, bullying a sophomore because she’s doing something that doesn’t just rehash the latest fashions. I bet every single one of you talks about being edgy, breaking away from the conventional wisdom, finding your personal voice, but when somebody actually does that you can’t wait to tell them how wrong they are.”
“Yeah, right,” said one of the others, in a tone of utter disdain. “Big words from someone who makes money playing headbanger trash.”
“And you’re pea green with envy,” Molly shot back, “because people actually pay to hear my music. You know what? I could make a hell of a lot more playing pop or country, but metal says what I want to say, and it says what a lot of people want to hear, and that’s what music’s actually about—saying something an audience can relate to. Not sticking your hand down your shorts and thinking that makes you special.” She walked up to the one who’d spoken, grinning the kind of grin that sets fists flying. “Not pretending that you’re better than everyone else because you go out of your way to write stuff they don’t know how to follow.”
For one cold moment Brecken thought a fight was about to start, but the senior that Molly confronted glared and then backed away. “Look,” Brecken said. “I’m not telling anybody else what they ought to compose. I just want to keep writing the music I love, okay?” She stopped. Maybe it was the Vach-Viraj incantation and some trace of the feeling of being ♪sheltered♪ it had brought her, maybe it was something else, but she drew in a breath and went on. “And I’m going to keep writing it. If you don’t like it, that’s not my problem, it’s yours. If you want to yell about it, go shout at the wall over there. Who knows, maybe it’ll listen.” A motion of her head indicated the nearest flat expanse of concrete. “But you know what? I won’t—and you really ought to save your breath for someone who cares what you think.”
What would have happened if she and the seniors had been alone, Brecken didn’t want to guess, but Molly was there, her head tossed back at a truculent angle, and most of the other people in The Cave had turned to look. The senior who’d spoken first glanced this way, that, and then fixed Brecken with a cold look. “Your loss,” he said in an acid tone, and turned and walked away. The others looked around and made off.
In less than a minute Brecken and Molly stood in an otherwise empty space in the middle of The Cave. “Nice,” Molly said. “Up for coffee?”
“Sure,” said Brecken, and the two of them crossed The Cave to the doors that led to Vivaldi’s. A few minutes later they were sitting at a table in a convenient corner with steaming cups in front of them.
“Don’t let ‘em get to you,” Molly said. “Seriously. Everybody in this department who’s not doing pretentious avant-garde crap has to deal with that kind of thing. You just have to shrug it off and go your own way.”
“I’m still figuring out how to do that,” Brecken admitted.
“Keep at it,” Molly went on. “The thing is, every time you play one of your Baroque things you put their noses a couple of miles out of joint. My stuff they can brush off—hey, it’s just amplified noise, right?” She grinned. “But they can’t do that with yours. They know perfectly well how much work it takes to make a fugue or something like that come out right, and most of them couldn’t do a halfway decent job of it if they tried. Why do you think you get all those nasty looks from Prince Foofy-Hair in composition class?”
Brecken choked hard at the nickname, but managed not to spray coffee across the table. When she’d swallowed and put the cup down: “I was wondering if it was that.”
“Bet the farm on it.” She leaned forward. “Ever thought about transferring somewhere else, where they teach the kind of music you want to do?”
“Well—” Brecken stopped, made herself go on. “I’ve applied to a program at a school in Massachusetts,” she said. “I’ll be auditioning there next week.”
“Sweet. Whereabouts?”
“Miskatonic University in Arkham.”
That got a nod. “Don’t know squat about the school but Arkham’s a decent place. My band’s played a club there a couple of times.” She downed some of her coffee, sat back. “The thing is, this school is giving me what I need: more grounding in music theory and some good hard challenges to get me writing in new directions. I don’t think it’s going to give you what you need.” She shrugged. “I grew up in one of those pretty plastic suburbs that sucks the soul right out of you, and if I hadn’t found metal to do my screaming for me I probably would have walked out in front of a truck or something. My music tears the world apart. Yours puts it back together—and I don’t think they can teach you how to do that at Partridgeville State.”
“No, probably not,” Brecken admitted.
She brooded about that from time to time that weekend, as she nerved herself up to the trip to Massachusetts, rehearsed the pieces she’d chosen for her audition, and made plans with Sho for the few days they’d be spending apart. Molly was right, she thought more than once: the music I love makes the world feel as though it’s been put back together again—but how can that work when it really is just as arbitrary as Julian Pinchbeck says it is?
THIRTEEN
The Yellow Sign
IT WASN’T THE HARDEST thing Brecken had ever done, boarding the bus the next Monday morning. Really, she told herself, it should have been routine. She’d done the same thing half a dozen times already since she’d first come to Partridgeville. Of course getting ready for those previous trips hadn’t involved comforting a worried and affectionate shoggoth, talking over how to make sure Mrs. Dalzell didn’t realize that the converted garage had someone living there other than Brecken, and cooking up three big batches of cheese polenta and tucking them in the fridge to keep the shoggoth in question well nourished in her absence, but that hardly seemed to matter. Sho had become so much a part of her life by then that the little everyday rituals they’d created between them felt as though they’d been there from her childhood on.
The bus station fronted on Central Square, an easy walk from Brecken’s apartment even with a small suitcase in one hand and her tote bag in the other. She got to the station twenty minutes before the bus did. From the waiting room she could see buildings she knew well, dark brick broken by dark windows, grimy marble cornices against an unsettled spring sky. She looked at them for a little while, trying not
to think about what waited in Arkham, and then tried to distract herself with her copy of The Book of Nameless Cults, which she’d decided to take with her. Any other time the strange tales of forgotten civilizations and lost continents would have held her interest, but she couldn’t keep her mind on the book at all.
The bus pulled up more or less on time, and Brecken fumbled with her phone, got the ticket to display on the screen, lined up to hand over her suitcase and climb the stair. A few minutes later, she settled into a window seat as the engine rumbled to life. Familiar streets slid past, and then the bus plunged through Mulligan Wood and the highway stretched away into the northern end of the pine barrens. She tried again to make sense of von Junzt and got nowhere, so it went into her tote bag next to Mrs. Macallan’s flute.
After that, she watched mile after mile of pine forest slip past, and thought about the legend of the Jersey Devil, the monster that haunted the pine barrens—a great winged creature with a head like a horse, so the old stories said. The thought occurred to her, somewhere in the middle of the barrens, that the Devil sounded quite a bit like the Shantak-birds von Junzt discussed. She opened The Book of Nameless Cults, paged through it to the section on Shantak-birds, and nodded slowly. Shantak-birds and shoggoths, she thought, and wondered how many other creatures of the elder world might still hide in isolated corners of the globe. Were there still Deep Ones in their undersea cities and voormis in their cavern homes? The silences of the pine barrens didn’t answer.
Finally the barrens fell behind, giving way first to old towns in a green landscape and then to the sprawl surrounding Trenton. There Brecken got off the bus, retrieved her suitcase, waited for most of an hour in the train station, and boarded an Amtrak train headed north. She got a seat in the quiet car, and finally managed to get her mind to focus on von Junzt. The rest of New Jersey was a blur, New York City a few glimpses of aging skyscrapers, and the landscape from there to Boston left not even that much trace in her memory.
At Boston’s South Station she had barely enough time to hurry from the Amtrak train to the MBTA train out to Salem, and at Salem she headed straight to the bus stop, doublechecked the schedule on her phone, and five minutes later climbed aboard a county bus with 13 TO ARKHAM VIA KINGSPORT on the sign above the front windshield. She was nervous enough that she pulled von Junzt out of her tote bag three times, reread the passage on the words and signs of recognition, and then put the book away again. The bus left Salem on what street signs told her was the Old Kingsport Highway, and before long Kingsport came into view, a pleasant little tourist town around a harbor busy with small boats. The black masts and yards of a tall ship caught Brecken’s gaze, and beyond it crags rose up against the eastern sky, height upon height to the soaring mass of Kingsport Head.
From Kingsport the highway turned north and headed into the hills, and the bus drove into dark woodlands where pines and twisted willows huddled together as though whispering to one another. There were so few traces of human settlement that Brecken felt as though she’d somehow strayed from the busy world she knew to some distant corner of space or time, where her species had not yet arrived or had long since departed. The feeling lasted until the bus rounded one last curve, came out from under the trees, and started down a long slope toward a town huddled in a river valley.
Arkham, Brecken thought. It has to be. She was right, too; before long the bus passed an old sign with peeling paint welcoming visitors to Arkham, Massachusetts, and a few moments after that the highway had become a street that passed through a half-abandoned business district, crossed the river on a well-aged steel bridge, and headed straight toward the cyclopean buildings of the Miskatonic University campus.
A few minutes later she was standing beside what her map and a conveniently placed street sign both agreed was Curwen Street, waiting for the light to change. The neighborhood around her yelled its closeness to the university, with its array of little strip malls and clapboard-covered homes clumsily remodeled into student housing. That was familiar enough to comfort her, but she braced herself, knowing that there was one more hurdle to leap, and no way of gauging how high it was until she got there.
A block down to Hyde Street, four blocks along it to the intersection of Hyde and Jenkin: she’d rehearsed the directions in her mind often enough on the bus ride that she had no trouble at all finding 438 West Hyde Street. That proved to be an elegant Victorian house with a mansard roof and impressive amounts of ornate trim. Brecken stood looking at it for a few moments, then walked up to the door, drew in an unsteady breath, and rang the doorbell.
PROFESSOR JUNE SATTERLEE ANSWERED the door. Tall and brown, dressed in a tailored skirt and jacket, her neatly braided hair long since gone silver, she gave Brecken an assessing glance and then said “Good afternoon” as though she meant it. Brecken, feeling even more gawky than usual, said something more or less appropriate and introduced herself, and moments later found herself and her suitcase inside the entry, with a wood-paneled parlor lined with bookshelves reaching away to one side, and a tightly curled spiral staircase rising on the other.
“So you’re Carson’s discovery,” the professor said. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, child, leave those there for now.” Her gesture included the suitcase, the tote bag, and the foot of the stair. “Your coat can go on the rack. Can I offer you a cup of tea? Excellent.”
Brecken followed her through the parlor to a big comfortable kitchen, took the seat at the table the professor indicated. She watched while the old woman moved about the kitchen, made a pot of tea and got cookies on a pair of plates. The words and signs of recognition she’d learned from von Junzt’s book hovered in her mind.
She waited until Satterlee settled down again across the kitchen table, poured tea for them both, and started asking about Brecken’s studies. Without doing anything to call attention to the motion, Brecken picked up the teacup in forefinger and thumb and stretched her other fingers, slightly splayed like a squid’s tentacles, along the side of the cup as she raised it to her mouth.
A flicker of visible surprise crossed the professor’s face, vanished as quickly as it came. As Brecken answered the question, the old woman took hold of her teacup handle in the same way, but slowly folded the other fingers into her palm. A chill went down Brecken’s back as she realized that she’d guessed correctly.
Thereafter, for the next five minutes, two conversations filled the kitchen, one as audible as it was casual, the other silent and in deadly earnest. In the one conversation, Professor Satterlee asked Brecken questions about the music program at Partridgeville State and the studies she’d pursued there, and Brecken managed a series of somewhat distracted replies. In the other, sign answered sign until the whole sequence was complete.
Finally Professor Satterlee put down her teacup and said, “What do you know?”
“I know a sign,” Brecken said, set her own cup aside, and folded her fingers awkwardly into an intricate pattern, hoping she’d understood von Junzt’s instructions.
“I know another sign,” said the professor, and folded hers in a different pattern.
“I know a place,” said Brecken, “where the sleeper waits.”
“I know a time when the stars are right.”
“I know a dream that the sea will not stop.”
“I know a call that will always be answered.”
“In the name of the Dreaming Lord,” Brecken said then, “I greet you.”
Professor Satterlee smiled. “You learned every word of that from a book, didn’t you?”
Brecken stared, swallowed, made herself say, “Yes. Yes, I did.”
“It’s been a century and a half since anybody’s used those words and signs.” Holding up a reassuring hand: “Don’t worry about it. I use the old sign in my emails precisely because there are people out there who have the books and nothing else. When you spotted it and sent back the old answer, I had certain people investigate you and make sure you weren’t bait for a trap, or something of the sort.”
“Next to nothing.” Satterlee leaned forward. “An ordinary young woman with musical talent who had no connection to the Great Old Ones or their worshipers that anybody could trace, but who knew a very obscure sign, and whose voor had a curious quality that three highly skilled sensitives couldn’t interpret.”
“Voor,” Brecken said. “There’s something about that in the books I’ve read.”
“I imagine so. Do you know what voor is?” When Brecken shook her head: “It’s the life force, the power that flows through our bodies and the body of the Earth.” All the while, as she talked, the green eyes stayed focused on Brecken with a dreadful intensity, and the dark face smiled. In a sudden moment of cold clarity, Brecken sensed that the old woman was perfectly capable of killing with that smile on her face.
“I think I know what the people you sent were sensing, then.” It took Brecken an effort to say the words: “I have a friend, a very dear friend, that most people can’t know about.” She swallowed again, forced the words through a dry throat. “A friend who’s not human. I know you may not believe that.”
The professor nodded as though that was the most ordinary thing in the world. “That was one of the possibilities I’d wondered about.”
Brecken, baffled, said, “Okay. Do you know what a shoggoth is?”
Satterlee’s eyebrows went up, hard. “Yes, I do,” she said after a moment. “That’s not at all what I expected, but we should be able to work something out.”
A silence passed, then Brecken asked, “Is it okay to—to ask what you expected?”
“Of course. I guessed you had something going on with one of the Great Old Ones.”
Completely nonplussed, Brecken stared at her for a long moment, then realized her mouth was open and shut it. The professor gave her an amused look. “How well do you know your mythology, child? The old gods of nature did that kind of thing all the time, and they still do. There are children, too. Shall I tell you a secret?”
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 22