The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  “Thank you,” he said after a moment.

  Brecken nodded, then ventured, “Can I ask a question?” When he gestured, inviting: “Who did that?”

  The man glanced at Professor Satterlee, then back at Brecken. “There’s a war being fought,” he said. “A secret war. The elder races, and the humans who’ve learned to live in peace with them, are on one side. The other side can’t stand the thought that shoggoths or anything like them can exist—and they’re stronger than we are, until the stars are right.”

  “Okay,” said Brecken. “The other side—do they have a name or something?”

  “The Radiance,” said June.

  Brecken gave her a startled look.

  “They’ve had many names down through the years,” said the man, “but it’s always some form of that. They are the children of light, the rest of us are the slaves of darkness: that’s what they believe.” With a bleak little smile: “And if you think that truth and light and reason are all on your side, you can justify anything you do to the other side.”

  Brecken took that in. “I’m not sure,” she said then, “but I may have met two members of—of the Radiance.”

  Another quick glance passed between the man and Professor Satterlee. “Go on,” he said. When she’d described the man who claimed to be from the state animal control office, the woman who’d called herself a folklore researcher, and the curious conversations she’d had with them, he nodded. “Thank you. That may turn out to be important.”

  “I hope so,” said Brecken. “I’m on the side of the shoggoths.”

  That earned her a sudden smile. “So am I.” He reached in past the neckline of his shirt, pulled out a pendant on a chain. “Do you know what this is?”

  The pendant was a black oval of onyx, and on it was a curious symbol or letter in gold. It looked a little like a word in Arabic and a little like a Chinese character, but Brecken felt sure that it was neither. “No,” she said.

  “The Yellow Sign.”

  She looked up at his face. “That’s for real?”

  “Yes.” He tucked the pendant beneath his shirt, stood up. “Thank you for your help.” Professor Satterlee stood also, and went with him to the door. Brecken stared after them until the door whispered open and shut again, and the old woman returned.

  “So you’ve heard of the Fellowship,” Satterlee said.

  “I thought they were just something in old stories,” Brecken admitted.

  “Not at all. People get drawn into the secret war you just heard about in various ways.” She sat down, picked up her wine glass. “Sometimes it’s because they’ve had their lives, their families, their careers, or their reputations destroyed by the Radiance. When that’s the way of it, and they decide they want to fight back, sometimes they find the Fellowship, and some of them become soldiers and servants of the King.”

  “The King In Yellow,” Brecken guessed.

  “Yes.” The professor leaned forward and in a low voice went on: “My father.”

  Brecken stared at her.

  The serene smile showed on her face again. “Would you like a little more wine?”

  “Please,” Brecken said.

  FOURTEEN

  A Door Into April

  MAYBE HALF AN HOUR later, feeling slightly unsteady, Brecken climbed the stair to the guest room on the third floor, closed the door behind her, and stood beside the window staring blindly out at the night for what seemed like a long time. Finally she pulled the curtains shut, set the alarm on her cell phone to wake her, and got ready for bed.

  Around her, the room filled with shadows of things she’d always thought could not exist: the Great Old Ones, the Yellow Sign, the elder races. Shoggoths, she reminded herself. You never thought that shoggoths could exist, either. Powerful though the argument was, it made her aware of how much she missed Sho. All at once she wanted nothing more than to hear a familiar piping voice and feel a comforting pseudopod wrapping around her. That made her think of how distant Sho was that night, and that in turn sent a chill down her spine as she thought of all the things that might happen while she was too far away to protect Sho from the human world.

  But if the Great Old Ones really existed—

  She turned off the light. Then, for the first time since she’d heard about Mrs. Macallan’s suicide, she knelt by the side of the bed, folded her hands, and prayed: not to the god of her childhood, not to the old gods of nature, but to another. Nyogtha, she called silently. Dweller in Darkness, Thing That Should Not Be. Sudden doubts rose. I’m not one of your fosterlings. You don’t have any reason to listen to me—but if you do listen, please protect my sweet Sho. A fragment of one of Sho’s stories came to mind. The shoggoths say you’re wise and subtle. Help her be wise and subtle now, when I can’t be there to help keep her safe.

  The prayer trickled away into silence, but Brecken knelt there for a while longer, feeling small and huddled and cold. Church bells somewhere in the near distance sounded the time, ten o’clock, the voices of the bells like and yet unlike their equivalents in Partridgeville. Then, in the silence that followed, she noticed the change.

  The darkness that surrounded her was listening. That was all. Nothing moved in the shadows of the room or the deeper shadows that wrapped Arkham by night, no voice spoke to her, no presence detached itself from the night—but the darkness listened.

  For Brecken, that was enough. She murmured her thanks, climbed into the unfamiliar bed, and fell asleep within moments.

  THE ROOM WHERE SHE’D be auditioning had decent acoustics, Brecken judged. No doubt it was a classroom the rest of the year: square and featureless, with a grand piano and a projection screen on one side and two dozen or so chairs on the other. Windows looked out over the wooded lower slopes of Meadow Hill, blurred with shreds of fog.

  She’d gotten there a good fifteen minutes ahead of time, leaving Professor Satterlee’s house while the sun still hung low and red in the morning mist, hurrying along narrow unfamiliar streets toward the cyclopean buildings of the Miskatonic campus. The map she’d downloaded wasn’t quite up to date—it showed a building called Belbury Hall where Brecken found nothing but a flat open space covered in gravel—but it was accurate enough to get her to Upton Hall without any trouble.

  Once there, she made a beeline for the department office, made sure the audition hadn’t been moved to another room, and learned from the secretary that her audition was the day’s first and nothing else had been scheduled in the room beforehand. That was an unexpected gift; she went straight to the room, found an unobtrusive place for her coat, checked her hair and her makeup in a pocket mirror, assembled her flute, and played a few quick warmups. Then she sat down at the piano and played scales from one end of the keyboard to another, familiarizing herself with the off notes so they wouldn’t startle her once she started playing. Too much depended on the next hour to take anything for granted.

  She had just finished when the door opened and the first two members of the audition committee came in. Introductions followed, hands got shaken. Professor Michael Silva turned out to be a flautist himself, Professor Anne Ricci a composer and the mainstay of Miskatonic’s composition program. They sat in two of the chairs, and Brecken perched on the piano bench.

  A minute or so later, the door opened a little and then swung wide, and a white-haired man in a wheelchair came briskly through. He nodded to his colleagues, and then to Brecken, who went over to introduce herself. “Paul Czanek,” he said in reply; eyes the pale blue of a frozen lake glanced up at her face, seemed to find nothing of relevance there, looked away. Brecken returned to the piano, picked up her flute, waited another minute or so, then started playing the first notes of Telemann’s Fantasia #8 in E minor.

  She’d expected to be nervous, to fumble with the piece at first, but reflexes she’d built up over years of weddings and holiday parties came to her assistance and got her through the first few bars, and after that the music carried her. The Telemann Fantasias were challenging enou
gh that most undergraduates wouldn’t risk them at an audition, and Brecken knew the Miskatonic professors would judge every nuance to see if she really understood the piece or was trying to show off with something she hadn’t actually mastered.

  The piece flowed smoothly to its conclusion, and Brecken risked a glance at the members of the committee. Ricci was smiling, and Silva’s eyes had narrowed in concentration. Czanek’s face hadn’t shifted at all, though, and his eyes were cold and distant as the Moon. Brecken drew in a long slow breath, paused, and then launched straight into the cascading sixteenth notes of Bach’s Partita for flute in A minor.

  Ricci’s eyes went suddenly wide, and Silva’s narrowed even further. The Partita was a really demanding piece, well outside the usual range of audition fare, but after all the Friday afternoons she’d devoted to it, Brecken knew it in her blood and her bones. She hadn’t been sure how to play it—bitter with grief, for Mrs. Macallan? Sweet, for Sho? Wistful, for the future as a music teacher she’d once imagined for herself, the one that would go to the country of might-have-beens once and for all if the audition went as she hoped?—but the choice never came. The music chose its own path through the Partita, swept her along with it, left her to climb up slowly onto its own far shore.

  She knew when she put the flute down that she was most of the way there, but the piano still waited. She sat on the bench, shook her hands out, stretched her fingers. She’d wrestled for weeks with the question of what piece to play for that part of the audition, but in the end only one would do, even though it was as far from standard audition fare as her two flute pieces. She steadied herself, and then sounded the first chord of the overture to The Magic Flute.

  The adagio measures needed careful handling, what with the wide dynamic range, loud and then all at once very soft, but once adagio changed to allegro and her right hand took up the second violins’ theme, sending quick soft notes scampering out into the room, she could relax into the piece and focus on interpretation. Measure by familiar measure, the piece flowed to its end. As the final chord faded into silence, turned to face the committee.

  “Fair enough,” said Michael Silva after a moment. “When your email said you’d be doing the Bach Partita, I admit I rolled my eyes—but that was very creditably played.”

  “Thank you,” said Brecken, blushing.

  “The Mozart piece was also well played,” Anne Ricci said then. “I don’t think I’ve heard that arrangement for piano before.”

  “Well, no.” Brecken swallowed, went on. “It’s mine.”

  Ricci’s head tilted, for all the world like an owl eyeing its prey. “You arranged it.”

  “I’ve been arranging since I was sixteen.” With a sudden smile, remembering: “When I first started getting wedding gigs, the only musicians I could find to play with me were two violins and a bassoon. I kind of had to learn.”

  Ricci gave her a glazed look; Silva smiled and nodded, as though to say he’d been there and done that. The expression that mattered most was Paul Czanek’s, though. Something had stirred in those wintry eyes for the first time

  “Fair enough,” Anne Ricci said then. “I think that settles any questions we might have had about your musicianship. We’ve also looked at the compositions you submitted, of course—well, I have.” With a smile that was visibly frayed around the edges: “It’s been a difficult time here. Perhaps you could play them for the benefit of my colleagues.”

  “Of course,” said Brecken, and turned back to the piano. The instructions for the application had asked for three pieces, and on Professor Toomey’s advice she’d sent them the Bourrée in B flat, the most intricate of her three Sarabandes, and the Theme and Variations in G. She played each of them, the Bourrée quick and lilting, the Sarabande slow enough to show off its intricacies, the Theme and Variations precise and not too fast.

  Finishing, she turned on the bench, to find Paul Czanek considering her with those cold eyes. “The handling of the variations in that last piece,” he said; his voice was unexpectely light, and fell away to a near-whisper at the end of each sentence. “A little unsatisfactory.”

  “I know,” Brecken said. “I don’t know how to get the piece to do what it wants to do. I’m hoping to learn that here.”

  His eyebrows rose. After a moment he nodded once, as though something had been settled. Watching him, Brecken realized suddenly that his eyes weren’t cold at all. They were pure blue flame, and they’d looked cold to her only because what they liked to contemplate had nothing human in it.

  “Well,” said Professor Ricci. “Thank you, Miss Kendall. Of course there’s still the paperwork to take care of, but I have to say I’m favorably impressed.” She extracted herself from her chair. “I hope,” she said then, “that financial issues won’t be a problem.”

  That was when Brecken knew that she’d passed the audition. “No, I should be fine,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm despite the dizzying wave of relief that broke over her. “I’ve got an inheritance from my grandparents and some benefits from the VA—my dad was a vet.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Professor Ricci. “I’ll look forward to seeing you in the fall.”

  Brecken thanked her, shook everyone’s hands again, got flute, purse, and tote bag, scooped up her coat and headed for the door. As she neared it, Professor Czanek glanced up at her and said, “Can you spare an hour this afternoon?”

  That got startled looks from the other two professors, but Brecken managed to keep her surprise off her face. “Yes, I can,” she said. “I won’t be taking the bus home until tomorrow.”

  He nodded once, the motion as precise as the flick of a conductor’s baton. “If you like, I may be able to show you some things you can do with your theme and variations.”

  Brecken blinked. “Thank you. I’d really be grateful for that.” They settled the details, and then she went out the door into the hallway outside. The other two professors were staring at Czanek by then, and a nervous-looking young woman who was waiting outside the door gave Brecken a startled look before going in, but Brecken barely noticed. She found her way out of Upton Hall by blind instinct, drew in a long shuddering breath of cool April air, felt the door she’d hoped to open flung suddenly wide.

  SHE WAS WAITING FOR the bus at the transit station as the sun came up the next morning, her mind full of half a dozen competing trains of thought. The fifty-five minutes she’d spent with Professor Czanek, taking apart the Theme and Variations in G, had left her mind awhirl with possibilities. He’d showed her, with a precision that would have stung if it hadn’t been so impersonal, mistake after mistake she’d made in weaving together the melodies of the four voices, and disassembled two of the mistakes in enough detail that she could see exactly how to rework the entire piece. He’d mentioned diffidently the class in intermediate composition he would be teaching in the fall, and Brecken decided then and there to get into it if she had to ask Sho to teach her how to flow through the crack beneath the door.

  “I’d encourage you to do more with fugal technique,” Czanek had said just before she’d left his office, and that started another flurry of thoughts. As the bus to Salem pulled up and she boarded and paid her fare, those were the thoughts that occupied the forefront of her mind. She thought of Darren Wegener, and the plan they’d hatched for that Thursday afternoon; and of course that got her thinking about Rosalie and her other friends, and how she was going to break the news to them that she’d be leaving Partridgeville.

  By the time she got off the bus in Salem and boarded an MBTA train for Boston, she was thinking about the details of moving. She’d already arranged to rent Professor Satterlee’s upstairs apartment, and that came with furniture and the piano, so all she’d have to bring to Arkham were her possessions and Sho. The last was the one difficulty, of course, and she spent much of the trip into Boston trying to come up with the best possible way to smuggle a shoggoth from New Jersey to Massachusetts.

  As she got off the MBTA train in South
Station and headed for the next Amtrak run south to Trenton, she was thinking of Arkham, and Miskatonic University. Though the audition results wouldn’t be official until the acceptance letters went out, Professor Satterlee had heard from Professor Ricci by noon that Brecken would be offered a place in the composition program, and Sarah Choynski already knew the same thing by the time she got back from classes at three o’clock. Exactly how far and fast word spread from there, Brecken wasn’t sure, but that evening Sarah took her to a café just off campus where Miskatonic’s music majors spent whatever spare hours their studies allowed them, introduced her to so many people that Brecken wasn’t sure she recalled more than half the names, and talked her into playing several of her compositions on the battered piano in the corner of the café. Applause, encouragement, and questions followed, and by the time Brecken got back to her room in Professor Satterlee’s house, she was feeling more than a little giddy with it all.

  As the Amtrak train rattled and lurched through Rhode Island and Connecticut, and the northern suburbs of New York City came into sight, deeper questions troubled her. She pondered the glimpses she’d gotten of the wider world in which she, shoggoths, and Miskatonic University all had their places: a world in which the Great Old Ones were real enough to have half-human children, the Yellow Sign was a reality, and the fate of Sho’s people was part of a secret war in which, all unknowing, Brecken had chosen a side.

  That, in turn, got her thinking about Professor Satterlee’s words about the other shoggoth communities along the eastern seaboard, and the very different fate of their inhabitants. As she got off the train in Trenton, hauled her suitcase under a blue spring sky to the bus station, and waited there for the bus back to Partridgeville, she clutched to herself the news she’d soon be able to share with Sho. “They’re safe, most of them,” the professor had said, and Brecken could not help but imagine how Sho would respond.