The Magnus Archives #2: “Do Not Open”

Episode two of the podcast is about 40% longer than the pilot. The title "do not open" is a bit less suggestive than "angler fish," at least without further context. Could refer to a lot of different types of horror premise. Let's see what it turns out to be!


The moody violins and spooky drums give way to Dr. Simms' next account. No preamble or metaplot stuff this time. We start this recording with him reading off the words "Statement of Joshua Gillespie, regarding his time in possession of an apparently empty wooden casket. Original statement given November 22, 1998."

Gillespie, eh? That's a rather storied surname in the horror genre. Chug your aglaophotis extract before continuing!

Mr. Gillespie's story begins during a vacation to Amsterdam with some of his friends. Once again, the protagonist is a hardy-partying college aged guy out doing debauched things with others like himself. I hope the Magnus Archives diversifies its protagonists a little after these first couple episodes. One morning, when Gillespie found himself less hungover than his companions, he went out for an early stroll while the others were still sleeping it off. He'd apparently been wanting to do some private appreciation of Amsterdam's scenic archetecture away from his friends who didn't share those interests.

He phrases this last bit way too poetically for his own good. Dark lilac text for this kid. I'm only a couple minutes in, but so far he's coming across as much less likable than Nathan Wallace from yesterday's episode.

Being a dumbass as well as a pretentious hipster, Gillespie neglected to take a map or anything with him on his adventure, and two hours after leaving the hostel he was hopelessly lost. I guess that's why we're back in 1998 for this story. Hipsters didn't carry overpriced, ironically-decorated smart phones that they could access Google Maps with back then. Gillespie also didn't speak a word of Dutch, and seems to have been unable to find an English speaker who could help him. In as touristy a city as Amsterdam, that's probably something of an accomplishment. By the time he managed to find his way back to the hostel, it was starting to get dark. Hungry and exhausted, he decided to eat in one of the nearby cafes before rejoining his friends. There, he spaced out getting high and looking very cultured and intelligent until it was well after sundown and he suddenly realized he was nearly alone inside the cafe. One of the very few others still in the establishment was a mysterious man who had sat down in the chair right across from Gillespie without him noticing.

Gillespie describes the newcomer as unusually short, with a very dense-looking build. He has trouble remembering any more details of the man's appearance, though. He *thinks* he was clean shaven and had short brown hair, but the more he tries to remember what he looked like the less clear his own mental image becomes. Granted, Gillespie fully admits that he was high as a kite at this point, so the fuzzy memories could just be down to that.

...

Okay. Two college boys who wandered away from their partying friends and met mysterious men somewhere in the city in a row is already pushing it.

Having both of them also be drunk/high and using that as a possible out for there having been mind fuckery going on? That's crossing the line and going far into "redundant."

Couldn't they have just waited a couple more episodes before reusing that setup? I thought the whole point of the archives being a mess was so the episodes DON'T have to be arranged by theme.

...

The strange little man introduced himself as simply "John," and told Gillespie that he too was an Englishman in this foreign land (his phrasing was even more tryhard than Gillespie's own, and Gillespie comments on this). He claimed to be from Liverpool, but lacked the distinctive Liverpool accent. John then said that he was looking for a friend who could do him a certain favor.

The ambient spooky music is starting to rise in the background. A little prematurely, since nothing actually creepy has happened yet. Its timing was much more effective in "Angler Fish."

Stoned though he was, Gillespie grew wary at this very scam-y sounding hook, but he heard John out. John said he had a package that some friends of his would come by to pick up later, and that he needed someone to look after it until then. Gillespie started to reply that no, he was not interested in starting a career in the heroin, cocaine, or munitions industries, but then John pulled out an envelope containing ten thousand British pounds, and Gillespie quickly determined that there was actually nothing immoral or illegal about this gig at all. John smiled, thanked him, and told him he would be contacting him again shortly before leaving Gillespie alone in the cafe with the money.

Gillespie didn't much enjoy the next couple days of his Amsterdam vacation, preoccupied as he was with what he'd agreed to and whether or not he should back out (and whether or not he could if he wanted to, at this point). He decided that when John approached him, he'd try to return the money and back out if that was an option. Actually...nevermind "a couple of days," this ended up ruining the entire rest of his vacation, because John never showed up. He checked all his bags and pockets before boarding the plane back to England to see if someone had slipped something into them, but nope. He was just flying out of Holland with ten thousand pounds that he'd gotten seemingly for nothing.

As this had been a post-graduation vacation, Gillespie started job hunting immediately after returning. He got a low-paying position in a seaside town in the south of England that turned out to not be nearly as scenic or idyllic as he'd been led to believe (lol what a prick), and found himself unable to afford the local rent and "unwilling to share his space with strangers" (lol what a prick). So, despite his nervousness about it, he spent some of the money that he'd kept in the envelope. It had been several months since he returned from Holland, and he'd never given John his name, address, or anything of the sort (at least, as far as he can remember). So, Gillespie reasoned that he was safe, and that John and his associates must have been nabbed by Interpol just at the best possible moment for him or something.

Also, he'd grown a beard since the vacation, which he reasoned would make himself harder to recognize by sight. I'm a little surprised he didn't already have one, ngl.

Hardly a week after making his downpayment and moving into his spacious one-bedroom apartment, Gillespie had an unexpected knock at the door. A pair of large, intimidating men in plainclothes had carried an immense, box-shaped package up the stairs to his apartment door, and were still panting and red-faced from the effort. They confirmed Gillespie's identity, but refused to answer any questions in turn. Instead, they pushed passed him into his apartment, set the coffinlike package down on the floor, and left again without another glance or word in his direction.

Well, those two men sounded more like typical organized criminals doing their job than anything weird. Nothing to suggest that they weren't human. So, not everyone connected to this is necessarily supernatural; heck, they could even have been recruited the same way Gillespie was.

Not willing to chase after two large, unfriendly, and possibly armed men and confront them, Gillespie simply examined the package. It was about two meters long, one meter wide, and slightly less than one meter deep. So, yeah, coffin sized. It was wrapped in unassuming brown packaging paper, on which Joshua Gillespie's name and brand new address were written in an ornate, looping font. No return address. Cutting the paper open revealed a rectangular cardboard box, and inside of that was, well, a wooden coffin. Well crafted, but unvarnished and undecorated. It also had a bunch of metal chains wrapped around it, keeping it sealed shut. These chains were looped through a heavy padlock, and there was a key taped in place right next to it. There was a folded piece of paper tucked under one of the chains, and carved - crudely, deeply, and VERY clearly - into the lid of the coffin were the words "DO NOT OPEN."

I guess Gillespie is going to be babysitting a vampire for a little while?

Trying to figure out what to make of this, he read the note. All it said, in that same looping handwriting, was "Delivered with gratitude. -J." Gillespie had been discombobulated enough by the bizarre package and it's arrival that his brain hadn't even made the connection until he read John's note.

Realizing that he's just been made complicit in covering up a murder or something along those lines, and that he had no idea how long he'd be tasked with this, Gillespie just sort of shut down. He called in sick to work, and spent the rest of the day just sitting on the floor of his new apartment, staring at the coffin.

...

I mean, ten thousand pounds (around sixteen thousand USD, in late 1998) is a hell of a lot to give someone just to sit on a box of cocaine for a few days, even if you're a wealthy drug lord and it's some really high grade stuff.

It's considerably more realistic for paying someone to hide a corpse in their house for an undetermined period. Probably on the cheap side, really.

...

There was no smell coming from the coffin, besides the scent of unvarnished wood, so either the body inside was very fresh, very well embalmed, or it didn't actually contain a body. The coffin was very warm to the touch, though, as if it had been left laying in the sun for a long time just recently. Odd considering that it was only early summer, and that the coffin had had two layers of packaging. Even stranger, the chains and padlock were perfectly cool. As if the heat were coming from inside the box rather than outside, and hadn't quite managed to infuse the chains.

Fire vampire? Space ripper stingy eyes? Don't put your face near the keyhole, Gillespie.

After getting over his surprise and unease, he placed the key inconspicuously on the side of his coffee table and (with considerable effort) dragged the coffin to a corner of the living room, where he covered it with a sheet and disguised it as a nondescript bench type thing. He threw away the packaging paper and cardboard in the usual recycling bins outside, and then just resolved not to think about it until more of John's associates arrived to take the thing off his hands. Whenever that would be.

He felt nervous being in his living room for the next few days, but slowly got over it. Time passed, and still no smell came out from beneath that sheet, which led him to infer that maybe it really was drugs after all. Hidden in a coffin for ease of smuggling or something. After a couple of weeks, he got nonchalant enough about the coffin that he started using it as a side table without even really thinking about it.

That is, until he put a cup of orange juice down on it, and then heard movement from inside the coffin. A slow, deliberate scratching, as of fingernails against wood, right under the part of the lid he'd placed the cup on. The vibrations of the scratching were strong enough to make ripples appear in the cup.

Fire vampires like orange juice. Noted.

Gillespie knew that there was no way a human could have survived for nearly two weeks without food or water, even assuming there were hidden airholes that had escaped his notice. He couldn't think of much of *anything* that could survive in a sealed box for that long. He'd never heard breathing, or moving, or anything other sound from the coffin until then.

He picked up the cup again, and the scratching stopped. He put the cup back down on the opposite end of the coffin lid, and the scratching came back, louder and more insistent, and this time it continued for five minutes even after he removed the cup once more.

Temptation came to him - very, very strong temptation - to use the key. He even picked it up and exposed the coffin lid, making to unlock it. But, that motion brought him face to face with the warning engraved into the lid, and after some internal struggle he put the key back down and covered the coffin again without touching the padlock.

He went back to deciding he just wouldn't interact with the coffin at all, and avoid so much as going near that corner of the living room. Whatever was in there - living or otherwise - he was better off not knowing, and not wondering.

This decision got harder to live up to during the next big rainstorm a few days later, when the coffin began to moan.

...

A more intense, ambient creepy music starts up here, and it's somehow even more effective than the scoring of "Angler Fish." Rising from the silence just as Gillespie starts describing the dark, overcast afternoon and the torrential downpour, and increasing in strength much more rapidly than previous musical segments as he starts to talk about the moaning. It actually gave me chills.

...

He describes a very low, gentle, almost melodious moaning sound. Almost like singing. Gillespie investigated the building, to make absolute sure the moaning, faintly musical noise couldn't be coming from the apartment next to his or the floor below him or something. Nope. It was definitely the thing inside the coffin moaning for the rain.

A cup of juice got it's attention. Heavy rainfall made it more active. This thing - vampire or whatever it is - seems to have an affinity for water. I'd assume it's thirsty for blood, but it notably DIDN'T react when Gillespie touched the coffin with his hands. So, no, it's moisture in general that it seems to react to.

Gillespie became less and less happy with his living room guest, and desperately hoped that it would be taken off his hands soon. However, he managed to adjust to the new status quo. It moaned whenever there was heavy rain, and sometimes scratched when the coffin had things placed on it (no mention of which things it did or didn't scratch at; my water hypothesis might still be valid, or might not be). Gillespie did his best to ignore it. He didn't develop much of a social life in his new town, at least partly due to his unwillingness to bring anyone into his home where they might hear something. He considered trying to get rid of the box, or to find "someone like you guys" (addressing the Magnus Institute interviewer) to investigate it, but in the end he was more afraid of the people who gave him the box than he was of what the box contained. Probably wise, honestly.

As the summer wore on and fall arrived, Gillespie believes that he started suffering from nightmares. He never remembered his dreams, so he can't be sure, but he started frequently waking up in a panic in the middle of the night and not being sure why, so nightmares are a likely explanation. Whether this is down to anxiety from keeping the coffin, or to some supernatural effect of the creature within, he couldn't say. More alarmingly, as fall became winter Gillespie started sleepwalking. Something he had never done before. When he awoke from one particular somnambulistic incident, he found himself in his living room, standing over the coffin...with the key in his hand.

...

It's got some kind of remote hypnosis power that it's trying to use to free itself.

...

He tried getting medical treatment for his sleepwalking. No dice. And also no sleepwalking incidents at all when they had him sleep anywhere other than his apartment. Sounds like that might have prevented a solution (hide the box somewhere outside of the apartment and hope it's out of range. Or, alternatively, make arrangements to sleep elsewhere), but he either didn't think of this or was too paranoid about leaving the box anywhere that might make it seem like he wasn't properly guarding it. He tried hiding the key in more and more difficult to access places, but he kept waking up with it in his hand regardless. This culminated in an incident where he didn't wake up until he'd actually gotten the key into the keyhole and was literally a second from turning it.

This is where I'd bury the key somewhere on the other side of town, personally. But, I'm fortunately not Joshua Gillespie.

He managed to figure out something almost as good, though. He put the key in a bowl of water, and then left it in his freezer. Whenever he sleepwalked after that point, the chill of the ice would wake him up when he tried to retrieve the key. Okay, that's actually pretty smart, if not quite as secure as my idea.

The sleepwalking, too, he simply got used to. He learned to tolerate it. Waking up every couple of nights with his hands in the freezer became just part of the cost of doing business, like the nightmares, the anxiety, and the not being able to bring people over. He lived in fear, but he lived with the fear. This lasted for a year and a half.

...

Hmm. Slightly less than a thousand US dollars a month to live like this, assuming that his custody of the coffin didn't end prematurely.

Yeah, he got ripped off. Maybe for twice that much I'd be willing to put up with this. Big maybe. Two and a half times, sure.

...

Sometime in the following autumn, there was a rainstorm that the thing in the coffin didn't react to. Silence. No moaning. Gillespie didn't notice it at first, since he'd gotten in the habit of putting on music or turning on the TV during rainstorms, but eventually he realized that there was no moaning to drown out this time.

Shortly afterward (same day? I'm not sure, he just says "shortly"), there was a knock at the door. Answering it, Gillespie found himself faced with John and the two unnamed deliverymen. He wasn't surprised to see them, but strangely enough they seemed surprised to see him.

Were they expecting the thing to have killed him, or mutated him? Or for him to have just abandoned the apartment? Hmm.

Quickly getting over his apparent surprise, John told Gillespie that he would now recover the package, and that he hoped it hadn't been too much of a burden. Gillespie told him to shove his gratitude up his own ass, which John seemed to take in stride. John also seemed somewhat impressed when he found out about the freezer trick, Gillespie simply dropping the bowl of ice with the key sealed inside onto the floor in front of him and telling him to take it and the coffin and fuck off.

John picked the key out of the broken ice block, and led his henchmen into the living room where Gillespie told them the coffin could be found. He didn't follow them. He didn't want to know if they were opening it or not, and if they did he didn't want to see what was inside. Even when he heard the screaming coming from the living room, he just stood in the kitchen with his back to the door and waited. After the screaming stopped, the three men carried the box out into the rainstorm (no mention of whether or not it appeared to still be locked and chained shut) and into a van marked with the logo of a nonexistent delivery service. They drove off, and Joshua Gillespie never heard from them again.

Not long afterward, Gillespie got a better paying job in London. That, as far as he told the Magnus Institute investigators, was the end of the story.

Dr. Simms records some follow-up thoughts of his own for this one. He's sort of darkly amused that his own hometown of Bournemouth isn't quite as boring as he thought it was, living there as a child. He may have even still been living there himself during the late nineties when Gillespie's story took place. Perhaps he passed him on the street.

That said, Simms continues, returning to his usual, coldly professional delivery, this account is from an admitted drug user, has no corroborating evidence, and is told in such a way as to make witnesses impossible to look for. In the Institute's initial investigation, they - unsurprisingly - weren't able to find a thing. The only reason he's not unceremoniously tossing this one in the "cool story bro" heap is because that moving company apparently WASN'T actually nonexistent. It was just a very small and obscure one that Gillespie could feasibly have never heard of, and by his own account wasn't inclined to look into. The small, Nottingham-based company was liquidated in 2009, and if they kept any records of their deliveries in the late nineties no one knows where to look for them now. One other strange detail: according to the records of the homeowner's association that owned the building, Joshua Gillespie was the only tenant in the entire building for that nearly two year period. A detail that Gillespie himself seemingly didn't notice, somehow, or else deliberately left out of his account. No one is sure who the landlord at that time was, and the building itself was condemned not long afterward.

Dr. Simms' otherwise good voice actor kind of botches it here at the ending, with him starting to ominouuuusly draaag ouuut the words a little in the final sentences. Less like an archivist recording findings for an organization, and more like...well, like a performer telling a horror story. He didn't do that last time, so I guess this was just a rare slip-up. Anyway, that's it for "Do Not Open."


Aside from the music being on point, and the psychological horror themes of what people are willing to coexist with under fairly minimal prompting running a bit deeper than the previous story's more primal brand of fear, I didn't find "Do Not Open" to be quite as good as "Angler Fish."

The less likeable protagonist was part of it. Another is that, while I can understand how the length might help convey the notion of a dragging, unending nightmare, the story still feels a little too long for its contents. In particular, I don't feel like a detailed account of Gillespie's Amsterdam vacation leading up to his encounter with John was necessary. I also, thinking about it more, am not sure why Gillespie would have bothered telling them about it, considering how mundane and irrelevant it was. He could have just started with a couple sentences saying he was vacationing in Amsterdam, and had gotten himself all fucked up in a pot café and lost track of the time when John appeared, and that would have made the story both more convincing and more succinct. I guess it helped a little by establishing beforehand that Gillespie is self-absorbed, has poor judgement, and tends to go at things alone even when he clearly shouldn't, but him just displaying those traits over the course of the coffin narrative itself would have been fine.

Also...this one had an over-the-topness to it that detracted from the effect. The brand new and unforeshadowed spooky detail of the building having been empty save for Gillespie and the box that whole time being thrown on at the end feels more like a sequel hook for some cheesy detective show than the haunting end of a horror short.

Granted, it may actually *be* a sequel hook. That leads me into another subject, and an angle from which I might view this story a bit more favorably, depending.

As an addendum to what I said about the effectiveness of unexplained horrors in my last review, I feel that the storyteller should always know the answers to at least the most pressing questions raised by the story. I'm being *really* subjective here. This might only be true for me. But, when I find out that the creator of a haunting mystery was just throwing creepy details out there without knowing what they were hints of, I feel cheated. Even if I know I'm never going to learn the answer that the author had in mind, and wouldn't want them to tell me and ruin it.

That might sound rich coming from me, since I'm usually okay with going death of the author when it suits me, but I don't think this actually IS a death of the author issue. Not quite. I maintain that having a vision in your head of what the monster or mystery actually is DOES effect how the text itself comes out. Sometimes it's harder to catch than other times. But there are certain warning signs that tend to pop up when an author is pantsing it with a mystery, and when I see them I immediately become less interested in the story. So, that's one strong point about "Do Not Open;" it really does feel like the statement of Joshua Gillespie is offering a partial view of a much bigger story, and that the writers actually do know what that bigger story is.

Given a longrunning series like the Magnus Archives that seems to have some sort of ongoing metaplot and continuity rather than being purely a monster of the week show, doing this is important. If the series is going for a persistent world, then each and every incident needs to fit into the worldbuilding, or at the very least have room to plausibly exist alongside it without creating issues. So, if the story behind the coffin, the empty apartment complex, and "John's" organization is going to come up in future episodes and this one is just laying some ground work and dangling, then that makes its failings as a standalone horror story much more forgivable.

You could make a pretty strong case for disconnected shorts being the ideal medium for horror. The story definitively ending with the audience never getting to learn the truth behind the monster is scary in a way that an ongoing investigation in which we slowly, by degrees, learn its name and origins probably never can be. And a long series in which we *don't* learn anything would just get repetitive and frustrating. I guess you could almost say that these are two different genres, with the former being proper horror and the latter being more along the lines of thriller or dark fantasy.

Regardless of what genre it falls into and whether it's just the introduction to something bigger, taking "Do Not Open" for what it is on its own, it's still weaker than "Angler Fish." But, that doesn't mean it isn't good! I might have spent most of this wrapup criticizing it due to its predecessor setting such a high bar, but it's still head and shoulders better than most creepypasta-adjacent horror stories you can find for free online. My opinion of the Magnus Archives as a whole remains overwhelmingly positive.