“That’s probably not fair,” Rosalie was saying. “It wasn’t all bad.”
“Molly Wolejko’s piece was really good,” Brecken replied.
Rosalie gave her another of the odd baffled looks. “So was yours, Breck. How come you never told me you write music?”
“That’s the first tune I’ve ever written.”
“Come on.”
“Seriously. I’ve done a lot of arranging, you know that, but I never tried writing anything of my own before.”
Rosalie made a skeptical noise in her throat. Before she could add anything to it, the customer in front of them got his coffee and headed elsewhere, and they went to the counter to place their orders. Just then Brecken noticed someone come into the café, spot her, turn sharply and leave. He was out of sight before she realized that it was Julian Pinchbeck, and he’d given her the same venomous look he’d turned her way in the classroom.
WATER SPLASHED FROM MEASURING cup to saucepan. Instant polenta followed it, guided by Brecken’s practiced eye. Her grandmother’s recipes called for grits, but stores in Partridgeville didn’t carry them, so polenta it had to be. The water came to a boil; a few minutes of stirring with a wooden spoon followed, and then Brecken turned down the heat, plopped on the lid, and whistled, ♪That will be ready to eat in a little while.♪
♪You are very kind,♪ Sho replied. She still seemed startled when she said it.
For the second time in as many years, Brecken was getting to know a new roommate. That was how she ended up thinking of Sho’s abrupt appearance in her life, and her impulsive decision to give the shoggoth the shelter and help she so obviously needed. Framing it in her mind alongside her year with Rosalie in Arbuckle Hall helped make the strangeness of it all a little easier to manage. The comparison had its own complexities, though, for Rosalie was careless, talkative, and brash, and Sho was none of those things.
One measure of the difference was that it took Brecken days of coaxing to get Sho to admit to likes and dislikes concerning food. Partly, Brecken guessed, that was politeness—shoggoths, or at least this particular shoggoth, seemed to have a strict if strange sense of propriety—and partly it was simple hunger. From scraps of information Sho let fall from time to time, Brecken gathered that food had been scarce under Hob’s Hill for far longer than Sho had been alive. Finally, though, Sho admitted that she disliked strong bitter flavors, and that hot spices were painful for her to eat. Brecken adjusted her cooking accordingly.
Most of the other things she cooked met with an enthusiastic response, though it took a while for Sho to get used to different foods each day—Brecken guessed that the diet under Hob’s Hill had been monotonous as well as sparse. Then there was cheese polenta, which Brecken made often because it was cheap and filling. The first time she served Sho a bowl of it, the shoggoth scooped up a little in a pseudopod and enfolded it as usual, and then stared at it with eight eyes, while a different scent, like freshly washed mushrooms, tinged the air. ♪Is something wrong?♪ Brecken asked, and Sho answered after a pause, ♪No. It is good. It is—♪ She flowed forward and engulfed it, then seemed to sink down in a daze. ♪In all my life I have never fed on anything so good.♪
♪I can make more,♪ Brecken said at once. Courtesy warred with craving, or so Brecken guessed, and finally Sho let out an unsteady whistle: ♪Please?♪ So the instant polenta came out of the cupboard again, and half an hour later Sho slumped on the futon next to Brecken, visibly lumpy with two not-yet-digested masses of cheese polenta inside, quivering slightly with sheer delight as she slowly absorbed both, and smelling distinctly of freshly washed mushrooms all the while. Brecken found the shoggoth’s response amusing, but made sure that cheese polenta featured regularly in their meals thereafter.
Then there were the questions. One evening, as rain rolled in from the Atlantic and pattered hard against the glass, the two of them sat on the futon after dinner, and Sho asked, ♪Why do you always give off heat?♪ That took some explaining, and so did the questions that came out of Sho’s difficulties understanding that human bodies had specific places for specific things—feet for walking, hands for grasping—and that Brecken had no choice but to see through the same eyes and speak through the same mouth all the time.
Another evening, when she’d gotten back late from another tryst with Jay, Sho startled her by piping, ♪Why do you smell like someone else?♪ Brecken blushed furiously, but realized that Sho had asked the question in all innocence, and found herself having to explain sex to a curious shoggoth. That proved to be a more awkward task than she’d expected, since sex with Jay had nothing to do with reproduction—the thought of having a child by him was unwelcome enough that she was even more careful than usual about her birth-control pills—and love wasn’t a concept that translated straightforwardly into the language of shoggoths.
Then Sho said, ♪I understand. It is like what is between broodmates.♪ That confused things further, until Brecken asked enough questions to clarify that broodmates were members of the same litter, shoggoths who budded at the same time from the same broodmother. As they got that settled, Sho suddenly huddled down and piped an apology, and it took Brecken several more questions to figure out that there was something very private that some broodmates did, something that involved sharing moisture, and Sho hadn’t known that humans did anything like that and hadn’t meant to ask about something so personal.
Brecken had questions of her own, for that matter, and not all of them had simple answers. Once when they were sitting on the futon and Brecken had just finished reading a story by Philip Hastane, she asked Sho, ♪This writing says your people are—wet. Moist.♪
Sho huddled down. ♪Is it wrong that I am not?♪ Brecken reassured her, and after a little while the shoggoth said, ♪I understand. The one who wrote that knew how we fight. I will show you.♪ She flattened, spread out, produced a hollow like a shallow bowl on her upper surface, and a moment later a few drops of black fluid welled up there. The moment it appeared, Brecken’s eyes started to burn, and a choking, fetid stench filled the air. Though the fluid seeped back into Sho a moment later and left no trace, Brecken had to make an effort not to burst into coughing.
♪That is the moisture-of-war,♪ said Sho. ♪It harms most other beings. We cover ourselves with it when we fight. If only it kept us from burning—♪ She started trembling again, and Brecken put an arm around the shoggoth, held her for a while until the trembling stopped and the bitter scent of grief faded. Later, Sho explained that there were other moistures as well, each with its own scent, but she seemed shy about them and Brecken decided not to push.
Alongside the questions and the complexities around meals, it took Brecken a while to get used to Sho’s simple physical presence. She got the impression, from stray comments Sho made, that the shoggoths who’d lived under Hob’s Hill spent much of their time in a wriggling communal heap, and Sho’s notion of appropriate personal space among friends thus involved as much close contact as circumstances allowed. That was unsettling in some ways, endearing in others—it reminded Brecken of a dog named Pepper, a big malamute who’d lived next door to her childhood home in Woodfield, who would climb onto any available lap, look up with adoring blue eyes, and whine piteously and squirm until you scratched behind her ears.
Sho didn’t whine, piteously or otherwise. The one time she came close was the night when a thunderstorm broke over Partridgeville, not the rumbling out of a clear sky Brecken remembered from the night before Sho’s arrival but the real thing: rain lashing down in sheets, wind howling in the trees, blue-white glare of the lightning stark and sudden against the windowshades, and then great rolling peals of thunder that shook the former garage the way a dog shakes a rat. They’d gotten Sho settled in the closet a few days before—the space down under the floor was getting soggy and chill as autumn wore on—and an hour or so after bedtime, when Brecken was lying awake and hoping she’d get some sleep that night, Sho slid through the gap under the closet door. She crept over to t
he futon, surrounded by the acrid odor of fear, and said in a shaking whistle, ♪I—I am sorry—I do not wish to trouble your dreaming—but—but—I am so frightened—♪
Brecken whistled ♪Of course you can dream here♪ and made room for her on the futon, and the shoggoth flowed up and huddled against her. She got the quilts settled over them both, put an arm around Sho, and settled down to rest as Sho’s trembling slowed and then stopped, and the acrid smell gave way to the Brie-cheese scent of calm. To her surprise, even though the storm continued, Brecken fell asleep shortly thereafter, and woke up later than usual the next morning with sun streaming in through gaps in the blinds and her arm still curved around the shoggoth. Sho thanked her profusely as she blinked and sat up.
As breakfast cooked, Brecken thought about that, and about Pepper the malamute and other pets she’d known—Sho wasn’t a pet, but that was the only interaction between species that seemed at all relevant. She also thought about her own sound sleep, for she was honest enough with herself to admit that Sho hadn’t been the only one who’d taken comfort in their closeness.
Finally, over bowls of oatmeal, she asked Sho, ♪Do you like to dream alone?♪
Sho huddled down. ♪No.♪
♪From now on you don’t have to.♪
♪Your customs—♪
♪They will permit it,♪ Brecken reassured her.
Sho huddled down even further. ♪You are so very kind to me.♪
♪I slept better.♪ They had worked out a shoggoth-phrase for the human custom of sleeping. ♪So it is a kindness to us both.♪ Sho seemed to ponder that for a long while.
That evening, when Brecken got back from her piano lesson, greeted Sho, and went to take care of the dishes, she found that everything in the sink looked as though it had been put through an industrial dishwasher, it was that clean. So did the sink, for that matter. ♪I wished to be kind,♪ Sho said as she turned, startled. ♪I hope it was not a wrong thing.♪
♪Not at all,♪ Brecken said. ♪I thank you for it.♪ She explained later that evening, as gently as she could, that clean dishes belonged in the cupboard, not the sink, and that was where they went thereafter. Over the days that followed, Sho watched her at such housecleaning as the apartment needed and then quietly took over each chore. The monthly water bill went down noticeably as a result. Brecken wondered from time to time what happened to the food scraps, dust, tangles of hair, and occasional spiders and centipedes that weren’t there any more when Sho finished cleaning, and finally decided that she really didn’t want to know.
It wasn’t the only thing she let pass. As day followed day and the world outside the little apartment became more and more difficult, her time at home with Sho, waking and sleeping, became one of the few sources of sanctuary Brecken could find.
THE TROUBLE BEGAN QUIETLY enough, with the comments on her bourrée. Those had no names attached by the time Brecken got them, and she didn’t know her classmates well enough to guess who was who, though Rosalie’s ebullient encouragement was easy to pick out. There were precisely two that paid close attention to the music she’d written; one of them praised it with an enthusiasm that made Brecken blush, and the other offered suggestions on the harmonies she’d chosen that were so useful she copied them out by hand into her composition notebook. Most of the rest trotted out the kind of vague generalities that made it clear they knew little about Baroque music, though some of those at least mentioned that they’d enjoyed the piece.
It was the other comments that troubled her, because those never quite managed to get around to talking about her music itself. They criticized the bourrée not because she’d made this or that mistake, but simply because it was a bourrée. The old musical forms were dead, tonality was dead, nothing worthwhile could be said with them any more, they were all just arbitrary rules, music had moved on and Brecken needed to get out of the eighteenth century and join the twenty-first—they were all things she’d heard over and over again since her high school days, and the only answer she’d ever found to any of them was the simple fact that the old music made her heart leap and its up-to-date replacements didn’t. By the time she finished reading through the comments she was feeling so demoralized that she emailed Professor Toomey to ask whether she’d been wrong to write a bourrée at all.
She got an email back early the following morning, encouraging her to come by his office, and so Tuesday morning, an hour before Composition I, she took the elevator to the sixth floor of Gurnard Hall and tapped on the door with his name beside it. The office inside was a cramped space with one window at the far end that stared across the plaza at the bleak gray mass of Mainwaring Hall. It was barely large enough for a desk, a few chairs, a few bookcases, and a well-used electronic keyboard up against one bare wall. The professor waved her to a seat and said, “Go ahead and leave the door open.” Brecken gave him an uncertain look, but didn’t argue.
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong,” he said once they were both seated. “But you’re going to get that kind of pushback if you’re going to follow the rules of tonality or use any of the older styles. These days an ambitious composer can’t even risk doing the kind of thing that Murail or Lachenmann did, much less anything older. It’s got to be new, new, new.”
“Well, I’m not ambitious,” said Brecken, “and I’m not really a composer. I’m on the music education track.”
Toomey regarded her with his unreadable eyes. “Your bourrée,” he said, “was the best original composition I’ve heard from an undergraduate in the last ten years.”
Brecken blinked, and then stared, trying to find some way the professor’s words could be saying something other than what they obviously said. Failing, she said, “Okay.”
“I mean that quite seriously,” said the professor. “Every year I get one or two students who copy Bach, Brahms, somebody else like that, and turn out nice third-rate imitation Bach or Brahms or whoever. That gets an A if it’s a halfway decent job, because it means they’ve paid enough attention to be able to fake it. But you’re not imitating anybody.” He leaned forward. “Bach sounds like Bach, Brahms sounds like Brahms, their imitators sound like Bach or Brahms on a bad day if they’re good, and like fake Bach or Brahms if they’re not. Your bourrée doesn’t sound like fake anything. I don’t know for a fact that it sounds like Brecken Kendall, because it’s the only composition of yours I’ve heard, but I’d put money on it.” Sitting back in his chair again: “So don’t be too quick to say you’re not a composer. You just might surprise yourself.”
That was encouraging, and as she headed down the stairs Brecken let herself daydream about being a composer, crafting concertos, gigues, and sarabandes for other musicians to play. The Cave brought her back to reality in a hurry, though. She got there a good half hour before composition class, and headed as usual for the table Rosalie habitually staked out. As she passed a little knot of students she recognized from Professor Toomey’s class, though, one of them looked at her and made a loud comment about musical necrophilia. That stung, and it didn’t help that someone else from the class—Mike Schau, a big blocky guy with yellow hair and ambitions as a classical pianist—came bustling over to lecture her in patronizing tones about how she’d wreck her chance at a career in music if she wasted her time on outworn musical forms. When she tried to explain that she was planning to teach and was only taking the composition class because it was on the required list, he broke in on her to tell her she wasn’t listening, and then repeated what he’d already said; when she tried again, he got angry, insisted that he was just trying to help, and stalked away.
Composition class wasn’t much better. There were five more student projects to take in and comment on. One of them was an astonishment and a delight to her, a three-voice fugue for piano, heavily influenced by Bach, by the thin young man who sat in the back row—Darren Wegener, the professor called him, and Brecken made a note of the name. The others included one painfully derivative rock guitar solo, one bland and cheerful little ditty tha
t sounded like half the top-40 hits Brecken had ever heard, and two pretentious avant-garde pieces that succeeded at being original but failed to be anything else but dull. The fugue fielded barely enough applause to be polite; all the others got more in sustained applause than Brecken’s bourrée had. That left Brecken in a bleak mood. Though Rosalie picked up on that, told her not to let it get to her, and insisted loyally that the bourrée had been really good, the mood remained as Brecken crept back to her apartment that afternoon.
That was the way the whole week went: comments variously snide and stinging flung her way, and now and again lengthy diatribes from classmates who seemed to think it was their job to tell her how wrong she was. Puzzled and hurt at first, she settled quickly enough into a familiar numbness, trudged through the round of classes and lessons. Even Saturday’s Rose and Thorn practice session did little to cheer her up. As the ensemble gave the playlist for the upcoming gig one last rehearsal, she found herself wondering whether she’d been stupid to think of writing new music in the old forms.
It didn’t help that one of the lectures in The Fantastic in Literature that week jabbed the same sore spot from a different angle. “Eldritch,” Professor Boley said, looking even more weary than usual. “You’ve seen that word over and over again in the stories you’ve read. The dictionary says it comes from Old English, aelf, elf, ricce, realm, elfland—but I think the etymologists are wrong this time around. No, it’s from eald, old, and ricce, realm, the old realm, or as some of our authors liked to say, the elder world.”
Jay leaned forward, intent on the lecture. Brecken tried not to notice, because the smile she hated was all over his face at that moment. Off beyond him, sitting off by himself in the mostly empty room, she spotted a face she didn’t want to see—Julian Pinchbeck’s—gazing at Boley with a look of insufferable boredom. She looked away.
“The elder world,” Boley repeated. “Most of the horrors our authors display to us come from the distant past. Most, not all. Some, like the fungi from Yuggoth, come through space rather than time. Some, like the Hounds of Tindalos, come from right outside our space-time continuum. But most of them? They’re from the elder world, and that’s why they scare us.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 9
