Her finger went up to his lips, and she turned and walked out the back door, taking his hand and drawing him after her.
The sky was as dark as it got in Los Angeles at night. A pixelated maroon cyclorama arched over them as Mother led him around the back of the house to the door he'd forgotten was there.
At the far corner of the back of the Cundieffe garage, almost totally obscured by the shaggy row of giant juniper bushes that grew along the fence, there was a door that opened on a room Frank Cundieffe had built himself by partitioning the workshop portion of the garage. Mother produced an old key she must have taken down from the hook on the chore board in the pantry. He'd seen it so many times it was wallpaper, without wondering what it went to. Funny, that his keenly honed deductive mutant Mule mind could be so blind to the secrets of his own home.
Mother turned the key in the lock, but had to jiggle the knob and throw her weight rather savagely against the flimsy wooden door before it came unstuck. Several coats of paint that had been slathered over the doorway cracked with a gummy sound like dead, dry lips smacking. Cundieffe could smell a musty Barbasol odor among the mold and dust and stale air. It pricked his sinuses and brought back Father, and the first and last time he saw this door open.
He remembered the night he woke and went out there because he could hear his father and mother screaming at each other. He couldn't have been older than six, because he recalled the scrape of his pajamas with the feet in them on the green asphalt. Father wasn't home when he went to bed, his Father back from Washington only a few minutes, and he took so long, coming by train instead of the plane, as he always did when he visited Headquarters. He remembered the room filled with boxes, and Father striking him across the face, and Mother on his trail as he flew, wailing, back to his bed. The last time, he was eight and Father was dead, Mother mooning over the empty office, collecting pictures and a few mementos before sealing it up. There were no boxes.
He looked around the room now. There were pictures on the walls, photos of Special Agent Frank Cundieffe posing awkwardly beside the famous and infamous, mostly the latter. A plain office chair and a cyclopean wooden desk with a scarred slate surface swept clean but for a thick skin of dust, a few file cabinets, an empty gun locker. A threadbare knockoff Oriental rug covered the oil-spotted concrete floor, minus a few holes where mice or moths had chewed it up.
He looked around and around before fixing his gaze on Mother. "It's safe, here? To speak freely?"
Mother nodded solemnly, closed the door behind her and pulled a thin chain dangling from the ceiling. A venerable lightbulb flickered and caught fire, lending the room a muddy, undersea ambience. Mother knelt on the floor before him. "What do you know about the Director's Blue files, Martin?"
"Only—that they were commonly believed to be myth, part of the Official and Confidential files kept in the Director's office. When he— when the Director died, there were discrepancies over the disposition of the files, which were transferred to the Director's residence. I got a phone call the other day, from someone who told me to ask you about them—"
It came together. He was six in 1972, when the Director died. His Father was one of the Director's most trusted agents, with duties often outside the realm of legitimate Bureau powers. He kept secrets. His Father never struck him except that one night. His Father took the train, that one time. There were boxes.
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."