The Secret of the Sorcerers
BRECKEN SURFACED SLOWLY FROM sleep, feeling—what was the shoggoth word?— ♪sheltered.♪ Sho lay curled protectively around her, the quilts felt warm, and sunlight slanted down at a steep angle through the windowshades. From the street, traffic murmured low.
She stretched, kissed the nearest of Sho’s curves, and then settled back down on the futon, thinking about what had happened. As far as she could tell, she’d had no dreams at all after she’d used the Vach-Viraj incantation, and she’d slept for—how many hours had it been?
She craned her neck to see the clock in the kitchenette, let out a wordless cry and scrambled out from under the quilts. Sho came back to the waking-side in a hurry, half a dozen eyes blinking open all at once. ♪It is well with you?♪
♪Yes, but it’s very late.♪
♪I know,♪ Sho admitted.
Brecken turned to face her. ♪You let me sleep.♪
♪You were so very tired.♪
Brecken knelt and gave the shoggoth a kiss. ♪I know. It’s just that I have to be at class very soon.♪
Scrambling into clothes, getting her hair to behave, and packing her tote bag took only a few minutes, and then she was out the door and hurrying toward campus. She got to Gurnard Hall with only a few minutes to spare, dashed through The Cave and caught the elevator. It stopped on the sixth floor, and Professor Toomey got on. Breathless and flustered, she glanced at him; he gave her a wry look in response; neither of them said anything. The elevator door hissed open, and they went to the door; he motioned for her to go ahead of him, and she hurried across the room to her usual seat next to Rosalie, who glanced at her and then pointedly looked away.
Before either of them could speak, Toomey had reached the podium. “Okay,” he said, “the same drill as before. You all know quite a bit more about composition now than you did last semester, and I want to see that reflected in your comments. Any questions? No? Our first piece today is ‘Fantasia in B,’ by Marcia Kellerman. Marcia?”
By the time two other students had played their midterm projects, Brecken had ample time to catch her breath, force her attention away from the events of the night, and review the score of her Theme and Variations in G. When the professor called her up, she started for the piano, went back for her sheet music, finished the interrupted journey.
Settling onto the piano bench felt like entering a different world, a place where things made sense and the confusions of everyday life lay far off. That was common enough for her; what was unfamiliar was the distance that seemed to open up around her even before she began to play, separating her from the opinions of her classmates. She felt—there was only one word for it in any language she knew—♪sheltered.♪ Was it the work of the Vach-Viraj incantation, or something else? She did not know, but it exhilarated her.
She turned to face Professor Toomey. “Do you mind if I say something before I start?” He gestured, inviting the words, and she turned the other way, facing the class. “A lot of people in the music department here have asked me whether I’m going to keep on writing the kind of music I love, and some of them have been really pretty nasty about it. Here’s the answer.” She pivoted back to the keyboard, raised her hands, and brought them down in the first of the three sforzando chords that opened the piece.
From there the music took over. She flung herself into it, let each movement choose its own pace and tone—mellow for the statement of the theme, somber for the first variation, quick and precise for the second, hard and fast for the third. She could feel the music straining, reaching out for something she didn’t yet know how to help it grasp; the feeling was powerful enough in the flurry of fast notes at the beginning of the third variation that she stumbled and had to recover, but the fierce allegro that followed came readily to her fingers, and the rest of it flowed smoothly enough to the final cadence.
A moment of silence followed, and then the applause began. She got up, managed to remember the sheet music, faced the class, and walked back to her chair. Julian and some of his cronies weren’t clapping, but they weren’t glaring at her, either, the way they’d done earlier; they looked away, with taut hard expressions. The others applauded, and it wasn’t just Molly and Darren who clapped enthusiastically.
Long afterward, thinking back on the year when she’d become a composer, Brecken came to think of that short walk from the piano to her chair as the turning point, the moment when she pushed past her own fears and the disapproval of her classmates to start on her own path once and for all. At the time, it didn’t seem anything like so important. It mattered to her that she’d played a piece of her own, played it well, and that she’d told the others in so many words that they weren’t going to be able to bully her into giving up her music and the bright trembling joy that filled her when she composed, but her future still held so many unknowns that her one small triumph that morning didn’t feel that significant.
It wasn’t until she and Rosalie headed downstairs again and got coffee at Vivaldi’s that she realized what else had changed that morning: Jay had been nowhere in sight when she’d crossed The Cave. Curiosity made her glance around the space, looking for him, before she headed off to her 1:30 class, but he wasn’t there. She shrugged, went to the elevator.
THE DAY AFTER SHE played her midterm project, she spent as little time on campus as she could. Word of her composition had clearly spread through the music department, and The Cave was full of cold silences that even Rosalie’s chatter couldn’t break. In her orchestral arrangement class, where she took detailed notes on the proper handling of woodwinds, she tried not to notice Professor Kaufmann’s gaze as it flicked across her like a whip, or the glances and whispers that followed her all the way out from the classroom to the doors of Gurnard Hall. All in all, she was glad to return to the privacy of her apartment and Sho’s company.
It helped that an email from June Satterlee was waiting for her when she got there. Most of it was polite talk about the audition process, but it ended:
I don’t know if you’ve yet made any arrangements for a place to stay when you come up to Arkham. If not, I have a guest room that you’d be welcome to use if you like, and my house is only a few blocks from campus, which might be convenient. Let me know.
Below the signature, again, the sign .v. appeared again. Brecken pondered that, but there was only one answer she could make and she knew it. That evening, before sitting down at the piano for a long practice session, she wrote back, accepting the offer gratefully. As before, she put the answering sign .x. under her own signature.
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 it 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 boyfriend 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?”
“Sure,” Brecken replied.
“You’re the one who’s composing classical stuff, right?”
“Baroque, actually.” She faced him, noted the hint of a swagger in his posture and the way his eyes strayed to the other students he’d been talking with.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the music I love,” Brecken said.
He rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, come on,” and launched into one of the overfamiliar arguments she’d been fielding all semester—afterwards, she couldn’t even remember which one. Her protest simply brought a couple of the young man’s friends into the argument. Before long there were half a dozen of them, more, mouthing the same tired reasons that she’d heard so many times before, insisting that she had to stop writing the music she loved and instead start writing the same things that every other young composer was writing just then.
“Look,” Brecken said finally, exasperated beyond endurance. “I know that I’m going to spend my life flipping burgers or something. I know that maybe three people in the history of forever are going to want to listen to my music. I know that I’m going one way and the rest of music is going somewhere else. I understand all that, and I’m good with it, okay? So why can’t you just back off and let me write the music that matters to me?”
That got her a moment of silence. Then, from past them, Molly Wolejko’s voice:
“Because they’re a bunch of meek little conformists.”
One of the young men spun around to face her. “That’s total bullshit.”
Her answer was a contemptuous snort. “Look at you,” she said, stepping closer, hands on her hips. “You’re seniors, aren’t you? Eight on one, bullying a sophomore because she’s doing something that doesn’t just rehash the latest fashions. I bet every single one of you talks about being edgy, breaking away from the conventional wisdom, finding your personal voice, but when somebody actually does that you can’t wait to tell them how wrong they are.”
“Yeah, right,” said one of the others, in a tone of utter disdain. “Big words from someone who makes money playing headbanger trash.”
“And you’re pea green with envy,” Molly shot back, “because people actually pay to hear my music. You know what? I could make a hell of a lot more playing pop or country, but metal says what I want to say, and it says what a lot of people want to hear, and that’s what music’s actually about—saying something an audience can relate to. Not sticking your hand down your shorts and thinking that makes you special.” She walked up to the one who’d spoken, grinning the kind of grin that sets fists flying. “Not pretending that you’re better than everyone else because you go out of your way to write stuff they don’t know how to follow.”
For one cold moment Brecken thought a fight was about to start, but the senior that Molly confronted glared and then backed away. “Look,” Brecken said. “I’m not telling anybody else what they ought to compose. I just want to keep writing the music I love, okay?” She stopped. Maybe it was the Vach-Viraj incantation and some trace of the feeling of being ♪sheltered♪ it had brought her, maybe it was something else, but she drew in a breath and went on. “And I’m going to keep writing it. If you don’t like it, that’s not my problem, it’s yours. If you want to yell about it, go shout at the wall over there. Who knows, maybe it’ll listen.” A motion of her head indicated the nearest flat expanse of concrete. “But you know what? I won’t—and you really ought to save your breath for someone who cares what you think.”
What would have happened if she and the seniors had been alone, Brecken didn’t want to guess, but Molly was there, her head tossed back at a truculent angle, and most of the other people in The Cave had turned to look. The senior who’d spoken first glanced this way, that, and then fixed Brecken with a cold look. “Your loss,” he said in an acid tone, and turned and walked away. The others looked around and made off.
In less than a minute Brecken and Molly stood in an otherwise empty space in the middle of The Cave. “Nice,” Molly said. “Up for coffee?”
“Sure,” said Brecken, and the two of them crossed The Cave to the doors that led to Vivaldi’s. A few minutes later they were sitting at a table in a convenient corner with steaming cups in front of them.
“Don’t let ‘em get to you,” Molly said. “Seriously. Everybody in this department who’s not doing pretentious avant-garde crap has to deal with that kind of thing. You just have to shrug it off and go your own way.”
“I’m still figuring out how to do that,” Brecken admitted.
“Keep at it,” Molly went on. “The thing is, every time you play one of your Baroque things you put their noses a couple of miles out of joint. My stuff they can brush off—hey, it’s just amplified noise, right?” She grinned. “But they can’t do that with yours. They know perfectly well how much work it takes to make a fugue or something like that come out right, and most of them couldn’t do a halfway decent job of it if they tried. Why do you think you get all those nasty looks from Prince Foofy-Hair in composition class?”
Brecken choked hard at the nickname, but managed not to spray coffee across the table. When she’d swallowed and put the cup down: “I was wondering if it was that.”
“Bet the farm on it.” She leaned forward. “Ever thought about transferring somewhere else, where they teach the kind of music you want to do?”
“Well—” Brecken stopped, made herself go on. “I’ve applied to a program at a school in Massachusetts,” she said. “I’ll be auditioning there next week.”
“Sweet. Whereabouts?”
“Miskatonic University in Arkham.”
That got a nod. “Don’t know squat about the school but Arkham’s a decent place. My band’s played a club there a couple of times.” She downed some of her coffee, sat back. “The thing is, this school is giving me what I need: more grounding in music theory and some good hard challenges to get me writing in new directions. I don’t think it’s going to give you what you need.” She shrugged. “I grew up in one of those pretty plastic suburbs that sucks the soul right out of you, and if I hadn’t found metal to do my screaming for me I probably would have walked out in front of a truck or something. My music tears the world apart. Yours puts it back together—and I don’t think they can teach you how to do that at Partridgeville State.”
“No, probably not,” Brecken admitted.
She brooded about that from time to time that weekend, as she nerved herself up to the trip to Massachusetts, rehearsed the pieces she’d chosen for her audition, and made plans with Sho for the few days they’d be spending apart. Molly was right, she thought more than once: the music I love makes the world feel as though it’s been put back together again—but how can that work when it really is just as arbitrary as Julian Pinchbeck says it is?