That happened several times during finals week, but finally her music ed exam was over and so was the semester. Friday night, after ducking out on another invite from Rosalie—a party on Sorority Row that promised loud music, dancing, and plenty of liquor, the sort of thing Brecken liked to avoid even at the best of times—she and Sho dined on macaroni and cheese, and talked about the winter break ahead and the schedule of Rose and Thorn gigs that would fill the otherwise empty weeks. Brecken had already sent a letter to Aunt Mary explaining that she’d be staying in Partridgeville over the winter break, and gotten back a cloyingly cute Christmas card, a letter full of vague pleasant chatter, and a $100 gift certificate from a department store chain that had gone messily bankrupt and closed its doors earlier that year. Somehow no zucchini bread accompanied these, and Brecken breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief.
After dinner, Brecken got her printer working, not always an easy task, and printed out sheet music for Rose and Thorn—the new arrangements of “The Carol of the Bells” and “Ode to Joy” she’d worked up, half a dozen of their holiday standards she’d needed to revise now that Donna was part of the ensemble, and the biggest gamble of all, an arrangement of her own Bourrée in B flat. Not even her memories of the last session of Composition I could quite stifle the shiver that went through her at the thought of having one of her pieces played in public by musicians she knew could do it justice. Whatever else happens, she told herself, whatever else I do or don’t do from now on, I’ll have that memory for keeps.
SHE GOT TO THE Student Union Building right as the bells of the First Baptist Church were sounding the quarter hour, went down the stairs to the basement at something close to a trot, paced down the long hallway to the door of the Debate Club room. Voices came out the doorway to greet her as she neared it. Through the door, into the glare of the fluorescent lights, across the room toward the long glass case of trophies, it was a familiar route with familiar faces at the end of it: Rosalie, Donna, Walt, Jamal. Brecken said hi to everyone, made a beeline for the big oak desk next to the trophies.
“Hey, it’s the hermit,” said Donna.
“Oh, come on,” Brecken replied, blushing. “It’s called finals week.”
“You okay, girl?” Rosalie asked. “We’ve been worrying about you.”
“I’m fine.”
Rosalie gave her a skeptical look, but nodded and got back to work tuning her harp. Brecken got her flute case and folding music stand out of the tote bag, then lifted out the stack of sheet music and started sorting the pages into stacks, “The Carol of the Bells” here, “Ode to Joy” there, the rest in order, ready for the practice session.
Sound of the door closing caught her attention, and she looked up and put on a smile for Jay. It was Jay, all right, but he wasn’t alone. Barbara Cormyn was draped over him, her arm around his waist, his arm around her shoulders, and she had a big tote bag in her free hand from which two small instrument cases and a folding music stand protruded.
Brecken’s smile trickled from her face as that sank in. Before she could do much more than stare, Jay detached himself from the blonde and crossed the room to her. “Hi, Breck,” he said, in the wheedling tone that told her he wanted something. “Can we talk?”
“Sure,” she said, still staring at him, and let him lead her over to shelves full of reference books close to a window, far from the other members of the ensemble. “Look, I know we’ve been together for a while,” he began, but for some reason she couldn’t keep track of what he was saying, even though she knew from the first word what it meant. Phrases like broken shards—“these things happen,” “how much we have in common,” “you’ve been really distant”—spun and glittered in the still air. Three or four times, she tried to collect her thoughts and say something, but Jay kept talking, always in the same wheedling tone, and when he finished at last, it took her a moment to realize that he expected her to respond.
“Okay,” she said, for want of anything better. “Okay.” Then, clutching at the thing that mattered most: “I hope at least we can keep playing gigs together.”
“Well, that’s another thing,” he said. “Breck, I really do appreciate everything you’ve contributed to the ensemble, but let’s face facts, we’ve gotten into a rut and it’s time to bring in some new talent, find a new sound. I’m sure you can find some other group to perform with.”
Brecken looked at him blankly for a moment, then realized what he was saying. Her mouth opened, but she could find no words. He started talking again, but she turned away from him and started back across the room.
The others were staring at her. Only when she felt wetness on her face did she realize why. Jay followed her, still talking, but the words dissolved into meaningless sounds. She reached the old oak desk, put her flute case and music stand back into her tote bag, turned to go, then remembered the music and turned back to gather it up.
“Breck, would you mind leaving those?” he said, and it wasn’t in his wheedling tone. There was an edge in it, one he hadn’t directed at her before.
She turned again to look at him. Off past him, Barbara Cormyn stood watching her, with the same surprised expression in her soft blue eyes and the same implacable look half-hidden within them. In that moment Brecken knew with cold certainty where Jay had been all those evenings he claimed he’d spent doing homework, and knew also why he hadn’t breathed a word about any dissatisfaction he’d felt with her as a girlfriend or a musician until she’d finished working out all the holiday arrangements for Rose and Thorn. Some unexpected depth in her burst open and flung up words for her to say, and she said them: “You son of a bitch.” A quick turn, and she scooped up the music, stuffed it into her tote bag, and headed for the door.
Jay went after her, his voice rising, but Rosalie got in the way, and when he tried to go around her she grabbed his arm and whipped him around in a tight arc. Her voice rang out, shrill with fury: “What the hell did you say to her?” He started to reply, but by then Brecken reached the door and flung herself out into the hallway. Jay’s voice faded, drowned out by the beat of her footsteps in the long corridor and a cacophony of other voices that rose to contend with it.
She was shaking as she climbed the stair, and she could feel tears on her face, but it all felt distant, abstract. Raw habit got her out of the Student Union Building and headed uphill on Danforth Street. Flurries of snow fell from a hard gray sky, and more than half the houses and buildings she passed had dark silent windows now; Partridgeville was emptying out for winter break. Bells sounded half past the hour behind her; had it really only been fifteen minutes, she wondered, since she’d gone to the practice in such high spirits?
That sent thoughts running down paths she desperately didn’t want them to follow, but this once she lacked the strength to force them elsewhere. She could see every detail of her relationship with Jay in a light as cold as the wind that blew snow in her face: how many times she’d set aside her needs for his, how often he’d made that the price of his affection, how little he’d obviously thought of her. Nor was it just Jay; the two boyfriends she’d had in high school had been variations on the same theme. They’d been less deliberate than Jay and less systematic, maybe, but like him, they’d thrown her aside once they’d gotten what they wanted.
Like a broken toy, she thought. Broken Brecken. The old schoolyard gibe surged up in her memories, whispered itself repeatedly in her mind.
By the time she got to the narrow walk between Mrs. Dalzell’s house and the neighbor’s, she felt numb and cold. Stiff fingers fumbled with the key. She got the door open somehow and went in, and the door clicked shut behind her. She took her coat and hat off, set her tote bag somewhere, stumbled over to the futon and slumped onto it, eyes clenched shut.
A whisper of movement across the floor meant nothing to her. A moment later, though, something flowed up onto the futon next to her, wrapped partway around her. A low troubled whistle sounded: ♪I think it is not at all well with you.♪
If
the words had been in English they might well have stayed meaningless sounds, but the musical language of shoggoths cut through the numbness the way music always did, and Brecken burst into tears. Shapeless darkness reached for her and drew her down. Then she was crying hard, her face buried in Sho’s iridescent flesh as the shoggoth held her.
Later, she sat huddled on the futon with Sho half encircling her, and tried to find words in the shoggoth-language to explain what had happened. ♪I should have known,♪ she said finally. ♪I really should have. Donna and Rosalie even tried to warn me, but I was too stupid to listen.♪
A pseudopod tapped against her cheek, just hard enough to get her attention. Brecken gave the shoggoth a startled look. A pale green eye met her gaze squarely. ♪No,♪ Sho piped. ♪You are not stupid.♪
Brecken blushed, and flung her arms around Sho, nestling her face into the curve of one pseudopod. The curious fluttering motion passed through the shoggoth, and for a moment Brecken worried that something was wrong, but the pseudopods tightened, returning the hug, and the scent that reminded her of freshly baked bread reassured her. She couldn’t help thinking of the difference between Sho’s words and the patronizing comments she’d fielded so often from Jay, the putdowns she’d gotten from her high school boyfriends. I wish, she thought, that just once I could fall in love with someone like Sho.
A moment later, the next thought followed: and the logical conclusion is?
The imagery that accompanied the thought was anything but vague. Her face reddened further, and she tried to push the idea away.
THE IDEA WOULDN’T GO away. Over the week that followed, as Partridgeville finished emptying out for the holidays and flurries of snow flung themselves against Brecken’s windows, it kept circling back, sometimes whispering subtly in the small hours, sometimes surging up with dizzying intensity. It didn’t help that the holiday gigs she’d counted on to fill the time between semesters had gone whistling down the wind, so that she had nowhere to go but the apartment; it didn’t help that leaving the apartment was the last thing she wanted to do.
It occurred to her more than once, as the two of them lay curled around each other under the quilts at night, the almost-Brie scent of a shoggoth at rest surounding her, that she’d fallen half in love with Sho during those last few weeks of the semester. She told herself that letting herself fall the rest of the way, letting her world revolve wholly around the shoggoth, ought to horrify her, but it didn’t. She brooded on that, realized that any discomfort she felt at the idea was purely abstract. It didn’t touch her deeper places, didn’t keep a hand resting on Sho’s surface or a pseudopod brushing her cheek from making her heart leap and her body tremble.
Later, as it became clear to Brecken exactly what was going to happen sooner or later, she tried to convince herself that she couldn’t go through with it, and failed. That they were so different, that their species had no ancestors in common this side of protozoa, simply didn’t matter enough. She loved Sho, and that being the case, the cool shapelessness of Sho’s body had begun to waken familiar responses in her. What had started as kindness and grown into friendship was becoming something else, something that made its own rules and had no patience with her ineffectual protests.
Nor, she realized, was she the only one whose feelings had strayed into unexpected depths. One afternoon, after Brecken played half a dozen of the medieval carols she liked best, she tried to explain what they were, and Sho began trembling violently and huddled up against her, tinging the air with a sharp bitter scent. Brecken put her arms around the shoggoth and drew her close, held her until the trembling stopped and the scent went away. Afterwards, in a whistling tone so low and unsteady Brecken would have called the equivalent human voice an ashen whisper, Sho talked about very ancient songs that she and her broodmates learned from their broodmother. They were piped at certain points in the circle of the seasons, and they framed some of Sho’s earliest memories.
Later Sho taught her some of them, and Brecken played them on her flute.After that they curled up together on the futon in silence. Eyes appeared and vanished on Sho’s surface; she was just a short distance over onto the dreaming-side, Brecken knew, and guessed where the dreams centered. How long had it been, she wondered, since the shoggoth had let herself dream of her broodmates and broodmother, the little world beneath Hob’s Hill that had ended so terribly? She slipped an arm around Sho, felt her nestle closer in gratitude, and then pseudopods flowed out to cling to her; the curious fluttering once again moved through the shoggoth, and the fresh-bread scent appeared, stronger than before. Brecken thought she could guess what those meant.
The days before Christmas trickled away. The neighborhood went silent as the last students headed off to holiday cheer somewhere else; the rattle and rumble of city buses lurching along empty snowy streets boomed like thunder, and the tolling of the bells of the First Baptist Church up on Angell Hill, inaudible from Brecken’s apartment most of the year, came across the roofs of the Central Square neighborhood and through the cyclopean buildings of the campus. ♪Listen,♪ piped Sho. ♪In our language the bells say: hear and remember, be afraid and hear.♪
♪You used to hear them from Hob’s Hill, didn’t you?♪ Brecken guessed.
♪Whenever the wind blew in from the sea.♪ Sho’s whistle was low with dread. Brecken reached for the shoggoth and drew her into a comforting embrace, felt the fluttering again, and knew that they’d both gone too far to back away from the inevitable next step.
Early the next day, Christmas Eve, Brecken put on street clothes for the first time in days, bundled up against the cold, and headed for the First National grocery on Meeker Street four blocks away. Shopping for two was complicated when the two in question belonged to different species, but she managed to fill the basket with things they both enjoyed, and hurried home as the wind began whipping snow down from the clouds.
Christmas Eves during Brecken’s childhood had been an orgy of cookie-baking, with the whir of the big countertop mixer and the moan of the old spring-loaded oven door half drowning out tinny carols from the cheap CD player in the kitchen and mindless chatter from the never-silent television in the living room. Some years those memories hurt too much to reawaken, but this once Brecken did as close to a fair imitation of those bygone holidays as she could manage, and got sugar jumbles, snickerdoodles, and thumbprint cookies with apricot jam in the dents baked and cooling on racks before dinner. Later Brecken played her flute and, for the first time, Sho sang harmonies in response, setting strange sweet dissonances chasing one another through the corners of the apartment. Later still, Brecken changed into her flannel nightgown and the two of them sat on the futon with quilts wrapped around them, curled up close together shoggoth-fashion, and talked and ate cookies.
Something Brecken couldn’t name put bright shimmering edges around everything, but mostly around Sho’s black curves, since that was where Brecken’s gaze rested nearly all the time. She watched with fascination as Sho picked up one cookie after another with a delicate pseudopod, and then engulfed the cookies slowly or greedily—the latter was the fate of the thumbprint cookies, due mostly (so Sho confessed) to the apricot jam. As the last of the cookies got eaten, the talk turned personal.
♪No, I had no broodlings of my own,♪ said Sho. ♪My broodmates and I were still too unripe. Another two summers, maybe, or three.♪ With a tentative glance at Brecken: ♪And you?♪
♪It’s more complicated with us,♪ Brecken said. ♪I’d have to find a partner, someone I want to have children with—if I decide I want them. I’m not sure I do.♪
♪With us, the budding comes when it comes; there is no choosing. But broodmates always ripen together. We were made that way.♪ In a low sad tone: ♪Sometimes when it was cold we would gather close together and talk about which of our dreams we would tell to our broodlings. Now I must remember their dreams to share with mine.♪
Brecken reached for Sho, and the shoggoth flowed close. ♪In A Quiet Cavern,♪ she said; i
t was Sho’s name that day. ♪It must hurt terribly to be left so alone.♪
The answer came in an unsteady whistle, and with the same curious fluttering: ♪But I am not alone, not now, not when I am with you.♪
It was a simple thing to do after all, Brecken thought later: a matter of saying ♪I’m glad,♪ and letting herself bend to kiss the shoggoth’s smooth cool surface. A pseudopod flowed out in response, curved around her cheek, left a sudden dampness there, tinged with the fresh-bread smell and something else, something dark and rich like soil. Brecken placed a hand over the pseudopod, holding it gently in place.
♪I—I wish...♪ Sho started to say, fell silent in confusion.
The damp place on Brecken’s cheek tingled and enticed. ♪The, the moisture,♪ she said. ♪That is the thing between broodmates?♪
♪Yes—yes, it is.♪ In sudden frantic notes: ♪I am sorry, I do not wish to offend—♪
♪I’m not offended,♪ she replied. ♪I’m very glad.♪ It was true, though she was trembling nearly as much as Sho was. She kissed Sho again, and made sure this time that the kiss was good and wet. Sho flowed against her, trembling even harder, and a pseudopod traced a line of wetness from the point of her cheekbone around to the back of her neck, waking every nerve.
The Shoggoth Concerto Page 14
