The Thing on the Linoleum
BRECKEN STOOD THERE FOR a long moment, frozen into place. The thing on the kitchenette floor stared at her with its wide pale eyes, trembling visibly, then drew itself together. Its motion reminded her suddenly of an animal about to spring.
Panic set her heart pounding. She tried to think of something to do, anything, but the only thing that came to mind was the absurd notion that she was looking at a shoggoth. All at once she recalled one of the little scraps of melody from the photocopy, the one that was supposed to mean “I will not harm you,” and because she couldn’t think of anything better to do, and because the thing on the kitchenette floor looked so much like a shoggoth, she whistled it aloud.
The thing seemed startled. Three more eyes blinked open on the surface facing Brecken, stared at her. Then the thing darted away in a motion so quick and evasive she couldn’t keep track of it. An instant later it had vanished.
Brecken stood there motionless for some time thereafter. Just then, taking even a single step toward the kitchenette was the last thing on earth she wanted to do, and it didn’t matter whether what she found there proved that the thing had actually been there or not. She drew in a ragged breath, made herself go into the kitchenette anyway, The thing really was gone, if it had ever been there. At first, the only sign of its apparent presence she could find was the empty plate and wrappings on the counter. Then she caught a half-familiar scent, recognized it after a moment as the odd acrid odor she’d smelled around the trash cans earlier that day, and noticed that a glass she’d filled with water and put in the sink that morning was completely empty.
She walked back to the futon, slumped down onto it, stared at nothing in particular for what seemed like a long time. The thing couldn’t actually have been there, she told herself. Things like that don’t exist. Shoggoths don’t exist—not outside of stories by old-fashioned fantasy authors like Carter, Lovecraft, and Hastane. Not in the real world, and certainly not in a rundown student apartment in Partridgeville, New Jersey.
After a while she got up again and made sure the zucchini bread really was gone. The wrappings, she noticed, looked as though someone had cleaned them—not a single crumb remained. She dropped the wrappings into the trash, breathed a sigh of relief, then felt guilty and made herself get another loaf of Aunt Mary’s regrettable zucchini bread out to thaw.
Lacking anything better to do thereafter, she went to the piano and tried to drown out her thoughts with an hour of hard practice: a flurry of warmups and etudes, and then straight into the second book of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, one prelude and fugue after another, until the serene mathematics of Bach’s music brought the world back into something like its proper shape. After that she rewarded herself by getting out her flute and playing until sheer tiredness made her stop. More than once, while the clear bright notes of the flute filled the apartment, she had to push aside the uncomfortable feeling that someone was listening to her, but by the time she pulled the futon out and settled down to sleep, she’d managed to forget that passing fancy.
A solid night’s sleep, another hour of flute practice, and the rest of her morning routine made her feel better still. By the time the morning sun chased off the last scraps of mist and streamed through her eastern windows, she had convinced herself that she must have imagined the thing on the linoleum. The only discord in that comfortable conviction was the hard fact that a loaf of Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread had vanished without a trace. She pondered the second loaf, still in its foil wrapping, and thought of a simple test.
She got a plate and a bowl, unwrapped the loaf, put it on the plate, filled the bowl most of the way with water, and set both on the kitchenette floor. There, she thought. When I get home tonight and both of those are still there, I’ll know the whole thing was just nerves or something. Conscience reminded her that the bread would probably be too stale to eat by then, and so she grabbed her purse and tote bag, and headed for the door before second thoughts could interfere. Besides, she told herself, if something really did eat the loaf, maybe it needs another meal.
Outside, the morning air was cold and damp, tinged with salt from the harbor. The slopes of Hob’s Hill blazed red and gold with autumn colors, and for some reason three more identical gray SUVs with tinted windows were driving slowly around the neighborhood, as though looking for something. She walked down Danforth Street past the usual morning traffic, cut across the lawn in front of Mainwaring Hall, crossed the concrete plaza to Gurnard Hall, and reached The Cave half an hour before her composition class began. She veered past a knot of students debating some detail of the latest postmodern reinterpretation of music theory, and crossed to the table by the concrete wall. “Hi, Ro.”
Rosalie glanced up at her from a chair tipped back precariously against the wall. “Hi, girl. Where were you last night? I tried to call you around eight.”
“Over at Jay’s,” Brecken admitted.
A momentary silence told her what Rosalie thought of that—no surprise there. “Well, you missed a good time. You’ve haven’t met Barbara Cormyn, have you?” Before Brecken got halfway through shaking her head, Rosalie had turned to another young woman nearby. “Barb, this is Brecken Kendall, my BFF. Music education track, plays a mean flute, and perfect pitch.”
Barbara Cormyn was a willowy blonde with big blue eyes that seemed stuck in a look of perpetual surprise. She shook Brecken’s hand. Perfect pitch, imperfect everything else, Brecken wanted to say, but didn’t.
Rosalie chattered on. “You know the jazz singer Olive Kendall?” Brecken gave her an embarrassed look, but she went on anyway: “That’s her grandmother.” She turned to Brecken.
“Barb’s performance track, plays half the instruments that exist.”
“Oh, stop,” Barbara said. “Reeds and piano, mostly.” She had a breathy high-pitched voice that made her sound like a movie star.
“And flute, and guitar,” said Rosalie, grinning. “And I don’t know what else.”
Barbara rolled her eyes, turned toward Brecken. “That’s really wild, that you’re Olive Kendall’s granddaughter. Did you get to study with her at all?”
“I’m not much of a vocalist,” Brecken admitted, “so mostly I learned from Grandpa Aaron. He was her pianist—that’s how they met.”
“That’s sweet,” Barbara said. “Rosalie was telling me about the Rose and Thorn Ensemble—you’re both in that, right? I’d love to hear you play.”
“I don’t know what Jay’s got booked for us next,” Brecken said. She glanced at Rosalie, who looked away with an irritated expression. “I’ll find out, though.”
“Will you? That’d be great.” The soft blue eyes didn’t lose any of their surprised expression, but something moved beneath that, precise and implacable as machinery.
“There won’t be a lot until winter break,” said Rosalie then. “You know how it goes.”
“Well, yes. Are you going to be here all break?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Rosalie. “My folks are trying to talk me into going to Guadalajara with them, but I’m going to make a career in music. You got to live your dream, right?”
“That’s the spirit.” The soft eyes turned to Brecken. “You?”
“I’ll be here,” Brecken said. She hoped the other girl wouldn’t ask why—she didn’t want to have to explain to a stranger why neither of her parents could give her a place to stay for the holidays. Fortunately, Barbara simply nodded and smiled.
“I’ll probably see you around then. I’ll be here.” Then, glancing at her cell phone: “Gotta run. It was nice meeting you, Brecken.”
Brecken said something polite and watched her hurry off.
“ANYTHING,” SAID PROFESSOR Toomey. “Absolutely anything at all.” He leaned forward, propped his chin on long folded hands; his long brown face creased in an amused smile. Most of the students in the room gaped at him as though he’d sprouted a second head. His eyes moved this way and that, unreadable, surveying them all.
Composition I met on the top floor of Gurnard Hall, in an architect’s afterthought of a room with odd angles everywhere and equally odd acoustics. A baby grand piano sat over to one side of the space; chairs scattered at random across the smooth concrete floor made up the rest of the furnishings. Tall windows on one end of the room looked out toward Hob’s Hill.
“There’s a lot of structure to the craft of composition,” the professor went on. “That’s important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. There’s also your own personal voice, your own personal vision. We’re going to give some time to that. All of you know your way around music; all of you know at least one kind of music inside and out—otherwise you wouldn’t be in this class. That’s why the assignment for your first original composition is wide open. Any style, any form, any genre, any tradition—whatever. Compose a short piece in it. That’s your assignment.”
Dead silence filled the room for a moment. Then, inevitably, Julian Pinchbeck broke it: a stocky young man in a sports jacket, chinos, and loafers, with a booth-tanned face and blond hair he’d painstakingly trained to billow up like Leonard Bernstein’s. “So something really far out on the bleeding edge, like postspectralism, would be acceptable.”
“Yes,” said the professor.
“How about metal?” That was from a tall young woman with bright pink hair, dressed in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans, whose name Brecken hadn’t gotten around to learning, whose talent she admired and whose music she couldn’t stand.
“Yes.”
Half a dozen other fashionable musical genres got named and approved in the next few minutes. Then, in a gap, a thin tense voice from the back row asked, “What about a fugue?”
Heads turned. “Yes,” said Professor Toomey, before anyone else could speak.
That conjured up an even deeper silence.
“Oh, and there’s one other thing,” the professor said then. “You’re not just going to compose a piece, remember. You’re going to perform it, right here, for the class to critique. If you need backup musicians, get them. If you need instruments other than that—” His gesture indicated the piano. “—bring them. That’s up to you. Performances will begin one week from today, first come, first served; those of you who’ve gotten something scheduled with me before class starts that day will get an extra five points. Without composing this and your final project and performing both of them here, you can’t pass this class. Got it? Excellent.” His smile gleamed again. “That’s all. See you Thursday.” He got to his feet, glanced around the room again, left the classroom.
As soon as he was gone, Julian Pinchbeck stood up and sent a glare toward the back of the room. “A fugue? Are you serious?”
“The professor said anything,” said the voice from in back. Brecken turned in her seat, glimpsed the speaker between two heads : tall and rangy, his lean face hunched toward his shoulders, dull brown hair in an unfashionable cut. “Tell me how that excludes fugues.”
Pinchbeck rolled his eyes. “That’s not the point. As a musical form, the fugue is stone cold dead. Its possibilities got used up centuries ago.”
“In your opinion,” said the young man in back.
“It’s not just my opinion,” Pinchbeck snapped back. His voice always rose in pitch when he got pedantic, and it was rising now. “Composers dumped the fugue in the late eighteenth century because it couldn’t say the things that needed to be said. Going back to it now is a total waste of time.” Three other students started talking at once, but Pinchbeck’s voice rose above them: “Classical music is dead. It doesn’t speak to anyone any more.”
“In your opinion,” the young man in back repeated.
Brecken glanced from one to the other, uncertain. She’d heard a hundred times, more, the same rhetoric Pinchbeck used: classical music is dead, it doesn’t speak to anyone any more—
Rosalie, shaking her head, pushed through the crowd, grabbed Brecken’s sleeve. “Come on,” she said. “They’ll be at it all day.” Brecken let herself be pulled toward the doors.
It speaks to me. The words she hadn’t said followed her out into the hallway.
Two of the three elevators that reached Gurnard Hall’s top floor were out of order, and the third had a crowd waiting around the door. Rosalie glanced at Brecken, motioned with her head toward the stair, and Brecken followed. Plenty of others were headed the same way. The big metal door, painted an impressively ugly shade of blue, swung open.
Memory stirred as Brecken started down the stairs: a great E flat major chord bursting out of the near-darkness of an opera house on an afternoon twelve years past. She’d been sitting between her grandparents, shocked into alertness by the music, the harsh details of a troubled childhood washed away for a moment by the sound.
Footfalls echoed in the stairwell, beating a leaden bass rhythm on concrete. Voices raised in conversation carried on an ungainly melody line above them. Brecken barely noticed the sounds. In her mind, an orchestra played the adagio measures at the start of the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. She’d listened, puzzled and fascinated. Then—
All at once the second violins took off scampering in a flurry of notes as adagio gave way to allegro. The first violins leapt in to join them after four measures, the bassoons, the violas and the cellos after seven more. She’d sat there with her mouth open, clutching the arms of the seat, scarcely daring to breathe, the effervescent delight the music brought seemed that fragile. Then the whole orchestra took up the same theme fortissimo, crashing over her like a wave, and she’d sat there shaking in sheer exhilaration, all but drowning in the impossible glory of it.
After it was all over, they’d gone to an old-fashioned café half a dozen blocks from the opera house—it had been a Sunday matinee, the kind where opera companies park second-string vocalists to give the regular cast a break, but if the old gods of nature in all their eldritch might had risen up singing in the opera house, they couldn’t have had a greater impact on Brecken’s world. There, in a window booth over sandwiches and fries, with the promise of an ice cream sundae hovering in the near future, her grandmother asked her what she’d liked best about The Magic Flute. Was it the comical bird-man Papageno? Was it the romance between Tamino and Pamina, the majesty of the wise Sarastro, the perilous beauty of the Queen of the Night?
Then her grandparents had listened with raised eyebrows as Brecken tried to explain, within the narrow limits of a seven-year-old’s vocabulary, that it was the music, not the story or any of the characters, that had shaken her to her core. They’d given each other startled looks—she remembered, with almost photographic clarity, the expressions on their faces.
“Earth to Brecken?” Rosalie said then. They were at the bottom of the stairwell, with other students streaming past them into daylight. Brecken blinked, managed an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I was thinking.”
“I figured,” said Rosalie. They went out the door onto the bleak gray square, and Rosalie asked, “Got anything scheduled tonight?”
“Homework and practicing,” said Brecken. “Of course.”
Rosalie laughed. “I know, dumb question. If you finish up before eight or nine, give me a call, okay?”
Brecken promised that she would, and said something polite. Rosalie did the same and headed off at a sharp angle.
It speaks to me, Brecken repeated to herself, and all at once glimpsed the perfect answer to Julian Pinchbeck’s smug dismissals. Since she could do anything for that first composition assignment, why not compose a short piece in one of the standard Baroque forms, a declaration of loyalty and love to the music that mattered most to her?
Enticing, the idea hovered in the air around her. As she considered it, she recalled the sequence of notes headed I will not harm you, the one she’d picked up from the photocopies and whistled at the thing she hadn’t seen in the kitchenette the night before. Her pace slowed to a standstill as she turned it over in her thoughts. It really would make a fine theme for a bourrée, she decided. If only she knew the bourrée form well enough—
Then, all at once, she realized that she did know it well enough. All the Baroque pieces she’d practiced and played, all the music theory she’d studied in high school and in her freshman year, had already handed her the tools. It was just a matter of using them—and if there were details she needed to learn, she knew where to find them.
Yes, she thought. I can do this. She turned, set off for Hancock Library.
THE LOAF OF ZUCCHINi bread was gone when Brecken got back to her apartment, the bowl of water was nearly empty, and a very faint trace of the acrid scent hung in the air. She stared for a moment, then shrugged and put the plate and bowl in the sink. If something was getting into the apartment to eat the zucchini bread, she decided, at least it wasn’t leaving a mess.
She had more important things to think about, though, and plopped down on the futon as soon as she’d shed her coat and sorted out the contents of her tote bag. A notebook full of staff paper made a prompt appearance, along with a mechanical pencil. All the way up Danforth Street she’d had fragments of her bourrée playing in her head, and getting them written down before she lost them was the one thing that mattered.
By the time she’d copied down everything she remembered, she’d already decided to arrange the bourrée for piano—it would work as a flute solo, no question, but the melody begged for richer harmonies and a bass line. At first she could only see a few of the ways the fragments fit together, how the bass notes she’d sketched out for one passage in the first part could be developed to fill gaps in some of the other passages, how the middle notes could weave their own textures between the melody and the bass. She wrote, erased, scratched out false starts, and then all at once she could see the bourrée as a whole, turned to the next blank page, and wrote it out from beginning to end in such a rush that she snapped the pencil lead four times.
Now, for the test that mattered.
She was on her feet and halfway to the piano before she realized she’d left the notebook sitting on the futon. Retrieving it, she sat on the bench, stretched her fingers, shook out her hands, drew in a deep breath, and began playing. She stumbled hard the first time through the first part, pushed through, and then caught the rhythm of the bourrée and played the rest of it without trouble. A second time through, a third, and it sounded exactly the way she’d imagined it, filled the little apartment with its own bright elegance.
The last notes faded into silence. Brecken sat on the piano bench for some minutes afterward, feeling a little dazed, a little—what? She couldn’t find words. It was done; it was—
Hers. Not hers like something she owned, hers like a breath, a voice, a child.
She shook herself, then, and finally thought to glance at the clock on the kitchenette wall. It was almost eleven o’clock. Somehow four hours had slipped by while she’d been writing the bourrée. It was far too late to call Rosalie, of course, so she got up unsteadily from the piano bench, went to the kitchenette, and split the next half hour between cooking a pot of rice, heating up red beans and collard greens from bowls in the refrigerator, and washing two breakfasts’ worth of dishes. Eventually a good-sized bowl of red beans and rice and a smaller bowl of buttered greens accompanied her back to the futon.
Once both bowls were empty, she sat back, tried to clear her head. She ought to put in another hour of piano practice, she told herself, but it felt just then as though every drop of music had been wrung out of her. Instead, once she’d emailed Professor Toomey to tell him she had a piece finished for the composition class assignment, she pulled the futon out flat and got the quilts spread out on it. She had to struggle to find the energy to get ready for bed, and once she lay down and pulled the quilts over her, she fell asleep almost at once.
She had a curious dream somewhere in the small hours, though. In the dream, as in reality, she was curled up on the futon in her apartment, her quilts heaped over her, and she happened to be looking through the darkness toward the kitchenette. Something dark and shapeless crouched there, gazing at her with pale phosphorescent eyes.
“MY COUSIN RICK EMAILED ME a link to the website,” Rosalie said. She was wearing an even louder blouse than usual, and Brecken suspected she’d chosen it to match her mood. “The idea is the meaning of your family name predicts your future.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“No, seriously, give it a chance. Do you know what your name means?”
“It’s the Italian word for ‘German,’” said Donna. “What it means is that one of my dad’s ancestors took a wrong turn in the Alps somewhere. I’m not going to repeat the mistake.”
Rosalie sighed, turned to Brecken. “Help me, okay? Do you know what Kendall means?”
“No,” Brecken admitted, “and that’s not what it was originally. Grandpa Aaron changed the spelling. It used to be Kandel—that’s a Jewish name, but I don’t know the meaning.”
“Your grandfather was Jewish?” Donna asked.
Brecken nodded. “Grandpa Aaron was a Jewish pianist from Brooklyn, Grandma Olive was a black jazz singer from St. Louis, so of course it was love at first sight. They started out doing gigs together, then got married and had my dad. My mom’s Irish and Armenian on one side and nobody’s quite sure what on the other.”
“Wow,” said Donna. “How do you even decide what church you’re going to get married in? Or synagogue, or whatever it would be?”
“Your whole family’s Italian?” Brecken asked.
Donna nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yeah. Not just all Italian, all from Abruzzo, and most of ‘em from the town of Pescara. My aunt Giannina gets teased all the time for being a foreigner because her family’s from Chieti, which is like from here to Mount Pleasant.”
“You two aren’t cooperating,” Rosalie said.
“Nope,” said Donna, and checked the time on her cell phone. “And we’ve got about six minutes to get to class, too. See you!” She gave Rosalie a sly smile, got up and headed off across The Cave. Rosalie sighed in exasperation, checked her own phone, and launched herself toward the glass doors, leaving Brecken to shake her head and go to Intro to Music Education I.
Fifty minutes later, she was wondering whether her class in music education made no sense, or whether she was just too stupid to understand it. Professor Neal Rohrbach had curly brown hair and a vague pink face; he talked smoothly in a tenor monotone, but everything he said heaped abstraction on top of abstraction until Brecken was left trying to guess how any of it related to teaching people how to play music, or if it had anything to do with that at all.
After that she had an hour of study time, then The Fantastic In Literature at 1:30, where Professor Boley talked about the philosophy of the Lovecraft circle. “Indifferentism,” he said, and once again Brecken could almost glimpse the embers of the enthusiasm he’d once put into his lectures. “That’s what Lovecraft called it, but he didn’t invent it. It was in the archaic texts he and so many other authors of weird tales read so avidly: the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and so forth. Their idea was that the universe doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t even notice us. What’s more, it doesn’t mean anything—or if it does, and we’re unfortunate enough to find out what the meaning is, it turns out to be so unhuman that it shatters our minds and drives us mad.
“That vision of a universe that’s fundamentally hostile to human existence pervades their work. You’ll find it especially in the way they interpreted the gods they borrowed from those same archaic texts—Tsathoggua, Cthulhu, Nyogtha, and the rest of them. All of the weird-tales authors of that period liked to pretend that these Great Old Ones were the old gods of nature, the realities behind all the figures of the old mythologies. But these gods don’t care. Their concern for you is about on a level with your concern with the bacteria on the soles of your shoes. The same theme of indifferentism: the universe really is out to get you.”
Brecken made the mistake of glancing at Jay just then, and saw the smile she hated playing over his face. She forced her attention back to the lecture, and wondered: how can the universe be indifferent to us and hostile to us at the same time? If the Great Old Ones really don’t care, doesn’t that mean they can’t be bothered to be out to get us?
She brooded over that as she went home, got her laundry together, and took it to the laundromat on Meeker Street, where she sat working on her music education assignments while the washer and dryer did their work. After another quick trip home, she headed out again, went through the old downtown to her weekly piano lesson in an clapboard-sided house on Dexter Street at the foot of Angell Hill. Ida Johansen, her piano tutor, was a mousy-looking woman with hair that had once been blonde and was now mostly colorless, who filled in the gaps in an inadequate pension by giving piano lessons and playing organ Sundays at the First Baptist Church, and whose living room was almost completely bare of decoration except for a framed piece of embroidery saying, in faux-Gothic script, Ve grow too soon Old, und too late Schmart. Her teaching was uninspired but systematic, and Brecken left after her hour with a page of useful comments in Mrs. Johansen’s minute handwriting, and two other passages in the Telemann concerto to work on.
The walk back from Dexter Street took her past Central Square and the door of Buzrael Books, and though she had plenty of other things to think about, her mind kept straying back to the vanishing loaves of zucchini bread. Of course the thing she thought she’d seen Monday night couldn’t be responsible, she told herself, because things like that don’t exist—but a raccoon would have left more of a mess, she’d seen their treatment of garbage cans often enough to be sure of that, and why would a human being who got into the apartment two days running have taken only a loaf of zucchini bread and a drink of water each time?
She was nervous enough when she got to the door to her apartment that it took her two tries to get the key into the lock, and three fumbling motions to turn on the light. The third loaf was gone, and so was the water. Brecken considered the empty plate for a long moment, then shook her head, put it and the bowl in the sink, and got the last loaf of zucchini bread out to thaw. The thing she’d imagined, or hallucinated, or dreamed in the kitchenette Monday night—it couldn’t possibly have been real, she told herself.
Could it?
An unwelcome thought tried to remind her that even the hungriest hallucination couldn’t actually eat three loaves of Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread. Another thought, just as unwelcome, found it improbable that anything, hallucinatory or otherwise, could accomplish that feat. She tried to shove both thoughts aside, went to the futon, sank onto it and closed her eyes.
Moments passed, and then a soft slippery noise whispered across the room from the direction of the kitchenette. It sounded unnervingly as though something was sliding across the linoleum. Brecken shivered, though the evening was still warm, and thought: I am not going to open my eyes. I don’t care what—
A low unsteady piping sound shattered her resolve. She opened her eyes, and wished at once that she hadn’t.
There the thing was, on the floor of her kitchenette again: shapeless, iridescent black, and horrible. It watched her with pale green eyes that emerged from the gelatinous mass and then sank out of sight. The acrid scent came from it, faint but definite. Panic seized her; she opened her mouth, but all that came out was a little squeaking noise. Then she remembered that the thing’s piping might be speech.
Without taking her eyes off the thing, she reached with a shaking hand for the stack of photocopied papers on the end table next to the futon. That particular trill—it was on the first page, she thought she remembered. A quick glance confirmed that. It was a question: ♪Why?♪
She glanced up from Chalmers’ notes. The thing was still there. It piped a longer sequence of notes, in equally unsteady tones, through a mouthlike orifice that appeared on its upper surface and then disappeared again. She glanced reflexively at the papers in her hands, saw enough of the other motifs to guess at the meaning: ♪Why do you help me?♪
It’s talking to me. The thought circled around and around, the only coherent thing in the utter confusion that filled her mind. Something that can’t exist is talking to me. Belatedly, she realized that it probably expected an answer. Pages rustled as Brecken fumbled through the lexicon, and whistled the only answer she could think of: ♪I think—you need—help.♪
The thing responded at once: ♪Your people hunt and kill my people.♪
It took a few moments for her to decipher the piping, but then Brecken stared, horrified. She flipped through the lexicon again, and managed to whistle an answer: ♪I—didn’t know.♪
She looked up from the papers again, to see the thing staring at her with no fewer than twelve wide pale eyes. After a long moment, it piped in shaking tones: ♪Then I thank you for food and water.♪
That left Brecken even more unnerved than she’d been, and she replied with an impulsive promise: ♪There—will be—more.♪
♪I—I thank you.♪ The thing turned and fled in a sudden blur of motion. This time, Brecken was able to follow its route: a zigzag dash across the vinyl tiles to the open space below the sink, then suddenly down, through a gap in the flooring that seemed far too small for it. A faint noise told of its descent into the trench under the apartment.
All at once, Brecken realized that she was trembling from head to foot. She drew in as deep a breath as she could manage, then another. The thing was right there under the floor, she knew, had probably been there for days. It was—
A shoggoth. That, at least, she no longer doubted. The description she remembered from Professor Boley’s lecture was too close a fit to what she’d just seen, except for the matter of size, and so were the descriptions in the stories she read: the shapeless body that looked like a mass of bubbles covered by a smooth gelatinous-looking surface layer, the iridescent black color, the pale greenish eyes that appeared and disappeared, every detail was right.
Her imagination offered her unpleasantly vivid images of the shoggoth slithering up out of the crawlspace in the middle of the night with some unthinkable purpose in mind. It was when she tried to think of the unthinkable purpose, of course, that the whole fantasy fell apart. If it had meant to devour her as she slept, say, it could have done that already; instead, all it seemed to want was Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread and some water to wash it down.
The sheer absurdity of that fact conjured up a little shaken laugh, but there was something about the encounter that felt far too serious for laughter. The creature had been frightened and desperate, she felt sure of it, not threatening—and there were those inexplicable words: your people hunt and kill my people. There was no shoggoth-hunting season anywhere Brecken had ever heard of, but she suspected the creature was telling the truth. That implied a cascade of things she didn’t even want to think about.
After a moment Brecken got off the futon and crossed to the kitchenette. Though the shoggoth looked gelatinous, the floor where it had been was clean and dry, and so were the edges of the gap in the flooring through which it had disappeared. The creature had left behind no scent at all, for that matter. Considering the gap, she wondered what it was doing under her floor, and how it had gotten there. I’ll ask it next time, she decided.
Would there be a next time?
She found, to her considerable surprise, that she hoped so.