The Magnus Archives #1: “Angler Fish”

This review was commissioned by @Walker of the Yellow Path


"The Magnus Archives" is another weekly horror podcast, this one from a London-based studio called Rusty Quill. It's been producing weekly content more or less consistently since 2016, and seems to have reviewed pretty well. Unlike "The Hidden People," this is an anthology work, though there is a larger metanarrative connecting the individual episodes. Something along the lines of a secret organization researching the occult, with each episode being about another discovery of theirs. I guess it might be a little bit like the SCP Foundation etc.

I've got the first two episodes of the show queued up. Their pilot episode, "Angler Fish," is a relatively short (sixteen minutes, whereas most of the later episodes are between twenty and thirty) piece that debuted in March 2016. So, let's take a listen!


Moody violin intro! Moody, posh-accented title drop! Violins give way to spooky drumbeats, spooky drumbeats to silence, and then silence to the actual show. After testing the mic, a man who introduces himself as paranormal researcher Jonathan Simms. He's a member of the Magnus Institute's London branch, and has been so for four years. He's just gotten a promotion to "head archivist" of the London branch (which is sort of implied to be the organization's main office as well, but that's not explicit yet) after the death of the woman who previously held that position. No mention of how she died.

He goes into a little bit about the organization's history and modus operandi next. Which...well, it might make sense for him to go into all that, depending on who this in-universe audio log is meant for. Anyway, the Archives seem to be less like the SCP Foundation and more like the Miskatonic University faculty. Relatively small group of personnel, mostly of academic leanings, whose main agenda is to research and document supernatural events rather than trying to control or appropriate them. Simms makes it clear up front that the vast majority of "paranormal" incidents they look into turn out to be hoaxes, frauds, or urban legends, but they've found enough real things to justify the organization's continued existence since its early 19th century founding. Even if most of the investigations yield only cryptic, open-ended hints and hypotheses of the event in question, they're still verifiably real. The London Archives contain everything they've learned about every genuine paranormal event they've investigated in those two hundred years.

The archives are, at least in Simms' opinion, not in very good shape. His predecessor seems to have been allergic to modern library organization methods, or else just too lazy to go through everything and give it its long overdue reordering. There are folders just spread out across tables or crudely stuffed into unmarked boxes. So yeah, either the previous archivist, Gertrude Robinson, suffered some kind of genre-appropriate psychological break and trashed her own library, or she was just really, really bad at her job. Simms is not looking forward to fixing this all up, as well as digitizing and/or audiorecording the case reports so that they're not stuck with fragile paper for everything.

Also namedropped in passing is the Institute's current head honcho, Elias Bouchard. Probably a name I should remember.

So, it sounds like Simms is going to be the primary narrator for the whole show, with each episode being another case file he goes over as he organizes the archives. He also mentions a couple of assistants who he's requisitioned for this daunting task, who I guess will be secondary narrators. It's a cute framing device. Simms also comes across as an overbearing perfectionist who always has something to complain about; he's just been given his new helpers, and he's already finding petty reasons to be annoyed at them. This personality will probably be used for a lot of dry comedy throughout the series. His sidekicks will also do brief follow-up investigations into some cases as they go, apparently.

He also mentions that some of his previous recording attempts have had issues with "audio distortion" when he tried to use his laptop mic, and that he's being forced to use a tape recorder because of this. Some of those case files have magic protecting them, I guess, or are haunted by mid twentieth century ghosts that can possess computers but not tape recorders. Okay then!

So, the first case file to be read and recorded! Statement of Nathan Wallace, regarding events in an Edinburgh fish market, 2012. Simms mentioned that thanks to the chaos of the archives, he's not going to be able to go through them in chronological order, or really any kind of order, so each episode can be in a different time, a different place, and tackling a different monster of the week.

Nathan Wallace was a biochemistry student at the University of Edinburgh at the time of the incident he witnessed. His statement establishes that this all happened a couple of years before his interview by the Magnus Institute (so, 2010-ish), and that he's not sure he can remember all the details right, but he says he'll try to do his best.

During Wallace's sophomore year, he got piss drunk at a pub with some of his junior and senior friends, and - after a dramatic vomiting episode - decided to head back to his off-campus apartment a little earlier than the others. Being very drunk, it didn't occur to him that walking along the steep hills of the Old Fish Market Close neighborhood while very drunk might not be the best idea, and he ended up taking a nasty fall into one of the lower streets. After recovering from the fall, he decided to roll up a cigarette to calm himself down. Tobacco is good for drunkenness. While doing so, he heard a strange noise coming from a nearby alley entrance. Then, a voice asking him for a cigarette.

Here, Wallace asks for a cigarette from the Magnus interviewer. Either to help jog his memory, or just because he's having nerves. Or...maybe just because mentioning cigarettes made him crave one right then, lol.

Returning to his story, Wallace explains that the alleyway was unusually dark, even for a poorly maintained part of a very old-timey city. Beyond the entrance, it was pretty much pitch black. However, coming up to the entrance, Wallace saw a human figure standing halfway up a little staircase further along the alley, just sort of swaying in place. It looked male, but with the darkness he really couldn't be sure. Assuming that he's run into a fellow drunk idiot in need of nicotine to help with the alcohol, Wallace offered the swaying figure some tobacco and rolling paper as the voice had asked for. The shadowy figure didn't respond. Just kept swaying back and forth. Then, after a moment, it repeated - in a strangely even, intonation-less voice - "Can I have a cigarette?" Without making any movements to actually take what Wallace was trying to offer.

Wallace muses that if he'd been any less drunk at the time, he would have realized that there was something wrong at this point.

...

I'm predicting some kind of nonsentient man-eater that parrots requests for help to lure its prey closer without necessarily understanding what the words mean. Like a hunter using a bird call. Or like, well, an anglerfish.

I remember reading a story with something similar to this? I think it was something like a giant cockroach that could stand on its hind legs and silhouette its wings to look like a person wearing a coat, in the dark? Wish I could remember the name.

...

As Wallace's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he was able to vaguely make out the man's blank, vacantly staring face, and his shriveled, oddly damp-looking skin. Well...maybe not "oddly," come to think of it, it's rarely not raining in Scotland. The man's swaying became more pronounced, side to side, and seemingly from the waist rather than from the feet or even the hips. Wallace rolled and held out a cigarette, deciding that if this weirdo wanted to take it he'd have to come out of the dark alleyway to do so himself. I'm guessing that decision is what saved Wallace's life. The figure didn't come closer. Just stood there, swaying from the halfway point of the waist on up.

"Can I have a cigarette?" the figure repeated a third time. No change in the delivery. As if that sentence were an audio recording being replayed, rather than a person speaking it repeatedly.

Wallace then had the thought of an anglerfish occur to him. A swaying lure, just at the edge of the prey's vision, trying to bring it within reach of the jaws. The figure asked for a cigarette a fourth time, sounding exactly the same as the previous three. And that was when Wallace, whose eyes were slowly getting better with this level of darkness, noticed that the man's lips didn't move when "he" asked for the cigarette. The voice wasn't actually coming from what appeared to be his mouth.

...

Here, some faint, spooky music starts playing. More like ambient sound than anything melodic. It would be cheesy if it started playing suddenly, but by starting it out too quiet for the listener to hear and then slowly increasing the volume it's able to make itself felt without snapping you out of the story.

Your slowly mounting awareness of the music also mirrors Wallace's creeping realization of what he's actually dealing with.

...

Wallace then looked down at the figure's feet. It was impossible to say for sure in the darkness, but he could have sworn that his legs just...ended...right where they should have had ankles. As if the "man" were actually the head of a snakelike creature, holding its upper body aloft with its tail trailing back around the corner tucked in the dark alley.

Wallace dropped his cigarette and started fumbling for his cellphone with its light. He knew he should have backed off and run away, but in the moment he was desperate to see if his eyes were playing tricks on him; the figure HAD to have feet, it just had to! The instant he reached for his phone though, the figure vanished back up the little staircase and around the dark corner. A fast, jerking motion, like it had been yanked back by a string. When he managed to get his phone out and its light on, the figure - and any larger structure it might have been attached to - was completely gone without a trace.

He ran away from that alley mouth, and didn't stop until he was in a better lit area with some people walking around. He took a cab the rest of the way home.

After sleeping off the fear and hangover, and ingesting two liters of water and some cheap college student ramen for breakfast, Wallace resolved to go back to that Old Fish Market Close intersection and have a look in the alley by daylight. Nothing unusual. Just some old alleyways, and a cigarette laying on the pavement. Not the self-rolled kind he'd dropped, though. A Marlborough Red.

He later tried telling his friends about what happened, but they all assured him he must have just met some creepy drug addict while drunk and tired and his eyes played tricks on him. When Wallace insisted that that wasn't it, they just started getting worried for him, as you'd expect. Eventually, Wallace stopped trying to convince anyone, and kept the story to himself for the following two years until his interview with the Magnus Institute investigators. However, just a few days after Wallace's encounter, another student from his university was reported missing. Wallace didn't really know John Fellows, though they'd had some mutual acquaintances. However, there are two details that struck Wallace as highly significant, as well as disconcerting. First, Fellows was at that same party that night before Wallace left it. Second, in the photo of Fellows on the missing person posters, he had a box of Marlborough Reds in his vest pocket.

The statement of Nathan Wallace ends, and we return to Simms summarizing the report. Simms was all ready to toss this one away under the "hoax" category, but he had his assistants ask some questions of the Edinburgh Police Department, and the answers they got changed his mind. Apparently, there were six missing persons during the 2005-2010 time period who were known to have last been passing through Old Fish Market Close. All six of these disappearances remain unsolved. And, given that no one knew exactly what route Wallace would be taking on his walk home, it's entirely possible that other missing person cases in the city from that time period might have also been taken in that same area. Two of the other known victims were definitely smokers. There's no documentation one way or the other regarding the others. Also, one piece of evidence from one of the missing people was a photo she had sent to her sister the night that she disappeared. Taken on a cell phone, it was of a certain Old Fish Market Close alleyway entrance, accomponied by the caption "check out this drunk creeper lol." There is no one visible in the photo. Just an empty alleyway entrance, and an empty staircase tucked into a corner just beyond it.

Putting the photo through some contrast editing that the Magnus Institute has determined to be effective for situations like this, they were able to reveal a faint outline. Not of a man, but of a slender, strangely-shaped hand reaching out from the staircase, holding its fingers up at what would be waist level for a man of average height. End episode.


Pretty good, honestly. It's nothing new conceptually (like I said, I've read at least one story with monsters very much like this. It's also pretty reminiscent of some Dr. Who episodes, and the photo-editing twist at the end is basically lifted wholecloth from Lovecraft and Rimmel's "The Tree On the Hill"), but that's hardly an indictment. We've been telling stories about vampires and werewolves for thousands of years without them getting old; it's all in the telling. The telling here was easily good enough to sell the well-worn concept.

The framing narrative of Dr. Simms and his colleagues going through the documents isn't quite as convincingly written, and has a bit of cheesy, borderline campy, "Welcome To Nightvale" sort of vibe to it. The actual file, though, was the exact opposite of that. It felt real. Nathan Wallace felt real. His account was written the way you'd actually expect an account like his to be told.

The one detail of it that felt "written" rather than genuine to me was him thinking of an anglerfish, specifically, before having had time to think it through. Maybe if he was a zoologist or an oceanographer or something, his mind might have gone there that quickly, but for a biochemist it feels a little too much like the author talking through him. But really, that was such a minor detail, and the rest of his account was well enough written, that it only bothered me very briefly.

Going back to Simms now. Within the milieu of cheesy paranormal investigator characters, he manages to avoid a lot of common pitfalls. One problem I often have with characters from this type of series is what I guess you could call Mulder/Scully syndrome. The investigator is either a stubbornly insistent naysayer who downplays any evidence of something weird happening from the get-go and only grudgingly accepts reality at the end (and usually only until the beginning of the next episode :/), or an unhinged cloud-chaser who believes everything that a person can possibly believe regardless of evidence. Simms is a rational skeptic. He's starting this archivist gig already having worked for the organization for several years. He knows that some incidents are real, and that a greater number of them are fake. He applies exactly the level of scientific scrutiny and follow-up confirmation that I'd expect someone in his position to apply, and when he confirms the reality of the phenomenon he accepts it and writes it all down. For all that his grumpy, anal-retentive librarian self provides comic relief, he's also characterized as having pretty much the exact right skills and philosophy for the job. If I were Elias Bouchard, I'd definitely want Simms in this role, even if he isn't always pleasant to deal with. This, in turn, indirectly characterizes the organization itself, which is probably important for setting up a metaplot about the previous archivist's death and so forth.

Finally, one thing I really respect about this story was that it lived up to Simms' initial caveat: of the investigations that don't turn out to be hoaxes, the majority only yield more questions rather than any answers.

I've tried my hand at writing horror, and one of my biggest weaknesses in that genre is that I feel compelled to explore and explain everything. That's an impulse that gets in the way of the fear of the unknown, which is a more potent fear than just about anything you can actually visualize. There's nothing you could attach to that anglerfish lure deeper in the alley that would be more disturbing than, well, nothing. We'll never learn what that creature was. Or why it was active in a certain neighborhood in Scotland for five years before vanishing. Or whether there are more than one of them. What makes it a horror story rather than a dark fantasy or scifi thriller is that the monster won. Completely won. It wanted to snatch victims and remain hidden from the public, and it did. CAN you even fight something like this? Will it EVER appear in a place and time where people could be ready for it? We don't even know if it's a ghost, or a biological creature, or something weirder. Or whether its human-shaped lure was a projected hologram, a telepathic illusion, or what. Just what it did.

The "doesn't show up on cameras" thing feels like a copout on one hand, but on the other it's really the only possible way the creature could have been. If things like this could be photographed, they wouldn't be considered paranormal anymore. Monsters that show up on camera stopped being monsters when photography was invented, and so they stopped being the Magnus Institute's business.

I'm definitely looking forward to the next episode!