The Shoggoth Concerto

by John Michael Greer

  After she’d finished practicing, she stood irresolute in front of her dresser for a few minutes, then got her copy of The Secret Watcher out of the bottom drawer, took it back to the futon and sat down. Sho slid up next to her and said, ♪I hope the dreams have not come back.♪

  ♪No,♪ Brecken replied. That wasn’t quite true. She could still feel whatever pressure Jay had tried to aim at her hovering in the distance, and she’d had the occasional nightmare of Jay’s face repeating the same words, but ever since she’d done the Vach-Viraj incantation, she’d slept well enough to get by. ♪I’m wondering if maybe I need to know more than I do about sorcery and—and things like that.♪

  ♪I understand. You wish to have knowledge if such a thing happens again.♪

  ♪Yes, I think so,♪ said Brecken, and that was true, but only part of it. Ever since she’d heard the not-voice and followed its promptings, she’d felt herself on the border of an unfamiliar world, at once drawn and repelled by it. The thought of learning more about that world scared her but it also enticed, and reading a little more from the book seemed like a middle ground of sorts. She paged through The Secret Watcher at random, found the beginning of a chapter entitled “The Secret of the Sorcerers,” and read:

  To become a sorcerer is to learn that love is a glandular accident, that good and evil are arbitrary labels, that the universe notices neither our virtues nor our vices. It is to understand that humanity has no special place in the grand scheme of things, that the races who inhabited this planet before we came did not concern themselves with those who would come after them, and the races who will inhabit this planet after we perish will not remember us at all. He alone can call down dread powers from the stars who realizes that the powers that emanate from the stars do not exist for our benefit, and will not stir themselves to rescue us from our own folly.

  She gave the book an angry look, turned the page. If that’s what it means to be a sorcerer, she thought, count me out. A glance at Sho sent a warm tremor through her. Love is just a glandular accident? The thought of forcing so cold and dismissive a label onto her feelings for the shoggoth made her want to slap Halpin Chalmers silly. She paged further, stopped when her eyes came to rest on a familiar phrase:

  This is also the secret of the Hounds of Tindalos, and it defines the work in which the sorcerer must engage. That work is a matter of deeds, not words. In the beginning was the deed, a German novelist has written, and he is quite correct, but what he does not understand is that the deed that was in the beginning, before time, was a terrible and unspeakable one. This deed the sorcerer must make his own. For him the tree, the snake, and the apple, vague symbols of a most awful mystery, take on a tremendous reality.

  Next to this was one of the marginal notes in blue ink:

  Chalmers thought he understood this, but the Hounds tore his head from his body and left his corpse smeared with their blue ichor. I have given below the formula he used for the Liao drug. One grain is enough; five, the dose he used, is too risky, for the Hounds will sense it and come hunting. No sorcery will keep them at bay for long, and the larger the dose, the more quickly they will come.

  Below that was a recipe full of ingredients and processes she had never heard of.

  Brecken closed the book. I can’t do this, she thought. I just can’t. The unknown territory of sorcery still hovered in front of her, but whatever enticements it might offer didn’t begin to make up for what she sensed she might lose.

  Sho glanced up at her then. ♪You are troubled, broodsister.♪

  The endearment comforted her, and she bent and kissed Sho’s surface. ♪I think I know why only a few elders of your people were supposed to read writings about sorcery. There are things in this book I don’t want to think about and things I don’t think are right. If the dreams come back I know where to find the thing I did to stop them, but other than that—♪

  She got up, took The Secret Watcher back to the dresser and replaced it. ♪Other than that, I think I’m just going to have to take my chances.♪

  She returned to the futon, sat down, flung her arms around Sho and nestled her face into cool shapeless darkness.

  WEDNESDAY SHE COULDN’T AFFORD to hide at home, not with two classes, laundry, and a piano lesson on her schedule. She went to campus early to meet with Professor Toomey and talk over the details of her audition choices, then went to The Cave to spend a few minutes chatting with Rosalie. There she heard unexpected news: Jay had dropped all his classes that semester.

  “That’s what Melissa Bukowski said,” Rosalie told her in a low voice. “You know she does her work-study in the Registrar’s office, right? She told me he dropped out even though it’s too late to get a full refund on his tuition.”

  “That’s got to hurt,” Brecken said. “He’s got to be short on money without Rose and Thorn to help out. Unless he’s got another group going—”

  “Not in this town.” Rosalie’s face twisted in an unpleasant smile. “I made good and sure that every musician in this part of New Jersey knows all about how he cheated us. Donna’s done the same thing, too.”

  “Where is she these days?” Brecken asked. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen her here.”

  Rosalie looked uncomfortable. “Around. She’s really busy with her classes.”

  Brecken gave her a long steady look. “Ro,” she said. “Come on.”

  “No, really—” Rosalie glanced up at her, saw the expression on her face, looked away.

  “Out with it.”

  In a low voice: “She looked up your mom.”

  A vast silence seemed to open up around Brecken then. “Okay,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me,” Rosalie burst out. “I mean, you said she was in prison, but not—”

  Brecken nodded. “We can talk about it if you want, but—but not here.”

  “Okay,” Rosalie gave her a nervous look. “My place? You’ve got time between Comp II and your 1:30 class, don’t you?”

  Brecken agreed to that readily. They got to Composition II just before it started, and listened to three bland and interchangeable student projects. “‘Tone Sequence Seventeen’ by Julian Pinchbeck,” said Professor Toomey then.

  Julian got out of his chair, waited impatiently for Mike Schau to leave the piano, then sat down on the bench and turned half around to face the professor. “Before I start,” he said, “I’d like to say a few words.”

  “Go ahead,” said Toomey.

  Julian turned to face the class. “I don’t know why we have to keep on revisiting the obvious,” he said, “but the eighteenth century was a long time ago and music has moved on. The old arbitrary forms are a ball and chain nobody needs any more. Here’s an example of why.”

  He played a series of single notes, hitting all twelve of the piano keys in the octave above middle C one at a time, to a jerky rhythm.

  “Listen to it,” Julian said. “Just listen to it.” He played the sequence again. “That’s why composers got rid of tonality and the whole hopeless, arbitrary classical mess more than a hundred years ago—because there’s a whole world of music that the old forms can’t touch. You can’t do anything with a sequence like that if you’re hobbled by some kind of sick obsession with outdated music.” He shot a hostile glance at Brecken with those last words. “Dump that nonsense and you can do something like this.” He turned to the keyboard, began to play.

  The piece was better than anything he’d done in the fall semester, Brecken thought, less showy and more focused. Good? Not yet, not by a long way, but it was moving toward something that wasn’t simply pretentious noise. Maybe facing a challenge was good for him.

  And maybe, she thought, maybe a challenge would be good for me too. The thought of making him eat his words hovered before her, enticing.

  The same sequence of tones repeated half a dozen times in the course of Julian’s piece, each time over the top of a different set of discords. Brecken took a moment to write the sequence out note for note the third time i
t recurred, listened carefully the fourth time to make sure she’d gotten them down correctly, then returned to the comment form on the class website and made a few more comments she hoped would be helpful.

  A final jarring dissonance ended the piece, and Julian left the piano and went back to his seat. “That’s it for today,” Professor Toomey said. “Tuesday it’s back to lectures. Catch up on your reading if you’ve slacked off; we’re going to hit the ground running.”

  As the others got out of their chairs, Brecken turned to Rosalie, said, “Just a moment,” rose and went to the piano. “Julian,” she said then, loud enough to catch his attention; he gave her an irritated look. “This sequence?” she said, and replayed it.

  His expression went from irritated to uneasy. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” She gave him a broad smile, went back to her seat, tucked her notebook and phone into her tote bag and waited for Rosalie to get up from her chair.

  AFTER THE CLASS WAS over they headed down the stairs and walked to Rosalie’s apartment in silence. It wasn’t until they got there, and Brecken shed her coat while Rosalie dove into the kitchen and got coffee going for the two of them, that it occurred to her that she hadn’t been there since the day when she and Donna quarreled about Jay. A couple of pieces of tourist art from Mexico hung on the walls, souvenirs of the trip to Guadalajara, and a brand new standup frame on the desk near the sofa had a photo in it, a young black man with a winning smile, wearing an expensive suit and tie. Brecken gave the photo a speculative glance, decided that this wasn’t the time to ask about it.

  Rosalie came out of the kitchen, handed Brecken a cup, sat on a chair facing the sofa, opened her mouth and then closed it again.

  “You wanted to talk about my mom,” Brecken said then.

  A moment passed. “Did she—”

  “Kill two people?” Brecken said. “Yes.”

  Rosalie gave her a horrified look. “What happened?”

  “She started using opiates as soon as they got to Woodfield.” Brecken stared at the coffee table between them as memories of a bygone and bitter time flitted past. “She started drinking after my dad died in Afghanistan, she was that torn up about what happened to him, and she was an angry drunk, so things were pretty bad. But then she switched to the pills. They didn’t make her angry at all—she just sat around being vague and happy—and she said they were from the doctor’s, so for a while I thought things were going to be okay.

  “But I found out later that she lost her job because she couldn’t pass the urine tests, and started dealing to pay the bills. She’d been an office manager, so she was good at it, and she ended up handling some really big deals. Then one night—this was right after eighth grade, and I was out of town, staying with my grandparents for the summer—she went to meet a couple of people, and one of them pulled a gun on her. The police think they were just going to shoot her and take the drugs, but she had a gun, too, and started shooting. She took a couple of bullets, but she lived and they didn’t.” She glanced up at Rosalie. “The county prosecutor threw the book at her, because it was an election year and he wanted everyone to think he was tough on drug crime, and she got a court-appointed lawyer who just went through the motions of defending her. So she’s probably never going to get out.”

  Rosalie took that in, said nothing for a while. Finally: “Okay.”

  “I thought you knew,” Brecken burst out then. “I thought that when I told you last year that my mom was in prison, you’d gone online and looked her up. It was all over the local media for a while.” She glanced up at Rosalie. “I thought you knew, and decided that it didn’t matter because we’re friends.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Rosalie said. “You got that right, girl.”

  She was lying, Brecken knew at once, for Rosalie had never had to learn how to keep her feelings from showing on her face. It mattered very much, but the lie was a generous one, and Brecken smiled and said, “Thank you, Ro.”

  Neither spoke for a while. “So that’s why Donna’s been avoiding me?” Brecken asked.

  Rosalie looked uncomfortable. “Yeah. Well, that and something else.” She gulped at her coffee. “She told me she thought the reason you weren’t going out with us at night any more was that you were probably using, too.”

  Brecken blinked, said, “What?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “If I ever said anything nice about her,” Brecken said with some heat, “I take it back. That was a really mean thing to say.”

  Rosalie stared at the table, looking even more uncomfortable. “The thing is, girl, you really have been distant.”

  Nettled, Brecken said, “So have you. What happened to the Saturday practice sessions we were going to do together?”

  That got a look of acute embarrassment, of a kind that Brecken recognized. She sat back and said, “Okay, I think I understand. The photo on your desk—is that Tom Bannister?”

  In a very small voice. “Yeah.”

  “The one who wasn’t boyfriend material.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ro, why didn’t you tell me?”

  She swallowed visibly, said, “Because I was such a jerk about you and Darren Wegener.”

  “It’s okay, Ro,” Brecken said then. “Really.”

  For the next twenty minutes they laughed and shared secrets the way they’d done when they were roommates in Arbuckle Hall, but beneath it all something had shifted, Brecken could feel that all too clearly. When she left to go to her counterpoint class, the doubtful look in Rosalie’s eyes stung. She shoved the awareness aside, turned her attention to a minuet she was beginning to work out.

  BY THE TIME BRECKEN finished the day’s errands and got back to her own apartment, afternoon was turning to evening and the sun glowed crimson behind Hob’s Hill. She shed her coat, put down her tote bag, flopped down on the futon, and whistled a greeting to Sho as the shoggoth flowed out from under the closet door. The iridescent black shape that nestled close to her a moment later, and extended a shy pseudopod to place a drop of fluid on her cheek, seemed so familiar and natural to her that it startled her to think of how everyone else in Partridgeville would react if they knew.

  Later, after dinner, pushing aside brooding thoughts about Rosalie, she pulled out her composition notebook and started trying to figure out what to do with Julian Pinchbeck’s sequence of notes. She’d already figured out the first step, which was finding a key that included the notes she wanted to accent, and it took only a few minutes to be sure that G flat minor would work best. That turned out to be the easy part, though. When she tried to go on from there and work out harmonies to the sequence, nothing worked right, no matter what she tried. Finally, frustrated, she set the notebook aside and got to work on the latest assignment from the counterpoint class, and she’d been studying Johann Joseph Fux intensively enough by then that the exercises in the assignment took no effort at all.

  The next day was her last day of classes before spring break. She’d arranged to meet Darren at the coffee shop inside Tuchman Hall, and got there in plenty of time despite a slow pleasant morning with Sho. Twenty minutes or so later they’d just gotten deep into the mathematics of an elegant fugue by Buxtehude, and Brecken, chin propped on folded hands and elbows on the table, had begun to make sense of the way that the geometrical ratios Darren talked about gave an underlying structure to the entire piece. Just then Darren’s phone played the first two bars of Mozart’s De Profundis Clamavi; he gave his pocket a bleak look, pulled out the phone, glanced at the screen and said, “Well, I’m in for it now.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Text from my folks. They’re coming to visit toward the end of spring break.” He shrugged. “They show up half a dozen times a year. At least this time I’ve got a week’s warning, but it’s going to suck.” He turned off the phone, stuck it back into his pocket. “A day or two of Mom telling me everything I’m doing is wrong and Dad trying to figure out if I’ve got a bo
yfriend tucked under the sofa or something.”

  Brecken laughed, then said, “I wish we could get them to walk in on the two of us here. I bet we could give them quite a show.”

  That got her a sudden calculating look. “Would you be good with that?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Do you think you can make that happen?”

  “Maybe.” He sat back, stared at nothing she could see. “If I tell them I’ve got something scheduled and don’t want to get together with them until after that, and let slip the place, I bet they’ll show up to try to catch me with a guy. They’ve done it before.”

  “That could be fun,” said Brecken.

  He gave her a wan look. “You haven’t met my folks.”

  “No, but everything you’ve said makes me want to mess with them.” A year earlier, she knew, she wouldn’t have been able to find the courage to think that, much less say it, but those days were behind her now. Don’t get between Brecken and her strays, she thought, flinging the words at the world like a challenge. It was true, too: she didn’t have to fall in love with someone to want to give them whatever shelter they needed.

  “Okay,” he said then. “You’re on.” A moment later: “But here won’t work. Can you handle sushi?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Mom hates it, but she pretends she likes it because she thinks it’s fashionable.” He leaned forward again. “Ever been to Fumi’s, up on Prospect Street?” When she shook her head, he went on. “Best sushi in town. When are you getting back?”

  “Wednesday afternoon.”

  “How about Thursday at one?”

  “You’re on,” she said, and made sure to get the address copied onto her phone before they went back to talking about Buxtehude.

  THAT AFTERNOON SHE GOT off the elevator in The Cave after a frustrating session of her orchestral arrangement class, and started for the bank of glass doors. She’d gotten less than halfway across the space when a tall young man standing in a knot of older students noticed her, turned toward her, and said, “Hey, can I ask you a question?”