The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  THE SOARING WHITE STEEPLE of the First Baptist Church stabbed up at broken white clouds as Brecken climbed Angell Hill in the teeth of a brisk wind. Behind her, the roofs of the old downtown huddled around Central Square, and the university buildings rose stark behind them. A glance back revealed Gurnard Hall, where she’d spent half an hour listening to Rosalie talk about another idea she’d had for her future as a touring musician, fifty minutes learning about orchestral arrangements, and five minutes being lectured by a classmate about why she shouldn’t waste her talents writing old-fashioned music. All in all, she was glad to be out in the fresh air.

  She’d felt nervous, talking with Sho, when she’d first brought up the possibility of playing Sundays at the church. To her surprise, the shoggoth didn’t object. ♪If you often had to go elsewhere when it is dark, then I would be sad,♪ she piped, ♪but when it is light it matters less. And it seems wise of you to make offerings to the Great Old Ones, as my people made offerings to Nyogtha. Do you know which of Them they worship at the place you will go?♪

  Brecken considered trying to explain that Baptists didn’t worship the Great Old Ones, then found herself wondering if maybe they did. ♪No,♪ she admitted. ♪I’ll have to see.♪ Three phone calls to Mrs. Johansen later, she headed up Church Street to meet a Mr. Knecht, who was the music director at the First Baptist Church, and see where she’d be playing on Sunday.

  The sign in front of the church’s main door was informative in that unhelpful way common to local landmarks across the United States:

  FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF PARTRIDGEVILLE

  Old Independent Liberal Baptist Convention of New Jersey

  originally St. James Episcopal Church, 1717

  Brecken considered that, wondered whether there was also a New Independent Liberal Baptist Convention of New Jersey, and climbed the stairs to the door. A handwritten sign instructed her to go to the side door, without giving her any clue as to which side it was on; a little searching turned up a door at ground level next to the parking lot.

  Inside was a corridor reaching into dimness, and an open door on the left. Fortunately that turned out to be the church office, staffed by two old women with blue-tinted hair. They both looked up as Brecken ventured in and, not quite in unison, asked “May I help you?”

  “Please,” Brecken said. “I’m here to meet Mr. Knecht.”

  “Down the hall, turn right, up the stair to the worship hall,” one said. “If he’s not at the organ he’s under it.” Brecken thanked them and went down the corridor. The right turn and the stair were easy enough to find, and a few minutes later she stepped into a vast cool space where sunlight slanted down from high windows onto rows of old wooden pews.

  She had taken three steps into the worship hall when a tremendous G major chord flooded the space. After a moment a grave and patient melody unfolded over the top of it, while the chord itself shed certain notes and embraced others, flowed into D major, returned to G. Brecken walked out into the middle of the hall, turned, and only then spotted the organ console in one corner, surrounded by a waist-high wooden wall. She went toward it, and finally saw the bent figure sitting at the keyboard, watching her in a little mirror set atop the console.

  The music faded to pianissimo and went silent as she neared the organ. Then the player turned, got up from the bench and came out of the enclosure through a narrow door.

  “Mr. Knecht?” Brecken asked.

  “Carl Knecht,” he said, shaking her hand. “And you must be Brecken Kendall. I hope you’ll forgive my little musical welcome; I’m told I have a regrettable sense of humor.”

  She assured him it was all right, considered the man before her. Hunched and dwarfish, he had sparse gray hair and a sparse gray beard; his jacket and tie had gone out of fashion long before Brecken was born, but his eyes gleamed with an improbable brightness.

  “Ida tells me you’re a fine pianist but haven’t played the organ yet,” he went on. “That’s an unfortunate omission.” A slight uncanny smile creased his face as he gestured to the door of the enclosure. “Please humor me and give it a try.”

  Uncertain but by no means unwilling, Brecken let him guide her to the bench, and sat. Three keyboards, stacked one above the other, met her eyes; to either side waited ranks of knobs of unknown function, and on the floor, where a piano had two modest pedals, a keyboard three octaves wide made of long wooden bars waited for her feet.

  “Start with the middle manual,” Knecht said. “I’ve set it to a registration you shouldn’t find too unfamiliar. Slow at first—the keys don’t respond the way a piano’s do.”

  Fingers pressed keys, and a F major chord thundered from the pipes high above. She played three other chords, then a simple melody with chord accompaniment.

  “Excellent,” he said then. “I’ll be in the office there.” A motion of his head indicated the east end of the hall. “Call me if you need advice—but don’t call me too soon. The organ will teach you if you give it a chance.” He made a curious little bow and picked his way back to the aisle. Brecken thanked him, and then turned back to the enticements of the keyboard.

  It was more than three hours later, and the sun had already set behind Hob’s Hill, when she finally left the First Baptist Church and walked back to her apartment. Mrs. Johansen was right, she thought: a keyboard is a keyboard, and although organ keys didn’t have the delicacy a piano offered, they made up for the lack with an astonishing range of sound. She’d gone in search of Carl Knecht three times, once to ask about the logic behind the arrangement of stops, once to find out what the swell pedal did, and then finally to wish him a good evening, and he’d greeted her each time with the same cryptic smile. The last time they’d talked over what she’d do on Sunday—incidental music before and after the service, which she could choose, and two sets of hymns, which were Reverend Meryl’s to pick—and he handed her a hymnal, a book of organ music, and a sheet of paper with the next Sunday’s hymn tunes and a phone number on it.

  “Call me any time you’d like to practice,” he said as she left. “The organ doesn’t get the use it once did, and it misses the exercise.” From his expression, he didn’t mean it as a joke.

  AS THE DAYS PASSED thereafter, Brecken got used to the hostility of her classmates and the dismissive looks and remarks every mention of composing got from Rosalie. She had other things to occupy her thoughts. One afternoon, as she came up the last block of Danforth Street, she saw Mrs. Dalzell’s face peer out the kitchen window. A moment later the landlady came bustling through the front door with a big envelope in one hand and a little envelope in the other. “The postman had some things for you, Brecken,” she said, handing over the envelope. “They look awfully official.” Brecken chatted with her for a few minutes, then hurried to her own door. She’d already glanced at the return addresses, and knew the large one was from Miskatonic University and the smaller one from Chequamegon College.

  After she’d greeted Sho and the two of them settled on the futon, she opened them. The smaller one was a polite form letter telling her that the composition program at Chequamegon College had no openings for the fall semester, but the larger one had a packet of brochures on Miskatonic University and a old-fashioned paper application form in triplicate. That was encouraging enough that Brecken went over the brochures, read aloud some of the contents to Sho, thought for a while about living among the ancient hills and rocky shores of northeastern Massachusetts. Before dinner she made sure she still had time to apply for the fall term, made a list of the transcripts and letters of recommendation she’d need, and started sending out emails.

  After dinner, she looked up Dr. June Satterlee on the Miskatonic University website. The photo on the web page showed a dark brown face with high cheekbones, graying hair in neat braids, eyes an unexpected green. The biography and brief curriculum vitae listed dozens of book and article publications, and six albums of her own jazz piano pieces. She gathered up her courage, clicked on the CONTACT link to open the email progr
am, and typed:

  Dear Professor Satterlee,

  You don’t know me at all, but I think you know one of my professors here at Partridgeville State in New Jersey, Carson Toomey. I’m pursuing a degree in music composition with a focus in

  She stopped, bit her lip, started typing again:

  modern Baroque music. Professor Toomey recommended that I transfer to Miskatonic University, and I’m definitely considering that option. If there’s any advice you can offer me about applying to Miskatonic, I’d be very grateful.

  Yours sincerely

  Brecken Kendall

  The next morning, when she checked her email, she found a response:

  Dear Ms. Kendall,

  Thank you for your email. Yes, Carson mentioned you a little while ago, and from his description it sounds as though you might find Miskatonic a good fit. Admission to the program here is competitive, of course, but ours is a small and rather specialized program and it’s been years since we’ve had to turn qualified students away.

  If you haven’t gotten the application packet yet, I’d encourage you to hurry – the deadline for fall semester isn’t far off. If you have questions about the details of the application process, please don’t hesitate to ask me.

  Yours,

  June Satterlee

  That was all, or almost all. A few lines below the signature was a curious little mark, a V flanked by periods— .v.—like a typo or a bit of formatting code. It would have meant nothing to Brecken, except that she’d spent an hour before bed the night before reading The Secret Watcher, and had seen a reference to that mark in one of the notes in the margins. She flung herself up off the futon, got Halpin Chalmers’ book out of the dresser, and found the passage:

  The sign .v. was once much used by students of the ancient wisdom to identify themselves to others in print or by letter. Its proper answer is .x. See von Junzt’s Nameless Cults for the other words and signs of recognition.

  All that day Brecken mulled over the little mark and what it implied. That afternoon, once her orchestral arrangement class was over, she went to Hancock Library and looked up the name “von Junzt.” To her surprise, the catalog had a listing for the name—

  Junzt, Friedrich Wilhelm von (1795-1840): 1 title

  —and when she clicked on the link, it brought up the title she’d hoped for—

  The Book of Nameless Cults (New York: Golden Goblin Press, 1909)

  —but when she checked the book’s availability, all the catalog said was REMOVED FROM CIRCULATION. She was trying to figure out what to do next when she happened to notice a familiar face at the circulation desk halfway across the room.

  She quickly copied down the call number on a scrap of paper, closed the catalog search window, and went to the desk. “Hi, Stan.”

  The library student glanced up from a computer terminal, grinned. “Hi. Brecken, right? What can I do for you?”

  “I looked up a book in the catalog and it’s listed as removed from circulation.” She handed over the scrap of paper.

  Keys clattered on his keyboard, and then he glanced at her, looked past her to one side and then the other. Leaning forward, he whispered, “Do you want it?”

  Brecken gave him a startled look, nodded enthusiastically.

  Stan grinned, left the desk, and disappeared through a door behind it. Minutes passed. Then he returned with a hefty book in one hand. “Here you go,” he said in a low voice. “Scanned and marked as discarded.”

  “Thank you,” said Brecken.

  “Any time.” With a wan smile: “I know it’s going to a good home.”

  SHE WENT STRAIGHT HOME from the library with her prize. Though she had homework to do, she settled down with Sho on the futon to page through The Book of Nameless Cults. It turned out to be a long and rambling account of secret societies and obscure religious groups that von Junzt encountered in various corners of the world.

  One of those caught her interest at once: a witch-cult in New England that worshiped Nyogtha, The Thing That Should Not Be, and had dealings with shoggoths. Von Junzt had more to say about his dalliance with one of the witches than about their rites and beliefs, but he did mention an emblem he’d seen in their places of worship, an emblem of Nyogtha: a black mirror with a rim of mosaic work, blue, green, and purple. She read on.

  Later in the book was a chapter on “a secret cult of fearsome antiquity”—von Junzt’s words—which passed down strange teachings related to music. All the ratios she’d found in her rescued texts were named there, alongside references to “the musical intervals forbidden by the Church Fathers” and “that dread music spoken of in the writings of Confucius, which presages the destruction of dynasties.” She turned the page, and read:

  There I heard also of Hippasus the Pythagorean, who betrayed the secret teachings of the old Pythagoreans to those outside their order and who, as he sailed to a distant land to escape their vengeance, plunged over the railing to a watery grave. Serafina told me, though, that it was for no revelation of some trivial mathematical rule that he drowned, nor was it any human hand that dragged him off the ship to his doom. What he revealed unwisely and at his grave peril, she said to me, is that there is no order to the cosmos and no harmony of the spheres; that these are mere fables for the childish; that it is mere chance, which they also name the Blind Ape of Truth, that certain melodies and harmonies have potent effects on the human soul and others have none.

  That troubled her, but she knew better than to dismiss it out of hand. Tonality and the rest of the Baroque musical toolkit really were arbitrary, she knew; no law of nature required a melody that danced around a tonic note to mean something and go somewhere, while a melody drawn up on some other principle did neither; that minor chords gave voice to sadness while major chords did the same for joy was nowhere required in the nature of things—it simply happened to be the case that these things were so. She let a dozen pages turn, read on.

  Further still, toward the middle of the book, was a long chapter titled “Narrative of the Elder World” that seemed familiar. It took half a dozen pages read at random to call to her mind the stories she’d read in Boley’s class the previous semester, and remind her that Carter, Lovecraft, Hastane, and the rest had mined von Junzt for raw material for their stories.

  She flipped past a few more pages and found another story, even more familiar. ♪This writing tells the story of your people and those others,♪ she said to Sho.

  Five eyes popped open. ♪What does it say? Please tell me!♪

  She did her best to translate. When she was done, Sho said, ♪It is well. The human who wrote that must have spoken with my people, to know such things.♪

  Later, when dinner was a pleasant memory, and Brecken had changed into a nightgown and a baggy sweater, Sho stared at nothing in particular with three pale eyes and said, ♪I think that things could have been different with those others. If they had said to us, we made you to do these things we need and wish, now tell us what you need and wish so we can live well together, we would have labored for them gladly, and praised them for giving us our lives. It happened that sometimes, even after Nyogtha came to us, my people spoke to those others and said, this is all we wish, that you will not kill us, that you will leave us in peace, and those others would not do it. They could not bear to have any other say, listen to us as you would listen to one of your people. If they could not be the only ones that mattered, they did not wish to be at all.♪

  ♪And they got their wish,♪ Brecken said.

  ♪Yes. Sometimes I think it is sad, that they gave us our lives and we took away theirs.♪

  Brecken put her arms around Sho, nestled her face into the shoggoth’s cool soft shapelessness. Sho flowed closer, wrapped pseudopods around Brecken, and the warm-bread scent of her affection tinged the air. After a time, she opened a speech-orifice and said, in notes as soft as whispers, ♪There is a thing I need and wish.♪

  ♪Apricot jam,♪ Brecken whistled, teasing her.

  Amus
ement rippled through Sho’s form. ♪That too.♪

  Later still, when Sho had slipped onto the dreaming-side, Brecken put on her nightgown again, sat next to the shoggoth, opened the book again. That was when she found the thing she’d been looking for: the words and signs of recognition that the marginal note in The Secret Watcher mentioned. Ever since she’d recognized the strange little sign in June Satterlee’s email, the thought had circled through her mind that there might be other people who weren’t afraid of shoggoths, and Satterlee might be one of them. Before she roused Sho and pulled the futon out flat for sleeping, she crafted a polite reply to Satterlee’s email, tucked the answering sign .x. below her signature, and sent it.

  The next morning she got an email from Mr. Krause, the band director at Trowbridge High School, promising a prompt and enthusiastic letter of recommendation. At her counterpoint class, Professor Toomey motioned her over and handed her his letter of recommendation, and when she checked her email that evening she found crisp messages from Trowbridge High and Partridgeville State University letting her know that they’d forwarded her transcripts to Miskatonic University. With all those in hand, she finished the day in a luminous mood.

  That carried over into the days that followed. Though the stares and silences and whispers of the other music students still followed her, the knowledge that she had somewhere else to go made it easier to tolerate, and in Sho’s company she could set aside the whole burden of her uncertainties for a while. With both those things to buoy her, she filled out the application for Miskatonic University’s music composition program, got all the letters of recommendation together, and mailed the packet off at the downtown post office. Handing it to the postal clerk felt like a step into the unknown, but it was a step she longed to take.