The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  Partridgeville High School taught her otherwise. On her first visit there, she couldn’t stop thinking that it looked like a prison, and the impression remained on each further visit as she hurried down bare concrete corridors under the blank gaze of surveillance cameras and the red glare of digital clocks. The lunchroom where the band class met, a stark cubical space with no windows and the most dismal acoustics she’d ever experienced, with racks of gray metal chairs lined up against one wall and gray metal lunch tables folded flat stacked against the other, did nothing to change that impression.

  The band director, a soft-faced man named Carruthers who liked plaid jackets and wide ties, welcomed her effusively and spoke about fostering the musical gifts of his pupils, but by the end of the first session she’d figured out how little those words actually meant. The band program at Partridgeville High used the goal-oriented teaching methods Professor Rohrbach praised so highly in Intro to Music Education I, and so Brecken’s job amounted to drilling the flute and clarinet sections in a series of monotonous etudes until they could play every note with mechanical precision. That was all Carruthers wanted from her, and all he would allow. Worse, though he beamed cherubically between etudes, while the students played he stalked around the room, snarling insults at anyone who made a mistake, making what was already a wretched experience actively miserable for everyone involved.

  By the time her first volunteer session was over she was ready to drop out of music education on the spot. She talked herself out of that on the walk home, though it wasn’t an easy task, and by the time she went back she’d convinced herself that it couldn’t actually have been as bad as she remembered. Unfortunately her second session was no better, and neither was the third. Ever since the first day of Intro to Music Education I, she’d been wondering what the abstractions on display in that class had to do with the process of teaching someone how to play a musical instrument. Now she knew, and it horrified her.

  She was upset enough to go up to the podium after a session of her music education class and try to talk to Professor Rohrbach about what was happening in the class. He interrupted her halfway through her first sentence with a shake of his head and a patronizing smile. “You need to get past that kind of purely subjective impression,” he said. “Goal-oriented methods follow the latest research in the psychology of learning, and they consistently yield higher scores in controlled double-blind studies. That’s why they’re being adopted all over the country.” His smile broadened into a rictus. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it as you learn more, and you’ll find that it really is more successful.” He turned to another student, leaving Brecken wondering: more successful at what?

  The weekend offered some respite, with a really good Rose and Thorn practice session on Saturday, the pleasures of crafting the harmonies for her concerto on Sunday, and a friendly shoggoth for company both days, but by the time she got to The Cave the following Monday morning she was dreading the trip to the high school that afternoon. She and Rosalie spent a quarter hour or so discussing the latest gossip in the music department—Barbara Cormyn had been going around draped all over Julian Pinchbeck, having dumped someone else Brecken didn’t know, and the friends of the two young men in question were at each other’s throats. Brecken didn’t mind, since it meant that Pinchbeck and his friends in Composition I had something to grumble about instead of her.

  Only after that topic had wound down did she bring up the miserable time she’d been having at Partridgeville High School, and in the music education class generally “I’m starting to think maybe I shouldn’t be on the education track after all,” she admitted.

  Rosalie gave her a startled look. “What else are you going to do, girl?”

  “I don’t know.” She did know, she knew it in her bones, but just then she didn’t have the courage to blurt it out with the certainty she felt. “Composition track, maybe.”

  “Don’t even think of that,” Rosalie told her. “You need something that’s going to pay your way, so you don’t have to spend the rest of your life flipping burgers or something. Stick with your plan, girl, and get that teaching gig. It’ll work out, you’ll see.”

  That wasn’t much comfort, Brecken reflected later, but she knew Rosalie was right about her career prospects if she gave up on becoming a music teacher. You’ve been through plenty of other wretched experiences, she told herself. You can survive one more.

  So the semester slid by, the days darkened toward winter, and leaves whipped past night after night on winds turned cold. Brecken tried to ignore the walls of hard-edged silence that rose between her and most of the other students in the music department, and trudged through the three hours each week she spent at Partridgeville High. She kept watch for anyone who might be searching for Sho, like the man who’d claimed to be from the state animal control office and the woman who claimed to be from Rutgers, and when none appeared she watched even more closely. It seemed improbable to her that Sho might have slipped entirely past their guard.

  Practice sessions with Rose and Thorn were bright spots in her week. So were the two gigs they played during those weeks, and so were her piano and flute lessons—and then there was the sanctuary of her apartment, where she could fling herself into the condition of fire as the first movement of her concerto came together, play music for hours, and spend time with the one person she knew who didn’t seem to be interested in telling her what to do or who to be.

  THE THANKSGIVING BREAK CAME as a welcome respite from her perplexities. Her freshman year, Brecken had taken the bus back to Harrisonville to spend a few days with Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim and their side of the family, but it had been an awkward time, with most of her relatives so busy not talking about Brecken’s mother that they might as well have been shouting her name aloud. This year, she emailed Aunt Mary and told her that she’d be spending the holiday with friends in Partridgeville who had nowhere else to go. Aunt Mary promptly sent Brecken a gift certificate for a free turkey from a grocery chain that didn’t have a store within fifty miles of Partridgeville, and four more loaves of zucchini bread.

  ♪Are you sure?♪ Brecken asked Sho dubiously when the shoggoth offered to eat them.

  ♪They are good,♪ Sho replied. ♪Not as good as the food you make, but good. Also, they remind me of how you fed me when I first came here, and that is a memory I wish to recall.♪

  Brecken blushed and gave her a hug, and left one of the loaves out to thaw and be engulfed that day. A turkey seemed extravagant for just the two of them, but she headed to the First National grocery on Meeker Street and bought a whole chicken, sweet potatoes, an abundance of vegetables, and the raw materials for an apple pie. On the way to the checkout line she passed a display of apricot jam, considered it, and put a jar in her cart, thinking of holiday baking. I like to cook for people, she’d told Donna that time they’d quarreled about Jay, and it was true, too, whether or not the people in question happened to be human.

  Thanksgiving Day itself dawned wet and chill, and stayed that way. Rain drummed hard against the roof, and Hob’s Hill and the university buildings alike became gray uncertain blurs against unseen distances. For once Brecken left her classes and her music to one side, and put most of the day into cooking and sharing a lavish meal. As the last daylight guttered out and the streetlights came on outside, she and Sho slumped on the futon in companionable silence, feeling comfortably gorged. Just then it didn’t matter that her plan of becoming a music teacher hit an increasingly sour note in her mind, that she wanted to become a composer even though she knew she couldn’t make a living at it, and that she had no idea what she would do with herself and even less of an idea what she would do with Sho once she got her degree: the simple enjoyments of a full belly and pleasant company outweighed it all, at least for the moment.

  She managed to cling to that same mood through the three remaining days of the holiday. The concerto absorbed much of her attention during that time; there were several tricky passages toward the end of th
e first movement that she had to rework over and over again before they began to sound the way she wanted. Late Sunday afternoon, though, she played the whole piano part through twice, once to listen to it and once to record it on her smartphone, and then got out her flute and played the other part along with the recording. When she was done, her legs nearly buckled beneath her from sheer relief. It worked, all the way from the quick piano arpeggios that started the piece to the high haunting note that ended it. When she settled down to sleep that night, it felt to her as though some great weight had slid off her.

  The next morning came as an unwelcome shock. It wasn’t that anything had changed from the week before; it was that nothing had changed at all. Rosalie chattered about the time she’d spent home in Newark, her visits to her father’s brokerage and the district attorney’s office where her mother worked, the holiday trip to Guadalajara she still swore she wasn’t going to take, and a young man named Tom Bannister she’d met and certainly wasn’t considering as a potential boyfriend. In Intro to Music Education I, Professor Rohrbach lectured on learning theory as though every human being learned in exactly the same way; in The Fantastic in Literature, Professor Boley lectured on shoggoths and other eldritch beings as though they couldn’t possibly matter. At Partridgevile High School, the students in the flute and clarinet sections met her attempts to teach them with weary silence and grudging obedience.

  That evening she and Jay had scheduled a date, and for a change he was far enough ahead on his homework to keep it. That started out pleasantly enough, as she bustled around his kitchen making beef stroganoff for the two of them, and kept up her end of a conversation about the latest gossip in the local music scene and what pieces of music Rose and Thorn might learn for the springtime wedding season once the holidays were over. Once dinner was on the table, though, he leaned forward and said, “Breck, can I ask a favor?”

  “Sure,” she said, hiding a sudden sense of unease.

  “I’m looking for a book.” He stared at his plate as though the noodles and sauce could communicate something to him. “I don’t know if there’s any chance you might see it in a junk store or something, and I have my own ways of trying to hunt them down, too, but I figure asking you is worth a shot.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There was an old guy here in town named Jacob Wells,” he said. “He died back in July or August, I think, and I found one of his books when we were doing the junk shops last month. He put his name on the inside cover, and wrote notes in it—really interesting stuff.”

  “Is this about your studies?” Brecken asked him.

  “Yeah. Wells knew a lot about those things.” His fork stabbed down hard. “A lot. I’m pretty sure from his notes that he had a copy of Halpin Chalmers’ book The Secret Watcher.”

  “So you want me to keep an eye out for that.”

  “Got it in one. Old books on strange subjects, with notes written all over them—if they’re like the copy of The Seven Cryp—” He caught himself, stopped cold.

  “The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan?” Brecken asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was in a couple of the stories we read for Boley’s class,” she reminded him. “I didn’t know it was for real.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance, then got up, crossed the room to one of the bookshelves near the unmade bed. When he returned he was carrying a slim hardback volume with a pale green cloth cover. “It’s for real,” he said, handing her the book. “Take a look.”

  She opened it, paged through it. As she’d begun to suspect, it had notes in the margins, plenty of them, neatly written in blue ink in a handwriting she knew at once. “Okay,” she said, closing the book and handing it back. “If I see anything like that I’ll pick it up for you.”

  That earned her a broad smile. “Breck, you’re priceless. Thank you.”

  Later, as they finished dinner and he tipped back more wine than usual, she said, “It’s kind of spooky.” Gesturing with one hand: “Here’s Partridgeville, New Jersey.” With the other: “And here’s this whole other world: The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and all the rest of it.” She brought her hands together. “And somehow they’re both here.”

  “‘There are two realities,’” Jay quoted. “‘The terrestrial, and the condition of fire.’” Seeing her startled look: “That’s William Butler Yeats. He knew a lot, too—did you know he was an initiate of a magical order?” Before she could answer, he went on. “The other reality’s right next to us. You can get to it if you know how, or just by dumb luck.” He smiled the smile she hated. “To talk to it, if that’s all you want—or to do more. I want to do more. I want to control it. To make it do what I want.” He gave her a sidelong look. “You’ll see.”

  Later, she walked home by the usual route, and cold wretched thoughts circled in her head. She tried to convince herself that Jay’s words about controlling the other reality were empty talk, but all her efforts in that direction failed. She’d seen too much of the way he could charm and bully his way to what he wanted. A sick feeling twisted in her as he imagined him using the same sort of tactics on Sho to get whatever he might want from a shoggoth.

  Then, for the first time, she asked herself: is he doing the same thing to me?

  She shoved the thought away angrily, forced her mind as hard as she could to some other topic, told herself that it was Donna’s fault for saying what she’d said when they’d quarreled, but the question couldn’t be unasked. She finished the walk in a foul mood, and when she got home and shed coat and hat, she slumped on the futon and put her face in her hands for a while.

  ♪It is not well with you,♪ said a familiar piping voice.

  ♪No,♪ Brecken admitted. ♪No, it isn’t.♪

  Pale eyes considered her. ♪When you go to see Jay now you always come back unhappy.♪

  The words matched Brecken’s feelings so precisely that she started to cry. Sho let out a distressed sound and said, ♪I have hurt you, I am so very sorry—♪

  ♪No,♪ said Brecken through her tears. ♪No, it’s not you. It’s—it’s because you’re right.♪

  Two pseudopods flowed out and managed a very good approximation of a hug. Brecken reached for Sho, buried her face in the shoggoth’s upper surface until the tears were past. A faint fluttering movement stirred the shapeless mass beneath her, and a scent a little like freshly baked bread came from it. She wondered briefly what those meant, but her own miseries were too intense to allow her to hold the thought.

  Later, after she’d fixed another round of cheese polenta for Sho and a cup of herb tea for herself, after they’d sat for a while talking and settled into a comfortable silence, Brecken got her copy of The Secret Watcher out from the dresser and paged through it. The handwriting of the marginal notes was the same she’d seen in Jay’s book earlier, and when she turned to the inside front cover a name—Jacob Wells—was written there in the same hand. She thought about what the proprietor of Buzrael Books had said about not letting Jay know about The Secret Watcher, and tried to convince herself that she didn’t know the reason why. One of the marginal notes in Chalmer’s book seemed uncomfortably appropriate:

  Why the old lore must stay hidden—

  Humans are much too good at convincing themselves that they’re

  smarter and stronger than they are, and so they call up things they

  can’t put down and go to places from which there’s no way back.

  The Hounds of Tindalos never sleep.

  The Hounds of Tindalos, Brecken thought, tasting the words. There had been something about them in one of Professor Boley’s lectures and something more in the stories she’d read for his class, but she couldn’t remember any of it. She turned to the index, found the first reference to the Hounds there, paged forward to it, and read:

  The Hounds of Tindalos guard the boundary between our life and that other life. They are not living beings in any sense we can understand. They are the deeds of the dead, hungry and athirst, moving through
dim angles in the recesses of time. They are not evil in any prosaic sense of that word; rather, they are beyond good and evil as we know it. They only know hunger, and they sate their hunger on those who stray across the boundary between the two modes of time.

  That made her shiver, and she put the book back in the drawer and made a pretense of studying her music education textbook for half an hour or so. The textbook was less colorful but no more pleasant, and when she finally let herself set it aside she got ready for bed and settled down on the futon, with Sho pressed close and comforting against her.

  SHE AND ROSALIE GOT to Composition I the next day a little earlier than usual—two of the elevators were working, for a change, so there was less of a line to use them than they’d counted on—but that simply meant that Brecken came in for more unpleasantness before Professor Toomey arrived and everyone shut up and listened. This time it was Susan Chu who leaned toward her and said, “I hope we’re going to hear something a little less fossilized for your final project.” Rosalie glared at her, but Brecken simply looked away and said nothing. It had suddenly occurred to her that between working on her concerto, trying to keep up with her music ed homework, and trudging her way through her volunteer hours at Partridgeville High, she’d forgotten that she’d have to compose and perform a final project for the composition class.

  All through Toomey’s lecture, her mind circled frantically around the question of what to do. The obvious solution was to play the first movement of her concerto, but thinking of the reaction that choice would field from her classmates made her want to imitate Sho and ooze through a crack in the floor. The only alternative she could think of was to compose and play something in an avant-garde style, and by the end of the class she’d decided to try that.