Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  And there was Mother on the floor, gingerly rolling back the Oriental rug, so as to raise as little dust as possible. "I never had cause or clearance or curiosity to look at the Blue files, but I heard the odd story or two, and I mean the word in its truest sense. Some said they were cases the Director kept tabs on, but would never move forward. Odd stories. It sounded like the kook file, which would've needed an annex building of its own, if we didn't purge it every couple of years, except the Director took an interest. Nobody even joked about it, but we didn't think it amounted to anything."

  Mother stepped over the rolled-up rug and crossed to the center of the small room, edging Cundieffe aside as he approached for a closer look. A rectangular hole had been dug out of the paved floor, and warped, cracked two-by-four boards lay across the gap. Mother gently pried out the first board with her sensibly short fingernails and laid it aside. Beneath, Cundieffe saw only dark and dust, and, when he stooped, his own shadow. One by one, she lifted out the boards.

  "When Mr. Hoover passed away, bless his soul, Frank flew back east to pay his respects, and kibbutz with the other old-timers, like a flock of self-appointed cardinals, over who would take over. They all liked De Loach for the job, but he was fat and happy in the private sector. At least they kept that two-faced Judas Sullivan from creeping back in. Anyhow, Frank came back on the train, still drunk and more upset than when he'd left. He came back, bless his poor soul, with these."

  Mother leaned over and seized something in the hole with both hands, gave a grunt of effort and hauled it out into the yellow light. She brushed at the dust on it, but it had hardened into a crust, and rolled off in tufts, or not at all. It was an ordinary corrugated cardboard box, brown and unmarked, the lid sealed with flaking yellow shipping tape.

  "Frank had time to read some of them on the train, and he got pretty upset about it. He said the Bureau had acted on some of the cases, or passed them on to other agencies who did the dirty work. Others they ignored completely, and those were the worst.

  "It was the worst thing in the world for your father, Martin. If they were true, if any of it was true, it was the smoking gun the Director's enemies had hunted high and low for to ruin him, or, failing that, his legacy. The bleeding heart liberals, the civil liberties maniacs, the Reds, the race radicals; they would have torn down the Bureau, if any of it came to light. Frank was supposed to bury it all, but never destroy it. He waited for further instructions, but they never came. He passed away, bless his sweet soul, without another word from Washington."

  Cundieffe looked into the hole. It was deep, and extended under the floor, under his feet. The hole was full of boxes.

  "I waited for you to grow up, to show this to you. Waited until you had reached and secured the appropriate clearance before seeing this. When you asked about them that morning, I knew that it must be time. Frank had friends in the Bureau and elsewhere in federal service, friends who I know must've taken an interest in your career. That they sent you is a sign, but you have to look into my eyes and tell me that you trust those men. Do you?"

  He looked into her eyes, and let her see him. She must know, he thought, how can a mother not know what her child is? "You know Assistant Director Wyler, don't you?"

  "I knew him to say hello to. He was a junior agent at the DC field office, I think he might have worked with your father on a few assignments in the early sixties. Sort of a pantywaist accountant, was Frank's brutally honest picture of him." She took Martin's hands and bored deeper. She had never seen what he was, but she had always looked blindly past it into the clear heart of who he was. "What is this about, Martin? Does somebody want you to dredge up all this poison?"

  He looked back into the hole. So many boxes.

  If any of it were true—

  "Mother, how many people know these are here?"

  "No one. Frank could keep a secret, that's why they gave him the duty, damn them. He took out several safety deposit boxes in different banks to flush out anyone bad who might come looking. He put phone books in them, and they've never been touched. Martin, I only want to help you, but if someone wants you to dig these up, and use them, I don't think I can allow it. Your Father—"

  "I think there's something in one of these boxes that relates to a case I'm investigating now, Mother. I can't seem to find the information any other way, but I have reason to believe that someone else in the Bureau does know. I think they want me to find out something that can only be found here." He pointed into the hole. "I won't take anything away from here, but I need to look at them. I need to know."

  Mother Cundieffe looked long and hard at her only son, then she smiled and climbed up off the floor, shrugging off his assistance. "I'll go fix you something to eat," she said, and left him alone with the hole full of boxes.

  There are secrets, the truth of which strike you in the face and open your eyes. There are lies that sicken the soul and close your ears. After he knew not how many hours of poring through the Director's Blue files, he was further than ever from divining the difference. There was no visibly coherent filing system, neither alphabetical, nor chronological, nor regional, but as he read, Cundieffe began to gather that some system was at work, if only because each one that he opened was worse than the last.

  Very few of them directly involved the FBI, and none contained anything like hard evidence. Indeed, Cundieffe saw almost immediately that the Director might have collected them merely because they almost invariably implicated one or another of his rivals' agencies, particularly the Pentagon and the OSS under his archenemy, "Wild Bill" Donovan. They were chiefly hearsay statements taken from unnamed witnesses about events which allegedly took place several years before, if at all. The Director's crime was only one of collecting such filth, of compounding it and consecrating it in secrecy. Worse, he had laid it at the door of the Cundieffe household, branded them the custodians of a body of apocryphal conspiracy theories a thousand times more venomous than the naïve accusations leveled by the most radical of revisionists. No wonder the name of Frank Cundieffe was expunged from all histories of the FBI. No wonder his mutant, eunuch son had been anointed the heir to a secret greater and more terrible, and invited inside it. The keeping of terrible secrets ran in his blood. His first reaction was to burn them all, but as the hammering of atrocities beat him into numb submission, stained his fingers and strained his underpowered eyes, he knew he would hide them again. If lies they were, the Bureau would yet be rocked by their assembly, and the Director's memory would be tarred anew with a lunatic brush; but if they were true, if there was the least atom of truth in any of the tens of thousands of brittle, yellowed foolscap typewritten sheets, the Bureau would only be the first to fall, and the nation, the world, would plunge into anew Dark Age.

  There was the account of the raids on the Massachusetts town of Innsmouth in 1928, of seven hundred American citizens executed and buried in quicklime-seeded mass graves, and three hundred more shipped to the nameless stockade at Ft. Avon in Florida—where seventy-one years later, they would imprison Sgt. Storch.

  There were the accounts of cattle mutilations, and worse—human mutilations—of the bodies of unidentifiable men and women, undocumented "hillfolk" in the Appalachian mountain ranges, and illegal immigrants in the badlands of the Southwest. Hundreds of them turning up over decades, found on or near remote mountaintops, or snarled in trees as if dropped from a great height. Their brains and other vital organs removed by a surgical procedure that left no wounds. Others wandered down out of the hills speaking in strange tongues or not at all, and medical examinations disclosed metal shrapnel lodged in their skulls, but laid out in purposeful patterns that a modern examiner might have recognized as computer circuitry.

  There was the tale of the centuried graveyard in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, that was excavated to make way for a golf course in 1954, and the excavation engineer's hysterical allegations that all the graves were empty, plundered by burrowers from below. The FBI had been notified because one of the tunnels
under the cemetery crossed the state line and emerged in a cemetery in Blackstone, Massachusetts, three miles away. Along the way, the distressed engineers claimed to have found proof of a cult of cannibal grave-robbers who had thrived for generations beneath the New England soil. The engineers gave up trying to explore the full extent of the tunnels after five of their number disappeared.

  There was the Livermore Laboratories researcher who approached the DIA in 1966 with a project proposal which would seek to scientifically duplicate the paranormal process known as remote viewing, a psychic wild goose pursued for years by the KGB and GRU in the Soviet Union. By bringing to bear certain resonant magnetic frequencies on a sensitive human mind, the researcher theorized, it would be possible to see across vast distances via magnetic "ley" lines, and even through time. The Pentagon cautiously invested in the project, only to bury it and disavow all affiliation with the researcher after three of his staff were "fatally consumed" in an unexplained accident which left the researcher raving about the "ethereal parasites" that coexisted with our own universe, and which his remote viewing project had made manifest.

  So many others, some fat as the national budget, others only a few crumbling documents with most of the names, places and dates blacked out: disappearances, discoveries, accounts of phenomena and of crimes that exploded all faith, if they were not cunningly constructed fictions. Cundieffe stopped reading them after the tenth or so, and rifled through box after box, studying only the curled typewritten labels on each file before shoving them too roughly back into the hole. Anger collected in his jaw, short sharp breaths cramped his chest and fogged his glasses. Sweat dripped off his crumpled brow and swelled the mummified papers, and though the arid chill of the night never quite seeped into the sealed secret room, Cundieffe shook with a cold that came down out of the dark between the stars.

  It was somewhere in the middle of the ninth box that his fingers fell on a file entitled, DR. LUX/STATEMENT OF ANON. FBI INFORMANT #28269-A-01090-D/5-16-67/Director's Eyes Only.

  With trembling hands, he opened it. He found only a single typewritten memo addressed to Associate Director Clyde Tolson, and a photograph. The file folder was creased and cracked as if it once held a much larger report. The memo merely introduced the report, and advised the Associate Director that "no corroborating evidence has been collected, but this is hardly surprising, given the extreme level of security in the institution concerned. But I feel it merits the Director's attention, primarily because of its improbability, if only to forewarn him to quash with authority any rumors that might reflect badly on the Bureau, should any part of it come to light."

  The statement alleged a secret murder of a key Pentagon scientist committed in 1954 by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon overseers of the atomic weapons programs. The victim, known only by code name for the duration of his work with Manhattan and subsequent atomic weapons projects, was only identified by a photograph. Interviews and an intensive secret review of the personnel files at Los Alamos failed to determine that he ever existed or worked for the project, let alone that he was murdered. The writer noted that he never would have passed the item on to the Director, if not for the peculiar death of the anonymous FBI informant, a security handler recently retired from the Los Alamos laboratories, within days of recording his statement.

  The photograph was a crumbling copy of the one that had appeared in his office. A blue pen—it could only be the Director's—had circled Dr. Keogh.

  I had occasion to know Dr. Lux as well as anyone at Los Alamos, outside the inner circle of scientists, the "bomb makers." They hated to be called that, they preferred their official titles, which made them feel like they were solving the world's problems. It was part of my duties to watch them, especially the marginal ones like Lux, but as they have no direct bearing on the issue at hand, I decline to go into specifics about them. There are still too many above ground to be declassified. But the world needs to know about this. It needs to know the price it's paid, what we've become.

  When Oppenheimer got the go-ahead to start recruiting for the project, there was no Red- baiting going on, we just needed the brightest minds, and fast. To slay the dragon, we needed a magic sword. Oppenheimer himself was questionable, and his brother was all but a card-carrying Red since the thirties. So a few pinks slipped into the wash. Out of the egghead Jews, Poles, Czechs and what-have-you Hitler chucked out of Europe, there were bound to be a few. They were all a lot of odd ducks, and even the few staunch superpatriots in the bunch, Teller and his cadre, could get pretty cold when they discussed kill- ratios and maximum yields, and such. It didn't seem to matter who they were talking about bombing, they were so in love with the challenge. So nobody at the time took particular exception to Dr. Lux, least of all the Pentagon. Not at first, not when he was blowing them down with his formulas.

  But in a pond full of odd ducks, Dr. Lux was the oddest. Nobody had ever heard of him, and nobody knew where they dug him up. Nobody ever even found out his real name. He might have just stepped down off a cloud, as far as Oppenheimer and the brass seemed to care. The top-rated rumors had him pegged as a German refugee, maybe a Socialist kraut, or even a Jew. We didn't know about all the things they were doing over there, but we knew Jews didn't figure in the plans. In any case, he had no accent when he did talk, which was seldom. Dr. Lux talked in numbers, big sweeping formulas on every wall in his house, even on the breakfast table, like he did figures to decide what to eat. That gave them fits; they had agents come in with cameras and photograph everything in the house when he left, and then scrubbed it all down. It was all gold, apparently.

  Lux was in his late thirties when he came to Los Alamos, same as most everyone else, and if he was an enigma, he didn't stand out long. He became a linchpin in Bethe's Theoretical Group, and a lot of the brightest lights gathered around him. He and a bunch of the other theoreticians hung together, formed sort of a clique, they called themselves the Plowsharers. I guess Teller and Eisenhower might've stolen the name for their half-baked plan to rehabilitate the Bomb, for digging canals and nuclear power plants, later. Bethe might've exerted a powerful influence on Lux, or it might've been the other way around. His specialty was radiation: the X-rays and gamma rays and such that come out of the A-bomb, and out of the sun all the time. He had only a peripheral role in Manhattan, but they said his work would lay the groundwork for the new post-war world. The bomb would become the doorway into a new future without poverty, without war. Ah, they don't make bullshit like that, anymore…

  After the war, there was a brain-trust bust at Los Alamos. A lot of them lost the stomach for the work after seeing their handiwork do its stuff on real live human beings. To be fair, there was less of a moral imperative; the Crusade was over, and the troops were coming home. Others went back to the ivory towers of academia and screamed bloody murder about what they'd helped to create. Those of us who were keeping score weren't surprised to see Bethe leave, but we were stunned when Lux didn't. We didn't know then that he couldn't.

  Lux became the leading light in the Theoretical Group—somebody else led it, but to be honest, his name escapes me. The Plowsharers became a school of thought around the labs, and they liked to draw lines and make people dance to one side or the other. They liked to argue. With Bethe gone and Oppenheimer and Teller wrapped up in their own cold war over the H-bomb, the place got ugly. The secrecy became a fetish, and everybody took turns being on the outside of it.

  The Plowsharers didn't keep secrets, at first. They said that all tools are inherently neutral morally, and that man decides to use them for good or ill. Rather than pursuing a more powerful bomb, they wanted the labs to turn to using the Bomb for peace, you know, make it rain on the deserts and feed the world, free energy, the whole utopian schtick. They dragged their feet, stopped just short of sabotage, to keep the H-bomb from happening. They tried to get everyone to believe that, if America alone had the Bomb, it would keep using it until the rest of the world was ashes or slave-states. Only b
y parity of annihilation— Mutually Assured Destruction, they've been calling it, lately—could the world be saved from big bad America.

  Teller split up the brain-pool and got his own lab in California to speed things along, and the H-bomb came in '52, but all the work, all the magic, still came from Los Alamos. Lux was there when they destroyed that little island in the South Pacific, Elugelab, to measure the gamma ray emissions. He and some of the others clashed loudly on the ship just before the test, put on a disgraceful show in front of the sailors.

  The Russians had just tested their own atom bomb, you see. The Rosenbergs went to the chair, and they got Klaus Fuchs, but they never did prove that any of them gave away The Bomb. Nobody dared to say it, but I don't think I was the only one who at least suspected that it was Lux, but it could have been goddamned Oppenheimer. Once you start trying to pick apart a secret, everything becomes the truth.

  But nobody pointed fingers at Lux. He loved America. He wanted to make it into some kind of Buck Rogers wonderland, but he and his associates were loyal to the core. He'd been with the labs since the beginning. He never left the Hill, never even went into Santa Fe, and if he did anything to arouse suspicion, it was so often a deliberate prank to draw out the security, that he could have gotten away with murder, once they got sick of chasing their tails.

  He went uncalled during the HUAC hearings. He wanted to come speak on behalf of Oppenheimer, when Teller pushed to revoke his clearance. They told him he couldn't. He was still top secret, and there was something about him that would have done more harm than good. He knew what they were talking about. He raged at them, but he went back to the drawing board. I don't think he was ever free to leave Los Alamos, or he probably would have, then.