The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  She threw all the free time she could spare that evening and the next day into the attempt, and failed. It wasn’t any lack of knowledge or skill that defeated her; she knew the fashionable atonal and post-tonal forms well enough to compose in them. It was that every attempt she made to write something in those forms tasted of wet ashes and failed dreams. Late Wednesday night she gave her final attempt a long bleak look, and then crumpled it up and tossed it at the nearest wastebasket; it missed and rolled across the floor, and she had to get up and stuff it in where it belonged. It would have to be the concerto, then. The thought depressed her enough that even with Sho pressed close to her, she slept badly.

  The next morning, though, brought a stroke of luck. Halfway through breakfast her phone chimed the opening measures of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, announcing an incoming text, and when she checked it she found that Rosalie had texted her to say that she was down with a cold and wouldn’t be going to classes that day. Brecken had her own sense of the real issue—she’d heard some talk about a video night with daquiris at a sorority house where Rosalie had friends, and guessed Rosalie was simply hung over—but it gave her a reason to avoid The Cave that morning, and she went to Hancock Library instead, hoping for some extra study time.

  As she went in the main doors, though, she met Darren Wegener, the thin young man from composition class, coming out. A sudden solution to one of her main perplexities came to mind. “Hi,” she said. “You’re in Toomey’s Composition I class with me, aren’t you?” When he nodded, she went on: “Can I ask you for a really big favor? My final project for the class is a concerto for flute and piano, and I’m looking for someone who knows Baroque music really well who can play the piano part. I wonder if you’d be willing to consider maybe doing that.”

  “Maybe,” he replied, obviously taken aback. Then, after a moment’s thought: “I want to see it first, of course.” He smiled a big ungainly smile. “If it’s old-fashioned enough to piss off Pinchbeck and his crowd, though, we might just have a deal.”

  They ended up sitting at a table on the first floor of Hancock Library, well away from the quiet study area. Brecken had her composing notebook with her, fortunately, and walked him through the piano part. By the time she was done he was nodding slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I can play this.” His fingers drummed on the edge of the table, miming the arpeggios that began the concerto. “It’s really pretty good, by the way.”

  Brecken blushed. “Thanks. I thought your fugue was very nice.”

  “Derivative,” he said with a shrug. “And that was deliberate. Did you know I’m actually a mathematician?” Before she could respond, he asked her for her email address and gave her his, and by then the clock showed 10:20 and they barely had enough time to get to Gurnard Hall and ride the elevators to the top floor before Professor Toomey got there.

  After class she emailed the professor to let him know that she had her final project done, and remembered this time to include the title. She got an answer back the same afternoon, while she was huddled in a study carrel in Hancock Library trying to make sense of the latest round of readings for the music education class, which talked about learning as though it took place on an assembly line and turned out interchangeable parts. Everyone else in Composition I had contacted Toomey before she had, his email told her, and so hers would be the last student composition to be played that semester, on the last day of class before winter break.

  She emailed Darren that same afternoon. A flurry of messages later, they’d scheduled three sessions in the practice rooms in Gurnard Hall. That evening, once she got home from her flute lesson, she entered the entire first movement of the concerto into her sheet music program, got a PDF made, and sent it to him. His answer the next morning said that he’d played it through twice already, and speculated enthusiastically about how irritated Julian Pinchbeck and his cronies would be when they heard it. That made Brecken flinch; the last thing she wanted to think about was how the other students in the class would react to something at least as offensive to their notions of music as the bourrée had been. Still, she didn’t have another choice. She tried to brace herself for the next semester by thinking of ways to deal with the things she knew they’d say to her, and succeeded only in making herself more miserable.

  ♪It is not well with you, I think,♪ Sho said over breakfast.

  ♪I’ll be okay,♪ Brecken told her, and then tried to convince herself it was true.

  THE THREE PRACTICE SESSIONS with Darren brightened her mood considerably, if only for a little while. He was a capable pianist with a taut, precise style of playing, and though she’d have preferred a gentler touch on the opening arpeggios and the final cadence, he gave the piano part a solid performance. Playing the flute part of the concerto with a live pianist instead of a recording exhilarated Brecken, and while Mrs. Macallan’s flute filled the practice room with dancing notes, she didn’t have to think about anything but the music. It was afterwards, when she thanked Darren and hurried off to a class or a lesson or a wretched hour of volunteering at Partridgeville High School, that the misery came whispering back.

  It didn’t help that she was so far behind on her music education assignments that she had to give up composing for the time being, and left her composition notebook under a stack of books on the end table in her apartment. That hurt more than she’d expected. She’d never quite noticed how much she’d come to need the release of writing music in the weeks since she’d written that first bourrée, and it ached to have to bottle the music up inside herself. Worse, every effort she made to turn her attention away from composing seemed to make themes and melodies all the more eager to fling themselves at her. The most banal bit of sky syrup dripping down from the loudspeakers in The Cave, the most random flurry of sounds heard on the street, could blend and change into something that made her long to start writing down notes. She pushed the awareness away from her, told herself she wanted to be a music teacher and that composition was distracting her from the work she needed to do, and spent long hours at the library where she had nothing to distract her from her schoolwork.

  So the last weeks of the semester slipped past. In her composition class, Julian Pinchbeck started off the series of final projects with another postspectralist piece, packed with all the tricks of the composer’s trade they’d studied during the semester but still never quite going anywhere or doing anything. Most of the projects that followed in his wake were of the same sort, bland avant-garde music that aped the latest fashions, though Darren set nearly everyone’s teeth on edge with a tautly written four-voice fugue for piano that could almost have come from a pupil of Bach, and Molly Wolejko brought her acoustic guitar to class on her day to perform and hammered out a furious tune that took most of the things they’d studied in the class and screamed them back in the uncompromising language of hard rock. Professor Boley wound up The Fantastic in Literature without ever coming to a conclusion, as though the effort of reading the lectures aloud one more time had exhausted him. Professor Rohrbach wound up Introduction to Musical Education I without ever getting around to mentioning what goal-oriented music education meant when applied to human beings.

  Wednesday of the last week of classes that semester was the last day Brecken had to volunteer at Partridgeville High—the next day, when she’d usually be there, the school was having an assembly sixth period and her services wouldn’t be needed. It was another grim fifty-minute session of trying to exact mechanical efficiency from a dozen teenagers who would all much rather have been somewhere else. Mr. Carruthers, the band teacher, came over toward the middle of the class session to thank her for her efforts and hope out loud that she’d be back after the winter break. She reassured him that she was planning on it, and tried without much luck to shove aside the savagely depressed mood that the prospect roused in her.

  The class stumbled to its end. Just after the bell rang, announcing the end of the school day, Brecken gathered up her courage and decided to take a small chance.
She turned to the best of the flautists, a pale and freckled redhead named Melissa something, and said, “You know, music doesn’t have to be like this.”

  She got a hard flat look in response. “People keep saying that,” Melissa said, bitterness all through her voice. “I don’t care. Once I graduate in June I hope to God I never have to pick up a fucking flute again.”

  Brecken tried to find something to say in response, failed, turned away and left the lunchroom. She managed to scrape together enough of her composure to go to her piano lesson later that afternoon and exchange holiday wishes with Mrs. Johansen, but when she finally got home to the little apartment and slumped on the futon, she started to cry, and it took a long time and the steady comforting pressure of a pair of iridescent black pseudopods before she could pull herself together and make dinner.

  EIGHT

  The Condition of Fire

  THE ELEVATOR RIDE TO the top floor of Gurnard Hall seemed to take forever. Brecken clutched her tote bag, waited for the door to open. Fifty minutes, she told herself. Fifty minutes and it’s over. The winter break on the other side of the class session, with a schedule of holiday gigs busy enough to keep her mind off her perplexities, felt like the Promised Land.

  She went through the door, settled in her usual seat next to Rosalie. Julian was already there, of course, and looked pointedly away; Darren was there, too, and gave her a smile and a nod she guessed was supposed to be reassuring. Molly came in a few minutes later, just ahead of the others, and sprawled comfortably in a chair up front. Then the rest of the students poured in, filled chairs around the room. Brecken could tell, from harried looks and tense body language, the three others who hadn’t played their final project yet. That made her wonder what she looked like; she tried without much success to push the question out of her mind.

  Professor Toomey was the last one through the door. “Okay,” he said as soon as he got to the podium. “You all know the drill by this point. We’ve got four pieces to take in and comment on, and once those are over we’re out of here. Everybody ready? Any questions? No? Then let’s go. First up is Susan Chu, ‘Center and Periphery.’ Susan?”

  Brecken woke her smartphone, accessed the class webpage, got the comment form loading, and tried to clear her mind and listen. The effort didn’t accomplish much. Susan’s piece was eight minutes of vaguely avant-garde piano music, not particularly dreadful, not particularly inspired, not particularly anything, and Brecken struggled to find something helpful to say about it. The two pieces that followed it were even worse—Brecken thought she remembered that both students were performance track, doing composition class only because the department required it, and their compositions were bland formulaic things that met the requirements of the class and weren’t intended to do anything else.

  Finally the moment came. “Brecken Kendall,” said the professor. “Concerto for flute and piano in B flat, first movement.”

  A sudden silence. She got up, caught herself before she could walk up to the front of the class without her music or her flute, got both of them and her folding music stand as well. By the time she got there, Darren Wegener was already at the piano bench, stretching his fingers with the cold intensity of a surgeon about to make the first cut. She got the stand set up, the music on it, the flute assembled, then turned to Darren, who nodded the way he’d done when she’d gotten to her seat. Another moment of silence, and then he started playing the quick flowing arpeggios that began the movement. She waited through the first six measures, brought the flute to her lips, and started to play.

  Right up until that moment she hadn’t been sure if she could actually go through with it, and perform the first part of her concerto in front of Julian Pinchbeck and the others. Once the music began, though, that and every other question faded into irrelevance. The theme—we live beneath the ground—melded with the piano’s harmonies, repeated itself a minor third higher, spun apart into fragments, flowed back together, dancing a quick bright allegretto around the B flat tonic, while the piano gave every note a shade of distant grief. She’d tried to catch some of what she’d felt as she listened to Sho’s stories and weave that into the movement, the memories and the sorrow, and knew as she played it that she’d succeeded better than she’d hoped; knew also that without ever quite intending it, she’d put some of her own memories and sorrow into the movement as well.

  The intricate cascade of sixteenth notes in the middle measures took all her concentration, but she got through them with only a few quickly amended mistakes, and after that the movement practically played itself. The driving nervous energy Darren put into the piano part swept her along until she reached the B flat above high C that ended the movement, forte at first, sinking slowly to pianissimo as Darren’s final chord faded away.

  Silence returned. She let herself look up from the music stand, and the moment shattered. No one applauded. They were all staring at her, but the only expressions that registered were the one on Julian Pinchbeck’s face, rigid with something that looked far too much like hate, and the one Rosalie wore, the hollow haunted look of a lost child.

  Brecken turned sharply away, started taking her flute apart with shaking hands. Applause sounded behind her, but it seemed distant and muffled, as though people were clapping in another room. She managed to say something more or less appropriate to Darren, who had put on his big ungainly smile, but that was as much as she could manage, and once she had her flute in its case and everything tucked into her tote bag, she headed for the door.

  Rosalie said something that might have been her name, Professor Toomey said something that might have been the same thing, but neither utterance turned into anything but random noise until later. The corridor outside echoed with strange sounds, and then she was in the stairwell, her footfalls beating an unsteady rhythm on the concrete steps, the space around her a maze of savage angles in which there were no curves at all.

  The door at the bottom of the stairwell cried out as though in pain as she forced it open. Then she was outside, half-stumbling into the bleak gray plaza beneath a bleak gray sky, with the bleak gray mass of Mainwaring Hall looming up in front of her.

  She drew in a ragged breath, made herself slow down. It’s over, she told herself. Over and done with. That wasn’t true, and she knew it, but it allowed her to push her shoulders back a little and raise her head.

  Her freshman year, she’d made a habit of celebrating her last class each semester and bracing herself for the ordeal of finals week by buying herself some little treat or other, as often as not with a friend or two. This semester, though, there was precisely one place in Partridgeville she wanted to go and precisely one person she wanted to spend time with. She hurried across the plaza toward Danforth Street and the way home.

  FINALS WEEK WAS LESS of an ordeal than it might have been. Composition I had no final exam—the final project filled that slot—and the test for The Fantastic in Literature was there purely for the benefit of students who’d slacked all semester and needed the extra points to get a passing grade. Intro to Music Education I was another matter. Brecken spent most of four days with her face buried in the textbook and the class readings, showed up at the classroom with her head crammed to the bursting point with memorized facts, and trudged her way through twelve pages of multiple choice questions, most of which made no sense to her at all. By the time she left, she was feeling so demoralized by it all that she spent half the walk home trying to figure out how she was going to deal with her first F.

  Fortunately it didn’t come to that. She got the automatic email Friday afternoon of finals week, as expected, letting her know she could log into the campus website and see her grades. When she worked up the courage to do that, the letters that blinked onto her screen made her slump back onto the futon and let out a long sigh of relief. LIT 397, The Fantastic in Literature, A; MUS 265, Composition I, A; and MSE 241, Introduction to Music Education I, C: those were grades she could live with. She clicked on her laptop’s calculator utility
and tried to figure out her grade point average, got lost twice in the figures, and finally had to pull out a notebook and a pen and work it all out on paper before it came out right.

  The whole time, while she studied and fretted and sagged in relief, while she fended off invitations from Rosalie to spend time and money she didn’t have, and frowned when her occasional texts to Jay got no answer, Sho helped her keep going. The two of them shared the chores that kept the little apartment running, nestled down together to sleep each night, talked companionably when the demands of finals week permitted, and when the pressure on Brecken made her curl up in a ball on the futon with shoulders hunched and eyes clenched shut, a cool shapeless pseudopod or two flowed around her and held her until she felt better.

  Sho found the entire system of university education baffling, and exams more baffling than the rest of it. The way shoggoths did things, so Brecken gathered, was to gather broodlings in a comfortable heap around an elder who sang something that was to be learned, over and over again. The broodlings sang along until they had it by memory, and the nearest thing to a final exam was that their broodmother or one of the other adults would ask them to sing it again from time to time. Curious, Brecken asked tentatively one night if Sho could bear to repeat one of the songs she’d learned in broodlinghood, and spent the next hour or so listening in utter fascination to an intricate keening melody that reminded her a little of Gregorian chant.

  The song was in a very ancient form of the shoggoth language, and Brecken could only catch a word here and there, just enough to know that it told of doings in the distant past, when Sho’s ancestors fled from the empty city of the beings Sho called “those others” and Halpin Chalmers called the Elder Things. The sheer strange beauty of it made up for any amount of incomprehension. She settled back into Sho’s curves, for all the world like a broodling listening to a shoggoth elder, and let the music wash over her. Thereafter, when Brecken studied until she was too tired to think and too tense to sleep, Sho took to singing old songs, just as she’d done from time to time for her broodmother’s younger broodlings. It had the same effect, too: more than once Brecken blinked half awake to find her head pillowed on Sho and a pale green eye or two watching her with an expression she could’t read at all, and pulled herself off the futon just long enough to get ready for bed.