Episode 7: THE PASSAGE OF J. EDGAR HOOVER

or any public enemy. Fear is an infectious paranoia that in America led to a government terrified by its own citizens. My next passenger, j Edgar Hoover, built an army to spy on those citizens, an entire agency and behavior spies and thought police. He was brought up here at the heart of this modern world, born on January the first, eighteen ninety five, as if created divinely, chosen for a purpose. He believed himself to be a great defender of the

American way. Well perhaps he was, but that way has frequently been fraught with self sabotage. His infectious brand of paranoia permeated the whole of American life. His suspicious mind saw a great many threats on the map. But were his actions justified? What secrets did he protect in life? And what truth has he taken with him into death?

the constraints the masters of this world would impose. Public ideas of good and bad are at best tinplate rationalizations. While they may seem solid enough in the light of day, they are no use beyond the light, in the great darkness where the monster's hide. They, the public and my enemies, called me paranoid. They said, I was jumping at shadows, and in a very real way, they were each correct. They slept and woke from one day to the next, and I kept them safe, even as they fought tooth

and claw for information they could never fully understand. There have always been threats, you see, far beyond the assassins or the gangsters, far beyond the reds, far beyond the hippies and the agitators and the bumbling spot eyes, threats even worse than the bomb. For no sense in standing on ceremony, Let's be off. Oh right, you want to know the truth, that's my price. Fine, I'll tell you a secret, perhaps the singular great secret. The monsters are real, thank you.

Here we are at the end, and I must be dead, And so what it's odd in life? I never confessed I was an emperor of the dark, and it was everyone else who, by hook or by crook came within my domain and confessed their sins to me. Worrid just came to.

FBI since that idiot wore short pants. But I did not see him as some grand nemesis. He was an annoyance, a buffoon's strolling late on the stage long after the great tale began. Now his father, Joe, there's a man for you. He understood the red threat, but his coddled sons were too busy fucking their way through the society

pages to bother with the business of leadership. Am I glad he died, you're asking, Yes, Yes, I suppose I am, but only in the way you'd be happy a neighbor's dog died if the neighbor let the dog bark at all hours of the night. And so we held the funeral and went about the business of grown men, keeping our fragile American experiment afloat. This wasn't my first presidential burial. One grows inured to such things after a time, and

we had bigger concerns in the pageantry of presidents. Those and go to keep the American public in their place, content distracted. The idea of a president allows the lower classes a sense of participation, and with rare exception, that is all a president should or can do. The real work the true leavers of power, those are not for the common I do know why he died, why he had to be removed from the board. By that point, i'd say all of us did. I may never be sure who did it, but I do know why the

events transpired. There is a a war, you could call it a secret conflict, one that began far before my time, perhaps before the time of modern man entirely, and this war continuous to.

a nail since the days of their first empires. They knew they had only two resources. They're vast wastes of job graphy and a surplus of people. And that is not a condemnation. In fact, I would say this is the genius of the Soviet mind. One almost has to envy them, and I grant them no small measure of grudging respect in this regard. Where we in the West hold countless meetings and debates and protests and polls, the Soviet throws bodies at the problem, from the Ottomans to Napoleon,

from Kursk to Stalingrad. The Russians never shied from giving the butcher its due. I would never say that publicly, of course, Yet we owe much of the modern world to their unspeakable capacity for sacrifice. We in the West pay for our sins in gold and treasure. The Soviet, the Russian, has always and only paid in blood. So it would come as no surprise they did the same when we finally set our sights upon the stars, and we spent a great deal of time covering for them

in those early days. That might sound odd, no, given how we all fought with such desperation to helm the wheel of power. But let me tell you this, Ferryman. Secrecy, secrecy, and revelation are addictive. Learning one's secret only accelerates the effort to learn the next, and eventually, inexorably, that addiction leads to ruin. We listen, we learn, we use. We weaponized our knowledge then, as now to our advantage we knew we must. It would, after all, have been naive

to assume others were not doing the same. I already possessed the libraries and the post. I had the fingerprints and the telephone records, and a vision of a world wherein every person of my reckon or not would submit their secrets to me such that I could further protect them from themselves. I suppose this may seem small to you, but you must understand control is more than a lock.

It is also a key. We sought and seek to build not only the doorknob, but the door itself, the house in which the door is held, the world upon which that house is built. In this, at least, those who come after me will find further success. They must. We had made certain breakthroughs in this endeavor, and even then our eyes extended across the globe, we encountered strange,

disturbing wonders, eye witness infernal, inexplicable things. Our sources indicated that during the years leading up to Gagarin's flight, fully half of all the Red Space launches made with failure, usually on the launch powder within seconds after ignition. This reminded me of a game my Soviet counterparts played during the Wars. They crouched in bunkers, surrounded by enemies and horror, and they knew surviving the bombs would only consign them

to the slower death of sarvation. Some had survived Leningrad, do you understand. So they would put a single precious bullet in a revolver and spin the chamber. They took turns putting the gun to their heads and pulling the trigger. The winner, they reasoned, wouldn't have to stick around and see what happened next. The Red space program naturally echoed those lessons. I do not know how many of those so called cosmonauts got shot out into the darkness. Most

were probably farm boys in the beginning. I imagine they used prisoners and slaves. It's what I would have done. I do know the Reds did not plan for most of them, perhaps any of them, to return. It was all for the greater good of the Union, as they saw it, and our side. We could not have a word of this reaching the American public. Again, one secret leads inevitably to the next. Some young men in Italy caught panicked signals from late stage experiments. As always, the

Reds grew sloppy in their desperation. We tracked the signals as well. Of course, in strange quiet moments, I wondered, why, what could it be, this unknown thing to make the Russians throw bodies at the sky. Those poor Italian boys little more than children. They did not understand the stakes the sheer depth of the waters in which they unknowingly swam. Two things became clear. First, it is best to discredit rather than to suppress information that.

package to the Kennedy boy, no guards in person. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to watch his face as he learned the horror of it all. I feel an almost sexual thrill even now at the memory of his ashen expression. We had little success placing assets behind the iron curtain. Luckily, our British friends were old hands at the game, and so it was they who first brought us whispers. This is how it always starts

nothing more than rumor's third hand gossip. By the time the Brits reached out to us, they had lost a baker's dozen of agents. Each disappeared without a trace, somewhere in that Red country. I did not understand the signals. The intelligence did not square with anything I had encountered previously. That I can admit. I wasn't sure at first what

we were seeing. Cities simply vanished. There were stories again at that point, only stories of the Reds putting whole villages to flame, every man, woman, child, animal and building. By this time we had the Corona satellite program. This initiative gave us eyes across the world. We did not tell our British friends our game had rules, but with their corroborating information, we examined those blurred satellite photographs. Anew villages in the hinterlands of the USSR were there one

day and gone the next. At first, these areas simply disappeared. Later we would learn this meant the Reds were burying the rubble. As things got out of hand. The Soviets grow sloppy, they always did. By the next year, you could see patches of black on the snow visible from lo low Earth orbit, smudgy streaks of it, as if someone had rubbed charcoal across a blank canvas. I could sense in these strange aerial rorschaks a growing desperation. And

then we found it. The British sent us a short piece of film smuggled from rural Kazakh country, and god knows how they got a hold of it. The Russian satellites were landing, but what came out of them was not a surviving cosmonaut. I am not a man given to exaggeration, so I will not attempt to describe the entity as more than what I witnessed in that footage. The film appeared to be from a type of motion

camera common to Soviet propaganda arms. It is reasonable to assume the Reds recorded this footage for release only after they had successfully returned a man from space, so this must have been a recording of the first such attempt. From what we could gather after consulting with several American experts, the entity appeared to be some mixture of marine invertebrate and what we hung this world would recognize as fungi. We pulled in a few disgraced micologists leveraging evidence of

their political or sexual leanings. One man speculated the entity reminded him of the Amanita Bisporeghera, a type of puffball mushroom known amid enthusiasts as the Destroying Angel. Oddly appropriate, we later terminated each civilian with knowledge of the film. I explained the situation to the Kennedy boy in a low voice as he watched the clip. I informed him we had consulted with the best minds on offer and ensured they would not pass their knowledge on to our rivals.

I took great pains to emphasize what we must assume. We were unprepared. Britain owned the pieces of the puzzle we were now attempting to solve, which meant the Soviets must likewise be much further along. He did not listen. Presidents never do. Instead, the fool, he asked how many casualties were projected. I gave him rough estimations for each landing, summarizing a ballpark total. He demanded we contact our colleagues on the other side of the curtain through the usual

tensely official channels. The idiot, as if I had not already bypassed the silly, gelded routes. I demurred. He directed us to play the clip again. It lasts all of forty three seconds. I noted, we must also assume the British had likely only given us part of the recording. That is what I would have done. And still we

played it again and again, simply sat there staring. By this point in the evening, he had already consumed his regimen of dope and pharmaceuticals, so I have no real idea what he was thinking, but at least he watched. I then offered him a folder of older photographs, combined with several obscure academic works on early Sumerian astronomy that had in the past few months acquired a new and

terrifying relevance. The academics responsible had all passed away long ago or been safely imprisoned in particular asylums, where they drew with their own shit and blood, the same obscure constellations over and over again along the fabric of their padded walls. The Kennedy boy pushed these documents to one side. He demanded play the footage again, this time without sound. In the last few seconds before the camera falls to the ground. You can see the fungal growths burst, dispersing

some sort of spore. As it ends to the right of the frame, you see what I imagine to be the cameraman's forearm sprouting similar growths to those of the the entity emerging from the craft. The Kennedy boy sat silent, and I let that silence ride out between us, the horrors of the film casting silver shadows across his haggard face in the darkness. We have to go public, he said, and would brook no descent. The President is the President and his word is law. I knew then, with some

small measure of regret, this boy will die. We all knew. We all knew there was something up there. I had long since contacted my friends over the curtain. They gave no reply. The space race continued, satellites seemed to hold no issue. Whatever it might be, this thing, this entity out there in the ink. It seemed solely interested in our species, and the Reds, may God damn them, once again, threw bodies at the problem. To this day, I'm not sure what they did to contain the gagar and entity,

nor to what degree it cooperated. Before everything collapsed. Our own program, the human element of it had always been a sham. As we took every opportunity to sabotage those endeavors. We were like children standing on a shoreline emptying an ocean with buckets. Corona satellites failed, each Western asset passed the curtain, one by one disappeared. Our few remaining scholars tore their eyes out and ate them rather than read the reports from the astronomers, who had earlier eaten their tongues,

removed their eyelids and pulled their teeth. The astronomers no longer spoke. They rolled their teeth on the ground like dice. They bowed at strange times toward unknowable directions. Our special little asylum reached full occupancy. Eventually we burned the these asylums to the ground, with those poor academics inside, anything to stop the chanting. On April twelfth, nineteen sixty one, the body of Yuri Gagarin returned, seemingly whole and unharmed.

But Gagarin and the entity were one. Later we would learn we were not the only group delving into ancient texts. Khrushchief leveraging clandestine assets in the Middle Eastern Theater, had acquired some means of communication with the entity. I cannot speak from expertise here, but from what I understand, some Eldrich dialect of Near East got through to it. Certain words, spells, you could call them, had a limited power of compulsion.

It possesses something like intelligence, though so alien as to be incomprehensible to the human mind.

help us. We were too late. The Russians had made their covenant as their own academics went insane, studying calculations and branches of physics innimbical to human thought. The Reds found a brutal, efficient solution to hold up their end of the bargain. Gulags became farms. First they exposed the prisoners. Then they fed the guards and soldiers to the fruiting spores. Third, those gods, families, as well as surrounding villages. A story about a nuclear disaster was all one needed to keep

things quiet. They reportedly achieved one promise, the entity would not infest other astronauts. It was already here, and so no current use in returning to the dark Man could if it wished, go to space, for all the good it would do, say, And so the war branched two fronts. One group, led by Kennedy, attempted to create an outpost on the Moon in the hopes of guarding against those

things of the outer dark. The other, our loose confederacy of scientists, spymasters and scholars, sought to kill the thing we called Gagarin. I don't know who got to Kennedy first, someone working with me or something sent by the entity. I suppose it doesn't matter.

during a particularly extraordinary lunar eclipse. We learned the Reds had their own asylum program, which I had anticipated but had not at that point confirmed. Their asylum in a forgettable suburb of Saint Petersburg. Burned to the ground. After the fire, you could still read her blood driven into the stone of the ruins. We had finally found a way to injure it. I stood there in person when we took it down. The official story is a plane crash.

On March twenty seventh, nineteen sixty eight. The Gagarin entity was destroyed via the detonation of a low yield nuclear device. While not successfully obliterating its physical frame, the radiation had a sterilizing effect on the creacher such that its spores could not disperse, allowing a group of soldiers close enough to eventually finish the job. Fifty brave men at the cost of their own lives. Those men whose names I never know are heroes. It spoke to me as its body failed in English.

chessboard from above. I've thought about that moment a great deal. Can you be haunted by a moment? Can it become a ghost all its own? I believe it can. I have labored with middling success to save mankind from that dark forest. I spent years reading, researching what the thing might have pinned, what it wanted.

one century of the next. This will be our ruin no time like the present, I suppose, no stars, no purgates, whereas the you know, the heaven, the hell.