A Leaf in the Torrent
THE NEXT MORNING, BRECKEN set out the last loaf of zucchini bread and another bowl of water on the kitchenette floor before leaving for campus. All the way along Danforth Avenue, as houses gave way to strip malls and then to the glass and concrete of the university, her mind circled giddily around the bizarre encounter she’d had the night before, the frightened creature hiding under her floor, the strange whistled conversation they’d had.
She got to The Cave with scarcely enough time to meet Rosalie, ride the elevator to Gurnard Hall’s top floor, and find a seat. Professor Toomey came in while she was still fumbling with her tote bag. He went to the podium and said, “Julian, Molly, Brecken, can I talk to the three of you for a moment?”
That left Brecken flustered for a moment, until she remembered that she’d emailed him about the composition assignment. She got to the podium a few moments after Julian Pinchbeck and the girl with pink hair did.
“I want to thank all three of you for letting me know so promptly about your projects,” the professor said. “Ironically, you all left out one detail—the names of your compositions. If you want to give those to me now I’ll put you down to perform first thing next Tuesday.”
“Mine is titled ‘Obsidian Ellipsoids,’” Julian said airily.
The pink-haired girl, Molly, gave him an amused look. “Mine’s ‘Marty’s Blues.’”
The professor’s eyes, unreadable as always, turned toward Brecken. She drew in a breath and said, “Bourrée in B flat.”
Both of the others glanced at her then. Julian looked as though he’d discovered a slug in his salad; Molly looked as though the slug had suddenly started singing to her, and she liked the tune. “Very good,” Professor Toomey said. “You’re set for Tuesday.”
Rosalie gave her a long startled look when she sat down again. “You’ve already got something done? Girl, you’re way ahead of me.”
Brecken gave her a smile and a shrug, and Professor Toomey started lecturing a moment later, sparing her the need to go on. There wasn’t really much she could say, she reflected later: how could she explain the sudden rush of certainty, the way her initial fumblings flowed together and called the bourrée into being, the dazed wordless sense of release once it was done?
The fifty minutes of class slid past, and she and Rosalie headed out the door and went down the stair to the plaza. “Doing anything this afternoon?” Rosalie asked her.
“Just studying,” Brecken said. “I’ve got a flute lesson at seven.”
Rosalie grinned. “Can you handle company? Donna’s coming to my place in an hour, when she gets out of her music theory class—we’ve both got to catch up on a bunch of work.” When Brecken gave her a dubious look: “There’ll be chicken quesadillas.”
That got a laugh from Brecken. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m going to hold you to that.”
“You do that,” Rosalie said. “I’ve already got all the fixings.” With a sudden grin: “I’m going to remember those quesadillas when I’m living on ramen and sleeping in fleabag hotels.”
DOWN DANFORTH TO CHURCH Street, over Church to the far side of Central Square: Brecken knew the route to Rosalie’s apartment as well as she knew the way to her own. Only a few minutes passed before they got off the elevator on the fourth floor of a big modern building, turned left, and went down to Rosalie’s door, which unlocked with a keycard. Inside was a pleasant one-bedroom apartment with windows and a balcony looking out over Partridge Bay, art prints on the walls, furniture that hadn’t yet seen the inside of a secondhand shop. A photo on the wall near the kitchen explained the relative luxury: Rosalie’s parents, Dad in a Brooks Brothers suit, Mom in an elegant silk dress, beaming down vicariously on their youngest child.
Once coats and hats found their way onto the bed, Rosalie made a beeline for the kitchen and waved aside Brecken’s offer to help, so Brecken settled down on the sofa with her music education textbook, a notebook, and a pen. As she started trying to get the chapter on learning theory to make some kind of sense, assorted sounds came out of the kitchen, followed by the groan of the oven door shutting.
“There we go,” said Rosalie, coming into the living room. “Ten minutes to quesadillas.”
Brecken gave her a sly look. “Unless Georgianna knocks on the door.”
Rosalie choked. “Girl, don’t even think that too loud.” She fetched a bulky textbook from a stack on a coffee table, slumped into an armchair facing the couch. “You know perfectly well that half the reason I bailed out of Arbuckle Hall was so I didn’t have to keep on hiding that damn toaster oven from her. I know, that was her job, but still.”
Brecken didn’t argue, and Rosalie flipped open the textbook and settled down to study. Other than quesadillas, nothing interrupted them until the door buzzer sounded an hour later and Rosalie flung herself toward the intercom. “Donna?” The intercom squawked at her, making sounds incomprehensible to Brecken. “Sure thing, girl. See you in a bit.” A pause, thumb on the button, and then Rosalie unlocked the door and headed for the kitchen again.
The door opened a few minutes later, letting Donna in. “Hi, Ro. Oh, hi, Breck. I didn’t know you were coming to our little soirée.” Grinning: “You better have something to study.”
Brecken raised her textbook in both hands. “Done.”
“Get her to help you if you run into trouble with the music theory, Donna,” Rosalie called out from the kitchen. “She’s really good.”
“I hope so,” said Donna, and flopped onto the couch with an exasperated sigh. “Can you explain what the big deal is about tonality? Kaufmann spent the whole class talking about how it doesn’t matter any more blah blah blah, and never bothered to explain it.”
“Sure,” Brecken said, setting the textbook aside. “Think of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’” She whistled the melody of the first two lines. “You start on C, spend the first line going up a fifth to end on G, and then the second line goes back down to end on C. C’s the tonic, right? That means it’s home base for the melody. You leave home base, go to a note that’s in some kind of harmony with it, then return to it.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Donna. “So?”
“Next two lines.” She whistled them. “They go toward home base but don’t actually get there. Your ear expects that next step and doesn’t get it—and then you repeat the first two lines again, and you get the resolution. So everything in the melody moves around that home base.”
In the kitchen, clattering noises spoke of a baking sheet meeting an oven rack, and the oven door groaned again. “Ten minutes to quesadillas,” Rosalie said, and came out to join them.
“Okay,” Donna replied. “I get that—but there’s got to be more to it than that.”
“Of course there is,” said Brecken. “You can do all kinds of things around that home base, and the other notes that harmonize with it. Listen to Bach and watch how he dances around home base. But the home base, the tonic, is always there and everything comes back to it.”
“That seems pretty arbitrary,” Donna said then. “Why bother with it?”
“Because it’s what makes music go somewhere and do something,” said Brecken.
“But that’s arbitrary too,” said Donna.
Brecken tried to think of a response; unexpectedly, Rosalie came to her rescue. “Do you want some chocolate ice cream on your chicken quesadilla?” she asked Donna.
“Ew.”
“That’s arbitrary too,” said Rosalie, grinning. “It still matters.”
“Okay,” Donna said after a moment. “Okay, I think I get it.” Her expression contradicted the words, but she turned to Brecken and said, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” When no more questions appeared, Brecken picked up her textbook.
Time passed, quesadillas appeared and disappeared, and more time passed. Brecken read the chapter from her textbook twice, took copious notes, and once again wondered if the people who’d written it had ever tried teaching music to human beings. Then it was on to the next round of readings for her literature class, two stories by Giles Angarth, a third by Amadeus Carson, and half a dozen poems by Edward Derby. By the time she finished the last of those, an unnerving sonnet about a nameless king in tattered yellow robes, evening was near and a dense fog was flowing in from Partridge Bay, turning the streetlights into smears of orange glare and the powerful lamp of the Mulligan Point lighthouse into a blurred momentary radiance.
“Okay,” Rosalie said then. “My brain’s full.” She got up, turned on the lights. “One more round of quesadillas, coming up.” She headed for the kitchen.
“Where were you Monday night?” Donna asked Brecken. “You missed a good time.”
“I had a date with Jay.” Brecken busied herself putting her textbook back into her tote bag, and tried to ignore Donna’s look.
“I bet he made you cook dinner.”
“I like to cook for people.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Breck, he’s just using you. You know that.”
“That’s really unfair,” Brecken told her, reddening.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is,” said Brecken. “And it’s pretty rude of you to say that about Jay when he went out of his way to bring you into Rose and Thorn.”
It had been the wrong thing to say, she knew that at once, and the sudden wince that crossed Donna’s face confirmed it. Donna fell silent, glowering. In the kitchen, the oven door groaned. A moment later Rosalie came back into the living room, glanced from one of them to the other, and said, “What’s gotten into you two?”
“I was trying to talk to her about Jay,” said Donna.
“Don’t go there,” Rosalie told her. “Just don’t.”
“I know.” In a scornful tone: “Don’t get between Brecken and her strays.”
“That’s really mean,” Brecken said, feeling stung.
“Seriously, Breck,” Donna said then. “Think, will you? I mean, do you really want to introduce someone like Jay to your folks?”
Brecken stood up, grabbed her tote bag. She heard her own voice, thin and brittle, as though it came from a distance. “My mom’s in prison,” she said, “and my dad’s been dead since I was five, so I won’t be asking them for advice. You know what? I didn’t ask you for advice either.” She turned sharply, headed for the door, remembered just before she got there that her hat and coat were sitting on the bed, veered over to the bedroom to get them.
“Brecken—” Rosalie said in a pleading tone, coming toward her. Brecken shoved past her and bolted for the door.
MOMENTS LATER BRECKEN STOOD on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, with the fog flowing around her. Her anger had guttered out, turning as it always did into shame. She managed to keep herself from bursting into tears, though it took an effort, and started along Church Street with no particular destination in mind. An old bitter memory circled in her mind. The other children in her elementary school, cruel as only children can be, liked to taunt her by calling her “broken Brecken;” she hated the gibe, but after a quarrel it inevitably came to mind. She always ended up feeling defective, a thing fit only to be flung aside.
She had most of an hour and a half to spend before her flute lesson, and as she reached Central Square and she fought her way back to calmness, she thought of one way to help spend it. The second floor windows above the old Smithwich and Isaacs jewelry store shone out into the murk, and the door at the foot of the long narrow stair was still open. A moment of indecision passed, and then she was on her way up the stair and into Buzrael Books.
For all she could tell, the proprietor hadn’t moved a muscle since she and Jay had left the store Monday night. He sat in the same old-fashioned wooden office chair, sorting through what looked for all the world like the same stack of leatherbound volumes with titles in strange scripts. He glanced up at her the moment she came in, though, and asked, “Can I help you?”
“Actually, yes,” she said. “I was wondering if you have any books on shoggoths.”
He gave her a long look over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses, and then said, “That’s an unusual subject.” With a laugh that sounded like dry leaves crackling: “What do you have in mind? Care and feeding?”
Taken aback, Brecken gave him a flustered look, then thought of something to say. “It—it’s for a paper. I’m taking a class on fantastic literature this semester.”
“Ah,” said the proprietor with the glint of a smile. “Yes, I may have something for you. Just a moment, please.” He extracted himself from the chair, vanished into the depths of the bookstore. After a moment keys jingled, and door hinges let out a long shrill moan.
Minutes passed. Brecken looked over the books scattered on the sales counter, sorted through the bin of fifty-cent cookbooks again, and then turned to the floor-to-ceiling rack of twentieth-century paperbacks on the wall facing the counter. Glancing over them, she spotted a cover image that made her draw in a sudden sharp breath: a scantily clad woman starting back in horror from a black iridescent blob with pale greenish eyes. The shoggoth looked quite a bit larger than the one she’d seen in her kitchenette the night before, but otherwise could have passed for a painting from life.
The title of the book was Daydreams and Nightmares and the author was Philip Hastane. A glance at the table of contents showed “The Piper at the Gates of Hell” among the stories within. The book only cost a dollar, so she took it with her when she heard the hinges of the unseen door moan again, and the proprietor of the store came back to the counter carrying a stout hardcover in a faded dust jacket.
An amused glance moved from the cover of the paperback to her face. “I see you have a good eye for shoggoths,” he said, and held out the hardback. “This may be what closer to what you’re looking for, though. Halpin Chalmers has quite a bit to say about shoggoths. There’s marginal notes and underlining, I’m sorry to say, but if all you need is a reading copy for your paper, why, this ought to do.”
Brecken took the volume from him, opened it. The marginal notes were in blue ink, in a neat old-fashioned handwriting. A glance at the front cover confirmed the title and author—The Secret Watcher by Halpin Chalmers—and a second glance inside showed $5 penciled in on the flyleaf, which seemed absurdly cheap. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re very welcome.” He ducked back behind the counter, went to the cash register. “One thing, though. You mustn’t show this book to your boyfriend.”
Brecken gave him an unfriendly look, but his gaze, unyielding, met hers above his glasses. “It wouldn’t be good for him, not at all. Do I have your promise?”
Before she quite knew what she was doing, she’d given the promise, paid for the books, and headed back down the stairs into the darkening evening. At the bottom of the stairs, she shook herself, turned and looked back up at the brightly lit windows of Buzrael Books. The tense way Jay had smiled when he’d found the other book Monday evening came to mind, and she wondered uncomfortably if the old man was right.
That got her thinking again of the photocopies she’d gotten that same night, and that started her mind chasing after scraps of melody. She started walking again up Meeker Street, as much from habit as anything else, and by the time the lights of Hancock Library came into sight through the fog she had an elegant little piano etude in E flat sketched out in her mind. A glance at her cell phone showed that she still had an hour before her lesson. She went into the library, sat down at the first table she could find, got out her notebook and started writing the etude.
SHE WAS ALMOST LATE for her flute lesson, but “almost” was the operative word. Evelyn Dobshansky, a retired professor from the university, gave flute lessons in the living room of her home just east of campus; she answered Brecken’s knock as usual with a smile and a few words of greeting, and the two of them plunged into an hour of rigorous work on one of Bach’s flute sonatas, which did a good job of clearing away the last of Brecken’s wretched mood.
On the walk back up Danforth Street, the salt breeze off the harbor blew cold and crisp, driving the fog away and leaving Brecken exhilarated, and her new etude played itself over and over again in her mind. The quarrel with Donna still stung, but music had worked its usual magic for her, and pushed the discomfort off to a distance where she didn’t have to feel it quite so acutely.
When she finally let herself into her apartment, though, her first glance was toward the plate and bowl on the kitchenette floor. Both were empty, as she’d expected, but that brought up a question for which she had no ready answers: with Aunt Mary’s zucchini bread gone, what was she going to feed the shoggoth?
That she would feed it wasn’t in doubt. Her promise mattered, to be sure, but that wasn’t the only thing that did. The creature was obviously terrified, and the fact that it was hiding under her apartment suggested all too clearly that it had few other options. The difficulty remained that she had no idea what it could eat, no notion if there was anything on the subject in the strange book she’d just purchased, and no one she could ask—with the obvious exception.
After minutes of indecision, and a long careful reading of Chalmers’ lexicon, she went to the kitchenette, knelt by the sink, and whistled ♪I wish to talk.♪ Then, guessing that moving further away would be less threatening to the shoggoth, she got up and backed away, sat on the floor beside the piano bench, reached for the lexicon, and waited.
Minutes passed. Then, with a soft rustling noise, iridescent blackness swelled under the sink, flowed outwards. The shoggoth piped, ♪I thank you again for food and drink.♪
It took Brecken a few moments of fumbling with the lexicon to find the proper response. ♪It is a little thing♪, she said. ♪But I don’t have—any more of the—♪ There was no word in Chalmers’ notes for “zucchini bread,” but it was simple enough to find words that would do. ♪—the thing I gave you. I want to know—what else you can eat.♪
The shoggoth stared at her with eight eyes for more than a minute. ♪You gave me food and water,♪ it said slowly, ♪and you did not have to. You could have told those who wish to kill me where I hide, and you did not. Now you wish to know what I am able to eat. I do not understand.♪ In a low trembling whistle: ♪Today my name is Drowned In The Torrent.♪
The thought that the shoggoth was hiding to save its life put a shudder of cold horror through Brecken, but the last sequence of notes pushed that aside for the moment, made her blink. ♪Was your name—something else yesterday?♪
The creature seemed baffled. ♪I had no name yesterday. How can there be a name when there are none to hear it?♪
Brecken took that in and tried to make sense of it, without much success. Other things demanded attention first, though. ♪You can—hide here—as long as you wish.♪
In a sudden desperate wail of notes: ♪Why?♪
♪Because—I’ve been alone—and scared too.♪ And it was true: a cascade of wretched memories tumbled through her mind, bringing back times she’d had to hide from bullies at school, from her mother’s boyfriends and drunken rages. She thought of the way that her grandmother used to scoop her up in her arms and hold her, and blushed as she realized that, hideous as the shoggoth was, part of her wanted to do the same thing to it.
The shoggoth in question regarded her in silence. Minutes passed. ♪I am grateful for what was given, but—but I would welcome more food,♪ it said finally, in a low piping tone.
♪You’re hungry,♪ Brecken guessed.
Lower still: ♪Yes.♪
♪What can you eat?♪
♪If it was once alive it is food,♪ said the shoggoth. ♪But—but a soft thing would be welcome.♪ The way it piped the final word reminded Brecken of how desperate the creature had seemed the night before. She found herself wondering whether shoggoths found humans as terrifying as humans found shoggoths, and realized that she didn’t find this shoggoth terrifying at all. It was too obviously frightened to be frightening.
♪I can make something soft,♪ she told it. ♪But the place where you are is the place where I make food. May I come closer?♪
♪Yes.♪
She got to her feet, moved with deliberate slowness into the kitchenette, watched the shoggoth slide warily to one side. Something soft, she thought. The cupboard wasn’t particularly well stocked just then, but it had several boxes of macaroni and cheese, and that would probably do. She decided to make a double batch, filled the biggest saucepan she had with hot water from the tap, got it heating on the stove.
A glance back over her shoulder showed the shoggoth huddled in the far corner of the kitchen. ♪Is there fire in that?♪ it asked, staring at the electric stove.
♪Not really.♪ She considered the creature, ventured: ♪You don’t like fire.♪
The answer came with an note of panic that startled Brecken. ♪No!♪
While the water came to a boil, she went to the refrigerator, looked for soft things. A big bowl covered with plastic wrap turned out to contain a batch of vanilla pudding she’d made the previous Saturday and then managed to forget. That’ll do, she thought, and busied herself with the rest of the preparations for a dinner for two, aware all the while of the shoggoth’s transitory eyes watching every move she made.
Finally she filled two bowls with mac and cheese, two more with pudding, and got out two spoons before she recalled that shoggoths probably didn’t use silverware. Two glasses of water completed the meal. Lacking a table, she set the dishes on the floor not far from where the shoggoth waited, sat on the carpet across from it, and whistled, ♪It’s ready.♪
The shoggoth slid onto the carpet, approached the bowls and the glass, and gave her a wide-eyed look. She motioned at the food, then picked up her own bowl of mac and cheese and started eating. That was apparently the encouragement the shoggoth needed; a pseudopod flowed out, scooped up a little of the mac and cheese, enfolded it.
♪It is good,♪ it whistled.
Brecken smiled and nodded, then realized that the shoggoth probably couldn’t interpret that, glanced at the lexicon, and whistled back, ♪I’m glad.♪
♪It is very good.♪ The shoggoth paused, and then slid forward and flowed into the bowl, engulfing the remaining mass of mac and cheese. When it flowed back, the bowl looked as though it had been washed. Brecken kept eating in her less efficient way, and the shoggoth watched her. After a time it said, ♪Can you only eat through that one place?♪
Brecken had a mouth full of mac and cheese just then, so a few moments passed before she could whistle an answer. ♪Yes. We’re like that.♪
♪That is so strange,♪ said the shoggoth.
She finished her mac and cheese and started on the pudding, and the shoggoth tasted its share with a pseudopod. ♪This also is very good,♪ it said, and engulfed the contents of its bowl.
♪There’s more if you want it,♪ said Brecken.
♪I am well fed,♪ it replied. ♪I thank you.♪ After a pause: ♪I will hide now.♪ It began to slide across the floor to the space under the sink, moving more slowly than before.
♪In the—♪ She couldn’t find a word in the lexicon for “morning” or “sunrise,” and had to improvise. ♪When light comes back I’ll make more food. I’ll speak to you.♪
♪I—I thank you,♪ it repeated, in piping tones that sounded dazed. It reached the gap in the flooring, slid through a little awkwardly and vanished. Brecken stared at the gap for a long while. It was only then that she realized that she hadn’t smelled the acrid scent at all.
She dealt with her bafflement by washing the dishes. When those were finished, she went to the piano, sat down, played her new etude twice, then got out an eraser and changed a dozen notes that didn’t work. There were other things she ought to practice, she knew, and more work for other classes she ought to do. Once she was finished with the etude, though, she went to the futon, picked up her copy of The Secret Watcher, and opened it.
A black and white photograph of Chalmers faced the title page: lean, hollow-cheeked, intent, the face of a medieval ascetic. The title page itself had a curious geometrical diagram on it, a pattern of circles linked by lines. She paged past the table of contents to the first chapter, “The Two Realities,” and read the quotation at the top:
There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire.
—William Butler Yeats
The condition of fire, Brecken thought, tasting the phrase. The dizzying intensity she’d felt surge through her as the bourrée finally came together felt like a condition of fire. Was that what Yeats had in mind? She filed the question, having no way to answer it.
From its first lines, however, the chapter plunged into a complex argument laced with terms that Brecken didn’t know—the doels, the Alala, the Secret Watcher, the scarlet circles, the kingdom of Voor—and the neat handwritten notes down most of the margins simply added to the obscurity, with references to books and people she’d never heard of. Brecken was tired enough that none of it seemed to make any sense at all. She ground to a halt at something called the riddle of the Alala—“Find me the place where the light goes when it is put out, and find me the place where the water goes when the sun dries it up”—and sat there trying to parse that for a while, then rubbed her eyes and paged ahead to the end of the chapter. The last lines read:
But the Alala pertains only to those beings who were part of the order of the cosmos from the beginning, those beings in whom curve and angle unite. There are other beings who were never part of that order, the creations of the created. Such are the shoggoths spoken of in a certain very ancient Arabic book, the formless ones that dwell in darkness, and such also are the dread beings that guard the threshold between curved and angular time, which will be considered later. Yet there is one greater than these: Nyogtha, The Thing That Should Not Be. Of him much will be said in a later chapter.
That left Brecken completely at sea. She turned to the index, trying to find everything it had to say about shoggoths, but the words blurred together as she tried to make sense of them, and after a few minutes she closed the book, put it in the bottom drawer of her dresser so that Jay wouldn’t see it if he happened to come over, and went to bed.
THE NEXT MORNING, AS the rising sun gilded the upper half of Hob’s Hill, she put her flute away after a solid hour of practice, got a double batch of oatmeal cooking, paged through the lexicon again, and whistled a greeting down toward the space under the sink. A few moments passed, faint sounds came from below, and then the shoggoth flowed up from the crawlspace and sat on the linoleum, considering her.
It really wasn’t that horrible to look at after all, she decided, and the only scent she noticed from it was faint and not unpleasant, a little like the odor of Brie cheese. Its outer layer caught stray glints of sunlight and turned them into dim opalescent splashes. Where the light was clear, she could see the shoggoth’s eyes sliding out from some deeper layer, among the clusters of black bubbles, and returning again. ♪Food will be ready soon,♪ she told it.
♪I thank you,♪ it replied. ♪Today my name is Leaf On Wet Stone.♪
Brecken took that in. ♪Is it different every day?♪
The shoggoth seemed nonplussed. ♪Yes, of course.♪ Then: ♪Do you keep the same name from one day to another?♪
♪Yes, of course, ♪ Brecken whistled, startled by the question. A moment’s reflection, though, left her doubting that matters were all that obvious. ♪Each of us gets a name when—♪ There was no word for “born” in Chalmers’ notes, so she improvised again. ♪When we start being. It isn’t changed very often after that.♪
♪How very strange,♪ said the shoggoth.
The oats got to the right consistency, and Brecken dressed them with brown sugar and half-and-half and dished them into bowls. Those, coffee for her, and water for her guest—what effect caffeine might have on a shoggoth wasn’t something she wanted to find out the hard way—went on the carpet. The shoggoth sat closer to her this time. As before, it waited for her to begin eating, tasted the food tentatively, and then engulfed it. ♪It is very good.♪
♪I can make some more for you if you want,♪ Brecken whistled.
♪I thank you, but—but I am well fed now.♪ The piping tones wavered, as though some strong emotion moved through the creature.
They finished the meal in silence. As she sipped her coffee, Brecken thought of something she’d been wondering since the shoggoth’s first appearance on the kitchenette floor. ♪Can I ask a question?♪
♪Yes.♪
♪I have—♪ The lexicon didn’t provide her with the word for “read” or anything else having to do with writing, and she decided that finding out whether shoggoths were literate could wait for another time. ♪I have heard that your people are big.♪ She gestured at the walls of the apartment. ♪Big enough to fill this place. ♪
♪You have heard of the greater ones.♪ The shoggoth considered her through pale eyes. ♪My people are not among those, or even among those of middle size. We were small even in the very old times, before the times of hiding, and I am small among my broodmates. We—♪
All at once the shoggoth began to tremble, and a sharp bitter scent tinged the air. In a sudden shrill tone: ♪Why do I say we? There is no we. They are all dead, all dead, I have seen the flames and tasted the smoke of their burning, and I am alone, alone, alone—♪
Appalled, Brecken reached out to touch the shoggoth: an act of raw instinct, as though she’d meant to comfort a terrified child. An instant later she caught herself, but by then her hand rested on it. It felt as cool and dry as the skin of a snake, as smooth and shapeless as water.
Eight eyes popped open, stared at her. For a frozen moment neither of them said anything. Then, for want of anything else, Brecken whistled, ♪Leaf On Wet Stone,♪ hoping that its name would calm it. If anything, the opposite happened; the shoggoth trembled even more violently, and something that felt like ambivalence tensed within it to the breaking point. It wanted and it feared—what?
A moment later she guessed what it might be. It took an effort to push past her own reluctance and fear, but she leaned forward, used her free hand to shove the empty dishes aside and, with the other, gently pulled the shoggoth toward her. It stiffened, and then the stiffness broke and it flowed to her, draped itself heavily over one of her folded legs like a shapeless lapdog, settled trembling against her belly and side. She made herself put her arms around it, the way her grandmother had done for her so many times, and held the creature as it shuddered.
Minutes passed and the shaking gradually subsided. Finally a speech-orifice appeared on its upper surface. In a piping low as a whisper it said, ♪I should not trust you.♪
That confirmed one of Brecken’s guesses. ♪My people did it, didn’t they?♪
♪Yes.♪ After a moment: ♪Do they hunt and kill each other too?♪
She drew in a breath, made herself tell it the truth. ♪Yes, sometimes.♪
One eye gave her a horrified look, closed again. The creature huddled against her.
Brecken glanced up at the clock on the kitchenette wall. She had nothing that day but Intro to Music Education I at 11:30, and she’d planned to devote the morning to study, but there was no reason she couldn’t do that and still put some time into comforting the terrified creature. After a few more minutes passed, she whistled, ♪Leaf On Wet Stone.♪
An eye blinked open, looked up at her.
♪If we could move there—♪ She glanced at the futon, saw its gaze follow hers. ♪—it would be more comfortable for me.♪
♪I should not trust you,♪ it repeated in the faintest of whistles, but it slid off her lap, freeing her. She turned, moved slowly across the floor to the futon, keeping one hand in contact with it, and it moved with her, clumsily, as though its strength had given out. When they reached the futon she braced herself for an effort, guessing that the creature weighed about as much as she did, but it surprised her, flowing up onto the futon like a waterfall in reverse; the frame creaked beneath its weight. She sat down within easy reach of her tote bag and books, and the shoggoth waited until she was still and then slid close, tentatively at first, then slumping onto her lap, clinging to her. A pseudopod probed the quilts, pulled ineffectually at one end.
♪Are you cold?♪ Brecken asked it.
♪No.♪ It shivered. ♪Unsheltered. I—I—♪ The shivering grew more intense.
She pulled a quilt over and got a fold of it settled atop the shoggoth, then put her arm around it. It stared up at her again with three wide baffled eyes, but the trembling gradually stopped, and the sharp scent faded out. Most of its eyes sank out of sight, leaving a few to surface and sink in a drowsy rhythm, seeming to see nothing.
As carefully as she could, she fished her copy of Fantastic Literature: An Anthology out of her tote bag, and had to suppress a laugh: was there anything in it as fantastic as the thing sprawled over her lap? Still, she opened the volume one-handed and set it on her unencumbered knee. Before she started the next item in the book, “An Ode to Antares” by Theophilus Alvor, she took a few moments to consider the creature next to her.
This is a person, not a monster, she thought. Professor Boley’s comments about the gender of shoggoths came to mind. A person, and her name today is Leaf On Wet Stone.
Brecken frowned, then, thinking of the complexities of remembering a different name for each day. Did shoggoths have nicknames? Nothing in Professor Boley’s lecture or the stories she’d read denied it, certainly, so she decided suddenly to give the shoggoth one.
Sho, she said to herself. It was simple enough, just the word “shoggoth” rounded off for casual use, but it felt right. She nodded, satisfied. Alvor’s poem waited, but her thoughts and her gaze kept drifting over to the iridescent black shape huddled against her, the eyes that rose and sank with hypnotic slowness. She blinked, thought about reading the poem, and then let her eyes drift shut—just for a moment, she told herself. A few heartbeats later she was asleep.