“The shapeless,” Boley said finally, as the hands on the clock above him pointed to 12:20. “The thing that lacks name, definition, form. To our authors, that’s the essence of terror—and it still frightens us today.” His voice trickled out into silence, and he stood there blinking like an owl in sunlight as the clock let out a sudden loud click.
Students surged to their feet and headed for the door. Brecken waited until the young man next to her started to get up, then stood, leaned toward him, kissed him on the cheek. “Looks like you got something out of the lecture.”
He smiled his usual smile, a slight upward twist at the ends of his mouth, let her take his hand. “Yeah, surprisingly.” With a shrug: “Something I can use for my studies.”
They followed the other students out into an echoing hallway where footfalls and voices rang off bare concrete, and then out the building’s main doors onto gray concrete slabs. “Still free tonight?” he asked her.
“Jay,” she said, chiding, though she smiled to soften it. “Of course I am.”
“Just thought I’d check.” She mimed a swat at him. Laughing, he parried it, said, “Well, you never know.”
On the far side of the square, Gurnard Hall rose up gray and stark. They went through one of the glass doors into The Cave.
“Do you mind if we swing by Buzzy’s on the way?” Jay asked her.
She did, but not enough to say anything about it. “We can do that.”
“Great.” He gave her a quick squeeze, a kiss. “See you at quarter to six.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she promised, and watched him cross The Cave to the elevators.
Outside the wind had picked up, and drove long gray shreds of cloud across a pale sky. Brecken huddled into her coat and hurried across campus to the main post office, mailed her weekly letter to her mother, and then got in line. It took ten minutes standing in line and two more waiting at the counter to make her worst fears come true. Yes, it was a package for her from Aunt Mary, with a half dozen rainbow-glitter stickers on the brown paper wrapping to prove it, and this time of year it would have to be—
She did her best to silence uncharitable thoughts and trudged the twelve blocks back up Danforth Street, hauling the package under one arm. For some reason, two identical gray SUVs with tinted windows were driving along different streets near Hob’s Hill at walking speed, but neither of them paid her any attention and she promptly forgot them. When she got home, she noticed that the garbage cans had brand new bungee cords in eyeburning colors holding them shut. The acrid odor still hovered faintly over the cans: animal repellent, Brecken guessed.
She got inside her own little space as quickly as she could, went to the kitchenette, gave the package a wan look, and then got a pair of scissors and opened it. Brown paper and a lightly dented liquor box gave way to masses of crumpled paper, to a plastic insulating bag, and then to four loaf-shaped packages neatly wrapped in foil and wax paper, still apparently frozen, with the dread word “zucchini” neatly misspelled in permanent marker on each one.
She really does mean well, Brecken thought disconsolately. It was true, too. Aunt Mary had the best of intentions, but it was a family joke that she couldn’t boil water without giving it a scorched taste. Her zucchini bread did its best to rise to that high standard, with considerable success. Maybe, she thought, I should leave it outside overnight to drive off the raccoons.
Tempting though the thought was, she put one loaf out to thaw on a plate, told herself that maybe this batch would be better than the others. The three remaining loaves went into the freezer, and the box and packing material went into the recycle bin. Then it was time to leave for the library, so she had a shot at getting her homework done before she went to meet Jay.
BUZRAEL BOOKS—BUZZY’S, IN Partridgeville State slang—was a hoarder’s dream and a bibliophile’s nightmare, a labyrinth of narrow aisles, stark fluorescent lights, floor-to-ceiling shelves of bare wood, and quirkily sorted books crammed into six rooms above the Smithwich and Isaacs jewelry store on Central Square. A tall narrow door, a long narrow stair, and another narrow door at right angles to the first led into it. On the far side of the door, a gap barely straight enough to be called an aisle led between a sales counter cluttered with oddities and a floor-to-ceiling display of garish twentieth-century paperbacks. Brecken rarely went past the counter; her sense of direction wasn’t good, and she’d gotten lost in the labyrinth more than once.
Once he came through the door, Jay plopped his backpack on the sales counter without a word and headed off into the dim corners of the bookstore. Brecken gave the proprietor, a bent white-haired man with a gnome’s face, an apologetic look; he returned a wry glance over gold-rimmed glasses, put the backpack behind the counter, then returned to sorting through a stack of leatherbound volumes with titles in unfamiliar scripts. Brecken glanced idly across the assorted books and objects on the sales counter before going further in. It was a time-wasting maneuver, one of the ways she handled waiting for Jay to finish hunting for books, but this time her eye caught on a photocopied page of handwritten words and music.
She picked up the sheet, considered it, and her brow furrowed. The writing listed phrases and single words, and next to each was a short, neatly drawn bit of musical score, treble and bass clef both. At the top of the sheet, for example, the author had written I will not harm you in front of two measures of fast, lilting notes that ran from G below low C to F sharp above middle C and back again. Brecken hummed the two measures, glanced over the other entries on the sheet.
“Ah.” The proprietor had risen noiselessly and come down the counter to where Brecken was standing. “An interesting find, that. Do you recognize the handwriting?”
“No,” Brecken admitted. “Should I?”
“Perhaps. Halpin Chalmers had a certain local notoriety once upon a time.”
She blinked in surprise. “The writer?”
“Ah, you’ve heard of him. Yes. These photocopies—” His gesture took in the sheet in Brecken’s hand, and a stack she hadn’t noticed a short distance away, under a hardback volume with yellowing pages and an ornate dust jacket tattered at the edges. “—they came to us from an estate sale last week.” With a curious look she couldn’t interpret: “It’s supposed to be a lexicon of sorts—a list of the songs of shoggoths and their meanings. Interested?”
“Maybe,” said Brecken, glancing again at some of the bits of music. The echo of her conversation with Rosalie that morning made her just a little uneasy. Still, shoggoths or no shoggoths, some of the pieces looked as though she might be able to use them as themes for her composition class homework. “How much are they?”
“A dollar for the lot,” he said. “Not much market for that sort of thing these days.”
Brecken agreed to the price, then went to the bin of fifty-cent cookbooks next to the counter and sorted through them. She found two that looked worth trying, added them to the photocopies and went fishing in her purse for the money to pay for them. She had just tucked her purchases in her tote bag when Jay came back from the stacks with an old book in one hand and a smile on his face—not his usual smile, but a tense smile that bent his whole face around it. It wasn’t a pleasant expression at all, and it made Brecken uncomfortable.
He dropped the book on the counter in front of the proprietor, who glanced up at him after a moment, took the book, opened it, closed it again. “You’re fortunate to find that,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” Jay said, and pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket.
“Not the sort of thing that comes into stock very often,” the old man said. He considered Jay, handed back the change and the book. “Not at all.”
A few minutes later they were on their way down the stairs. “Find anything?” Jay asked.
Brecken had already weighed her answer. If she told him about the Halpin Chalmers papers, she knew, he’d want to borrow them, and if that happened her chances of seeing them again in time to use them for her composition class
weren’t good. Once she was done with them, on the other hand, they might make a good birthday present. “Just a couple of cookbooks.” She glanced at him. “You found something pretty good, though.”
“Yeah.” The tense unpleasant smile returned. “A book I need for my studies. Something really old and really rare.” He didn’t say anything else about it, and she let the subject drop.
BY THE TIME THEY reached his apartment she’d gotten him talking about the gigs he’d lined up for their musical group over the winter break, and the smile she disliked so much went away and didn’t come back. They went up a narrow flight of stairs lit only by a single bare bulb, ducked down a narrow corridor lined at intervals with unmarked wooden doors. Brecken waited while he fumbled with his keys, followed him in once the light inside went on.
Jay’s apartment was a cramped irregular little space with an unmade bed in an alcove at one end, a big open space in the center with no furniture at all, and a ramshackle kitchen at the other end with a bathroom not much bigger than a closet opening off it. He dumped his backpack and coat on the floor and settled on a chair at the kitchen table; she set her tote bag near the door, hung her coat on a hook on the wall nearby, went to the cupboard and the fridge and assessed the contents with a practiced eye. “Spaghetti?”
“Please,” he said with his normal smile.
“Sure thing.” Water splashed into the biggest saucepan she could find, went to heat on one of the stove burners, and she sat down across the table from him. “We’ll have to do a grocery run sometime soon. You’re out of way too much.”
“Yeah, I know.” Then: “Breck, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” she said, teasing him, but still blushed at the praise.
They talked about classes and gigs, the other members of their ensemble, the latest gossip from the music department, and a new arrangement she was working up for “The Carol of the Bells,” while the water heated, the pasta boiled, and the contents of a jar of spaghetti sauce went into a pan to warm. A salad would be good, she thought, but the refrigerator didn’t offer any help there; two glasses of cheap red wine joined dinner on the table, and that was all.
Afterwards, they talked a while longer and finished the wine, and then Jay got up, took her hands in his, drew her to her feet, and started kissing her. She let her lead him to the unmade bed, helped him take off her clothes, held him as he thrust into her clumsily for a while and then shuddered and lay still.
Maybe five minutes later he was sound asleep, and starting to snore. Brecken extracted herself from the bed, gathered up her clothes, and went to the cramped little bathroom to wash up and dress. Jay didn’t like to be touched while he was sleeping and he liked to be alone when he woke up in the morning, and so even though she wanted nothing more than to settle down next to him on the bed and pull the blankets over them both, that wasn’t an option. Love, she thought, looking at him with a smile she tried to convince herself was heartfelt. It is what it is.
The door clicked behind her as she let herself out, picked her way down the ramshackle stairs to the door. Outside the wind still whistled down Partridgeville’s streets, flung a few petulant raindrops as it passed. Brecken walked as quickly as she could to Prospect Street, where sodium lights blazed down and an assortment of nightspots and cheap restaurants offered refuge in case of trouble. Prospect to College, and then College to Danforth and the long straight uphill run toward the dark mounded shape of Hob’s Hill: it was a familiar route, familiar as the pensive mood her trysts with Jay so often awoke in her.
Such thoughts led in directions she didn’t want to face just then, and so she called to mind the photocopies she’d bought at Buzzy’s that evening, the pages the proprietor had so preposterously called a lexicon of shoggoth songs. Her memory for music was keen enough that she didn’t need to glance at the sheets to remember some of the snippets of melody on them: the lilting notes that were supposed to mean I will not harm you, a fast sequence of trills for I wish to talk, a passage with a haunting quality that meant we live beneath the ground, and more.
She whistled them as she walked, turned them over and over again in her mind, tried to see ways in which she could use them as themes for upcoming composition class assignments. The sequence I will not harm you was particularly sweet; it really was a pity, she decided, that none of the Baroque composers had made it the theme of a bourrée or a gigue, one of the dance-music forms they’d turned into a mainstay of the eighteenth-century repertoire. She could hear in her mind the way it would sound on the piano, the crisp allegro tempo, four beats to the measure, the first beat accented but not too much.
The last blocks of Danforth Street slipped past in that pleasant way, and Brecken went through the gap between houses to her door. The lock turned noiselessly—Mrs. Dalzell must have oiled it again, Brecken guessed—and let her into her apartment. Inside, dim light from the alley streetlamp filtered in through the shades, splashed murky shadows over the furnishings. She reached for the light switch, turned to the kitchenette and Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread.
The bread was gone. That was the first thing that registered. The plate where she’d left it to thaw was still there on the counter, with foil and wax paper wrappings spread open on top of it, but the bread itself had vanished. An instant later she saw what else was in the kitchenette, and she forgot all about zucchini bread for the moment.
It crouched on the linoleum, a hideous, blobby, gelatinous-looking mass maybe five feet across and three feet thick, iridescent black in color, with six pale greenish eyes scattered across the surface facing her. As Brecken watched in stunned silence, two of the eyes receded into the mass of the thing, and four more emerged and blinked open. All the eyes were wide, and all of them stared straight at her.
TWO
The Thing on the Linoleum
BRECKEN STOOD THERE FOR a long moment, frozen into place. The thing on the kitchenette floor stared at her with its wide pale eyes, trembling visibly, then drew itself together. Its motion reminded her suddenly of an animal about to spring.
Panic set her heart pounding. She tried to think of something to do, anything, but the only thing that came to mind was the absurd notion that she was looking at a shoggoth. All at once she recalled one of the little scraps of melody from the photocopy, the one that was supposed to mean “I will not harm you,” and because she couldn’t think of anything better to do, and because the thing on the kitchenette floor looked so much like a shoggoth, she whistled it aloud.
The thing seemed startled. Three more eyes blinked open on the surface facing Brecken, stared at her. Then the thing darted away in a motion so quick and evasive she couldn’t keep track of it. An instant later it had vanished.
Brecken stood there motionless for some time thereafter. Just then, taking even a single step toward the kitchenette was the last thing on earth she wanted to do, and it didn’t matter whether what she found there proved that the thing had actually been there or not. She drew in a ragged breath, made herself go into the kitchenette anyway, The thing really was gone, if it had ever been there. At first, the only sign of its apparent presence she could find was the empty plate and wrappings on the counter. Then she caught a half-familiar scent, recognized it after a moment as the odd acrid odor she’d smelled around the trash cans earlier that day, and noticed that a glass she’d filled with water and put in the sink that morning was completely empty.
She walked back to the futon, slumped down onto it, stared at nothing in particular for what seemed like a long time. The thing couldn’t actually have been there, she told herself. Things like that don’t exist. Shoggoths don’t exist—not outside of stories by old-fashioned fantasy authors like Carter, Lovecraft, and Hastane. Not in the real world, and certainly not in a rundown student apartment in Partridgeville, New Jersey.
After a while she got up again and made sure the zucchini bread really was gone. The wrappings, she noticed, looked as though someone had cleaned them—n
ot a single crumb remained. She dropped the wrappings into the trash, breathed a sigh of relief, then felt guilty and made herself get another loaf of Aunt Mary’s regrettable zucchini bread out to thaw.
Lacking anything better to do thereafter, she went to the piano and tried to drown out her thoughts with an hour of hard practice: a flurry of warmups and etudes, and then straight into the second book of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, one prelude and fugue after another, until the serene mathematics of Bach’s music brought the world back into something like its proper shape. After that she rewarded herself by getting out her flute and playing until sheer tiredness made her stop. More than once, while the clear bright notes of the flute filled the apartment, she had to push aside the uncomfortable feeling that someone was listening to her, but by the time she pulled the futon out and settled down to sleep, she’d managed to forget that passing fancy.
A solid night’s sleep, another hour of flute practice, and the rest of her morning routine made her feel better still. By the time the morning sun chased off the last scraps of mist and streamed through her eastern windows, she had convinced herself that she must have imagined the thing on the linoleum. The only discord in that comfortable conviction was the hard fact that a loaf of Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread had vanished without a trace. She pondered the second loaf, still in its foil wrapping, and thought of a simple test.
She got a plate and a bowl, unwrapped the loaf, put it on the plate, filled the bowl most of the way with water, and set both on the kitchenette floor. There, she thought. When I get home tonight and both of those are still there, I’ll know the whole thing was just nerves or something. Conscience reminded her that the bread would probably be too stale to eat by then, and so she grabbed her purse and tote bag, and headed for the door before second thoughts could interfere. Besides, she told herself, if something really did eat the loaf, maybe it needs another meal.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 2
