The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  “Thanks for being willing to see me,” he said, and settled on the futon. “I know things got really ugly between us around what happened before winter break.”

  “You know, we don’t have to talk about that,” Brecken said.

  “Thank you.” He looked relieved. “So tell me about where you’re going. I heard some things from a couple of people I know, but—” He shrugged. “You know how gossip goes.”

  “Sure.” She sat on the other end of the futon, started telling him about Miskatonic University and its program in traditional composition, her trip up there to audition, the summer program she’d been invited to take.

  “That’s really great,” he said finally. “Worth a toast. Got a couple of glasses?”

  By way of answer she got up, went to the kitchenette, came back with two water glasses. “I apologize,” she said, laughing. “I don’t have anything better.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, with the same smile. The wine bottle had a screw top; he twisted it open, poured each of them a glass, handed her one. “To your future.”

  “Thank you,” she said, clinked glasses with him, sipped some of the wine. It had an odd, slightly bitter taste. She glanced at it.

  “Drink it,” he said. He hadn’t raised his glass to his lips.

  “It tastes funny,” she said, and the words came out a little blurred because a faint numbness had spread across her mouth.

  “Drink it,” he repeated, his gaze fixed on her. His smile had begun to broaden, taking on the shape of the smile she’d hated so much.

  She glanced at the wine, at him. The numbness was spreading. “You put something in this,” she said, and tried to fling the glass away, but her hand would not obey her will.

  “You bet.” He set his glass on the floor beside him. “Drink it.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, tried again to discard the glass. What had he put in it? She’d read about date-rape drugs, that was one of the reasons she stayed away from the parties and nightspots that Rosalie favored. Was that what he’d planned?

  “Drink it,” he repeated, and the smile on his face twisted into a rictus of triumph. “Did you really think that I came here to apologize? You turned your back on me when I needed you more than anything, and I’m the one who’s supposed to say I’m sorry? Not a chance.”

  “You’re the one who dumped me,” she made herself say.

  “I made a mistake.” He stood up. “Then I called you and texted you and tried to talk to you, and all I got back was you telling me to go die in a ditch. And then you and your little friends spread lies about me all over Partridgeville to make sure I couldn’t get a new group started or even find a solo gig. I fucking starved because of you.”

  Even through the haze the drug threw across her mind, she could see the falsehood in his eyes. “They were true,” she said. “I didn’t spread them, but they were true.”

  “Shut up!” he snarled at her. Then, in a voice that shook: “You destroyed me. You stomped the shit out of everything I built here, everything I wanted to do with my life. Now it’s your turn. Drink it.” His face, gloating, knotted into a parody of itself. “Drink it all, and get what’s coming to you.”

  Her hand began moving toward her mouth, carrying the glass, and though she fought to stop it the movement merely slowed to a crawl. He’s using sorcery on me, she thought. All at once, in a moment of cold clarity, she could see how things would unfold. Pale luminous eyes watched him already from the closet, she knew. If he touched her, whether he meant to rape her or worse, Sho would stop him, and that meant he would find out about Sho—

  Or he would die.

  Panic flared, laced with images: Brecken’s mother in her orange prison jumpsuit, media photos of the two people she’d shot, Brecken and Sho fleeing from the apartment leaving it tenanted only by a corpse, the future she’d hoped to make for the two of them gone whistling down the wind forever. Something like a scream rose up from her depths, though it made no sound. Her concentration broke, and the glass moved closer to her mouth.

  An instant later something unexpected surfaced in her mind. Sorcery, a memory whispered. A way to reverse sorcery, to turn it on the one who wields it. A sign—

  In the next instant she remembered the Sign of Koth, and the reference to it she’d read in von Junzt. She seized the memory the way a drowning man seizes a rope, imagined the Sign as clearly as she could, the way she’d drawn it when she’d done the Vach-Viraj incantation.

  In response, her hand stopped moving, and she could feel his spell twist around in the space between them, point back at its maker.

  “No,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded thick in her ears. “No. You drink it.”

  It took all her concentration to keep the Sign of Koth from blurring in her mind, but she flung every trace of energy she could find into the task, and the spell began to flow the other way. At the edge of her awareness, she barely noticed the sweat beading on Jay’s suddenly bloodless face, his hand rising unsteadily, hers raising the glass just as unsteadily for him to take. He took it; the hideous smile shattered, and what replaced it was stark terror, but all she could think of was the Sign of Koth, her one safeguard against whatever ugly act he’d planned. She felt his last defenses break, saw the glass go to his mouth and tip, the wine drain into him.

  The Sign splintered then, and she struggled to her feet, faced him. He stood there, staring at her in amazement and horror, his eyes round, his face pale and damp with sweat. A sudden motion flung the glass to the floor, where it broke. “No,” he said, his voice shaking. “How—how did you—oh my God. No, no, no—”

  Then he broke and ran for the door, hauled it open, flung himself out into the darkness. She could hear his footfalls, running hard, fading into the dim murmur of the night.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Hounds of Tindalos

  BRECKEN STOOD THERE SPEECHLESS for a moment, completely baffled, then turned unsteadily. She could feel the drug affecting her more and more. The room was going dark around her. ♪Broodsister,♪ she called, and Sho slid out from under the closet door.

  ♪I am here.♪ Her piping was low and intent. ♪It is not well with you.♪

  ♪No. He put something in my drink.♪

  ♪I feared he meant to harm you.♪

  Brecken reddened with the memory. ♪You were right and I was wrong. I am sorry.♪ Immediate issues forced their way into her mind. ♪I’m going to try to—♪ The shoggoth language had no word for “throw up.” ♪Get some of it out of me.♪ She stumbled into the bathroom—her limbs felt heavy and unnatural, as though they belonged to someone else—and knelt in front of the toilet. A finger down her throat got her to retch, but only a little liquid came up, and the room darkened steadily around her. After a time, she pulled herself to her feet, staggered back to the futon and slumped onto it, landing hard.

  ♪What will the thing he put in your drink do?♪ Sho asked.

  Brecken tried her best to remember everything she’d ever learned about date-rape drugs. ♪It’ll make me sleep,♪ she said. ♪He meant to hurt me while I slept. I didn’t drink much of it, but it may still have been enough.♪ The door still stood open, and a hideous possibility occurred to her. ♪The door—if he comes back—♪

  She had forgotten how fast Sho could move. An iridescent black blur flung itself across the room, pushed the door shut until the latch clicked, and a deft pseudopod turned the deadbolt. The pseudopod reached again, turned off the light. ♪If he comes back he will not see me, and I will stop him. I promise you I will not kill him, but I will stop him—and I will hurt him.♪

  Brecken barely registered the words. Something had happened to the darkness around her. She could see the room as clearly as in daylight, though all the colors were wrong. She could see Sho crouched by the futon, pale eyes gazing at her in worry, but she could also see where the shoggoth had been, a track through space that began in the closet and went to the door and back to the futon. Worse, she could see Jay comi
ng into the apartment, sitting on the futon, standing up, fleeing from the apartment—all at once.

  That was when she guessed what Jay had given her, and her blood ran cold. ♪This is bad,♪ she whistled. ♪This is really bad.♪

  ♪What is wrong?♪ Dread tinged the air with a bitter scent.

  ♪What I drank isn’t what I thought it was. It’s—♪ There was no word for the Liao drug in the shoggoth language. ♪A thing that makes me see the wrong kind of time. A thing that—♪

  Then, all at once, she understood, and at the same moment knew how Barbara Cormyn had died, and who had made that happen. The air had begun to turn milky around her. She tried to think through a rising fog of panic.

  ♪Is there something I can do? ♪ Sho asked her.

  The question helped her concentrate, and she struggled to remember what Halpin Chalmers had written about the Liao drug, what the stories she’d read in Boley’s class had said about it. ♪Shake me,♪ she said. ♪Shake me. Keep me here and now so the Hounds can’t find me.♪

  Sho was on the futon in an instant, and paired pseudopods gripped Brecken’s shoulders and gave her a brisk shake. ♪Yes!♪ Brecken whistled as her head cleared a little. ♪Like that.♪

  Sho repeated the shake, and it helped. The milky quality faded a little from the air, giving way to honest darkness. Brecken tried to concentrate, and heard the shoggoth piping a series of names in a low whistle, as if they were a litany: ♪Embraced, Day Spent Sleeping, Laughs At Falling Snow, Alongside You, In A Circle...♪ They seemed dimly familiar at first, and then Brecken realized that they were her own names, every shoggoth-name she had ever given herself, and Sho had memorized them all. Awed and humbled, she reached for Sho, slumped forward against her. She could feel the shoggoth’s love and stark terror, and managed to put her arms around Sho, hoping it might bring some comfort to them both.

  She saw—

  She saw her own life, spread out before her in a single moment: infancy and childhood and girlhood, happy hours with her grandparents and wretched ones with her mother, that first encounter with The Magic Flute, Friday afternoons with Mrs. Macallan, wedding gigs and halftimes with the Trowbridge High marching band and meeting Rosalie that first day in Arbuckle Hall and all the rest of it. There were other lives tangled up with it, too, like a skein of many-colored threads, Grandma Olive’s and Grandpa Aaron’s and her father’s and her mother’s and Mrs. Macallan’s and Rosalie’s and Jay’s and Donna’s and Darren’s and many more, and then Sho’s, an iridescent black thread that came from underground to wrap around hers.

  She could sense the temptation to follow those other lives, to stray toward the place where curved time meets angular time and the Hounds of Tindalos guard the boundary no being of curved time can cross with impunity, but whenever she began to drift that way, Sho’s pseudopods shook her, bringing her back to herself. Off beyond the tangled threads, though, she could sense the curves of time, and beyond those were strange angles of time, twisting and straining against the curves, a wrongness that cried for resolution and did not find it. From out of the angles, swift lean shapes without any curves at all plunged inwards, and her blood ran cold for a moment before she realized that they were not moving toward her.

  There was still another life tangled with hers, she saw then: a vast and subtle life that moved toward hers from immense distance. It reached back into a past almost beyond measuring. It was a blackness so total it felt like a gap in the fabric of reality. It came to her just before Sho did, she could see that clearly, but it curved around her in strange ways, guiding her thoughts one way or another, drawing the thread of her own life in unexpected directions. She stared at it, knowing somehow that it would not lead her into the distances where peril waited. It was there with her as Sho was there with her, wrapping around her a little further off, watching her.

  Nyogtha, she thought. Dweller in Darkness, The Thing That Should Not Be.

  The darkness closed in and swallowed her utterly.

  BRECKEN BLINKED. NAKED, SHE was standing beside the futon, and it slowly registered that her clothed body was lying there below her, nestled into Sho’s curves. A moment of panic seized her as she wondered if she was dead, but then she saw her own chest rising and falling slightly, and a few strands of hair that had strayed across her face fluttered with each outbreath.

  Your present condition makes communication easier, said something that was not a voice.

  She raised her eyes. A few feet away from the futon in every direction, a blackness that made the darkest night seem luminous erased all other presences. She tried to speak, swallowed, tried again; her voice sounded faint and far away. “Nyogtha.”

  Yes.

  “You reminded me about the Sign of Koth.”

  Yes.

  “Thank you. I—I owe you my life.”

  In due time, I will ask certain things in repayment.

  She wanted to say something, anything, in response, but then understood that no response was needed. The Thing That Should Not Be already knew what it would ask of her, and when, and where, and why, and what she would do about it. Gazing into the blackness, she thought of a different question, one that had haunted her for months.

  You wish to know why I did not save the other shoggoths, the not-voice said.

  “Yes. Yes, please.”

  It is well for you to know that. They would not have survived even if they stayed hidden. They were isolated too long, and there were genetic issues, as sometimes happens. So I let them die swiftly, rather than leaving them to the slow dwindling, the hunger and the silence. My pact with the shoggoths abides; of the few who were still healthy, I chose one that was young and strong to preserve their line, and I guided her to this place.

  Brecken stared at the blackness in wonder. “You sent Sho to me.”

  A trace of amusement tinged the not-voice. Did you think that any of what happened was the work of chance? She needed a human to feed her, shelter her, keep her safe from the enemies of her people. Of the humans living nearby, you were best suited to that task, so I brought her to you. It was an easy thing to see to it that you had a guide to her language, so that she could communicate her needs to you, and an easier thing still to mislead those who searched for her.

  “Did you know what—what would happen between us?”

  It was one possibility of many, said Nyogtha. It did not concern me.

  “I’m still more grateful than I can say,” Brecken told the darkness.

  I gave you another thing that might have protected you, said The Thing That Should Not Be. It did not, and it is well for you to know why. You had a book, which was later stolen. Did you know that it would have spared you this night?

  Brecken stared in dismay. “No.”

  The card you were sent had sorceries worked upon it, to play upon your weaknesses and keep you from exercising an appropriate caution.

  She clenched her eyes shut. “That was really stupid of me, not to think of that. Really really stupid.”

  The Vach-Viraj incantation would have kept the sorceries from attaining their goal. There will be other days and other sorceries, and my fosterling will depend on you, so you will need to practice that much sorcery, for her sake as well as yours.

  Though the prospect left her profoundly uneasy, Brecken made herself nod. “Okay,” she said, “But—but I don’t have the book any more.”

  You will be given another opportunity. Then you will know what you must do.

  Brecken nodded again, eyes closed.

  There is a further thing I wish you to know, The Thing That Should Not Be said then. You go to dwell in the house of the daughter of my ancient enemy, as I intended. Yes, that also was my doing in part, though the One who dwells in Carcosa willed another part, and our purposes run along the same path just now. There is a reason for that, which it is well for you to know.

  I have not concerned myself before now with the affairs of the Great Old Ones. Their purposes and their struggles are not mine, and certain
old quarrels stand between us. Yet it has not escaped my notice that it was their enemies who struck against my fosterlings, and their servants who came to my fosterlings’ aid. I will repay both those deeds in my own time and in my own way. For now, when you dwell with the child of the King, you will tell her the things that I have said to you. By then she will know them anyway—but you will tell her.

  “I’ll do that,” said Brecken.

  It is well. Then: The place you go will be a place of safety for a time, but only for a time, and thereafter I will act. Until that time comes, this fosterling of mine must be well hidden. The darkness ebbed and swirled. It is a long and difficult road I have ordained for her, to dwell in the human world and raise her broodlings there. There is a purpose behind it, which will be known at the proper time. Until that happens, it will be well for her if you stay beside her, keep her safe, help her with her broodlings when they come.

  The thought of Sho budding, abstract until that moment, suddenly became anything but. “I’ll do that, with all my heart,” Brecken said. “I’d do it anyway, because of what’s between the two of us. But since you’ve asked me to do it—” She laughed, a faint murmuring sound like running water. “Is it possible to do more than everything I can? Because I’m going to try.”

  It is well, Nyogtha said again. Now attend, my fosterling’s broodsister. The drug remains in you, and though you received only a small dose, some risk remains. I will return you to your body now, but you will sleep until it is gone, so the Hounds will not trouble themselves over you.

  Darkness took her then, sudden as a knife.

  THE PHONE RANG, PLAYING the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Brecken blinked half awake, reached for the end table. Her purse was close by; she got it, extracted the phone and picked up the call. “Hello?”

  The voice on the line sounded slightly familiar. “May I speak to Brecken Kendall?”