“You two aren’t cooperating,” Rosalie said.
“Nope,” said Donna, and checked the time on her cell phone. “And we’ve got about six minutes to get to class, too. See you!” She gave Rosalie a sly smile, got up and headed off across The Cave. Rosalie sighed in exasperation, checked her own phone, and launched herself toward the glass doors, leaving Brecken to shake her head and go to Intro to Music Education I.
Fifty minutes later, she was wondering whether her class in music education made no sense, or whether she was just too stupid to understand it. Professor Neal Rohrbach had curly brown hair and a vague pink face; he talked smoothly in a tenor monotone, but everything he said heaped abstraction on top of abstraction until Brecken was left trying to guess how any of it related to teaching people how to play music, or if it had anything to do with that at all.
After that she had an hour of study time, then The Fantastic In Literature at 1:30, where Professor Boley talked about the philosophy of the Lovecraft circle. “Indifferentism,” he said, and once again Brecken could almost glimpse the embers of the enthusiasm he’d once put into his lectures. “That’s what Lovecraft called it, but he didn’t invent it. It was in the archaic texts he and so many other authors of weird tales read so avidly: the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and so forth. Their idea was that the universe doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t even notice us. What’s more, it doesn’t mean anything—or if it does, and we’re unfortunate enough to find out what the meaning is, it turns out to be so unhuman that it shatters our minds and drives us mad.
“That vision of a universe that’s fundamentally hostile to human existence pervades their work. You’ll find it especially in the way they interpreted the gods they borrowed from those same archaic texts—Tsathoggua, Cthulhu, Nyogtha, and the rest of them. All of the weird-tales authors of that period liked to pretend that these Great Old Ones were the old gods of nature, the realities behind all the figures of the old mythologies. But these gods don’t care. Their concern for you is about on a level with your concern with the bacteria on the soles of your shoes. The same theme of indifferentism: the universe really is out to get you.”
Brecken made the mistake of glancing at Jay just then, and saw the smile she hated playing over his face. She forced her attention back to the lecture, and wondered: how can the universe be indifferent to us and hostile to us at the same time? If the Great Old Ones really don’t care, doesn’t that mean they can’t be bothered to be out to get us?
She brooded over that as she went home, got her laundry together, and took it to the laundromat on Meeker Street, where she sat working on her music education assignments while the washer and dryer did their work. After another quick trip home, she headed out again, went through the old downtown to her weekly piano lesson in an clapboard-sided house on Dexter Street at the foot of Angell Hill. Ida Johansen, her piano tutor, was a mousy-looking woman with hair that had once been blonde and was now mostly colorless, who filled in the gaps in an inadequate pension by giving piano lessons and playing organ Sundays at the First Baptist Church, and whose living room was almost completely bare of decoration except for a framed piece of embroidery saying, in faux-Gothic script, Ve grow too soon Old, und too late Schmart. Her teaching was uninspired but systematic, and Brecken left after her hour with a page of useful comments in Mrs. Johansen’s minute handwriting, and two other passages in the Telemann concerto to work on.
The walk back from Dexter Street took her past Central Square and the door of Buzrael Books, and though she had plenty of other things to think about, her mind kept straying back to the vanishing loaves of zucchini bread. Of course the thing she thought she’d seen Monday night couldn’t be responsible, she told herself, because things like that don’t exist—but a raccoon would have left more of a mess, she’d seen their treatment of garbage cans often enough to be sure of that, and why would a human being who got into the apartment two days running have taken only a loaf of zucchini bread and a drink of water each time?
She was nervous enough when she got to the door to her apartment that it took her two tries to get the key into the lock, and three fumbling motions to turn on the light. The third loaf was gone, and so was the water. Brecken considered the empty plate for a long moment, then shook her head, put it and the bowl in the sink, and got the last loaf of zucchini bread out to thaw. The thing she’d imagined, or hallucinated, or dreamed in the kitchenette Monday night—it couldn’t possibly have been real, she told herself.
Could it?
An unwelcome thought tried to remind her that even the hungriest hallucination couldn’t actually eat three loaves of Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread. Another thought, just as unwelcome, found it improbable that anything, hallucinatory or otherwise, could accomplish that feat. She tried to shove both thoughts aside, went to the futon, sank onto it and closed her eyes.
Moments passed, and then a soft slippery noise whispered across the room from the direction of the kitchenette. It sounded unnervingly as though something was sliding across the linoleum. Brecken shivered, though the evening was still warm, and thought: I am not going to open my eyes. I don’t care what—
A low unsteady piping sound shattered her resolve. She opened her eyes, and wished at once that she hadn’t.
There the thing was, on the floor of her kitchenette again: shapeless, iridescent black, and horrible. It watched her with pale green eyes that emerged from the gelatinous mass and then sank out of sight. The acrid scent came from it, faint but definite. Panic seized her; she opened her mouth, but all that came out was a little squeaking noise. Then she remembered that the thing’s piping might be speech.
Without taking her eyes off the thing, she reached with a shaking hand for the stack of photocopied papers on the end table next to the futon. That particular trill—it was on the first page, she thought she remembered. A quick glance confirmed that. It was a question: ♪Why?♪
She glanced up from Chalmers’ notes. The thing was still there. It piped a longer sequence of notes, in equally unsteady tones, through a mouthlike orifice that appeared on its upper surface and then disappeared again. She glanced reflexively at the papers in her hands, saw enough of the other motifs to guess at the meaning: ♪Why do you help me?♪
It’s talking to me. The thought circled around and around, the only coherent thing in the utter confusion that filled her mind. Something that can’t exist is talking to me. Belatedly, she realized that it probably expected an answer. Pages rustled as Brecken fumbled through the lexicon, and whistled the only answer she could think of: ♪I think—you need—help.♪
The thing responded at once: ♪Your people hunt and kill my people.♪
It took a few moments for her to decipher the piping, but then Brecken stared, horrified. She flipped through the lexicon again, and managed to whistle an answer: ♪I—didn’t know.♪
She looked up from the papers again, to see the thing staring at her with no fewer than twelve wide pale eyes. After a long moment, it piped in shaking tones: ♪Then I thank you for food and water.♪
That left Brecken even more unnerved than she’d been, and she replied with an impulsive promise: ♪There—will be—more.♪
♪I—I thank you.♪ The thing turned and fled in a sudden blur of motion. This time, Brecken was able to follow its route: a zigzag dash across the vinyl tiles to the open space below the sink, then suddenly down, through a gap in the flooring that seemed far too small for it. A faint noise told of its descent into the trench under the apartment.
All at once, Brecken realized that she was trembling from head to foot. She drew in as deep a breath as she could manage, then another. The thing was right there under the floor, she knew, had probably been there for days. It was—
A shoggoth. That, at least, she no longer doubted. The description she remembered from Professor Boley’s lecture was too close a fit to what she’d just seen, except for the matter of size, and so were the descriptions in the stories s
he read: the shapeless body that looked like a mass of bubbles covered by a smooth gelatinous-looking surface layer, the iridescent black color, the pale greenish eyes that appeared and disappeared, every detail was right.
Her imagination offered her unpleasantly vivid images of the shoggoth slithering up out of the crawlspace in the middle of the night with some unthinkable purpose in mind. It was when she tried to think of the unthinkable purpose, of course, that the whole fantasy fell apart. If it had meant to devour her as she slept, say, it could have done that already; instead, all it seemed to want was Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread and some water to wash it down.
The sheer absurdity of that fact conjured up a little shaken laugh, but there was something about the encounter that felt far too serious for laughter. The creature had been frightened and desperate, she felt sure of it, not threatening—and there were those inexplicable words: your people hunt and kill my people. There was no shoggoth-hunting season anywhere Brecken had ever heard of, but she suspected the creature was telling the truth. That implied a cascade of things she didn’t even want to think about.
After a moment Brecken got off the futon and crossed to the kitchenette. Though the shoggoth looked gelatinous, the floor where it had been was clean and dry, and so were the edges of the gap in the flooring through which it had disappeared. The creature had left behind no scent at all, for that matter. Considering the gap, she wondered what it was doing under her floor, and how it had gotten there. I’ll ask it next time, she decided.
Would there be a next time?
She found, to her considerable surprise, that she hoped so.
THREE
A Leaf in the Torrent
THE NEXT MORNING, BRECKEN set out the last loaf of zucchini bread and another bowl of water on the kitchenette floor before leaving for campus. All the way along Danforth Avenue, as houses gave way to strip malls and then to the glass and concrete of the university, her mind circled giddily around the bizarre encounter she’d had the night before, the frightened creature hiding under her floor, the strange whistled conversation they’d had.
She got to The Cave with scarcely enough time to meet Rosalie, ride the elevator to Gurnard Hall’s top floor, and find a seat. Professor Toomey came in while she was still fumbling with her tote bag. He went to the podium and said, “Julian, Molly, Brecken, can I talk to the three of you for a moment?”
That left Brecken flustered for a moment, until she remembered that she’d emailed him about the composition assignment. She got to the podium a few moments after Julian Pinchbeck and the girl with pink hair did.
“I want to thank all three of you for letting me know so promptly about your projects,” the professor said. “Ironically, you all left out one detail—the names of your compositions. If you want to give those to me now I’ll put you down to perform first thing next Tuesday.”
“Mine is titled ‘Obsidian Ellipsoids,’” Julian said airily.
The pink-haired girl, Molly, gave him an amused look. “Mine’s ‘Marty’s Blues.’”
The professor’s eyes, unreadable as always, turned toward Brecken. She drew in a breath and said, “Bourrée in B flat.”
Both of the others glanced at her then. Julian looked as though he’d discovered a slug in his salad; Molly looked as though the slug had suddenly started singing to her, and she liked the tune. “Very good,” Professor Toomey said. “You’re set for Tuesday.”
Rosalie gave her a long startled look when she sat down again. “You’ve already got something done? Girl, you’re way ahead of me.”
Brecken gave her a smile and a shrug, and Professor Toomey started lecturing a moment later, sparing her the need to go on. There wasn’t really much she could say, she reflected later: how could she explain the sudden rush of certainty, the way her initial fumblings flowed together and called the bourrée into being, the dazed wordless sense of release once it was done?
The fifty minutes of class slid past, and she and Rosalie headed out the door and went down the stair to the plaza. “Doing anything this afternoon?” Rosalie asked her.
“Just studying,” Brecken said. “I’ve got a flute lesson at seven.”
Rosalie grinned. “Can you handle company? Donna’s coming to my place in an hour, when she gets out of her music theory class—we’ve both got to catch up on a bunch of work.” When Brecken gave her a dubious look: “There’ll be chicken quesadillas.”
That got a laugh from Brecken. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m going to hold you to that.”
“You do that,” Rosalie said. “I’ve already got all the fixings.” With a sudden grin: “I’m going to remember those quesadillas when I’m living on ramen and sleeping in fleabag hotels.”
DOWN DANFORTH TO CHURCH Street, over Church to the far side of Central Square: Brecken knew the route to Rosalie’s apartment as well as she knew the way to her own. Only a few minutes passed before they got off the elevator on the fourth floor of a big modern building, turned left, and went down to Rosalie’s door, which unlocked with a keycard. Inside was a pleasant one-bedroom apartment with windows and a balcony looking out over Partridge Bay, art prints on the walls, furniture that hadn’t yet seen the inside of a secondhand shop. A photo on the wall near the kitchen explained the relative luxury: Rosalie’s parents, Dad in a Brooks Brothers suit, Mom in an elegant silk dress, beaming down vicariously on their youngest child.
Once coats and hats found their way onto the bed, Rosalie made a beeline for the kitchen and waved aside Brecken’s offer to help, so Brecken settled down on the sofa with her music education textbook, a notebook, and a pen. As she started trying to get the chapter on learning theory to make some kind of sense, assorted sounds came out of the kitchen, followed by the groan of the oven door shutting.
“There we go,” said Rosalie, coming into the living room. “Ten minutes to quesadillas.”
Brecken gave her a sly look. “Unless Georgianna knocks on the door.”
Rosalie choked. “Girl, don’t even think that too loud.” She fetched a bulky textbook from a stack on a coffee table, slumped into an armchair facing the couch. “You know perfectly well that half the reason I bailed out of Arbuckle Hall was so I didn’t have to keep on hiding that damn toaster oven from her. I know, that was her job, but still.”
Brecken didn’t argue, and Rosalie flipped open the textbook and settled down to study. Other than quesadillas, nothing interrupted them until the door buzzer sounded an hour later and Rosalie flung herself toward the intercom. “Donna?” The intercom squawked at her, making sounds incomprehensible to Brecken. “Sure thing, girl. See you in a bit.” A pause, thumb on the button, and then Rosalie unlocked the door and headed for the kitchen again.
The door opened a few minutes later, letting Donna in. “Hi, Ro. Oh, hi, Breck. I didn’t know you were coming to our little soirée.” Grinning: “You better have something to study.”
Brecken raised her textbook in both hands. “Done.”
“Get her to help you if you run into trouble with the music theory, Donna,” Rosalie called out from the kitchen. “She’s really good.”
“I hope so,” said Donna, and flopped onto the couch with an exasperated sigh. “Can you explain what the big deal is about tonality? Kaufmann spent the whole class talking about how it doesn’t matter any more blah blah blah, and never bothered to explain it.”
“Sure,” Brecken said, setting the textbook aside. “Think of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’” She whistled the melody of the first two lines. “You start on C, spend the first line going up a fifth to end on G, and then the second line goes back down to end on C. C’s the tonic, right? That means it’s home base for the melody. You leave home base, go to a note that’s in some kind of harmony with it, then return to it.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Donna. “So?”
“Next two lines.” She whistled them. “They go toward home base but don’t actually get there. Your ear expects that next step and doesn’t get it—and then you repe
at the first two lines again, and you get the resolution. So everything in the melody moves around that home base.”
In the kitchen, clattering noises spoke of a baking sheet meeting an oven rack, and the oven door groaned again. “Ten minutes to quesadillas,” Rosalie said, and came out to join them.
“Okay,” Donna replied. “I get that—but there’s got to be more to it than that.”
“Of course there is,” said Brecken. “You can do all kinds of things around that home base, and the other notes that harmonize with it. Listen to Bach and watch how he dances around home base. But the home base, the tonic, is always there and everything comes back to it.”
“That seems pretty arbitrary,” Donna said then. “Why bother with it?”
“Because it’s what makes music go somewhere and do something,” said Brecken.
“But that’s arbitrary too,” said Donna.
Brecken tried to think of a response; unexpectedly, Rosalie came to her rescue. “Do you want some chocolate ice cream on your chicken quesadilla?” she asked Donna.
“Ew.”
“That’s arbitrary too,” said Rosalie, grinning. “It still matters.”
“Okay,” Donna said after a moment. “Okay, I think I get it.” Her expression contradicted the words, but she turned to Brecken and said, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” When no more questions appeared, Brecken picked up her textbook.
Time passed, quesadillas appeared and disappeared, and more time passed. Brecken read the chapter from her textbook twice, took copious notes, and once again wondered if the people who’d written it had ever tried teaching music to human beings. Then it was on to the next round of readings for her literature class, two stories by Giles Angarth, a third by Amadeus Carson, and half a dozen poems by Edward Derby. By the time she finished the last of those, an unnerving sonnet about a nameless king in tattered yellow robes, evening was near and a dense fog was flowing in from Partridge Bay, turning the streetlights into smears of orange glare and the powerful lamp of the Mulligan Point lighthouse into a blurred momentary radiance.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 4
