The Magnus Archives #4: “Page Turner”

Another episode that cuts right to the chase. Looks like TMA is going light on the metaplot for the next cluster of episodes, after setting the stage for it in the first two. Anyway, "Page Turner" centers on the statement of Dominic Swain, concerning a book that he briefly had in his possession in the winter of 2012. The interview was conducted the following year.

Going by the title and summary, it looks like we're going with an alternating monster-artifact-monster-artifact pattern. Not that this isn't a sliding scale at times (the coffin in "Do Not Open" appeared to have a monster in it, the monster in "Across the Street" seemed to be at least loosely connected to the table, etc), but in terms of primary focus they've leaned pretty strongly toward one or the other. Anyway!


Swain jumps right into the story, with a minimum of introduction and personal flourishes. He's a theatre technician who works at a number of venues around West London. Mostly doing lighting control and maintenance, but in his line of work you necessarily learn at least a little bit of a lot of different skills, especially when working for the smaller theatres who can't afford large crews.

Then...okay, turns out I misjudged him completely. The reason he started with a rundown of his work isn't because those details are important to the story, but because he wants to be sure we know that he is NOT just a crazy person. He works. He does REAL work. With his HANDS.

The defensiveness in this guy's voice during that sudden rant...I'd almost describe it as vitriolic. Dominic Swain is a pretty angry, insecure person. Or else he's just had way too many people look down on him. Not that one of those can't very easily lead to the other.

Well, regardless. That November, an actress he knew invited him to see one of her plays. It was an expensive show, and he hadn't worked at this particular theater enough to get any kind of employee discount, but he'd had an on-again-off-again thing with this actress in the past and was hoping to make it on once more, so it was worth it to him. He arrived early, and decided to spend the extra time at a nearby curio shop that he'd bought to before. In the book section, calling a great deal of attention to itself by not looking remotely like the paperback scifi novels around it, was Ex Altiora. A book bound in genuine calf leather, with a faded title that suggested age and an unevenness to the pages that suggested it was hand-bound.

Swain wasn't particularly a book person, but this volume just looked so out of place and so attention-getting that he couldn't help but be curious. This book looked like it had to be at least a century old, and possibly older. His patchy Latin background told him that the title meant "From Above" or "Out of the Heights," which spurred his imagination. The book itself turned out to be entirely in Latin, with woodcut illustrations showing mountains, cliffs, and empty night skies that gave him a feeling of vertigo. It also, bizarrely, was being priced the same as the cheap fantasy and scifi books it shared the shelves with. Swain thought about asking the shopkeeper if they were sure this obvious antique was meant to be for sale for the same price as thirdhand Piers Anthony shit, but the temptation to get away with a virtual steal was just too great. He bought Ex Altiora and almost made himself late for the play while examining it. Unusual, for him; he normally prided himself on being punctual.

The play was...fine. He wasn't really there for the show itself, of course, but the book was now on his mind along with the actress who'd invited him. Also, while watching the show, he kept smelling ozone. This alarmed him, because he'd once had to deal with a theater light that some idiot had replaced a component of with a hospital UV lamp, and it had smelled a lot like this before Swain found the problem. He paid extra close attention to the lights, but he didn't see anything that looked like a UV projector. Additionally, the ozone smell didn't seem to accompany any particular lightsource coming on, and it was faint enough that no one who didn't know what to look for seemed to be bothered by it. During the hospital lamp incident, the ozone smell had been overpowering, so Swain figured this was probably nothing.

Hmm. There was no mention of an ozone smell in the curio store. If the book is emitting that smell, then it must only be doing so at certain times or in response to some kind of environmental stimulus.

After the play, he has his date with Katherine the actress. It doesn't go so well. Seems like the spark that they had in the past just isn't there anymore. He does show her the book, though, and she's impressed with it in much the same way that he is. She's a bit more disturbed by the starry night woodcut than Dominic is, on account of it somehow triggering her acrophobia, but she mostly just concurs that it's probably worth a hell of a lot more money than he paid for it. Well, fair enough.

...

The description of the vertigo-inducing night sky woodcut is strongly reminiscent of both the spiral-table from the last episode (with the sort of hypnotic effect it has) and the coffin from the one before it (with the sense of the object potentially being able to suck you into itself, perhaps with your own unwilling participation via the hypnosis-y thing). There's definitely a shared *thing* going on here. These objects all being similar types of supernatural artifact that follow similar rules. Since there IS a metaplot, then - assuming the "Do Not Open" story isn't actually bullshit as Simms concluded it probably is - I assume this category of artifact will have some kind of common origin.

The way the table co-occurred with the shapeshifter in "Across the Street" and the way the coffin seemed to contain a prisoner in "Do Not Open." Hmm. These items all have a theme of *entrapment* to them. The table not letting you look away from it, pulling your mind in deeper and deeper. The book illustrations that make you feel like you're falling into them. The coffin evidently having a prisoner inside of it. I wonder. Were these artifacts meant to be used against monsters? Like, they seem like they're designed to imprison things. One of them had a monster imprisoned within it. Another had a monster stalking the guy who owned it, but seemingly needing to take its time and gather strength before it could attack directly.

Maybe that's what's going on in the overarching plot. A bunch of demons used to be sealed inside of these magic artifacts, but some of them have escaped and are now trying to keep the imprisoning artifacts from being used against them once more. It's a fairly weak hypothesis, but it's the best I've got based on the scarce evidence that's been provided so far.

...

That evening, after the failed date, Swain looked through the Latin text again without understanding anything besides the pictures. He thinks his dreams that night were bad, but he's not sure. The next day, he spent his free time before the evening's lineup of theater shows getting in touch with book dealers and trying to research Ex Altiora online. Nobody had ever heard of this book. There was nothing about it on the publicly searchable internet. The dealers he showed it to in person confirmed that it was a nineteenth century antique, and some even offered to buy it for very healthy sums, but Swain decided he didn't want to part with it just yet. After all, the book dealers would still be there in a few days or weeks, and in the meantime he'd gotten very curious about what this book actually was.

Over the next day or two, he was able to at least identify the mark of the publisher barely visible on the binding. Turns out it belongs to one Jurgen Leitner, a rich Scandinavian weirdo who used to pay absurd amounts of money to have old manuscripts custom-bound. It's a bit odd, since Ex Altiora's leather binding looks pretty old in and of itself, and Leitner was known to be indulging his weird hobby in the early 1990's, but who knows what weird old components he'd have used to bind his even weirder and older manuscript pages. Anyway, Leitner had sometimes worked with an England-based indie publisher, so Swain decided to try talking to them next.

I'm surprised he hasn't just taken the book to someone who can read Latin yet. You'd think that would be an obvious early step for someone trying to learn more about it, no?

Swain's next worknight was off. He didn't make any mistakes with the lighting, but he found himself preoccupied by the book throughout his work, and he repeatedly thought he could catch that strange whiff of ozone in the air even as he moved from location to location. He also had this occasional feeling of vertigo, as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff and recoiling from the long drop at his feet, but it was just coming out of nowhere at random times. He skipped the cast parties that night, instead opting to go for a long midnight walk on his own and hope the early winter air would help clear his mind. He ended up falling into a sort of high-speed-walking trance that lasted for over an hour and that he only snapped out of after crossing half the city. He describes the experience as being more like falling than walking, being pulled forward by gravity, while his mind was virtually asleep.

When he did come to his senses again, Swain was somehow not even remotely surprised to find himself standing in front of Pinhole Books; the obscure book dealer/publisher that Jurgen Leitner had done business with. Also, he finally doesn't smell that ozone scent that he'd been trying to get out of his nostrils this whole time. Hmmm. Wonder what that could signify?

Well, he'd been planning to pay this place a visit soon anyway, so Swain walked up and rang the doorbell. It was late night by this point, and the sign by the door said that visits were by appointment only, but despite all these factors someone was still there to open the door. A thin, elderly, completely bald woman who had virtually every visible square inch of her skin tattooed with eldritch runes and symbols. Like some kind of weird nun. Incongruously, now that the door was open he could hear loud death metal being played somewhere inside the building. So many unusual combinations of elements, in this account. The woman was understandably annoyed to be disturbed at 2 AM by someone who didn't even have an appointment, but Swain managed to show her the book before she could slam the door on him, and upon seeing it her eyes lit up and her demeanour changed completely. She led him inside the building, babbling half to herself and half to him about how rare it is to find a Leitner book again after all these years, how she needs to find the other one she still has if only she can figure out where "Jared" would have stashed it, and a bunch of other, less comprehensible, mumblings.

Swain followed her through a maze of stacked books, half-collapsing bookshelves, and the odd exposed bit of wall, all the while trying to make out her mumbling over the loud music. Finally, she led him into a room whose mass of bookstacks left just enough exposed wall for a painting of an enormous, staring eyeball to be visible. As the old woman dug around looking for wherever Jared left the other Leitner(s), Swain stared at the eye painting. At first, he thought it was photorealistic, perhaps even a photograph with some hand-drawn embellishments. As he stared though, he realized that the eye was actually composed of numerous abstract hand-drawn patterns that overlapped with one another to form the image of the eye. To the point that, once he was looking at the individual patterns, the eye itself was almost hard for him to see again. Written beside the eye is a weird little prayer, beseeching the eye-entity for aid in seeing, hearing, and smelling that which mere human senses cannot perceive.

...

So. The main page of The Magnus Archives' website has this descriptive blurb on it:

The second paragraph is a little too on-the-nose for this to be coincidental.

So, basically, don't try to analyze the cases in isolation, because individually they're just wavy lines that don't mean much of anything, and overfixating on them can lead to one missing the forest for the trees. And the "forest" in this case is an entity capable of looking back at you.

This blurb also brings to mind the framing device from the beginning of the pilot, with Simms trying to put a big, messy library in order and having a weird feeling of being watched.

I wonder. How long has Simms been with the organization? How long before that has the organization had its records stored in this particular building? Surely, Simms would recognize it if the book place Swain described was the same building that he's recording in right now, but could it have been a previous Magnus Institute facility before they moved into this one? Was the tattooed woman one of Simms' predescessors?

Maybe the two libraries are just a thematic parallel, rather than being literally the same thing. That could also be. Either way though, it's got to be deliberate by the creators.

Anyway. I thiiiiiink I've been doing a fairly decent job so far, when it comes to looking at the big picture built by the cases in aggregate? One issue that makes it harder is that I've been taking Simms at his word when he says that many if not most of these incidents are hoaxes, and that he's already declared one of them ("Do Not Open") to almost certainly be fake. It's hard to build a big picture when I don't know how many of the little abstract patterns are supposed to count toward it.

Maybe all of them are actually meant to be legit, with Simms' scepticism having been unwarranted. That would make it easier to puzzle things out. On the down side though, I feel like if that does turn out to be how it is, this series will have lost something. As I've said a couple times before, I'm really happy with TMA's depiction of rational, openminded scepticism via its narrator. Part of the fun for me has been trying to determine the likelihood of each account being true in-universe, and seeing if Simms reaches the same conclusion that I do. Perhaps with an added bonus of some details of later episodes verifying or falsifying previous ones that used to come across differently. If they're all ultimately real though, then...it just makes the whole thing much less dynamic, and frankly, also much less convincing. Like, are we expected to believe that an organization like the Magnus Institute wouldn't be barraged with hoaxes and delusions even in a world where the supernatural was real? I have trouble swallowing that.

The alternative is that some of them are indeed fake, and in that case I'll just need to wait for the series to spell out which ones they are before I can form the staring eye out of the squiggles. This would also have issues, but they'd be less bad issues, at least from my perspective and through the lens I've been enjoying the series from.

...

Eventually noticing Swain checking out the eye-painting, the old woman (named as Mary Key) explained that Jared painted that eye. He's such an incredibly talented artist, even if she wishes there was more rhyme and reason to where he stashed the books sometimes. Hmm. Anyway, she serves the two of them some tea. She forgets her own cup immediately after putting it down and goes back to searching the bookstacks, and Swain only manages to down one sip of his on account of its foul taste. He notes that the tea doesn't have any milk in it, so whatever tastes bad must have been from the leaves themselves. Is she trying to drug him? It seems like she might be.

As Swain wondered what the hell is wrong with the tea and tries to free his eyes from Jared's fractal eyeball painting, Key finished digging up her other Leitner volume and showed it to him. It's very similar to his own. Same size. Very similar elegant, but unadorned, calfleather binding. And, of course, the same logo marking it as part of the Leitner Library. This one turned out to not have a title or illustrations, though. And also to be written completely in Sanskrit. Jurgen Leitner definitely seems to have liked his classical languages.

Swain asked Key if she could read that language herself. By way of an answer, she laughed uproariously for a minute and then took the book back again. Without explaining what she was doing, she then carried it up to an overly harsh electric desklight and started holding the book up to the bulb, flipping through the pages to expose each to the bright light and deep shadows around it. Then...she handed it back to him, and gestured for him to turn the pages. Which caused animal bones to fall out of it.

Little animal bones. Like, from rat/frog sized skeletons. Each bone bent or warped in some weird way from how it would be naturally shaped, but still recognizable. Each page turned causes more malformed bones to come tumbling out and bouncing across the floor. She took the book back, passed it under the light and shadows again, and shook more bones out of it. Repeat. The light apparently recharges its bone-creating batteries.

Swain tells us that at this point, he realized that the music was no longer playing. Which isn't as spooky as Simms' delivery suggests that I'm meant to find it. Sorry, guys.

When Swain asked Mary if Ex Altiora also breaks the laws of thermodynamics in the form of animal bones, she laughs again and bids him to try it himself. He does so, passing the pages of his own Leitner tome under the light. At first, there doesn't seem to be any reaction. The ink seems a little darker and starker, somehow, but it's subtle enough that Swain isn't sure if there was a real change there or not. However, when he reaches the illustrations, he notices much bigger differences. New lines added, as if they'd been there all along in invisible ink or hidden by other linework. Geometric lines coming down from the woodcut skies and running alongside the tall cliffs and mountains and towers. Erm...okay? Still not terribly spooky imo, but let's see where this is going. He reached the page with the starry night woodcut, and a pattern emerged from the illustrated sky that makes his stomach drop and his eyes go wide. The overwhelming smell of ozone filled his nostrils, now mixed with another scent that had been present before, but that had been too weak for him to identify until now. Head spinning, he closed the book, babbled an incoherent excuse, and fled the building so fast that he ended up falling down the stairs and badly cutting and bruising himself. Then takes a cab home. He rambles about how freaked out he was for a while before telling us what he actually saw, which isn't not annoying and also encourages my imagination to do distinctly unscary things.

When he finally tells us what the pattern was, it...okay, this...this just...this is told so backwards I don't even...alright. So. The pattern is a Lichtenberg figure. Which still isn't spooky, at least on its own, but Swain subsequently provides some context.

It's a specific Lichtenberg figure that he's seen before, when he was 8 years old. Swain had been playing outside with a friend of his, when a thunderstorm rolled in overhead. His friend said they should go inside; they were playing in a flat, open field with few buildings around, and their parents had told them it was dangerous to be out here during a storm. Swain told his friend that he was being overcautious, they'd be fine. His friend reluctantly agreed. They kept playing out in the storm, and his friend was struck by lightning.

The other smell, accompanying the ozone. It had been mixed in with the overwhelming ozone stench back then as well. Cooked meat. His childhood friend survived, but he was never the same afterward, and that same exact Lichtenberg pattern from the book was burned into his skin for the rest of his life.

...

If this had had any kind of buildup whatsoever, it might have gotten some kind of horrified reaction from me.

I would say that I understand why the story is having Swain tell us things in this order, if it's sacrificing narrative pacing for verisimilitude. The problem is that it's not really doing that either. If Swain told us what we needed to know as soon as we needed to know it, then he wouldn't have dragged things out babbling about how scared he was of what he saw and how he had to flee the building and get home before actually telling us what it was. It's not structured like an unromantic witness testimony. It's structured like an incompetently written horror story.

...

For some reason, despite being terrified of the book, Swain kept the book with him for the entire trip home. Even though the ozone and burnt flesh smells were still tormenting him. A couple hours later, in the predawn hours as Swain was just barely starting to feel calm enough to maybe consider trying to sleep, there was a knock at the door. A pale, unshaven, exhausted-looking man with black clothes and dyed glossy black hair had come calling. For some bizarre reason, Swain asked this man if he was Jared Key, the artist and assistant bookseller. Jared replied that yes, he was. Random knowledge just beaming itself into characters' heads at narratively dramatic times is a supernatural horror cliche that I've never been thrilled about. Anyway, Key Junior apologized for his mother's weirdness, and said that he'd very much like to buy the book off of Swain. His initial offer? 5,000 GBP, an order of magnitude more than any of the other dealers offered for it. This would be in the years right before the UK decided it didn't feel like having a decent economy anymore, so 5,000 pounds are worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight thousand USD. For a production technician, that's a hell of a lot of money to be offered without even needing to haggle.

Swain would have been willing to part with the book for free, he tells us (though...why didn't he just throw it out the window of the cab or leave it in the bookstore or something, then?), but he also had this knowledge-beamed-into-head-out-of-nowhere that giving the book away for free wouldn't "count" somehow. Like, he had a feeling that this book works on Bottle Imp sort of rules. So, needless to say, he doesn't argue.

Key didn't seem especially pleased when Swain accepted his offer. Just acknowledged it, and said he'd go and come back with the money. Leaving Swain alone in his apartment with a sleep deficit, the book, and the smell of ozone and charred human flesh still haunting his nostrils. While waiting for Jared to return, he decided to research the Key family and their establishment a little bit. He typed them into google, and the first thing to come up was a story from 2008 about Mary Key's murder case. She was found in her bookstore, dead from painkiller overdose. The reason it was deemed murder rather than suicide or mishap is because someone had peeled off most of her skin just shortly after her death and hung it out to dry on a set of fishing wires strung across the room. The skin was covered in strange writing, determined to be Sanskrit characters. The story included a photo of Mary taken shortly before her time of death, and there wasn't a single mark or tattoo on her.

Uh. Huh.

Swain researched more, and found that Jared Keen was investigated as the prime suspect in his mother's death. He was acquitted, on account of the evidence against him being ruled inadmissible. None of the articles say what that evidence was, or why it wasn't admitted. While Dominic tried to learn more, the door knocked again, and he had to face Jared once more, now haunted by this new knowledge.

The ozone and burnt flesh stench became stronger than ever when Jared Keen came back inside, but Dominic did his best to not let it show in his face or voice. When Jared handed him the envelope full of money, Dominic didn't even bother counting it. After being handed the book, Jared looked through its pages, laughed creepily just like the entity wearing his mother's skin did back in the library, and then...set the book on fire.

The horrible smells vanished immediately. Jared simply said that his mother doesn't always know what's best for their family, and then left with the still-burning-hot ashes of the book in his hands. Dominic Swain is glad to have never heard anything more from them again, and to have not suffered any more ozone-scented guilt PTSD since the destruction of the book. End of statement.

I was expected Simms to throw this one on the "bullshit" pile, on account of how impossible anything in the story is to corroborate. To my surprise though, he immediately launches into a bitter tirade about how Jurgen Leitner's work is apparently still out there in the world causing harm. The Magnus Institute had been sure all of those goddamned books were destroyed in the wake of the 1994 incident, but if there's an account accurately describing the effects of a Leitner Book from 2012-13 then that's very bad.

Simms also curses his predecessor in the archivist role, Gertrude Robinson, for her utter failure to take proper inventory of these cases. This statement would have been given during her tenure, and it was her responsibility to read the new accounts and correlate them with the existing body of knowledge. Looks like they might have to launch a new project to hunt down these additional Leitners before they claim any more innocent lives and souls.

Another disconcerting aspect of this, Simms explains, is that this Ex Altiora book seems to be an original work. All known Leitner books were custom variations of known mystical texts. If there are other books with the same powers, but with titles that no one knows to look out for, then that could make this much harder. In any case, Simms plans to go to the Magnus Institute's head honcho with this discovery at once. The scariest part of all, though? Simms was actually you, and you became skeleton and wrote this.


Mmmmehhhhhhhh.

Calling this episode bad might be a step too far, but it's the only TMA episode I've heard so far that I'd never call good either. It's also a step toward validating a concern I already had about this series, that leaning too hard into continuity and metaplot might undermine the horror value. Almost nothing in this story means anything, or is able to be all that scary, on its own. It's all just to tease later plot stuff that, frankly, isn't really attracting my interest.

Like, the outro by Simms sort of suggests that the Magnus Institute has like...adventuring parties that it sends out to kill monsters and burn books and shit? That level of...it's an outright genre change, frankly. We're supposed to be all spooked out over this Leitner guy, but we don't know enough about him to be spooked. And then there's the fact that we spent the first 2/3rds of the story on a slow burn psychological horror thing with the book, only for that to botch its landing with the backwards reveal of Swain's childhood guilt and then...suddenly switch gears into a monster/slasher thing? Like, we're just TOLD about this skin-wearing thing in the last few minutes, after spending 15 minutes building dread and anxiety about something totally different? And then ANOTHER gear switch in the outro, with the Call of Cthulhu player characters doing covert ops against this Scandinavian wizard?

What am I supposed to be feeling? What is this episode even about? What should I be scared of?

Now, doing a bit of extrapolation, it seems likely that prolonged exposure to one of Leitner's books might turn you into a monster. Or at least make you the target of a monster. There's the clear Sanskrit link between the Leitner tome the Keys had in their possession and the markings the imposter (either Jared himself, or something different) put on Mary's skin. So, I guess the book Swain had would have eventually...um...made him feel so bad about getting his friend struck by lightning that he'd kill himself and turn into a Latin-covered skin monster? Like, the eye-symbol is supposed to represent judgement for your sins, in addition to its story-arc symbolism? Maybe? I guess? Ish? I don't know enough to understand if that's even what's at stake. I don't know if ANYTHING was at stake in this story!

It's just all over the place.


I'm very much accentuating the negative here. There was a lot of good stuff in this story. I did enjoy listening to it. Really, it's as much a compliment to the series as anything else that it's got me expecting a much higher level of quality. If this was a mediocre series, I'd probably be giving this episode more praise than criticism. Even if it WAS outright bad, The Magnus Archives would still be batting 3/4 so far.

There's one more in this order. We'll see how it measures up. I still think "Anglerfish" was the most effective at being a horror story. "Across the Street," meanwhile, had the most to say as a work, at least as far as I can pick up. Those are the two bests so far. "Page Turner" is easily the worst. I'd put "Do Not Open" in between, but closer to the good end of the spectrum.

Next one is called "Thrown Away."