The Shoggoth Concerto Read online

  CONTENTS

  ONE | The Songs of Shoggoths

  TWO | The Thing on the Linoleum

  THREE | A Leaf in the Torrent

  FOUR | Music for the Dead

  FIVE | A Source of Sanctuary

  SIX | The Thing That Should Not Be

  SEVEN | The Walls of Silence

  EIGHT | The Condition of Fire

  NINE | Winter Symphonies

  TEN | A Fallen World

  ELEVEN | The Vach-Viraj Incantation

  TWELVE | The Secret of the Sorcerers

  THIRTEEN | The Yellow Sign

  FOURTEEN | A Door in April

  FIFTEEN | An Anchor for Dreams

  SIXTEEN | The Sign of Koth

  SEVENTEEN | The Hounds of Tindalos

  EIGHTEEN | The Reconciler of Worlds

  Author’s Note

  Copyright Information

  About the Author

  THE SHOGGOTH CONCERTO

  a fantasy with pseudopods

  by John Michael Greer

  ONE

  The Songs of Shoggoths

  THUNDER ROLLED IN THE night off behind Hob’s Hill, rattling the windows of the little apartment. Startled, Brecken Kendall got up from the piano. A glance out the window showed a clear sky spangled with autumn stars, the hill looming up black and hunched close by, and a tiny shape with two red lights—a helicopter, Brecken guessed—circling slowly above it. She shook her head, then saw what might have been a faint flash of light from behind the hill, heard the rumbling sound again a heartbeat later.

  Partridgeville weather, she thought. It still doesn’t make a bit of sense. She went back to the piano, sat on the bench, forced her attention back to the tricky bit of Telemann she had to have down cold before Wednesday. Mismatched, brightly colored sweats imperfectly hid the gawky angles of her body, clashed with the light brown of her skin; long black hair that never could make up its mind whether it was curly or wavy spilled forward over her face, got pushed back behind her ears with an irritable gesture. As she surveyed the score, her teeth tightened on her lower lip, an old habit. She splayed out her fingers, shook them, and started playing again.

  Half a dozen of the notes jarred as she hit them: the old upright piano had already begun its inevitable drift out of tune. Brecken did her best to ignore the sour notes, played the difficult passage over and over again until the mechanical details of playing the piece finally got out of the way and the music started to come through.

  Now, once through from the beginning—

  Thunder rolled again, hard. She gave the nearest window a dismayed look, even though she didn’t need to face whatever weather might be on its way, and there was nowhere else she needed to be until her first class in the morning. Something about the sound put a chill down her back, though she couldn’t tell what or why.

  You’re stressing out over nothing, she told herself. Stop it. She drew in a breath, pushed her hair back behind her ears again, played through the whole piece with as much concentration as she could find. One more roll of thunder sounded, but she made herself keep playing.

  By the time she’d worked out all the difficult passages, the thunder had stopped. The staccato rhythm of the helicopter sounded loud for a minute or two, faded into silence, and that was that. She glanced up at the tacky plastic clock on the wall in the cramped little kitchenette that filled one corner of her apartment, blinked in surprise at the time: it was almost midnight, much later than she’d thought. It was a good thing, she reflected, that she didn’t have neighbors to pound on the walls or the ceiling.

  Her shoulders complained as she got up from the piano bench. She rolled them forward and back, shook her hands and stretched her fingers until the stiffness went out of them, then went to the futon that filled most of one end of the little apartment’s ell. A brisk pull on the frame slid it from its daytime state as a sofa to its flat nocturnal shape. Though the thunder had unsettled her, the silence of the night once it was gone seemed oppressive. As she got ready for bed, she could not shake an uneasy sense that something terrible had happened.

  SHE WAS UP BEFORE dawn the next day, and put in an hour of flute practice before getting oatmeal going for breakfast and checking for texts and emails on her phone. After the meal she plunged into the day’s homework, trying to get far enough ahead that she didn’t have to feel guilty about doing something else that evening.

  In the pale light of morning, the apartment looked like exactly what it was, a detached garage that somebody retrofitted to cash in on the market for student housing when Partridgeville State University began to ride the postwar boom. The floor sagged visibly in the middle where a trench left open to allow car repairs from underneath had been bridged over with plywood and third-rate lumber. Cheap wallboard painted off-white defined the walls and ceiling, and old stained linoleum covered the bathroom and kitchenette floors, replaced elsewhere by a carpet that had been burnt orange a long time ago and now just looked burnt: that was as far as the interior decorator’s art had gotten with it. The apartment had only three virtues: the rent, which was low; the neighborhood, which was green, quiet, and far enough from campus to keep visitors scarce and the party crowd at a good distance; and the lack of anyone living on the other side of its walls, floor, and ceiling, which meant that a music student could practice at all hours without having to compete for the always overbooked practice rooms on campus.

  From outside the apartment still looked like a garage, complete with a rollup door facing the alley, though that had been nailed shut for decades. Garbage cans and recycle bins lined one wall: one of each for Brecken, for Mrs. Dalzell the landlady, and for the two tenants on the upper floor of her house. Normally the cans stood in a row like so many tin soldiers, but at quarter to ten, when Brecken finally put on street clothes, loaded her tote bag, and left for her first class, all the garbage cans had been knocked over. Mrs. Dalzell was bustling around with rubber dish gloves on her hands, picking up refuse from the neatly mown grass. An odd acrid odor, like nothing Brecken recognized, hung around that end of the yard.

  “Oh, good morning, Brecken,” Mrs. Dalzell said. Hair dyed boot-polish black was her one concession to vanity, contending with baggy jeans, a shapeless green sweatshirt, and a wrinkled face the color of underdone toast. “Did you hear anything out here in the small hours? Something got into the garbage cans. I hope we don’t have to deal with those raccoons again.”

  Brecken got halfway through saying that she hadn’t heard raccoons before Mrs. Dalzell said, “Oh, and you got a package slip from the postman yesterday.” She handed it to Brecken, who gave it a casual glance and then a second, appalled look. The postal clerk had written the sender’s zip code on the pink form, and it was Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary’s in Harrisonville. A package from Aunt Mary any time from July through the runup to Christmas meant—

  Brecken tried to shove the idea out of her mind. Before she could manage the feat, Mrs. Dalzell started talking again, this time about an article on the Partridgeville Gazette about sewer rates, and it took deft maneuvering for Brecken to leave for her classes. She ducked through the narrow gap between Mrs. Dalzell’s house and the house next to it. That put her on Danforth Street, which ran down the long slope from the foot of Hob’s Hill to the university campus.

  As she shouldered her tote bag and started walking, she could see Partridgeville spread out before her in the morning. To the south, Mulligan Wood stretched from Hob’s Hill to the distant pine barrens, Belknap Creek flowed green and silent through the oldest part of town to Partridge Bay, and on the creek’s far side the low uneven mass of Angell Hill rose up, with the First Baptist Church white and gleaming at its crest. To the north, a long arm of Hob’s Hill covered with pines swept
around to the sea, shutting out the view toward Mount Pleasant. Straight ahead, due east along Danforth Street, neatly squared blocks of postwar housing gave way to strip malls and apartment buildings, then to the stark concrete buildings of the university, and finally to the old downtown; beyond that, Partridge Bay met the Atlantic in a narrow gap between rocky breakwaters, and the Mulligan Point lighthouse thrust up toward a gray sky. An ordinary American college town, with an ordinary university that happened to have a better than average music program: that was what Brecken’s high school counselor had called it, and if there was more to it than that, Brecken’s time there hadn’t brought her within sight of it.

  She didn’t let herself look back at the great dark mass of Hob’s Hill. The thunder of the night before still troubled her, for reasons she could not name. She kept on walking until the cyclopean buildings of the university surrounded her and she veered toward Gurnard Hall.

  That was the music department building, a tall bleak shape of concrete and glass rising up on the far side of a courtyard paved in concrete slabs. Glass doors opened off the courtyard into the ground floor, where some architect’s whim had put a big open space with a scattering of chairs and tables. The Cave, music majors called it, and it deserved the label: a great dim space in which echoes fluttered about like bats. If you knew who was who, you could figure out at a glance the shifting territories where different factions and subsets gathered, and if you listened to the music from the loudspeakers high overhead—all of it chosen by a student committee in long contentious meetings—you could track the ebb and flow of competing fashions.

  Poorly lubricated hinges moaned as Brecken came in through one of the glass doors, looked around The Cave, headed for a table right up against a bare concrete wall on the other side of the space. She was most of the way there before someone sitting at the table spotted her and called out, “Hey, girl!”

  “Hi, Ro.” She got to the table, pulled up a chair.

  Rosalie Gibbs-Templeton grinned up at her. Short and plump, she exuded energy from every pore. Purple extensions in her black braided hair swore acidly at the colors of a loud blouse, found more congenial company with the dark brown of her skin. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” Brecken admitted.

  Rosalie wagged a finger at her. “Girl, don’t give me that. You got to live the dream.”

  “I’ve got to get through this semester first,” said Brecken, propping her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. “And so do you.”

  Rosalie made a skeptical sound in her throat, Brecken rolled her eyes, and they both laughed. They’d spent the previous school year, the freshman year for both of them, sharing a dorm room in the soaring mass of Arbuckle Hall. Though they’d moved into apartments of their own for their sophomore years, they still ran together more often than not.

  The loudspeakers high above, which had been playing something quiet and classical, suddenly spat out a saccharine voice over the top of a drum track, squealing something about love. “Great,” Rosalie said, rolling her eyes. “Sky syrup.” That was her term for pop music played over PA systems. “You got Music Ed today, right?”

  “Eleven-thirty,” Brecken said without enthusiasm. Introduction to Music Education I was rapidly becoming her least favorite class that semester. “Not—”

  “Hi, Ro.” Another young woman veered around a circle of students not far away, came over to the table. “Hi, Breck. How’s things?”

  “Hi, Donna,” the two of them said, not quite in sync.

  The newcomer pulled out a chair, flopped down into it. Donna Tedeschi was a freshman that year, petite and olive-skinned, with black hair bobbed short. “Who’s responsible for that atrocity?” she said, glancing upward at the mewling from the loudspeakers.

  “Don’t you dare blame me for it,” said Rosalie. “I was just asking Brecken here whether they showed her yet in music ed class how to teach singing.”

  That got a grin from Brecken. “Not yet,” she said. “But I can ask Boley this afternoon whether that’s a shoggoth song.” That got her startled looks, and she went on. “That’s what today’s lecture’s on: shoggoths.”

  “Well, isn’t that special,” Rosalie said in a withering tone. “That’s those Lovecraft monsters, right? They probably sing better than she does.”

  “SHOGGOTHS,” SAID THE PROFESSOR at the podium, a tired-looking man in a tweed jacket. Ragged gray hair and ragged gray beard framed a pale and sagging face, tried and failed to lend dignity to weary movements. Around him, the cavernous lecture hall soared to dim heights; fewer than a third of the seats below were filled. “One of the most distinctive monsters of twentieth century fantastic literature. You’ve probably encountered them in pop culture, anime, online fan fiction.” He shook his head. “Forget all that. It’s not what we’re talking about.”

  It was probably a good lecture the first time Professor Boley gave it, Brecken thought, and tried to imagine him as he must have been then, young, energetic, eager to pass on his own enthusiasms to his students. Since then there had been too many years, too many repetitions; the lecture reminded her of one of those dismal gigs where the same piece of music had to be played over and over again until all the life had gone out of it. She tried to stay interested, reminded herself that she needed the General Studies credit.

  “Three stories published in the 1920s and 1930s introduced shoggoths to readers,” Boley said. “‘The Thing in the Twilight’ by Randolph Carter, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by H.P. Lovecraft, and ‘The Piper at the Gates of Hell’ by Philip Hastane. The first of those is in the anthology, and all three of them are linked on the class website.”

  Though she’d read all three stories earlier that week, she dutifully wrote down authors and titles in the battered spiral notebook in front of her—another old habit, that, from the days when all the money she could scrape together had to go for her music, and a computer of her own was one of many things she’d done without. Once that was done, she spared a moment to glance at the young man in the seat next to hers. He was watching Boley intently; his bushy eyebrows, the one dark presence on a light face framed with blond hair, were drawn together in concentration over pale blue eyes; his hands hovered over a tablet keyboard, and his lips folded together so that the little tuft of blond beard on his chin bristled.

  “None of them invented shoggoths,” Boley went on. “Remember that it was standard practice for authors of the fantastic at that time to borrow freely from archaic mythologies and obscure occult literature. In this case all three got it out of The Secret Watcher by Halpin Chalmers—they mention that in their letters. One of the papers on next week’s reading list, ‘The Sources of Lovecraft’s Lore’ by Miriam Akeley, gives the quotations.”

  The young man next to Brecken typed at a feverish pace. For her part, Brecken noted down the title of the essay, resolved to read it. She’d have to write a term paper for the class, and hadn’t yet come up with a suitable topic.

  “So. Shoggoths are protoplasmic blobs six to fifteen feet in diameter—our authors don’t agree on size. They were created more than a billion years as a slave species by another set of monstrous beings, the Elder Things, who we’ll talk about a little later this semester. They look a little like heaps of iridescent black soap suds, but they’re not fragile. They have green luminous eyes that float to the surface, look at you, and then sink back down. They’re parthenogenetic females, by the way, and reproduce by budding. They have a language of piping notes over a wide range. Carter says they have a harsh smell, Lovecraft says they smell fetid, Hastane gets florid about it without actually describing it. Chalmers doesn’t say anything about a smell at all. Put it all together, and you’ve got the concentrated essence of pure hideousness.”

  Boley warmed to his theme, and his face flickered with the last embers of whatever passion had gotten him through his doctorate and landed him a teaching job at Partridgeville State all those years ago. Brecken lost track of his words, though, for his comment abo
ut the voices of shoggoths sent her thoughts slipping away down more congenial paths. Piping notes over a wide range, she thought. Start with G below middle C, say, pop up an octave and a fifth to D, drop back down to a pert little trill around D an octave lower and then tumble back down to G in a cascade of sixteenth notes; then do the same sequence again a fourth higher; then— Her pen darted across the paper, sketched out the first half dozen measures of a piece of music. She caught herself, spent a moment feeling guilty, forced her attention back to the lecture.

  “Chalmers was a local boy,” Boley was saying. “He was born and grew up right here in Partridgeville. He didn’t go to PSU, I’m sorry to say, but that’s because it was still Partridgeville Agricultural College back then and didn’t have much to offer an art historian with a taste for occultism. Dartmouth for his B.A., Harvard for his M.A. and Ph.D., and then to the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts, ending up as curator of the archeological collections: that was his route. As far as anyone knows, Lovecraft and Hastane never met him; Carter did, but then he knew everybody who was anybody in the New York art scene.

  “So. Chalmers came back here when he retired in 1926, and he died here the same year. More precisely, he was murdered here. It was pretty ugly. Whoever did it—it’s still an open case—stripped him, bashed him around, cut off his head, and smeared the corpse with some kind of blue gel, to make it look like he was killed by the Hounds of Tindalos, which were monsters Chalmers himself wrote about. You can get more of the details from articles on the class website, but I don’t recommend clicking through unless you’ve got a strong stomach.”

  The lecture rambled on, and the echo of vanished intellectual excitement that had tinged Boley’s voice for a short while faded out into sounds made by rote. Brecken’s thoughts slipped back to the musical theme she’d sketched out. She wondered if she’d be able to use it for any of the assignments she had to turn in for Composition I that semester. Playing with musical ideas in the privacy of her own mind or her own apartment was one thing, but the thought of having to compose something for others to hear and judge made her apprehensive to the point of queasiness. Stop it, she reminded herself. You can’t get a bachelors’ degree in music from Partridgeville State, no matter what track you’re on, without two semesters of composition.