Speaker 1: Hm, I am the fairy man.
Speaker 2: The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
Speaker 2: the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
Speaker 3: I regret to tell you that very many American lives
Speaker 3: in love.
Speaker 1: Was heard to shut from the car.
Speaker 3: He's dead, whether he rebird to president.
Speaker 4: For four hours, people must get up and go. If
Speaker 4: I am here in the in between, to collect their
Speaker 4: spirits and carry them to what comes next.
Speaker 2: This road is not on any map.
Speaker 4: It spans the thresholds between their most forbidden desires and.
Speaker 2: Their greatest fear.
Speaker 1: All I ask for.
Speaker 4: In payment is a tale and accounting of their lives
Speaker 4: and the great temporary that is the land of the living.
Speaker 2: These are their stories. This is.
Speaker 5: The passage.
Speaker 4: It's the morning of May two, nineteen seventy, to a pleasant,
Speaker 4: crisp spring day.
Speaker 2: In Washington, DC.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a cloudless blue sky. To defeat an invisible monster,
Speaker 4: My next passenger became the monster. It was in his DNA,
Speaker 4: after all, in the very code of his nation. America
Speaker 4: was born out of resistance, resistance to tyranny, having suffered
Speaker 4: that of a king. But it took no time for
Speaker 4: the defenders to become tyrants themselves. Oppression is the byproduct
Speaker 4: of fear, a force perhaps more dangerous than any ideology
Speaker 4: or any public enemy. Fear is an infectious paranoia that
Speaker 4: in America led to a government terrified by its own citizens.
Speaker 4: My next passenger, j Edgar Hoover, built an army to
Speaker 4: spy on those citizens, an entire agency and behavior spies
Speaker 4: and thought police. He was brought up here at the
Speaker 4: heart of this modern world, born on January the first,
Speaker 4: eighteen ninety five, as if created divinely, chosen for a purpose.
Speaker 4: He believed himself to be a great defender of the
Speaker 4: American way. Well perhaps he was, but that way has
Speaker 4: frequently been fraught with self sabotage. His infectious brand of
Speaker 4: paranoia permeated the whole of American life. His suspicious mind
Speaker 4: saw a great many threats on the map. But were
Speaker 4: his actions justified? What secrets did he protect in life?
Speaker 4: And what truth has he taken with him into death?
Speaker 5: Who?
Speaker 3: Who?
Speaker 1: Or what are you?
Speaker 2: I'm here to provide you passage.
Speaker 3: Oh, I see it was my heart, wasn't it. It
Speaker 3: was only a matter of time. I suppose I gave
Speaker 3: my heart to my country day in and day out,
Speaker 3: over and over, protecting it from a world of invisible,
Speaker 3: insidious threats hiding in the dark, protecting it more than
Speaker 3: once from itself. It puts a straight on you.
Speaker 2: I'd be delighted to hear all about it this way.
Speaker 3: Please, where are we going?
Speaker 2: Well, that's to be determined.
Speaker 3: What do you want to know?
Speaker 2: Just the truth? The truth, your truth? Please go on.
Speaker 3: Most people can't be trusted with the truth. No, someone
Speaker 3: must guard that flame. You have to control the narrative.
Speaker 3: See otherwise the sacred flame is snuffed and the battle
Speaker 3: is lost before it has even begun. The truth is
Speaker 3: more valuable and precious than life itself. Did I break laws? Perhaps,
Speaker 3: but only in pursuit of a greater good, probable cause
Speaker 3: that's the achille heel of this great nation. To combat
Speaker 3: the true evil of this world, one must evolve beyond
Speaker 3: the constraints the masters of this world would impose. Public
Speaker 3: ideas of good and bad are at best tinplate rationalizations.
Speaker 3: While they may seem solid enough in the light of day,
Speaker 3: they are no use beyond the light, in the great
Speaker 3: darkness where the monster's hide. They, the public and my enemies,
Speaker 3: called me paranoid. They said, I was jumping at shadows,
Speaker 3: and in a very real way, they were each correct.
Speaker 3: They slept and woke from one day to the next,
Speaker 3: and I kept them safe, even as they fought tooth
Speaker 3: and claw for information they could never fully understand. There
Speaker 3: have always been threats, you see, far beyond the assassins
Speaker 3: or the gangsters, far beyond the reds, far beyond the
Speaker 3: hippies and the agitators and the bumbling spot eyes, threats
Speaker 3: even worse than the bomb. For no sense in standing
Speaker 3: on ceremony, Let's be off. Oh right, you want to
Speaker 3: know the truth, that's my price. Fine, I'll tell you
Speaker 3: a secret, perhaps the singular great secret. The monsters are real,
Speaker 3: thank you.
Speaker 1: So this is it?
Speaker 3: Then the car where they shut him. You know, I
Speaker 3: never liked Kenneth. His soul had an odd shape, all
Speaker 3: hard in the wrong places, all soft in the places
Speaker 3: that matter. But if, as you said, now is the
Speaker 3: time for confessions, my friend, I confess I have always
Speaker 3: wanted to ride in this car. I've seen it before,
Speaker 3: who hasn't, the slick blue Lincoln Continental nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 3: Never thought myself much of a car man, But all
Speaker 3: things considered, it's nice to ride like a president just once.
Speaker 3: Here we are at the end, and I must be dead,
Speaker 3: And so what it's odd in life? I never confessed
Speaker 3: I was an emperor of the dark, and it was
Speaker 3: everyone else who, by hook or by crook came within
Speaker 3: my domain and confessed their sins to me. Worrid just
Speaker 3: came to.
Speaker 1: Us a minute ago.
Speaker 3: President Kennedy is dead. He was shot an assassined at
Speaker 3: the intersection of Ellman Houston Street. Oh, turn it off.
Speaker 3: He wasn't the first US president gun down. Hell, he
Speaker 3: wasn't the first gun down in this century. The first
Speaker 3: in this century was done in by a goddamned anarchist.
Speaker 3: I was just a boy when it happened, and I'd
Speaker 3: been at war with radicals ever since. Did I want
Speaker 3: Kennedy dead? Of course I wanted him out of the office,
Speaker 3: one way or another. I had been director of the
Speaker 3: FBI since that idiot wore short pants. But I did
Speaker 3: not see him as some grand nemesis. He was an annoyance,
Speaker 3: a buffoon's strolling late on the stage long after the
Speaker 3: great tale began. Now his father, Joe, there's a man
Speaker 3: for you. He understood the red threat, but his coddled
Speaker 3: sons were too busy fucking their way through the society
Speaker 3: pages to bother with the business of leadership. Am I
Speaker 3: glad he died, you're asking, Yes, Yes, I suppose I am,
Speaker 3: but only in the way you'd be happy a neighbor's
Speaker 3: dog died if the neighbor let the dog bark at
Speaker 3: all hours of the night. And so we held the
Speaker 3: funeral and went about the business of grown men, keeping
Speaker 3: our fragile American experiment afloat. This wasn't my first presidential burial.
Speaker 3: One grows inured to such things after a time, and
Speaker 3: we had bigger concerns in the pageantry of presidents. Those
Speaker 3: and go to keep the American public in their place,
Speaker 3: content distracted. The idea of a president allows the lower
Speaker 3: classes a sense of participation, and with rare exception, that
Speaker 3: is all a president should or can do. The real
Speaker 3: work the true leavers of power, those are not for
Speaker 3: the common I do know why he died, why he
Speaker 3: had to be removed from the board. By that point,
Speaker 3: i'd say all of us did. I may never be
Speaker 3: sure who did it, but I do know why the
Speaker 3: events transpired. There is a a war, you could call
Speaker 3: it a secret conflict, one that began far before my time,
Speaker 3: perhaps before the time of modern man entirely, and this
Speaker 3: war continuous to.
Speaker 5: Day born All Oh, no, my.
Speaker 3: Friend, no before that you're talking about. Yes, the greatest failure.
Speaker 3: The first man in space is Soviet. God, are the
Speaker 3: reds crewed? We almost went public with all their earlier failures.
Speaker 3: It would have been more accurate for them to say
Speaker 3: the Gagarum boy became the first man to reach space.
Speaker 3: In return, and this still would not have been entirely
Speaker 3: the truth. The Soviets had that hammer on their flag
Speaker 3: for a reason. From their perspective, every problem looked like
Speaker 3: a nail since the days of their first empires. They
Speaker 3: knew they had only two resources. They're vast wastes of
Speaker 3: job graphy and a surplus of people. And that is
Speaker 3: not a condemnation. In fact, I would say this is
Speaker 3: the genius of the Soviet mind. One almost has to
Speaker 3: envy them, and I grant them no small measure of
Speaker 3: grudging respect in this regard. Where we in the West
Speaker 3: hold countless meetings and debates and protests and polls, the
Speaker 3: Soviet throws bodies at the problem, from the Ottomans to Napoleon,
Speaker 3: from Kursk to Stalingrad. The Russians never shied from giving
Speaker 3: the butcher its due. I would never say that publicly,
Speaker 3: of course, Yet we owe much of the modern world
Speaker 3: to their unspeakable capacity for sacrifice. We in the West
Speaker 3: pay for our sins in gold and treasure. The Soviet,
Speaker 3: the Russian, has always and only paid in blood. So
Speaker 3: it would come as no surprise they did the same
Speaker 3: when we finally set our sights upon the stars, and
Speaker 3: we spent a great deal of time covering for them
Speaker 3: in those early days. That might sound odd, no, given
Speaker 3: how we all fought with such desperation to helm the
Speaker 3: wheel of power. But let me tell you this, Ferryman. Secrecy, secrecy,
Speaker 3: and revelation are addictive. Learning one's secret only accelerates the
Speaker 3: effort to learn the next, and eventually, inexorably, that addiction
Speaker 3: leads to ruin. We listen, we learn, we use. We
Speaker 3: weaponized our knowledge then, as now to our advantage we
Speaker 3: knew we must. It would, after all, have been naive
Speaker 3: to assume others were not doing the same. I already
Speaker 3: possessed the libraries and the post. I had the fingerprints
Speaker 3: and the telephone records, and a vision of a world
Speaker 3: wherein every person of my reckon or not would submit
Speaker 3: their secrets to me such that I could further protect
Speaker 3: them from themselves. I suppose this may seem small to you,
Speaker 3: but you must understand control is more than a lock.
Speaker 3: It is also a key. We sought and seek to
Speaker 3: build not only the doorknob, but the door itself, the
Speaker 3: house in which the door is held, the world upon
Speaker 3: which that house is built. In this, at least, those
Speaker 3: who come after me will find further success. They must.
Speaker 3: We had made certain breakthroughs in this endeavor, and even
Speaker 3: then our eyes extended across the globe, we encountered strange,
Speaker 3: disturbing wonders, eye witness infernal, inexplicable things. Our sources indicated
Speaker 3: that during the years leading up to Gagarin's flight, fully
Speaker 3: half of all the Red Space launches made with failure,
Speaker 3: usually on the launch powder within seconds after ignition. This
Speaker 3: reminded me of a game my Soviet counterparts played during
Speaker 3: the Wars. They crouched in bunkers, surrounded by enemies and horror,
Speaker 3: and they knew surviving the bombs would only consign them
Speaker 3: to the slower death of sarvation. Some had survived Leningrad,
Speaker 3: do you understand. So they would put a single precious
Speaker 3: bullet in a revolver and spin the chamber. They took
Speaker 3: turns putting the gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.
Speaker 3: The winner, they reasoned, wouldn't have to stick around and
Speaker 3: see what happened next. The Red space program naturally echoed
Speaker 3: those lessons. I do not know how many of those
Speaker 3: so called cosmonauts got shot out into the darkness. Most
Speaker 3: were probably farm boys in the beginning. I imagine they
Speaker 3: used prisoners and slaves. It's what I would have done.
Speaker 3: I do know the Reds did not plan for most
Speaker 3: of them, perhaps any of them, to return. It was
Speaker 3: all for the greater good of the Union, as they
Speaker 3: saw it, and our side. We could not have a
Speaker 3: word of this reaching the American public. Again, one secret
Speaker 3: leads inevitably to the next. Some young men in Italy
Speaker 3: caught panicked signals from late stage experiments. As always, the
Speaker 3: Reds grew sloppy in their desperation. We tracked the signals
Speaker 3: as well. Of course, in strange quiet moments, I wondered, why,
Speaker 3: what could it be, this unknown thing to make the
Speaker 3: Russians throw bodies at the sky. Those poor Italian boys
Speaker 3: little more than children. They did not understand the stakes
Speaker 3: the sheer depth of the waters in which they unknowingly swam.
Speaker 3: Two things became clear. First, it is best to discredit
Speaker 3: rather than to suppress information that.
Speaker 2: The first of the state is to recognize its enemy.
Speaker 3: Make a man a crackpot, and to the public he
Speaker 3: is only another countless lunatic. Yet bring him down too harshly,
Speaker 3: too visibly, and he becomes a martyr. His story, like
Speaker 3: an infection, grows contagious. He can spread across the world.
Speaker 3: One must poison the tree at the root, if possible,
Speaker 3: the seed. This was not an original sin. Yet our
Speaker 3: second learning informed everything. After these cosmonauts were returning to Earth,
Speaker 3: and they did not return alone, I hand delivered a
Speaker 3: package to the Kennedy boy, no guards in person. I
Speaker 3: wanted to see his face. I wanted to watch his
Speaker 3: face as he learned the horror of it all. I
Speaker 3: feel an almost sexual thrill even now at the memory
Speaker 3: of his ashen expression. We had little success placing assets
Speaker 3: behind the iron curtain. Luckily, our British friends were old
Speaker 3: hands at the game, and so it was they who
Speaker 3: first brought us whispers. This is how it always starts
Speaker 3: nothing more than rumor's third hand gossip. By the time
Speaker 3: the Brits reached out to us, they had lost a
Speaker 3: baker's dozen of agents. Each disappeared without a trace, somewhere
Speaker 3: in that Red country. I did not understand the signals.
Speaker 3: The intelligence did not square with anything I had encountered previously.
Speaker 3: That I can admit. I wasn't sure at first what
Speaker 3: we were seeing. Cities simply vanished. There were stories again
Speaker 3: at that point, only stories of the Reds putting whole
Speaker 3: villages to flame, every man, woman, child, animal and building.
Speaker 3: By this time we had the Corona satellite program. This
Speaker 3: initiative gave us eyes across the world. We did not
Speaker 3: tell our British friends our game had rules, but with
Speaker 3: their corroborating information, we examined those blurred satellite photographs. Anew
Speaker 3: villages in the hinterlands of the USSR were there one
Speaker 3: day and gone the next. At first, these areas simply disappeared.
Speaker 3: Later we would learn this meant the Reds were burying
Speaker 3: the rubble. As things got out of hand. The Soviets
Speaker 3: grow sloppy, they always did. By the next year, you
Speaker 3: could see patches of black on the snow visible from
Speaker 3: lo low Earth orbit, smudgy streaks of it, as if
Speaker 3: someone had rubbed charcoal across a blank canvas. I could
Speaker 3: sense in these strange aerial rorschaks a growing desperation. And
Speaker 3: then we found it. The British sent us a short
Speaker 3: piece of film smuggled from rural Kazakh country, and god
Speaker 3: knows how they got a hold of it. The Russian
Speaker 3: satellites were landing, but what came out of them was
Speaker 3: not a surviving cosmonaut. I am not a man given
Speaker 3: to exaggeration, so I will not attempt to describe the
Speaker 3: entity as more than what I witnessed in that footage.
Speaker 3: The film appeared to be from a type of motion
Speaker 3: camera common to Soviet propaganda arms. It is reasonable to
Speaker 3: assume the Reds recorded this footage for release only after
Speaker 3: they had successfully returned a man from space, so this
Speaker 3: must have been a recording of the first such attempt.
Speaker 3: From what we could gather after consulting with several American experts,
Speaker 3: the entity appeared to be some mixture of marine invertebrate
Speaker 3: and what we hung this world would recognize as fungi.
Speaker 3: We pulled in a few disgraced micologists leveraging evidence of
Speaker 3: their political or sexual leanings. One man speculated the entity
Speaker 3: reminded him of the Amanita Bisporeghera, a type of puffball
Speaker 3: mushroom known amid enthusiasts as the Destroying Angel. Oddly appropriate,
Speaker 3: we later terminated each civilian with knowledge of the film.
Speaker 3: I explained the situation to the Kennedy boy in a
Speaker 3: low voice as he watched the clip. I informed him
Speaker 3: we had consulted with the best minds on offer and
Speaker 3: ensured they would not pass their knowledge on to our rivals.
Speaker 3: I took great pains to emphasize what we must assume.
Speaker 3: We were unprepared. Britain owned the pieces of the puzzle
Speaker 3: we were now attempting to solve, which meant the Soviets
Speaker 3: must likewise be much further along. He did not listen.
Speaker 3: Presidents never do. Instead, the fool, he asked how many
Speaker 3: casualties were projected. I gave him rough estimations for each landing,
Speaker 3: summarizing a ballpark total. He demanded we contact our colleagues
Speaker 3: on the other side of the curtain through the usual
Speaker 3: tensely official channels. The idiot, as if I had not
Speaker 3: already bypassed the silly, gelded routes. I demurred. He directed
Speaker 3: us to play the clip again. It lasts all of
Speaker 3: forty three seconds. I noted, we must also assume the
Speaker 3: British had likely only given us part of the recording.
Speaker 3: That is what I would have done. And still we
Speaker 3: played it again and again, simply sat there staring. By
Speaker 3: this point in the evening, he had already consumed his
Speaker 3: regimen of dope and pharmaceuticals, so I have no real
Speaker 3: idea what he was thinking, but at least he watched.
Speaker 3: I then offered him a folder of older photographs, combined
Speaker 3: with several obscure academic works on early Sumerian astronomy that
Speaker 3: had in the past few months acquired a new and
Speaker 3: terrifying relevance. The academics responsible had all passed away long
Speaker 3: ago or been safely imprisoned in particular asylums, where they
Speaker 3: drew with their own shit and blood, the same obscure
Speaker 3: constellations over and over again along the fabric of their
Speaker 3: padded walls. The Kennedy boy pushed these documents to one side.
Speaker 3: He demanded play the footage again, this time without sound.
Speaker 3: In the last few seconds before the camera falls to
Speaker 3: the ground. You can see the fungal growths burst, dispersing
Speaker 3: some sort of spore. As it ends to the right
Speaker 3: of the frame, you see what I imagine to be
Speaker 3: the cameraman's forearm sprouting similar growths to those of the
Speaker 3: the entity emerging from the craft. The Kennedy boy sat silent,
Speaker 3: and I let that silence ride out between us, the
Speaker 3: horrors of the film casting silver shadows across his haggard
Speaker 3: face in the darkness. We have to go public, he said,
Speaker 3: and would brook no descent. The President is the President
Speaker 3: and his word is law. I knew then, with some
Speaker 3: small measure of regret, this boy will die. We all knew.
Speaker 3: We all knew there was something up there. I had
Speaker 3: long since contacted my friends over the curtain. They gave
Speaker 3: no reply. The space race continued, satellites seemed to hold
Speaker 3: no issue. Whatever it might be, this thing, this entity
Speaker 3: out there in the ink. It seemed solely interested in
Speaker 3: our species, and the Reds, may God damn them, once again,
Speaker 3: threw bodies at the problem. To this day, I'm not
Speaker 3: sure what they did to contain the gagar and entity,
Speaker 3: nor to what degree it cooperated. Before everything collapsed. Our
Speaker 3: own program, the human element of it had always been
Speaker 3: a sham. As we took every opportunity to sabotage those endeavors.
Speaker 3: We were like children standing on a shoreline emptying an
Speaker 3: ocean with buckets. Corona satellites failed, each Western asset passed
Speaker 3: the curtain, one by one disappeared. Our few remaining scholars
Speaker 3: tore their eyes out and ate them rather than read
Speaker 3: the reports from the astronomers, who had earlier eaten their tongues,
Speaker 3: removed their eyelids and pulled their teeth. The astronomers no
Speaker 3: longer spoke. They rolled their teeth on the ground like dice.
Speaker 3: They bowed at strange times toward unknowable directions. Our special
Speaker 3: little asylum reached full occupancy. Eventually we burned the these
Speaker 3: asylums to the ground, with those poor academics inside, anything
Speaker 3: to stop the chanting. On April twelfth, nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 3: the body of Yuri Gagarin returned, seemingly whole and unharmed.
Speaker 3: But Gagarin and the entity were one. Later we would
Speaker 3: learn we were not the only group delving into ancient texts.
Speaker 3: Khrushchief leveraging clandestine assets in the Middle Eastern Theater, had
Speaker 3: acquired some means of communication with the entity. I cannot
Speaker 3: speak from expertise here, but from what I understand, some
Speaker 3: Eldrich dialect of Near East got through to it. Certain words, spells,
Speaker 3: you could call them, had a limited power of compulsion.
Speaker 3: It possesses something like intelligence, though so alien as to
Speaker 3: be incomprehensible to the human mind.
Speaker 5: Mind.
Speaker 3: While it obeyed requests to perform in carefully curated public events,
Speaker 3: it displayed erratic, unpredictable tendencies. For every surviving record of
Speaker 3: a public appearance by Gagarin, there are another dozen were
Speaker 3: in the entity sport, and, as one officer later put it,
Speaker 3: ate the minds of everyone within range. By the time
Speaker 3: my Russian friends replied, they sent only two words in English,
Speaker 3: help us. We were too late. The Russians had made
Speaker 3: their covenant as their own academics went insane, studying calculations
Speaker 3: and branches of physics innimbical to human thought. The Reds
Speaker 3: found a brutal, efficient solution to hold up their end
Speaker 3: of the bargain. Gulags became farms. First they exposed the prisoners.
Speaker 3: Then they fed the guards and soldiers to the fruiting spores. Third,
Speaker 3: those gods, families, as well as surrounding villages. A story
Speaker 3: about a nuclear disaster was all one needed to keep
Speaker 3: things quiet. They reportedly achieved one promise, the entity would
Speaker 3: not infest other astronauts. It was already here, and so
Speaker 3: no current use in returning to the dark Man could
Speaker 3: if it wished, go to space, for all the good
Speaker 3: it would do, say, And so the war branched two fronts.
Speaker 3: One group, led by Kennedy, attempted to create an outpost
Speaker 3: on the Moon in the hopes of guarding against those
Speaker 3: things of the outer dark. The other, our loose confederacy
Speaker 3: of scientists, spymasters and scholars, sought to kill the thing
Speaker 3: we called Gagarin. I don't know who got to Kennedy first,
Speaker 3: someone working with me or something sent by the entity.
Speaker 3: I suppose it doesn't matter.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: Many died, some by their own hand, and we could
Speaker 3: not blame them. The entity sensed you, and I'll blast
Speaker 3: her a notion away, and it whispered to you in
Speaker 3: the night. But we finally figured it out. The answer
Speaker 3: came from a suicide note. A physicist amid a seizure
Speaker 3: scrawled the equation with her blood as her temperature. Plummeted.
Speaker 3: From what I understand, her blood later caught on fire
Speaker 3: during a particularly extraordinary lunar eclipse. We learned the Reds
Speaker 3: had their own asylum program, which I had anticipated but
Speaker 3: had not at that point confirmed. Their asylum in a
Speaker 3: forgettable suburb of Saint Petersburg. Burned to the ground. After
Speaker 3: the fire, you could still read her blood driven into
Speaker 3: the stone of the ruins. We had finally found a
Speaker 3: way to injure it. I stood there in person when
Speaker 3: we took it down. The official story is a plane crash.
Speaker 3: On March twenty seventh, nineteen sixty eight. The Gagarin entity
Speaker 3: was destroyed via the detonation of a low yield nuclear device.
Speaker 3: While not successfully obliterating its physical frame, the radiation had
Speaker 3: a sterilizing effect on the creacher such that its spores
Speaker 3: could not disperse, allowing a group of soldiers close enough
Speaker 3: to eventually finish the job. Fifty brave men at the
Speaker 3: cost of their own lives. Those men whose names I
Speaker 3: never know are heroes. It spoke to me as its
Speaker 3: body failed in English.
Speaker 6: It aped my own voice the thing, the entity. It
Speaker 6: smiled that famous Gagarins smile, And it said to me
Speaker 6: I like it here.
Speaker 3: Whoever they call you, I'll see you soon. See the
Speaker 3: smile of frozen rict as a caricature held fast. I
Speaker 3: watched it burn, and I wondered as I watched what
Speaker 3: had spoken? Was it me? Why did it speak in
Speaker 3: my voice? Was it in my thoughts? Had it eaten
Speaker 3: my mind as it had countless others? Ironoia again, my
Speaker 3: critics will say from their safe, smug, warm and ignorant fiefdoms.
Speaker 3: Yet the pawn mocks the movements of the bishop, forges
Speaker 3: forward one step at a time, and never sees the
Speaker 3: chessboard from above. I've thought about that moment a great deal.
Speaker 3: Can you be haunted by a moment? Can it become
Speaker 3: a ghost all its own? I believe it can. I
Speaker 3: have labored with middling success to save mankind from that
Speaker 3: dark forest. I spent years reading, researching what the thing
Speaker 3: might have pinned, what it wanted.
Speaker 5: What it wants? And I have failed.
Speaker 3: This is my confession. Each time a new launch occurred,
Speaker 3: I trembled in the night, and so, arriving at the darkness,
Speaker 3: now I must consign myself to that great majority. I
Speaker 3: hope my last thought will be of something kind and
Speaker 3: not the damning certainty that kept me away from the
Speaker 3: night sky for more than a decade. We are truly
Speaker 3: not alone. The monsters are real one day, one year,
Speaker 3: one century of the next. This will be our ruin
Speaker 3: no time like the present, I suppose, no stars, no purgates,
Speaker 3: whereas the you know, the heaven, the hell.
Speaker 2: All of that seems h this is your stop.
Speaker 3: You're just going to leave me here, of all the
Speaker 3: goddamn things. M hm.
Speaker 2: No, I told you, little liber I told you I
Speaker 2: will see soon you'll join me.
Speaker 3: Yes, I am the last line of defense. I am
Speaker 3: the great opposition.
Speaker 5: No more.
Speaker 2: You are now an extension, you one of a million
Speaker 2: hungry tenders.
Speaker 3: No, no, take me back, driver.
Speaker 1: Everything depends on.
Speaker 4: Perhaps Hoover was merely responding and real time to marvelous
Speaker 4: threats beyond human understanding. Perhaps he was mankind's great savior.
Speaker 4: He certainly believed that the numbers who died needlessly, both
Speaker 4: in service to Gagarin's monster and those in service to
Speaker 4: Hoover's mad desire to win, may beg to differ, as
Speaker 4: did all of the others who faced him and lost. Well,
Speaker 4: it's uh, it's not for me to judge. It is
Speaker 4: merely my job to carry him on to the next
Speaker 4: realm and listen to his passage.
Speaker 7: The Passage stars Dan Fogler as the Ferryman. This episode
Speaker 7: features Stuart Skelton as Jay Edgar Hoover. Written by Ben
Speaker 7: Bohlan with additional writing by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakoski.
Speaker 7: Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams.
Speaker 7: First assistant director, script's supervisor and production.
Speaker 2: Coordinator Sarah Klein.
Speaker 7: Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Casting
Speaker 7: by Sunday Bowling Kennedy and Meg Mormon. Editing and sound
Speaker 7: designed by Dan Bush, Dialogue editing and sound mixing by
Speaker 7: Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound. Our supervising
Speaker 7: producer is Josh Than. Created by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakowski.
Speaker 7: Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is a production of
Speaker 7: iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.