She made herself finish the thought. I wish you hadn’t tried to kill me, and I wish I’d found a way to save myself that didn’t kill you.
As soon as the service was over, while Jay’s relatives were still milling around looking bored and sad and not talking to one another, she slipped out the door. The breeze outside, cool and salt-scented, was infinitely welcome after the stagnant flower-heavy air inside the funeral home. The green mass of Hob’s Hill loomed to one side as she headed for Danforth Street, rose straight ahead of her as she took the familiar route home. Once the honest sounds of wind and traffic scrubbed the hymn tunes out of her ears, the first notes of a melody took shape. She’d half expected that, though she hadn’t guessed that it would be wistful rather than sad, a thing of memories and might-have-beens.
Two blocks after the first notes sounded in her mind, the melody was clear enough that she stopped by a big blue mailbox, pulled a pen and the funeral service program out of her purse, and wrote the melody line down, using the mailbox as an impromptu desk, so she wouldn’t lose any of it. It would always be Jay’s tune for her, she knew, though enough hard work might turn it into something in which other people could hear their own griefs.
By the time she closed the door to her apartment behind her and whistled a greeting to Sho, she’d set the melody aside. With finals so close, the move to Arkham following on its heels, and the third movement of her concerto demanding as much spare time as she had to give it, she had too many other things to think about, and Sho was another source of distractions. Once she’d shed dress, nylons, and shoes and replaced them with a t-shirt and sweat pants, she flopped on the futon, nestled against Sho, and closed her eyes.
After a time, Sho said, ♪You wished me to tell you to make the thing-that-talks talk to you again.♪ With a wry look: ♪If you decide to tell it to be silent I will not be sad.♪
Brecken blinked, surfacing out of something close to a doze. ♪Neither would I,♪ she admitted, ♪but I need it to talk.♪ She got her phone out of her purse, woke it, found a message from Rosalie waiting, and after a moment’s hesitation clicked on it.
“Brecken, give me a call,” Rosalie’s voice said. She sounded worried. “I—just give me a call, okay? Thanks.”
That was so uncharacteristically terse that Brecken hit the call back button at once, got the phone to her ear. “Ro?” she said, once Rosalie picked up. “What’s up?”
“They just found Julian Pinchbeck’s body,” Rosalie said. “Down on the beach by Mulligan Point.” She swallowed audibly. “They’re saying he drowned himself.”
EIGHTEEN
The Reconciler of Worlds
BRECKEN FOUND THE DETAILS on the Partridgeville Gazette website a few minutes later. A couple walking their dog on the beach had seen something in the surf, went to look, and called the police, who hauled the body ashore. They’d searched Pinchbeck’s apartment and found a suicide note, the article said, and the police were still investigating. That was all the article said, but it was more than enough to leave Brecken feeling chilled to her core.
The memory of Pinchbeck’s face after she’d played her fugue hovered in her mind’s eye. I did that, she thought. I didn’t know that he’d react that way, and I still don’t know why, but I killed him. I didn’t want that, any more than I wanted Jay to die, but—
♪Something is not well,♪ Sho said then.
♪Yes.♪ In fumbling words, she tried to explain what had happened. One at a time, three additional eyes surfaced on the side of the shoggoth that faced her. Finally, when she’d finished, she looked away and said, ♪Did your people ever do that—kill themselves?♪
A pseudopod closed on each of her shoulders, turned her to face Sho. A dozen wide eyes stared at her. ♪You will not.♪
♪No,♪ Brecken replied, startled. ♪No, of course not.♪ And it was true: a few times in the bitter months after Mrs. Macallan’s death, she’d toyed with the idea of suicide, but even then it had felt like a pointless waste. ♪No, it’s just that I—I don’t understand.♪
She wanted to cry, but there were no tears in her, just a vast emptiness that seemed to reach to the edges of forever.
♪I was afraid,♪ Sho said then. ♪It happened—not often, not at all often, but it happened—that one of my people killed herself to cast such shame on another that the other would do the same. I—I thought your people might do that also.♪
Brecken managed a fragile smile. ♪No. It might have happened long ago, but not now.♪
♪Is it known why he did it?♪
♪I don’t know. I think it was me—the song I made, to show him that he was wrong. I hope that wasn’t it, but—♪
♪I understand.♪ Sho hunched down a little. ♪And if it is?♪
♪Then I’ll live with that.♪ And that was true, too; she’d already learned to live with plenty of bitter memories, and she knew she could do the same with one more.
They spent the evening pleasantly enough, and though it took a long time for Brecken to get to sleep she was rested enough to function the next morning. An hour of flute practice helped clear her mind. Once that was done and breakfast was cooking, she turned on her phone to check messages and see if the Gazette had anything more to say. It didn’t, but the icon showed her that an email was waiting for her. It was from Professor Toomey, characteristically terse: Brecken—can you come to my office this morning before class? She glanced at the clock, talked with Sho, and sent an email back saying she’d be there at 10:30.
It took her a moment to nerve herself up before she crossed The Cave to the elevators, and another moment in the sixth floor hallway before she knocked on the familiar door. “Come in,” said the professor, and motioned her to a seat. She knew better than to close the door.
“You’ve heard about Julian Pinchbeck,” Toomey said. When she nodded: “The police aren’t making his suicide note public, but there’s something about it you should know.”
She gave him a bleak look and said, “Okay.”
“It didn’t mention you at all.”
Her astonishment must have shown on her face, because he allowed a fractional smile. “I thought there was a pretty good chance you’d blame yourself, after the way he reacted to your fugue. What you don’t know is that the morning before you played, I had him come here to talk about his grades and his future plans. He just barely dodged a D in Composition I, you see, and he was headed for worse than that this semester.”
As Brecken took that in, the professor got up, walked to the window on the far end of the little office, and stared out it for a moment, then turned. “There are a lot of tragedies in this world,” he said. “One that the playwrights and novelists haven’t really tackled yet is the one you get when somebody has dreams but no talent. Julian wanted to be a composer but he didn’t have what it takes. It really was that simple—and it’s one of the toughest things a teacher has to do, to tell somebody that they’re never going to be able to live their dream.”
His last three words hung in the silent air, reminding her of Rosalie’s choice, the other side of the coin. Brecken nodded, and said, “Did the note mention you?”
Toomey gave her a wry look, and then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “At length. I wasn’t the only one he blamed, though, and the police say there may have been something quite a bit uglier involved in his suicide.”
“Oh?”
“They searched his computer, and they found a bunch of files about a murder here in the 1920s: a writer, I think it was, who was killed the same way as the two students who were murdered this spring. The two students, as I imagine you know, were his former girlfriend and the young man who took her away from him.”
Aghast, she opened her mouth, closed it again, realizing that there was nothing she could say, not with any chance of being heard. The Hounds of Tindalos, the Liao drug: those didn’t belong in the world Professor Toomey or the Partridgeville police department thought they lived in, and the one thing she could show them to make them believe her—Sho
—was the one thing she most needed to keep secret.
“I know,” said the professor. “I have no idea if he did that or not. I hope not, but—” He shrugged expressively. “That’s neither here nor there. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t jump to the wrong conclusion about Julian’s suicide.”
Brecken thanked him, they talked about her move, and she headed down to The Cave. Rosalie wasn’t there yet, and so she went out onto the plaza, found an empty bench, sat there looking at nothing for a long moment, while the wind off the sea danced around the hard gray angles of Mainwaring Hall and clouds hid and revealed the sun.
The world has no eyes, she thought, and as she sat there, the words made sense in a way they’d never done before. Julian Pinchbeck dreamed of being a composer and she’d never imagined being one, but the world had handed the talent to her and not to him, not because she deserved it and he didn’t, not because she was a good person and he wasn’t, not because the universe or the Great Old Ones were out to get him, but because that was just the way things happened to turn out. She thought of Julian and Jay, and then all at once of Mrs. Macallan too—chasing their dreams, each of them, until the dreams broke beneath them and they broke too—and it wasn’t wrong for them to chase their dreams, any more than it was right, for the world had no eyes and wouldn’t have noticed or cared no matter what they’d done.
My life isn’t right or wrong either, she thought. It just is. It doesn’t mean anything to the universe that I fell in love with Jay or Sho or Mozart; those things just happened to me, the way I happened to Sho, or the Hounds of Tindalos happened to Jay, or wanting to be a composer happened to poor Julian. They happened the way that tonality makes music that makes sense, the way a major chord sounds like joy and a minor chord sounds like grief, just because that’s how things happened to turn out.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out again, knowing that she couldn’t be entirely certain she would live to draw in another. When she did, it came as a pleasant shock. That the spring sunlight slanted past her and the wind tasted of the sea, that music trembled in her like the blood in her veins, that Sho had come into her life, that she existed in the first place: none of those things had to happen, and nothing she’d done or left undone made them happen. They hovered there, arbitrary and astonishing, and the fact that they meant nothing to the universe didn’t keep them from meaning everything to her.
The world has no eyes, but I do. Part of her wanted to laugh with delight as she repeated the words silently to herself, and another part wanted to burst into tears. Instead of doing either, she sat there on the bench for a long while, letting each moment surprise and delight her by the sheer arbitrariness of its existence, until the clouds began to thicken and a glance at her cell phone told her there was somewhere else she meant to be.
Other things pushed Julian’s fate out of her mind. Over the days that followed, though, as she and the rest of Partridgeville State finished up the semester and got ready for finals week, rumors linking Julian Pinchbeck to the deaths of Barbara Cormyn and Jay Olmsted spread around campus, at first vague, then painfully exact. Nobody wanted to admit they believed them, but nobody argued against them, and Brecken could tell easily enough how it would end.
Years later, one bleak winter day when snow lay thick on the Massachusetts hills, a passage in the quartet for recorders she was writing kept refusing to come out right, and Sho and her broodlings were settled in a comfortable heap on the sofa, far over on the dreaming-side, Brecken went online and found a story on the Partridgeville Gazette website summing up the tragic events of that spring. The police never officially closed the case, but nobody seemed to doubt that Pinchbeck had killed his former girlfriend, his rival, and then himself. Brecken shook her head, wondered why the photograph of Pinchbeck in the news story seemed only half familiar to her, closed the browser window, and went back to work on the quartet.
THE UNIVERSITY GOT ALL three of the Gurnard Hall elevators fixed halfway through the last week of classes—“great timing,” Rosalie said with an eyeroll—and so when Composition II finished its last session on the Wednesday of the last week of classes, Brecken and Rosalie ended up in The Cave one last time. An awkward silence passed, and then Rosalie said, “Coffee, definitely.” Brecken agreed, and the two of them went through the doors into Vivaldi’s.
Another silence came and sat with them for a while as they sipped their coffees. Rosalie, who was looking more and more uncomfortable as the moments passed, finally chased it away for a little while by laughing and reminding Brecken of one of the silly mishaps they’d gotten into when they’d been roommates in Arbuckle Hall. Brecken laughed as well and reminded her of another, and they spent fifteen minutes or so at that pleasant task of remembrance. There were tears before it was all over, and promises to stay in touch that both of them knew would not be kept, but the music had to be played all the way to the end.
Finally Brecken finished the last of her coffee. The silence had begun to creep back, and it was time to go, she knew it in her bones. “Thank you, Ro,” she said. “Thank you for everything.” Rosalie looked up at her with wide bleak eyes and nodded, unwilling or unable to speak, and Brecken stood, gave her one last smile, and left Vivaldi’s.
The Cave seemed emptier than usual as she passed through it, though there were still plenty of music students bent over the tables in study or standing around in conversation. Maybe, she thought, it was the faces that weren’t there any more—Jay’s, Barbara’s, Julian’s. She squared her shoulders, headed for the glass doors, stepped out of the darkness and the echoes into wind and sunlight.
Later that day she had coffee with Molly at a place in town, got Molly’s email, and promised to send hers once she’d gotten settled in Arkham. “My band gets up there a couple of times a year,” Molly said. “There’s a place called J.J.’s on Fish Street—you ought to check it out, if you like anything but classical. They have live music every night of the week.”
“Blues?” Brecken asked her. “I grew up with that.”
“Every Wednesday night,” Molly said with a grin. “We got there a day early once—it was cheaper than staying in Boston. Definitely worth your while.” Brecken pulled a notebook from her tote bag and wrote down the details.
The next day she’d arranged to meet Darren for lunch at Fumi’s. True to form, they spent an hour over tea, sushi, and edamame picking apart the mathematical structure of one of Bach’s ricercars. Only after they were both sure she’d understood it did Darren bring up the obvious question. “So when’s the day?”
“My last final’s Wednesday,” said Brecken, “and I’m moving the Saturday after that.”
He hunched his head down slightly into his shoulders. “Well, stay in touch.”
“Of course I will! I’ll be getting a new email after I get settled, but I’ll send it to you and we can pick things up.” Then, with a wistful smile: “Though it won’t be the same without your folks and my friends missing the point.”
He choked on his tea, laughed. “True. Very true.”
“Besides,” said Brecken, “if you and Stan get married, I want an invite.”
Darren glanced at her, smiling. It wasn’t the big ungainly smile he used as a shield; it was the little fragile smile he showed only to friends. “When Stan and I get married,” he said, “You’re going to get an invite, and something else. If you’re willing, we’d like to commission you to write an original piece of music for the ceremony.”
Brecken’s mouth fell open, and then she beamed. “Thank you, Darren. That’s really sweet—and of course I’d be delighted.”
When she left Fumi’s a quarter hour later she might as well have been walking on air, and even three more days of frantic studying to get ready for her finals didn’t quite manage to quell her mood. One more errand still waited, though. The day after her last final, as the approaching summer wrapped the hills around Partridgeville with green and the sun shone down from a cloudless sky, Brecken walked down to Central Square,
climbed the long narrow stair to Buzrael Books, and pushed open the door. Thaddeus Waldzell was sitting behind the counter as usual, and as she came in, he glanced over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses at her. His smile hinted at unspoken knowledge, as though he savored a jest too subtle to share with anyone else.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
“Hi.” Brecken reached into her tote bag and brought out a hardback volume: the annotated copy of The Secret Watcher she’d gotten at Buzzy’s all those months before. “I’m wondering if I ought to give this back to you.”
He took it, gave it a careful examination inside and out, and then glanced back up at her. “Oh, quite the contrary,” he said. “A mutual friend tells me you’ll need it again someday.”
Brecken gave him a blank look, and then her eyes went round as she guessed which mutual friend he had in mind.
Waldzell’s smile broadened. “The same friend tells me you’re leaving Partridgeville,” he said, “and this would be better off elsewhere. Take it with you and keep it hidden.”
“I’m not sure I’m any good at that,” said Brecken. “It got stolen, and—and two people are dead because I wasn’t careful enough.”
“No.” A shake of his head denied that. “That wasn’t your doing. When people go running toward their fate, it’s not an easy thing to stop them from reaching it—whatever that fate happens to be.” He handed her back the book, and smiled again.
She gave him a long, uncertain look. “Can I ask a question?” He gestured, inviting it, and she went on. “The mutual friend—how long have you known him?”
Waldzell’s smile broadened further. “A very, very long time.” Then, meeting her eyes: “You should go now, I think.”
Then all at once she was standing in bright sun in front of the Smithwich and Isaacs jewelry store, blinking in surprise, with no idea how she’d gotten there. She turned to look at the door that led to Buzzy’s, and found it shut, with a CLOSED sign hanging behind the glass for good measure. Shaking her head, she started to put the book back in her tote bag, and stopped, seeing something glinting in the hand that held it.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 31