“Very good news.” She settled onto the chair, took the menu he handed her. He was full of questions about Miskatonic and her trip, and they’d finished their sushi and were on a second cup of tea each before the subject finally changed to the mathematics of the fugue they had been studying before she’d gone to Arkham.
It was pure chance that made Brecken glance up as a middle-aged couple came through the door. He had a slab-sided face and short brown hair gone white at the temples, she had a hard discontented expression and an expensive hairdo, and the only reason they registered in her mind was that they looked more like Darren than any appeal to randomness could explain.
She leapt to the obvious conclusion and turned to Darren, who was halfway through an intricate explanation of the irrational numbers that structured Buxtehude’s fugues. “Grab my hands,” she hissed. “Stare at my face.” He blinked in surprise, but trust won out. His hands closed around hers, his eyes fixed on her face with convincing intensity.
Then, the woman’s voice: “Darren?”
He looked up, startled. Before he could say anything and spoil the moment, Brecken put on a bright smile, extracted her hands, stood up, and said to them, “Oh, hi. You must be Darren’s parents—he looks just like you. I’m Brecken Kendall.”
Darren’s father gave her a blinking owlish look, and then put out a big meaty hand, hairy as a bear’s paw, and shook hers. “Pleased to meet you. Dwight Wegener. This is my wife Lucy.” Brecken took her hand as well and gave her the same bright smile, even though the woman looked as though she’d rather be touched by a snail.
“I, uh, didn’t think you’d get here this early,” Darren said to his parents, looking embarrassed.
“Don’t worry about it,” Brecken said to him. “Send me a text when you’ve got time.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and he turned exactly the right shade of pink. “Mr. Wegener, Mrs. Wegener, it was great meeting you.” She smiled at them again, and then left the table. She could feel all three of them watching her until she got to the door, heard Darren’s mother start saying something in a hard discontented voice as the door swung shut.
The rest of the day she had nothing else to do but spend time with Sho, and no wish to find anything else, so she headed home, torn between delight at how perfectly the plan had come off and worries about how Darren’s parents would react. Sho’s presence did more than a little to distract her mind from both subjects, but the worries kept circling back. Dinner was over and she and Sho were curled up together on the futon when Brecken’s cell phone finally rang. A glance at the screen showed that Darren was on the other end, so she picked up the call.
“Brecken? Oh my God, thank you,” he said all in a rush. “I’ve just been through the most astonishing evening in my life and it’s all your fault.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said, laughing. “What happened?”
“A lot.” He drew in an audible breath. “As soon as you left, Mom started peppering me with questions about you—who you are, where your family is, what you’re studying, you name it—and all the time Dad was saying, ‘Lucy, leave him alone,’ and finally she turned to him and said, ‘Look, I’m trying to find out something about that shameless hussy!’”
Brecken choked. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. And for once I thought of something to say when I still had a chance to say it, and I stood up and said, ‘Mom, if you’re going to talk about my girlfriend that way I’m going to walk right out of here.’ She started spluttering, and all at once Dad said, ‘For God’s sake, Lucy, at least it’s a girl,’ and then of course he got all embarrassed because it’s supposed to be some kind of secret that he thinks I’m gay, and Mom stopped in mid-splutter, and I said, ‘Dad, what the hell are you saying?’ So Mom lit into him, and he lit into Mom, and I stood there for about five minutes while they yelled at each other and then I said, ‘You both know my phone number. Give me a call when you stop fighting,’ and I turned, went to the cashier, paid up and walked out of there—and they shut up. For the first time I can remember, they actually both shut up.”
“Wow.”
“It gets better. So I went back to my place and started writing an email to—” He stopped.
“A certain someone.”
“Yeah.” After a moment’s pause. “Stan.”
“Your friend from the library?”
“Yeah.”
“I can forget that if you want me to.”
“No.” He drew in an audible breath. “You deserve to know.”
“Thank you,” she said, touched by the words.
“You’re welcome. But I was maybe halfway through it when Dad called. They came over to the apartment, and after a while we went out to dinner at Mulligan’s, and this time it was Dad’s turn to ask me questions about you, and Mom said practically nothing the whole time. So I talked about how you were a musician and a composer, how you’re going to finish your degree at an Ivy League university in Massachusetts, and how you play Sundays at the Baptist Church, and Mom said, ‘I suppose you mean the Second Baptist Church,’ and I just looked at her and said, no, the First Baptist Church up on the hill. So she shut up again, and we finished dinner and they drove me home, and Mom stayed out in the car but Dad followed me into the apartment, and he apologized for having unworthy thoughts about me—those are the exact words he used—and said that you looked like a really fine girl, and he pulled out a couple of hundred dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to me and told me to take you out someplace nice, and I promised him I would. Are you free Sunday afternoon?”
She checked the calendar on her phone. “Yes, I am.”
“Good. Philadelphia Opera’s putting on The Marriage of Figaro and I just scored two seats right near the middle of the first balcony. Want to go?”
Brecken let out a yelp of delight. “Yes, please.”
“You’re on,” Darren said. “One Mozart opera and a really nice dinner, coming up.”
Brecken blushed. “You’re really sweet.”
“I owe you, big time. Now that Dad has it stuck in his head that I have a girlfriend, nitroglycerine won’t shake it loose—and I’m probably safe until I’ve got my doctorate.”
“I wonder how he’s going to react when he finds out.”
“I don’t know,” Darren said. “I wish he could just accept me as I am. I don’t know, maybe he will someday.” For a moment she could hear in his voice, like a distant echo, the voice of the frightened child he’d once been.
“I hope so,” said Brecken. “I also hope you’re going to do something fun with Stan.”
“Thank you. Yeah, we’ve got plans for Saturday after my folks leave.”
“Good. Tell him I said hi.”
“You know,” said Darren, “I’m going to do that.” They said the usual things and then hung up, and Brecken set the phone aside and considered the iridescent black shape nestled up affectionately against her side. And if he knew what I meant when I mentioned my girlfriend, she wondered, would he say the same things I just did?
Sho glanced up at her then. ♪Is it proper to ask about the call?♪
♪Yes, of course,♪ said Brecken, and tried to translate the conversation into the language of shoggoths. Sho did her best to make sense of it, but before long she was thorougly confused and Brecken had started to wonder if she herself really knew what she was trying to explain.
♪Sometimes it is hard for me to understand your people,♪ Sho said finally.
At that Brecken started to laugh. ♪Sometimes it’s hard for me too.♪
THAT SUNDAY WAS AS delightful as she’d hoped. Darren picked her up that morning in front of the First Baptist Church, drove through the pine barrens, dodged and wove through Camden and Philadelphia traffic, and got to the opera house with most of an hour to spare. True to form, the matinee had second-string vocalists, but some of them were young performers who likely had successful careers ahead of them, and all of them sang well enough to make the opera worth savoring. Afte
rwards, she and Darren went to a restaurant looking over the Susquehanna River and had a gloriously over-the-top dinner at a table for two by one of the windows, talking music the whole time. By the time she got out of his well-aged sedan in front of Mrs. Dalzell’s house and wished him goodnight, she was pleasantly giddy with it all.
The next morning came too soon, and Brecken went to her composition and counterpoint classes and wondered why the classrooms in Gurnard Hall, so familar for so long, now seemed just a little strange to her. Down below in The Cave, she still got the stares and silences, but some of the students who’d tried to argue or bully her into composing something other than the music she loved simply looked away when she passed them, and talked a little more loudly to their friends. That was less difficult for her to deal with than the overt challenges had been, but it made her acutely aware of a widening gap between her and most of the other music students.
That sense deepened over the days that followed. It didn’t even help that Molly began to introduce her to some of the other renegade musicians at Partridgeville State—the aspiring rock and metal guitarists, the tight-knit circle of trad jazz and blues players, a dreamy-eyed young man with hair down to his waist whose world revolved around Appalachian folk music and who could make a three-string lap dulcimer evoke the fading culture of the mountains. Too much of her life had strayed into places they couldn’t or didn’t follow: she’d practiced sorcery, read forbidden books, and seen the Yellow Sign, and her heart was given to a creature of the elder world. She brooded over that from time to time, wondered if it would ever become easier to bear.
One Thursday Professor Kaufmann spent the entire lecture talking about a new and fashionable theory of arrangement that discarded all the traditional rules for balancing the voices of the instruments, and stalked back and forth in front of the class while she lectured, glaring at them all as though she dared them to disagree. Brecken found that it took her only a little effort to imagine what music arranged according to the new theory would sound like: words such as “muddy” and “uneven” came to mind. The professor kept using the word “arbitrary” to describe the traditional rules, and for some reason that kept reminding Brecken of the afternoon at Rosalie’s apartment all those months ago when Donna had asked about tonality. Of course it’s arbitrary, Brecken thought. It still works better. Do you want some chocolate ice cream on your chicken quesadilla?
Afterwards she took the stairs down—two of the elevators were working, but she wanted the solitude—and headed for Hancock Library to study some of Gesualdo’s late and highly chromatic madrigals, with the hope of finding some hints there on ways to make musical sense of Julian Pinchbeck’s tone sequence. She was maybe half a block from the door when she spotted a figure she recognized, hurrying ahead of her toward the same destination.
It was Jay, though it took her a moment to be sure of that. He looked thin and haggard, his hair hadn’t been combed in a while, and the swagger he’d cultivated while she’d known him had gotten lost somewhere in the months since that time. Brecken slowed, followed him at a distance, hoping that he wouldn’t see her, and luck stayed with her that afternoon. She got a glimpse at his face as he turned to go into the library, and flinched: it looked as though the smile she’d hated so much had carved itself so deeply on his face that the lines remained even when his expression was tense and angry.
She waited for a few moments after he’d gone inside before following, spotted him again heading for the special collections room as she rode the escalator up toward the music stacks on the fourth floor. When she’d settled down at a table with the right volume of Gesualdo, it took her an effort to keep her thoughts from straying back to Jay, and it turned out to be wasted effort, as she found nothing to the point in the Italian composer’s work. It wasn’t until she set out for her flute lesson that evening that she realized why it was that Jay kept surfacing in her thoughts: he was the only other human being in Partridgeville she knew of who had brushed up against the secrets of the elder world. That roused thoughts of Professor Satterlee and the nameless servant of the King she’d met in Arkham, and then of the old man—what had his name been?—who’d made the marginal notes in her copy of The Secret Watcher. How many people down through the years had carried the same burden she now did, standing at the border between two worlds?
She brooded about that while walking back home from her lesson beneath a pale evening sky, thought about reading Chalmers’ book, had to remind herself that The Secret Watcher had gone missing when her apartment was broken into. That sent her thoughts chasing down gloomy paths. Only the hideous blouse Mrs. Dalzell was wearing as she worked in the garden, acid green with huge pink polka dots on it, pulled Brecken’s attention back to the present moment.
“Brecken? Oh, good, I was hoping you’d be home soon,” Mrs. Dalzell said. “You got some kind of official letter from someplace in Minnesota, I think it was, or was it Maine? At any rate, let me go get it.” She hauled herself to her feet, shed a pair of mud-colored gloves, headed in through the kitchen door of her house, leaving Brecken standing there trying to think of anyone in either state who might have sent her a letter.
Mrs. Dalzell was back a moment later with a long envelope. “Oh, of course, it was Massachusetts,” she said. “Well, here you are.”
It was indeed from Massachusetts, and had an ornate coat of arms and the words Miskatonic University in old-fashioned blackletter at the upper left corner. Brecken managed to stammer out words of thanks, then let herself into the apartment and locked the door behind her. Hands fumbled with the envelope and got it open, and a moment later she had the letter inside in her hands. Below the ornate heading and the formal greetings of an earlier day, the words she hoped to see leapt out at her: ...your application to the College of Fine and Performing Arts has been accepted...
She let out a little low cry, tried to unfold the letter the rest of the way, and succeeded in dropping letter and envelope both. By the time she’d fielded the letter, darkness flowed out from under the closet door and three pale green eyes peered out of it. ♪Broodsister?♪ said a familiar whistling voice. ♪Is it not well with you?♪
♪It’s well,♪ Brecken said. ♪It’s very well, broodsister. This writing tells me that we’ll go to the new place once the time comes. I knew already that we’re going, but still—♪
♪I understand,♪ said Sho, sliding out of the closet and approaching her. ♪When I first came to you, every time you said I could stay, it was as if I had not heard that before.♪
To that Brecken could think of no answer but kneeling down and throwing her arms around Sho; pseudopods hugged her back. Then Brecken said, ♪I’ll read the writing now and see what else it says.♪
They got settled on the futon, and Sho turned curious eyes on the letter as Brecken read it. Most of it simply repeated overfamiliar words—a few phrases of congratulations, a sentence of vague encouragement, some unconvincing gestures toward sounding modern and relevant—but a paragraph toward the end told her something she hadn’t known: there was a summer program in music composition, mostly for summer-school postgraduates but open to undergraduates with a faculty recommendation, and if she was interested she’d already been recommended by Dr. Paul Czanek, who would be teaching two classes in the program.
That prospect was tempting enough to take her breath away. Summer school, she thought then. That means moving as soon as the semester’s over—and the rush of bittersweet emotion that came with that thought, half delight in the world that waited for her, partly grief for the one she was about to leave behind, made her whistling unsteady as she explained the letter to Sho.
♪It is well,♪ said the shoggoth. ♪I think it is better if we go soon.♪
♪I’ll send writing to them,♪ Brecken told her. As she opened the email program on her phone, though, she wasn’t thinking about Miskatonic University. She was thinking about Rosalie, and how on earth she was going to break the news to her.
THE NEXT TWO DAYS and most of t
he third belonged to music and to Sho, and neither one of those was entirely free of complexities. Sho was affectionate as always, but she wanted to learn English, and that turned out to be far more challenging a process than either of them anticipated. Partly it was a simple matter of pronunciation, since Sho’s speaking orifices could twist around to mimic the sounds of human language, but the action didn’t come naturally at all. There were deeper matters at work, though, for it had never before occurred to Brecken how much of English presupposed human senses, human limbs, and human interests.
It turned out, for example, that the hard distinction between nouns and verbs, things and actions, had no natural place in the thinking of a species that extruded temporary organs instead of collecting possessions. Then there was number, which was a complete mystery to Sho. It made no sense to her that two books had some quality in common with two cans of soup or two eyes, and the more Brecken tried to explain, the more confused Sho got. Finally the shoggoth huddled down, trembling, and said, ♪I do not understand at all. I am so very stupid.♪
Brecken reached out a comforting hand. ♪No,♪ she whistled. ♪You’re not stupid.♪ An instant later she remembered when Sho had said the same thing to her, and flung her arms around the shoggoth. ♪Don’t worry about it,♪ she said then. ♪Let’s find words that are easy for you, and leave the hard ones for later.♪ That was less simple than it sounded, but by the time the weekend was over Sho could name all her favorite foods and say a few simple sentences, and had begun to feel a little more confident about speaking with humans.
That experience ended up helping Brecken with the other perplexity she faced, which was Julian Pinchbeck’s sequence of twelve notes. Late Friday night, staring at her composition notebook in frustration, she suddenly thought: I’m trying to make it speak my language, instead of learning the language it wants to speak. After a few more moments she got up, went to the piano, and played the sequence slowly several times, listening to it. By the time she’d finished that, something as yet formless had begun to stir in her mind, and she settled down to sleep with Sho with a vague sense that she might be on the right track.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 26