It wasn’t a classic sonata, that was certain. It was in 5/8 time and was full of dissonances that nobody before Wagner would have considered musical at all, but it followed the sonata form, and it worked. After the first few measures Brecken leaned forward, propped her chin on one hand, and listened for a while. ‘Sonata in F’ was still rough in places and unsatisfactory in others, but Susan had taken the form and started to make something her own out of it. Brecken nodded slowly, then picked up her phone and wrote a lengthy comment, paused to listen to the development for a while, wrote another.
The piece wound gracefully to its end. Susan, beaming, put down her viola and nodded to the class, as though she’d proved a point. Applause drowned out anything she might have said; Brecken clapped enthusiastically, and she was far from the only one.
Silence returned. “‘Fugue in G flat minor,’ by Brecken Kendall,” the professor said.
For once, Brecken remembered to get her music out of her tote bag before she stood up. A few moments later she was at the piano, the keyboard spread before her like a banquet of sound. She stretched and shook out her fingers, then turned to face Professor Toomey and said, “Do you mind if I say something to the class first?”
“Go ahead.” His expression was unreadable as ever, but she thought she sensed a hint of dry amusement in it.
She pivoted on the bench, faced Julian Pinchbeck. “There’s been a lot of talk this semester about whether there’s any point to tonality, or to any of the older forms of music,” she said. “Back before spring break, a certain member of this class insisted that nobody could do anything with a certain theme so long as they’re, quote, hobbled by some kind of sick obsession with outdated music. Unquote.” She let some of her anger color her voice as she said the words, and was gratified to see Julian’s face redden. “Of course there are things you can’t do with the old forms, but you know what? That isn’t one of them.” She turned back to the keyboard and, before anyone else had time to speak, started to play.
The twelve notes of the subject sounded, introducing the first voice, and as it finished, the same notes came in a minor sixth lower. Somewhere in the distance, a voice she no longer recognized let out a slow sulfurous monosyllable under its breath, but Brecken was past caring. The eighty-eight keys in front of her and the architecture of sound that rose out of them became her world, a world where everything made sense to her, where anger, grief, and bitter longing could sound their own depths and then find a resolution that the other world so often refused to give. She kept the volume modest most of the way through the development, but as the first of the false entries heightened the tension, she let the music crescendo, and as the voices leapt past each other in the stretto she threw caution to the winds and played that passage fortissimo, reveling in the harsh discords. The dominant pedal in the bass line just afterward reminded her where she was, and she let the fugue slow and soften, until the final entry of the subject flowed into the cadence that brought the fugue to a close.
Silence, then. Brecken made herself draw in a breath, let it out again, and then turned toward Professor Toomey. For once, the impenetrable expression had cracked, and he was staring at her with his mouth slightly open. An instant later he recovered, and his face resumed its normal bland state, but before that she’d seen the sheer astonishment in his eyes. Beaming, she turned the other way to savor the one taste of revenge she’d promised herself, the look on Julian Pinchbeck’s face when she made him eat his words.
She’d expected—what? Rage and resentment, most probably; maybe embarrassment and shame; maybe, just maybe, some least trace of acknowledgment that she had the right to her own music just as he had the right to his. Certainly, though, she hadn’t expected an expression red and raw as an open wound, the bleak haggard eyes of a soul in torment. Horrified, she tried to think of something to say, but by then the applause had started, drowning out any words she might have spoken. Molly and Darren started it, clapping loud and hard; Rosalie joined them after a moment, and then the others began to clap. Even some of Julian’s cronies applauded, looking sidelong at her with rueful expressions.
As the applause died down, before the professor could say anything, Brecken said, “Julian, what you did with that was good too. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your music. I just want you to stop telling me I can’t have mine.”
He looked away, said nothing. After a decent interval, Toomey said, “And our last piece, ‘Circulations’ by Michael Schau.” Brecken got up from the piano and went most of the way back to her seat before she realized she’d left her music behind. She went back to get it; Mike Schau had already settled on the bench, and handed the sheets to her with a wry grin. She thanked him and went back to her place next to Rosalie.
Schau’s piece was workmanlike and utterly derivative, more than good enough to get the grade he needed but indistinguishable from the work of a thousand other undergraduates. His performance was stellar, though, and Brecken let herself daydream for a little while about what it would be like to have her compositions played by musicians who were better than she was. It helped distract her, and that was more than a little welcome. The haunted look on Julian’s face troubled her, then and later.
WALKING HOME UP DANFORTH Street, with Hob’s Hill rising before her, it began to sink in just how soon that familiar route would be a fading memory. Maybe that was why the card from Jay caught her eye later that same evening. She had phone calls to make—with the fugue finally out of the way, she’d arranged to call Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim, and spent most of an hour telling both of them about the upcoming move to Arkham, the summer program she’d been invited to take, and the rest of it. The call went better than she’d expected—Aunt Mary chattered enthusiastically about the one time in her life she’d been to Salem, which she adored, and Uncle Jim told her that the first time he’d seen her playing in the Trowbridge High School marching band he’d been sure her music was going to take her places, which was just as pleasant to hear then as it had been the last thirty times he’d said it.
Afterwards, though, a melancholy mood settled on her. She picked up Jay’s card, read the note again, wondered whether he really felt what he’d written. She had dinner to fix, so she set the card aside and headed for the kitchenette, and after that she and Sho talked for a while and worked on Sho’s still very limited command of English.
Then came two hours of hard practice on the piano, but she had no homework to follow that—she was caught up on her assignments for her counterpoint and arrangement classes—and with the fugue done, and no other ideas just then for music to compose, she felt at loose ends. After a while she got up and went to the bookshelf. She’d left von Junzt’s book alone since she’d gotten back from Arkham, but the thought of spending an hour or two among stories of forgotten ages and mysterious secret societies appealed to her just then.
She opened The Book of Nameless Cults at random, and found herself in the middle of a story about a Coptic sorceress in Upper Egypt who’d taught von Junzt to send curses back at their senders by concentrating on the Sign of Koth. That would make a really good short story, she thought, and then remembered dimly that it already had. Another trip to the bookshelf and a few moments of searching turned up, two-thirds of the way through her battered paperback copy of Philip Hastane’s Daydreams and Nightmares, a lively little tale titled “Zuleika’s Warding” that drew a good half of its details from von Junzt’s tale.
It really is a delightful story, she thought. I wonder what it would be like as—
Brief echoes of voices raised in recitative and aria spun through her imagination. An opera? She didn’t know the first thing about composing music for opera, and had to stop herself from booting up her laptop and looking up the basics. Later, she told herself, laughing. I’ve got a semester to finish and a move to pack for and English lessons for Sho and...
Her eyes strayed again to the card from Jay. An apology to accept?
Maybe, she thought, and turned her attention
back to von Junzt.
The next morning Rosalie texted first thing to say she wouldn’t be in The Cave that day: too much to do before the semester was over, the text claimed, but Brecken guessed that there was more to it than that. They’d both carefully avoided talking about Rosalie’s career plans or Brecken’s upcoming move, but those studied evasions simply emphasized the things neither of them wanted to mention. The friendship they’d had since those first days sharing a room in Arbuckle Hall was fraying, and the reason was simple enough: the fact that Brecken was pursuing her dream made it impossible for Rosalie to pretend that she meant to follow hers. That ached, but after the first few days it was a familiar ache.
She headed home as soon as her orchestral arrangement class was over, and spent two hours helping Sho with English. ♪So many names for things,♪ the shoggoth said disconsolately, huddling down a little. ♪I will try to learn them all. And maybe you can try again to help me to understand...♪ “Numbers,” she said in English.
♪You said that well,♪ Brecken reassured her. ♪You’re getting very good at speaking words.♪ She leaned back on the futon, tried to think of a different way of helping Sho with her perplexity, and found herself getting as confused as the shoggoth. Was there really anything that two hands had in common with two books, or two of anything else? Or was it just—
Her hand came up to cup her chin as she stared at nothing in particular. Maybe, she thought, maybe numbers are just as arbitrary as tonality, or not having chocolate ice cream on your chicken quesadillas. Is one apple plus one apple really equal to two apples? All at once she started laughing. It depends on the size of the apples, doesn’t it?
♪I think I know what to do,♪ Brecken said then. ♪Don’t try to understand them. There’s nothing to understand—it’s just a habit that my people have, to sort out all the things we give names to. Just learn the names, learn to count with them.♪ Memories from childhood came surging up. ♪It can be like a game.♪
♪I think I understand,♪ Sho piped slowly. ♪I will try.♪
By the time dinner was ready Sho had learned the names of the numbers from one to ten and could recite them in order. Afterward they talked about other things, and Brecken practiced on the piano. Now and again, though, her gaze strayed to the card from Jay on the end table.
THE NEXT DAY BRECKEN got to The Cave around the usual time, but found the familiar table empty, and ended up wandering over to where Molly and an assortment of her friends were standing. There she quickly ended up being drawn into a conversation, mostly with Molly’s friends; Molly herself had a broad grin on her face but said uncharacteristically little, and Brecken found herself wondering why. By the time she extracted herself from the conversation and went back to the table, it was nearly time to go up to Composition II, and Rosalie was sitting at the table looking depressed and bored. They talked a little on the elevator ride up to the tenth floor, but Brecken could feel the widening gap between them.
Once in the room she settled into her chair, made herself relax. With her final project out of the way, she reminded herself, she had nothing else due for Composition II but her comments on the other students’ projects. The first three of those were predictably bland, but then Professor Toomey said, “Molly Wolejko, ‘Meditation.’” Brecken gave him a baffled look in response, because Molly hadn’t brought her guitar to class.
Molly got up anyway, walked to the piano, and sat down at the bench. “Can I say something?” she asked Toomey, and he nodded. She pivoted, faced the end of the classroom where Julian Pinchbeck and his friends invariably sat. “One of the people I wanted to hear this didn’t make it today,” she said. “You’ll just have to ask him what happened to all those times he said the rest of us don’t do his kind of music because we can’t.” She turned back to the piano, paused, and then began to play.
She was maybe three notes into her piece when Brecken looked up from her smartphone, staring. By the time she’d played half a dozen more notes, everyone else was staring too. Molly’s final project for Composition II was a crisp and understated postspectralist piece for piano, one that picked up half the trends on the cutting edge of composition and did something new with them. It did more than that. Listening to it, Brecken finally caught some hint of what the postspectralist movement was trying to accomplish, some echo of the possibilities that enticed Julian Pinchbeck and his friends. It wasn’t a kind of music she wanted to write, and she wasn’t sure it was a kind of music she could write, but it finally spoke to her.
She listened for a while, nodding slowly, then remembered the comment form and typed a few sentences, listened for another minute or two and typed more. A quick glance one way caught two of Pinchbeck’s friends looking on in shock; a quick glance the other way caught Professor Toomey, his imperturbable expression shattered, shaking his head in disbelief.
The piece wound up with a sequence of notes that avoided the classic cadences but still managed to give a sense of completion to the music. Brecken started clapping the moment the last note faded, heard others applaud as well. Molly got to her feet and waited. When the applause died down, she faced Pinchbeck’s cronies and said with a grin, “You don’t have to tell Julian I’m waiting for him to prove he can do some halfway decent metal. I’ll tell him myself.”
That was when Brecken turned in her chair to look. She’d been upset enough when she’d gotten to class that she had missed Julian Pinchbeck’s absence.
The class had one more performance to take in, an unimaginative but pleasant piano etude by a young man whose name Brecken heard and promptly forgot, and then Toomey said, “That’s it for today, see you next week,” and started for the door. As most of the students got up, Brecken turned to Molly and said, “That was amazing.”
“Thanks. I started work on it last October.” With a sudden grin: “The first time His Majesty got in my face about how I wasn’t a real musician because I play metal, I decided to stuff those words down his throat. Pity he wasn’t here to listen.” She shrugged. “I bet he was too rattled to show his face after your piece last time. That was a hoot to watch.”
Brecken winced inwardly, thinking of the look on Julian’s face when she’d finished playing her fugue. “The thing is,” Molly went on, “I learned some seriously cool tricks from postspectralism. Did you know that a bunch of progressive-rock groups back in the Seventies used to put fugues in their stuff?”
“No, I didn’t,” Brecken said, startled.
“Check it out. Emerson, Lake and Palmer did it in Trilogy, and I forget which piece by Gentle Giant is a rock fugue. If they can do that, I can borrow some postspectralist licks for metal.” She grinned. “If I can talk my band into it. They think I’m kind of weird, but whenever we go out on a limb the audience eats it up.”
Brecken said something more or less appreciative, gathered up her things, and turned toward Rosalie’s chair. It was empty. Startled, Brecken got up and went to the door, but Rosalie was nowhere in sight.
She brooded about that while she sipped coffee in Vivaldi’s, sat through a lecture on invertible counterpoint, ducked back home to get her laundry, took it back home again, and went to her piano lesson with Mrs. Johansen. By the time she walked back to the little apartment where Sho waited, she’d worked her way into a miserable mood, thinking about her friendship with Rosalie and the way it was coming apart. Sho’s welcome helped, but gloomy thoughts still circled through her mind, and when her gaze happened to fall on the card from Jay, she decided on the spur of the moment that she ought to give him the chance to apologize.
She talked about it with Sho before dinner. The shoggoth gave her a dubious look out of three eyes, but said, ♪You know humans much better than I do. If you think he truly wishes to make amends I will not disagree.♪
Brecken knew her well enough by then to catch the unspoken meaning. ♪You don’t think he means it.♪
♪I do not know.♪ A pseudopod curled around her. ♪I know he hurt you, and I do not want to think kind thoughts about on
e who did such a thing.♪
Brecken bent and kissed her. ♪I know. But I think it’s only fair to give him the chance.♪
♪I understand,♪ Sho whistled. ♪If anything wrong happens I will be near.♪
Brecken emailed him before she got up to make dinner, and had a response back within an hour, polite and friendly, suggesting Friday evening at eight. She agreed, and found that her troubled mood cleared up thereafter. All through her Thursday class, a difficult hour trying to make conversation with Rosalie, and her flute lesson, all through a quiet Friday while she began studying for her finals in counterpoint and orchestral arrangement, she felt oddly lighter, as though some sort of pressure had been lifted from her, but she had too much to do to take the time to chase that feeling to its roots.
THE KNOCK CAME ON the door of the little apartment right at eight. Brecken darted a worried look at the closet where Sho was hiding, but went to the door and opened it. It was Jay, of course, with a smile on his face and the top of a wine bottle peeking out of a bag in his hand. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” She stepped out of his way, motioned toward the futon, and he came in.
He looked only half alive. That was her first thought, and though she tried to argue herself out of it, told herself that maybe he’d just slept badly or been sick recently, that was where her thoughts ended up when they’d run round the circle of evasions. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes unnaturally bright and staring, he’d lost too many pounds, and there was a sallow color to his skin that hadn’t been there before. Still, he’d shaved and combed his hair and put on clean clothes, and the smile on his face was the one she remembered, the little upward twist at the corners of his mouth.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 28