March 13, 2024 • 41 mins
In this gripping and thought-provoking episode of The Passage, the Ferryman, voiced by Dan Fogler (Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, The Walking Dead), welcomes a passenger whose name is synonymous with power, secrecy, and the watchful eyes of surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover, voiced by Stewart Skelton, the architect of modern intelligence and a figure shrouded in controversy, steps aboard, his presence casting a long shadow over the realms of the afterlife.
As they journey through the misty corridors of history and consequence, Hoover reflects on his legacy, a complex web of protection and paranoia, of defense and dominion. Under his watch, an agency was built, not just to safeguard America, but to scrutinize its every heartbeat, its every whisper. Surveillance became a weapon, a shield and a sword in the hands of a man who viewed the world through a lens of suspicion and control.
In this episode, Hoover is confronted with the eternal question: Was he America's stalwart defender, standing vigilant against the tide of threats, or did he morph into the very monster he vowed to vanquish, a manifestation of fear and power unchecked?
As the Ferryman guides Hoover deeper into the voyage, a moment of confession arises. Hoover reveals his greatest secret, a truth so potent and terrifying that it threatens to unravel the fabric of national security and trust. But is this secret a genuine revelation, a stark insight into America's deepest fears, or merely a self-fulfilling prophecy birthed from the depths of Hoover's own paranoia? Written by Ben Bowlin.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hm, I am the fairy man.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I regret to tell you that very many American lives
in love.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Was heard to shut from the car.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
He's dead, whether he rebird to president.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
For four hours, people must get up and go. If
I am here in the in between, to collect their
spirits and carry them to what comes next.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
This road is not on any map.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
It spans the thresholds between their most forbidden desires and.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Their greatest fear.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
All I ask for.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
In payment is a tale and accounting of their lives
and the great temporary that is the land of the living.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
These are their stories. This is.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
The passage.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
It's the morning of May two, nineteen seventy, to a pleasant,
crisp spring day.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
In Washington, DC.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
Yeah, that's a cloudless blue sky. To defeat an invisible monster,
My next passenger became the monster. It was in his DNA,
after all, in the very code of his nation. America
(02:59):
was born out of resistance, resistance to tyranny, having suffered
that of a king. But it took no time for
the defenders to become tyrants themselves. Oppression is the byproduct
of fear, a force perhaps more dangerous than any ideology
(03:21):
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
(03:44):
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
(04:06):
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
(04:29):
his actions justified? What secrets did he protect in life?
And what truth has he taken with him into death?
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Who?
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Who?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Or what are you?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I'm here to provide you passage.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Oh, I see it was my heart, wasn't it. It
was only a matter of time. I suppose I gave
my heart to my country day in and day out,
over and over, protecting it from a world of invisible,
insidious threats hiding in the dark, protecting it more than
(05:56):
once from itself. It puts a straight on you.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I'd be delighted to hear all about it this way.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Please, where are we going?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Well, that's to be determined.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
What do you want to know?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Just the truth? The truth, your truth? Please go on.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Most people can't be trusted with the truth. No, someone
must guard that flame. You have to control the narrative.
See otherwise the sacred flame is snuffed and the battle
is lost before it has even begun. The truth is
more valuable and precious than life itself. Did I break laws? Perhaps,
(06:53):
but only in pursuit of a greater good, probable cause
that's the achille heel of this great nation. To combat
the true evil of this world, one must evolve beyond
the constraints the masters of this world would impose. Public
ideas of good and bad are at best tinplate rationalizations.
(07:14):
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,
(07:37):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:28):
a secret, perhaps the singular great secret. The monsters are real,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
So this is it?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Then the car where they shut him. You know, I
never liked Kenneth. His soul had an odd shape, all
hard in the wrong places, all soft in the places
that matter. But if, as you said, now is the
time for confessions, my friend, I confess I have always
(09:17):
wanted to ride in this car. I've seen it before,
who hasn't, the slick blue Lincoln Continental nineteen sixty one.
Never thought myself much of a car man, But all
things considered, it's nice to ride like a president just once.
(09:40):
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
(10:03):
my domain and confessed their sins to me. Worrid just
came to.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Us a minute ago.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
President Kennedy is dead. He was shot an assassined at
the intersection of Ellman Houston Street. Oh, turn it off.
He wasn't the first US president gun down. Hell, he
wasn't the first gun down in this century. The first
in this century was done in by a goddamned anarchist.
(10:36):
I was just a boy when it happened, and I'd
been at war with radicals ever since. Did I want
Kennedy dead? Of course I wanted him out of the office,
one way or another. I had been director of the
FBI since that idiot wore short pants. But I did
not see him as some grand nemesis. He was an annoyance,
(11:01):
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
(11:22):
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
(11:46):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:28):
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,
(12:57):
perhaps before the time of modern man entirely, and this
war continuous to.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
Day born All Oh, no, my.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Friend, no before that you're talking about. Yes, the greatest failure.
The first man in space is Soviet. God, are the
(13:30):
reds crewed? We almost went public with all their earlier failures.
It would have been more accurate for them to say
the Gagarum boy became the first man to reach space.
In return, and this still would not have been entirely
the truth. The Soviets had that hammer on their flag
for a reason. From their perspective, every problem looked like
(13:53):
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
(14:14):
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
(14:35):
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
(15:02):
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,
(15:25):
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
(15:46):
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,
(16:11):
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
(16:31):
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,
(16:56):
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
(17:18):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:30):
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
(18:52):
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
(19:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
The first of the state is to recognize its enemy.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Make a man a crackpot, and to the public he
is only another countless lunatic. Yet bring him down too harshly,
too visibly, and he becomes a martyr. His story, like
an infection, grows contagious. He can spread across the world.
One must poison the tree at the root, if possible,
the seed. This was not an original sin. Yet our
(20:03):
second learning informed everything. After these cosmonauts were returning to Earth,
and they did not return alone, I hand delivered a
(20:34):
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
(20:56):
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
(21:18):
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
(21:40):
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
(22:00):
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.
(22:26):
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
(22:49):
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
(23:13):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:18):
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
(24:41):
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.
(25:05):
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
(25:27):
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.
(25:49):
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
(26:11):
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
(26:33):
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.
(26:58):
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
(27:21):
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,
(27:41):
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,
(28:03):
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.
(28:28):
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
(28:48):
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
(29:08):
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
(29:32):
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
(30:00):
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.
(30:20):
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
(30:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Mind.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
While it obeyed requests to perform in carefully curated public events,
it displayed erratic, unpredictable tendencies. For every surviving record of
a public appearance by Gagarin, there are another dozen were
in the entity sport, and, as one officer later put it,
(31:21):
ate the minds of everyone within range. By the time
my Russian friends replied, they sent only two words in English,
help us. We were too late. The Russians had made
their covenant as their own academics went insane, studying calculations
(31:47):
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,
(32:08):
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
(32:32):
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
(32:56):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:15):
Now.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Many died, some by their own hand, and we could
not blame them. The entity sensed you, and I'll blast
her a notion away, and it whispered to you in
the night. But we finally figured it out. The answer
(33:38):
came from a suicide note. A physicist amid a seizure
scrawled the equation with her blood as her temperature. Plummeted.
From what I understand, her blood later caught on fire
during a particularly extraordinary lunar eclipse. We learned the Reds
(33:59):
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
(34:20):
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
(34:45):
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
(35:07):
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
(35:29):
body failed in English.
Speaker 6 (35:35):
It aped my own voice the thing, the entity. It
smiled that famous Gagarins smile, And it said to me
I like it here.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Whoever they call you, I'll see you soon. See the
smile of frozen rict as a caricature held fast. I
watched it burn, and I wondered as I watched what
had spoken? Was it me? Why did it speak in
(36:18):
my voice? Was it in my thoughts? Had it eaten
my mind as it had countless others? Ironoia again, my
critics will say from their safe, smug, warm and ignorant fiefdoms.
Yet the pawn mocks the movements of the bishop, forges
(36:40):
forward one step at a time, and never sees the
chessboard from above. I've thought about that moment a great deal.
Can you be haunted by a moment? Can it become
(37:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (37:23):
What it wants? And I have failed.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
This is my confession. Each time a new launch occurred,
I trembled in the night, and so, arriving at the darkness,
now I must consign myself to that great majority. I
hope my last thought will be of something kind and
(37:57):
not the damning certainty that kept me away from the
night sky for more than a decade. We are truly
not alone. The monsters are real one day, one year,
one century of the next. This will be our ruin
(38:22):
no time like the present, I suppose, no stars, no purgates,
whereas the you know, the heaven, the hell.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
All of that seems h this is your stop.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
You're just going to leave me here, of all the
goddamn things. M hm.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
No, I told you, little liber I told you I
will see soon you'll join me.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Yes, I am the last line of defense. I am
the great opposition.
Speaker 5 (39:25):
No more.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
You are now an extension, you one of a million
hungry tenders.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
No, no, take me back, driver.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Everything depends on.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
Perhaps Hoover was merely responding and real time to marvelous
threats beyond human understanding. Perhaps he was mankind's great savior.
He certainly believed that the numbers who died needlessly, both
in service to Gagarin's monster and those in service to
(40:19):
Hoover's mad desire to win, may beg to differ, as
did all of the others who faced him and lost. Well,
it's uh, it's not for me to judge. It is
merely my job to carry him on to the next
realm and listen to his passage.
Speaker 7 (40:55):
The Passage stars Dan Fogler as the Ferryman. This episode
features Stuart Skelton as Jay Edgar Hoover. Written by Ben
Bohlan with additional writing by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakoski.
Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams.
First assistant director, script's supervisor and production.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Coordinator Sarah Klein.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Casting
by Sunday Bowling Kennedy and Meg Mormon. Editing and sound
designed by Dan Bush, Dialogue editing and sound mixing by
Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound. Our supervising
producer is Josh Than. Created by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakowski.
Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is a production of
(41:38):
iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
Hm, I am the fairy man.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I regret to tell you that very many American lives
in love.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Was heard to shut from the car.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
He's dead, whether he rebird to president.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
For four hours, people must get up and go. If
I am here in the in between, to collect their
spirits and carry them to what comes next.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
This road is not on any map.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
It spans the thresholds between their most forbidden desires and.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Their greatest fear.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
All I ask for.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
In payment is a tale and accounting of their lives
and the great temporary that is the land of the living.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
These are their stories. This is.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
The passage.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
It's the morning of May two, nineteen seventy, to a pleasant,
crisp spring day.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
In Washington, DC.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
Yeah, that's a cloudless blue sky. To defeat an invisible monster,
My next passenger became the monster. It was in his DNA,
after all, in the very code of his nation. America
(02:59):
was born out of resistance, resistance to tyranny, having suffered
that of a king. But it took no time for
the defenders to become tyrants themselves. Oppression is the byproduct
of fear, a force perhaps more dangerous than any ideology
(03:21):
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
(03:44):
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
(04:06):
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
(04:29):
his actions justified? What secrets did he protect in life?
And what truth has he taken with him into death?
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Who?
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Who?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Or what are you?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I'm here to provide you passage.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Oh, I see it was my heart, wasn't it. It
was only a matter of time. I suppose I gave
my heart to my country day in and day out,
over and over, protecting it from a world of invisible,
insidious threats hiding in the dark, protecting it more than
(05:56):
once from itself. It puts a straight on you.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I'd be delighted to hear all about it this way.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Please, where are we going?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Well, that's to be determined.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
What do you want to know?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Just the truth? The truth, your truth? Please go on.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Most people can't be trusted with the truth. No, someone
must guard that flame. You have to control the narrative.
See otherwise the sacred flame is snuffed and the battle
is lost before it has even begun. The truth is
more valuable and precious than life itself. Did I break laws? Perhaps,
(06:53):
but only in pursuit of a greater good, probable cause
that's the achille heel of this great nation. To combat
the true evil of this world, one must evolve beyond
the constraints the masters of this world would impose. Public
ideas of good and bad are at best tinplate rationalizations.
(07:14):
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,
(07:37):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:28):
a secret, perhaps the singular great secret. The monsters are real,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
So this is it?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Then the car where they shut him. You know, I
never liked Kenneth. His soul had an odd shape, all
hard in the wrong places, all soft in the places
that matter. But if, as you said, now is the
time for confessions, my friend, I confess I have always
(09:17):
wanted to ride in this car. I've seen it before,
who hasn't, the slick blue Lincoln Continental nineteen sixty one.
Never thought myself much of a car man, But all
things considered, it's nice to ride like a president just once.
(09:40):
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
(10:03):
my domain and confessed their sins to me. Worrid just
came to.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Us a minute ago.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
President Kennedy is dead. He was shot an assassined at
the intersection of Ellman Houston Street. Oh, turn it off.
He wasn't the first US president gun down. Hell, he
wasn't the first gun down in this century. The first
in this century was done in by a goddamned anarchist.
(10:36):
I was just a boy when it happened, and I'd
been at war with radicals ever since. Did I want
Kennedy dead? Of course I wanted him out of the office,
one way or another. I had been director of the
FBI since that idiot wore short pants. But I did
not see him as some grand nemesis. He was an annoyance,
(11:01):
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
(11:22):
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
(11:46):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:28):
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,
(12:57):
perhaps before the time of modern man entirely, and this
war continuous to.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
Day born All Oh, no, my.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Friend, no before that you're talking about. Yes, the greatest failure.
The first man in space is Soviet. God, are the
(13:30):
reds crewed? We almost went public with all their earlier failures.
It would have been more accurate for them to say
the Gagarum boy became the first man to reach space.
In return, and this still would not have been entirely
the truth. The Soviets had that hammer on their flag
for a reason. From their perspective, every problem looked like
(13:53):
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
(14:14):
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
(14:35):
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
(15:02):
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,
(15:25):
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
(15:46):
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,
(16:11):
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
(16:31):
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,
(16:56):
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
(17:18):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:30):
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
(18:52):
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
(19:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
The first of the state is to recognize its enemy.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Make a man a crackpot, and to the public he
is only another countless lunatic. Yet bring him down too harshly,
too visibly, and he becomes a martyr. His story, like
an infection, grows contagious. He can spread across the world.
One must poison the tree at the root, if possible,
the seed. This was not an original sin. Yet our
(20:03):
second learning informed everything. After these cosmonauts were returning to Earth,
and they did not return alone, I hand delivered a
(20:34):
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
(20:56):
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
(21:18):
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
(21:40):
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
(22:00):
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.
(22:26):
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
(22:49):
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
(23:13):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:18):
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
(24:41):
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.
(25:05):
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
(25:27):
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.
(25:49):
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
(26:11):
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
(26:33):
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.
(26:58):
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
(27:21):
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,
(27:41):
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,
(28:03):
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.
(28:28):
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
(28:48):
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
(29:08):
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
(29:32):
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
(30:00):
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.
(30:20):
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
(30:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:00):
Mind.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
While it obeyed requests to perform in carefully curated public events,
it displayed erratic, unpredictable tendencies. For every surviving record of
a public appearance by Gagarin, there are another dozen were
in the entity sport, and, as one officer later put it,
(31:21):
ate the minds of everyone within range. By the time
my Russian friends replied, they sent only two words in English,
help us. We were too late. The Russians had made
their covenant as their own academics went insane, studying calculations
(31:47):
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,
(32:08):
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
(32:32):
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
(32:56):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:15):
Now.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Many died, some by their own hand, and we could
not blame them. The entity sensed you, and I'll blast
her a notion away, and it whispered to you in
the night. But we finally figured it out. The answer
(33:38):
came from a suicide note. A physicist amid a seizure
scrawled the equation with her blood as her temperature. Plummeted.
From what I understand, her blood later caught on fire
during a particularly extraordinary lunar eclipse. We learned the Reds
(33:59):
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
(34:20):
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
(34:45):
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
(35:07):
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
(35:29):
body failed in English.
Speaker 6 (35:35):
It aped my own voice the thing, the entity. It
smiled that famous Gagarins smile, And it said to me
I like it here.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Whoever they call you, I'll see you soon. See the
smile of frozen rict as a caricature held fast. I
watched it burn, and I wondered as I watched what
had spoken? Was it me? Why did it speak in
(36:18):
my voice? Was it in my thoughts? Had it eaten
my mind as it had countless others? Ironoia again, my
critics will say from their safe, smug, warm and ignorant fiefdoms.
Yet the pawn mocks the movements of the bishop, forges
(36:40):
forward one step at a time, and never sees the
chessboard from above. I've thought about that moment a great deal.
Can you be haunted by a moment? Can it become
(37:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (37:23):
What it wants? And I have failed.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
This is my confession. Each time a new launch occurred,
I trembled in the night, and so, arriving at the darkness,
now I must consign myself to that great majority. I
hope my last thought will be of something kind and
(37:57):
not the damning certainty that kept me away from the
night sky for more than a decade. We are truly
not alone. The monsters are real one day, one year,
one century of the next. This will be our ruin
(38:22):
no time like the present, I suppose, no stars, no purgates,
whereas the you know, the heaven, the hell.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
All of that seems h this is your stop.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
You're just going to leave me here, of all the
goddamn things. M hm.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
No, I told you, little liber I told you I
will see soon you'll join me.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Yes, I am the last line of defense. I am
the great opposition.
Speaker 5 (39:25):
No more.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
You are now an extension, you one of a million
hungry tenders.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
No, no, take me back, driver.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Everything depends on.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
Perhaps Hoover was merely responding and real time to marvelous
threats beyond human understanding. Perhaps he was mankind's great savior.
He certainly believed that the numbers who died needlessly, both
in service to Gagarin's monster and those in service to
(40:19):
Hoover's mad desire to win, may beg to differ, as
did all of the others who faced him and lost. Well,
it's uh, it's not for me to judge. It is
merely my job to carry him on to the next
realm and listen to his passage.
Speaker 7 (40:55):
The Passage stars Dan Fogler as the Ferryman. This episode
features Stuart Skelton as Jay Edgar Hoover. Written by Ben
Bohlan with additional writing by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakoski.
Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams.
First assistant director, script's supervisor and production.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Coordinator Sarah Klein.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Casting
by Sunday Bowling Kennedy and Meg Mormon. Editing and sound
designed by Dan Bush, Dialogue editing and sound mixing by
Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound. Our supervising
producer is Josh Than. Created by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakowski.
Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is a production of
(41:38):
iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
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