Tales From the Black Chamber (12 page)

“As President, Coolidge was aware of Yardley's shop, which was the most secret and secretive part of the government. One day, Coolidge shows up unannounced at their brownstone at Three East Thirty-Eighth Street and asks to speak to Yardley alone. Coolidge tells Yardley he very much respects his work and his genius for codes and secrecy, and wonders if he'd be interested in doing some further outré research. Yardley says, in so many words, ‘Sure, Mr. President, whaddya got?' And granite-countenanced John Calvin Coolidge, Jr., thirtieth President of the United States, whispers, ‘I've seen a ghost.'”

“You're kidding me,” Anne said.

“Not in the slightest. Coolidge tells Yardley that, no, he is not mad. No, he is not deranged by grief. Yes, he has an excellent bill of health from his doctors. And yet, one day, staring out the window, as was his wont, he saw his son Calvin, still in tennis whites, walking across the White House lawn. Calvin stopped, turned, caught his father's eye, smiled and waved. Then he walked around the corner of the building and out of sight. When Coolidge got over the shock, his first thought was that it must have been a cruel prank. But after that, he saw Calvin twice more. Once in a deserted hallway late at night, Calvin appeared at the opposite end, walked toward him with a big smile, seemed to laugh without sound, then disappeared. The third time, Coolidge walked into the Oval Office alone, saw Calvin seated in his chair behind his desk—which the boy would never have had the effrontery to do—patted the desk, blew his father a kiss, and vanished.”

“He was obviously just seeing things,” Anne said, though with a bit of doubt in her voice.

“Like you, that was his first thought,” John recounted. “He confided in his wife, Grace, he told Yardley, who confessed that she hadn't seen Calvin, but her reaction was that Calvin was trying to comfort his father from beyond. Coolidge told Yardley, ‘I would love nothing more than to have this consolation, and indeed I shall go to my grave hoping it is so and cheered by the memory of seeing my boy laughing a few final times, but I conclude I cannot credit my eyes. I would have you find some sober, unconventional intellects and report to me on the reality or unreality of the so-called ‘spirit world' and similar phenomena. I have always assumed it is bunk, and that the Lord's plan does not allow for such things. However, given the evidence, however subjective, of these apparent visitations, I must call my preconceptions into question.'”

“Wait a minute,” Anne interjected. “This was all a ghost-hunting, spiritualist-busting sort of deal? Wasn't Houdini doing that on his own?”

“Yes and no. We don't have any records of what Yardley's first investigators found, but there must have been something that interested them because they stayed on the payroll.”

“Or they just liked the easy money,” said Anne.

“Maybe,” John said dubiously, “Though that doesn't explain all this.” He gestured at the office around them.

“No, it doesn't. So what does?”

John's eyes lit up and his eyebrows shot up. “The Innsmouth Incident.”

“The what?” Anne said.

“Good question. We're not actually sure ourselves. Coolidge visited Yardley in 1925. Yardley set up what he called ‘Section 6' of MI-8—MI-8 was the real name of ‘the Black Chamber'—on a very informal basis under his personal supervision. He declined to record the results of the investigation of the White House haunting, noting that he had reported them orally to the President. Then, in 1927, something big happened in a little town called Innsmouth in Massachusetts.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It's not there anymore,” John said significantly. “It was a ghost town by the late 1930s and sometime in the '50s, it was just razed to the ground and made into a state park and beach. Not even the name survived. But in 1927 and 1928 it was fairly big news. The newspapers reported some very substantial police or military action, complete with dynamiting of buildings, gun battles, and so forth.”

“Sort of a Waco thing?”

“That was the initial impression, except that it was assumed to have something to do with bootlegging or rum-running. Innsmouth was a very old port town: run-down, isolated, and poor. So it made perfect sense that rum-runners would be landing liquor there. There were scores of arrests, and people were held without trial in military prisons, which was a huge scandal for a while, until, apparently, the critics were actually taken to see the prisoners, after which time, they seem to have clammed up. In fact, that's the amazing thing about the whole story: everyone involved just seems to have refused to talk about it for the rest of their natural lives.”

“Weird,” said Anne, somewhat impressed.

“Very. And it only gets weirder. One tabloid, to be fair a very untrustworthy one, reported a submarine was concurrently firing torpedoes into an underwater trench behind a large reef a mile or two off the coast.”

“Huh?”

“Right,” John agreed. “Makes no sense. The story came from a drunken sailor who could never be re-located. Well, whatever happened in Innsmouth led to all of this. In the wake of the Innsmouth Incident, MI-8 Section 6 was moved to these top-secret digs below the OEOB and buried so deep in the budgets of the White House, Coast Guard, Navy, and Weather Bureau, that it's virtually impossible to detect or defund. Not that anyone's tried, as far as we know. Our budget is so small, compared to the size of the government these days, it'd be like trying to find three particular grains of rice in China.”

“We're below the Old Executive Office Building?”

John nodded. “We're below the sewers in the bedrock that the OEOB's basement is sitting on. Those brick tunnels you saw outside the door are a further sub-level of the old Washington sewer system that no longer carries water.”

“Okay, go back to Innsmouth. What happened?” Anne no longer felt confused or overwhelmed, just fascinated.

“To be honest, we don't know. There exists in our archives a very, very large file on it. It is, however, sealed and can only be opened with the signature of the President of the United States. Given that Coolidge was, as far as we know, the last president with direct knowledge of us, it's unlikely that any president will be ordering the file opened anytime soon.”

“Why don't you just open it?” Anne asked.

“Hey, we're law-abiding citizens … for the most part. It's actually been a bit of a hobby among various Black Chamber employees over the years to try and reconstruct what must have happened. There are lots of opinions, but no one's proved anything. Something big and bad definitely happened. One of our predecessors tracked down the Navy's records, and sure enough, there is a big lacuna in the whereabouts of U.S.S.
S-19
, an attack submarine out of the sub base in New London, Connecticut, for the dates in question. And in the '80s we managed to get a line on a few of the Marines whose units, we deduced, had gone into Innsmouth. They were all really old and presumably had nothing to lose by talking. To a man they all denied having been there and claimed the story was entirely cooked up by the New York papers in a circulation war. But our men said that they were all visibly startled to be asked the question, even though they couldn't be cajoled into spilling a word. Interestingly, veterans of those units had a very high rate of suicide and commitment for mental illness in the '30s through '50s.”

“Okay, seriously, let's open the file.” Anne was almost bouncing in her chair.

“Not unless you want to go to federal prison,” John said flatly.

“Really?” Anne allowed a little wheedling to slip into her voice.

“Really,” John said sadly.

“Damn.”

“I know. So, anyway, whatever happened in Innsmouth got the Black Chamber a headquarters, a decent budget for the day, and a very broad purview to look into unusual phenomena.”

“Like ghosts and vampires and Bigfoot?”

“The standard Discovery Channel trifecta? Sure. But also antique occult books and incunabula, oddball cults, et cetera.”

Anne had a sudden realization. “So, wait, are you telling me these things are real? Vampires and ghosts and Bigfoot?”

“Yes and no. I'm sure you've heard the cliché that ‘most myths have a basis in fact,' right? Well, it's a cliché because it's true,” said John.

“Wait, I'll give you cults and maybe even old books, but ghosts and vampires having a basis in fact?! Bullshit,” Anne objected and not primly.

John waved a hand. “Let's not get hung up in specifics. The reason you're here is because you know old books. Particularly old books about magic, alchemy, witchcraft, the occult—right?”

“That's my job. And my hobby. Okay, really my vocation. So, yeah, but come on.”

“You told me you've read a lot of these books, right?”

“Sure.” Anne nodded, then took a large drink of coffee.

“Do you think the authors are idiots?” John asked in a friendly tone.

“No,” Anne answered without offense. “Just massively ignorant, pre-scientific minds misdirected by the dominant superstitions of the day. And a few genuine loons.”

“So you wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in the text, there were some lost bits of historical arcana or folk wisdom or the like?” John asked.

“Of course not,” Anne answered.

“That's what we're mostly talking about,” John said, holding his hands up as if appealing to reason, “though they can often be startling. Also, I have to say that we post-scientific minds have to be careful not to be misdirected by the dominant superstitions of the day. Like scientism and materialism. Talk to particle physicists. They'll tell you that quantum theory is flatly incompatible with materialism.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Anne held up her free hand. “Are you telling me because physicists haven't nailed down the finer points of cosmology that I have to believe in Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Abominable Snowman?”

“Not at all! Just, you know, keep an open mind around here. If you don't, it can be, uh, rough.”

“Okay, so you guys have the real X-Files?” Anne asked, smirking a little.

“No, no. I mean, UFOs? Conspiracies to splice in alien DNA? Not at all. In fact, one thing I can say is that we've never found a shred of proof of sentient extraterrestrial life.”

“But all this other stuff?”

“Maybe. Depends what you mean.” He waggled his hands.

“Okay, so like the good, monster-hunt episodes of
The X-Files
,” Anne joked.

“I guess. I never watched the show. Though the redhead was awfully cute.” He paused for a second, lost in a reverie of Gillian Anderson, then said, “Back to the Black Chamber.”

“Oh, right.”

“So, in 1927, Section 6 gets set up right here in D.C., and in 1929, Stimson abolishes MI-8. Then in 1931, ostensibly desperate for cash, Yardley writes a memoir, essentially giving away the store of America's spy secrets of World War I. There's a huge uproar.”

“So he went to jail?” Anne asked.

“Curiously enough, no,” John said, lightly emphasizing the last word. “There was a loophole in the espionage law through which he and his book fit rather precisely.”

“He did it intentionally?” Anne was confused.

“It's hard to know, but we here in the surviving Black Chamber, what was Section 6, suspect that he did it to further conceal our existence. By totally exposing the Chamber's wartime and post-war existence, he eliminated the chance that anyone else would ever stumble on it accidentally, kicking over the traces of Section 6. In fact, he may have done too good a job. President Hoover, who appointed Stimson, may never have known of us, and consequently none of his successors.”

“Wait, so you're some rogue organization?” Anne was gripped by a mild suspicion.

“Not at all.” John laughed. “I mean, Oliver North and his buddies were the Agriculture Department by comparison, but we strictly abide by President Coolidge's charter and, unless we're necessitated to break them under said charter, all the laws of the United States.”

“But
quis custodiet
and all?” Anne asked.

“We watch each other.” His eyes darkened. “And, frankly, you can't really resign and write a tell-all book. That just doesn't happen.”

“Why n—”

“It just doesn't happen,” he said, very, very measuredly.

“I think I take your meaning,” Anne said, a chill running up her spine.

“Good,” John said, cautiously and a little sadly.

“So did Yardley face, uh, consequences for writing his book?”

John shook his head. “Oh no. We're not really sure how much Yardley knew about Section 6's workings, though it's safe to assume more rather than less. He ended up in China a few years later—again, according to another memoir—ostensibly as Chiang Kai-Shek's cryptographer during the Second Sino-Japanese War, but in the course of examining some documents recently, we think he may have also been working on a Section 6 project. Have you ever heard of
The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan
?”

“Oh, heck yes,” said Anne, happy to be back on familiar ground. “One of the principal—and rarest—treatises on Chinese occultism. It's rare enough that I've never seen a copy. I think there's supposed to be one in a restricted collection at the University of San Francisco.”

“Right. Well, near as we can tell, there was a copy dating to the first century
B.C.
in the Chinese Imperial Library when it was in Peking, but it never arrived in Taipei.”

“That's impossible. The earliest-known copy of
Hsan
is first century
A.D.
”

John raised his eyebrow and shook his head.

“
Wow
. That'd be priceless.”

“Oh yeah,” John said smiling. “Our best guess is that Chiang or Tai Li stole it for his personal library, and it's possible that Yardley stole it from him.”