The Magnus Archives #5: Thrown Away

The last Magnus Archives episode in this order. Will it top "Anglerfish" and "Across the Street?" Will it undershoot "Page Turner?" Let's find out!


Statement of Kieren Woodworth, regarding the aftermath of a house fire in 2009 and some items recovered in the aftermath.

Woodworth is a garbage man, who seems to have a healthy attitude toward his job and enjoys the occasional secondhand treasures he sometimes manages to rescue on their way to the landfill. Heh, the relevance of the title isn't waiting at all to reveal itself this time. Anyway, Woodworth is well-used to finding bizarre and inexplicable things in the dumpsters. People generally fail to think about how their garbage continues existing after they toss it out, and how someone - often multiple someones - will see what you've thrown away and probably have a pretty good idea of which building it came from. And yes, they will judge you for what they find. They can't really help it. It's just human nature. It most likely will never actually effect you, but still, it's yet another way in which privacy is a much scarcer resource than people tend to think.

Well, you can wrap incriminating waste up in opaque plastic bags or the like, sure. But if you do that enough, the trashmen will still begin to wonder what it is you're so determined to hide.

So. One day, Woodworth noticed a sack of severed doll heads in someone's dumpster. It was an opaque black garbage bag, so he'd never have known what was in it had the bag not sustained a small rip from some nearby sharp debris. He thought it was just a single plastic doll at first, that happened to have its face sticking out of the rip, but when he threw the sack into the truck the rip split wide open and revealed the bag to be packed full of hundreds of little plastic heads. They weren't all from the same type of doll, or even from the same set or company. They were all different sizes, all different makes, but all plastic and all without anything below the neck. The heads also looked scratched up in a way that didn't seem like normal wear and tear; more like they'd been repeatedly dragged or rubbed against a rough surface. There were also no signs of other chipping or fading besides that, giving the impression that these toys had all been new at the time of scraping and decapitating (whichever order those had happened in).

Hmm. Well, there's a few ways the story can go from here. Either the inhabitant of that house is starting with dolls and will eventually work their way up to human victims, or something is mutilating and killing people before turning them into plastic miniatures. "The Indian In The Cupboard: Silence of the Lambs Edition," heh.

At the time, Woodworth and his coworkers (there were four of them manning the truck) just shrugged their shoulders and made a few off-color jokes before moving on. In all likelihood, after all, this was just the biproduct of someone's weird modern art project. Still, the incident was memorable enough that their crew referred to 93 Lancaster Lane as "the doll house" among themselves in subsequent runs. And, since it stuck in their memories, they couldn't help but pay a little bit of extra attention whenever they emptied the dumpster from that particular bit of street. That's just how it is. When the trashmen find something weird or memorable, they start keeping their eyes peeled for other weird memorable things in that dumpster. Again, there's just no helping it.

For the next couple of months, the "doll house" didn't give Woodworth's crew anything else to talk about. If there were other weird creepy things in its trash, then the residents had done a better job hiding them since the doll bag got slashed open. But, finally, there came a day when they picked up another opaque black garbage bag from the pavement next to the dumpster outside 93 Lancaster. Like the doll bag, the surface of this sack was too regular to be stretched over an assortment of mixed trash. Unlike the doll bag though, this one was remarkably lightweight despite being stuffed full, and shaking it made a rustling, papery sound. Like it was full of old wastepaper or something.

They thought about opening it. Unlike the doll bag, this one didn't have a rip, so in this case they'd be intentionally going out of their way to invade someone's privacy rather than the usual, constant unintentional stuff. Not a good thing to do. However, Allen the truck driver - a man with weird interests and a sick sense of humor who had done more than the other three to keep the "doll house" meme going over the intervening months, finally made it clear that if they didn't open it as a crew then he'd just do it himself at the landfill. So, sighing, looking around to make sure there was no one walking around or peering out a window who could see them (luckily for them, Lancaster Lane was one of the firsts on their route, so it was always very early morning when they serviced it), they opened the bag. Turns out it didn't have papers in it after all. It had one very long strip of paper. Like a receipt roll or something. So long that it coiled and looped around and filled up the entire bag on its own. The edges of it were singed in some places, as if someone had held parts of it up to a flame. Written on it (and identified by a crew member who had received a conservative Catholic upbringing) was the Lord's Prayer in Latin, over and over again, all the way down the many dozens of meters' worth of paper. Handwritten, not printed.

Hmm. Writing in an ancient language that one might have reason to hold up to a light source. A motif of mutilation and dismemberment. Is this one also related to that Leitner guy? If not, then it's probably a similar type of magic at least.

The fact that this case file and the "Page Turner" one were apparently stacked right on top of each other suggests that the previous archivist might not have been quite as much of a slacker as Simms thought. At least SOME of the documents are thrown in piles of related incidents. Still pretty terrible librarian skills, but better than nothing at all.

Well, continuing Woodworth's account.

The prayer-scrawl wasn't *quite* as WTF as the doll heads. Or at least, it was WTF in a less obviously dramatic way (though if you think about it, it's actually much more suggestive of there being something wrong. The doll heads, like I said, could just be someone doing a weird art project with the bodies. The endlessly repeating handwritten prayer seems much more like the product of mental illness or child abuse or something. But, that's my perspective, not Woodworth and Co's). The Catholic guy was a little rattled, and Allen the driver was a little overexcited to have found more weirdness from the same source, but overall this second incident made a smaller impression than the first.

Two weeks later, they found a third black garbage bag tied shut beside the dumpster. After the last time, there was no chance of them NOT opening this one as well. Especially not with Allen still part of the crew. That line had already been crossed, that taboo broken. Woodworth picked it up. This one was heavier, and made a sandy, rattling sound, like it was full of powder or chips of something. It turns out that their next transgression would be unnecessary, however. Totally by accident, Woodworth scraped the bag against a cement wall while he was carrying it toward the truck, and the plastic had already been so scratched up and weakened by the bag's contents that it burst open in his hands. This one was filled with thousands of human teeth.

Woodworth doesn't mention the sizes of the teeth, notably. IE, if they might be hundreds of children's discarded milk teeth or something. The fact that he doesn't indicates that they aren't.

Well, there are some things that will shake even Allen the driver, and this turned out to be one of those things. They opted to put their garbage run on hold and call the police. That's something else that Woodworth mentions about the way people don't think about what they throw away. Garbage men aren't like priests or therapists. They don't have to sign any kind of confidentiality pact to get the job. Woodworth says that he and his coworkers find discarded drug paraphernalia and the like all the time, and usually just ignore it, but if they wanted to they could get a ton of people arrested.

...

Hmm. Yeah. That definitely is unsettling. I don't even have anything incriminating in my trash, and I still find it unsettling. Having a ton of laws that aren't usually enforced but COULD be enforced at any time is pretty much on the first page of the authoritarian playbook.

...

The crew might have had a live-and-let-live attitude toward crackheads, but potential serial killers were a bridge too far. They waited for the cops to arrive (fortunately, it didn't take long), showed them the evidence, and gave their witness statements. When the police tried the door, it was answered by an elderly couple who seemed surprised to see a cop and horrified by the teeth. They claimed not to know anything about it, or the paper, or the doll heads. They were either telling the truth, or very skilled at lying.

Hmm. Well. Shapeshifters and impersonators are already a recurring element in The Magnus Archives, and the old couple don't even need to be that in order to just be good at playing innocent. On the other hand, it would make sense for the real culprit to leave their incriminating trash in someone else's dumpster late at night. In fact, the way that these bags are always left NEXT TO the bin, rather than inside of it, supports that hypothesis. Opening those big dumpster lids tends to make a lot of noise, and if you were trying to do it secretly at night it would make more sense to just leave the bag next to it.

Of course, there's also another, more disconcerting, explanation. Maybe the three bags they noticed were just the only three that happened to be brought out when the dumpster was already full. Who knows how many others were buried under other trash in the dumpster and thus unseen by them. Who knows what they might have had in them.

Regardless, the police said they'd take it from here, and the trash crew just had to keep going on along their route. None of them ever got a follow up call or visit. There wasn't anything in the news that could have come from the investigation. Weeks passed. Then months.

Over the course of that time, Allen the truck driver had a noticeable decline in his mental health. He was always agitated and distracted. He often looked exhausted, as if he hadn't gotten any sleep, to the point where he was chugging multiple energy drinks some mornings and still seeming half-asleep afterward. He also always seemed to speed up a little when they were servicing Lancaster Lane. When his negligence and perpetual distraction caused Woodworth to twist his ankle once, Woodworth took Allen aside and asked him what the hell was going on. Allen was reluctant to answer, but Woodworth pressed, and finally he admitted that he'd taken to staking out Lancaster Lane at night in hopes of spotting the perpetrator on their way to make the next dropoff. Woodworth told him that this was a bad idea, for a long list of reasons, and urged him to take better care of himself because he was going from unpleasant to work with to downright dangerous to work with. Allen said that he would. Woodworth didn't get the impression he was being honest.

And...here Woodworth admits to the interviewer that he himself had felt a weird temptation to do what Allen was doing, after they'd found the teeth. He'd suppressed that bizarre impulse, using the same very sensible arguments to himself that he later shared with Allen. But still. He HAD felt it, just for a day or so.

Just curiosity, or did Woodworth actually pass a Will save here that Allen failed?

A week later, Allen fell asleep at the wheel and crashed their garbage truck into a parked car.No one was hurt. Low speed collision, so even the damage to the car wasn't too severe. Nonetheless, Allen had to be let go, and by that point he'd so alienated the rest of his coworkers that - though they'd been friends with him before - no one was sorry to see him go.

There's a mention here, of how Woodworth and the other crew members could have told the manager about Allen's growing issues in the months leading up to that last straw. If they had, maybe this could have been prevented, and Allen would have had his arm twisted into giving it up and perhaps keeping his job. They didn't, because Allen was their friend, and no one wanted to snitch on their friend. Even though the consequences of them not doing so ended up undermining their friendship with him and ended up doing him a much bigger disfavor. Woodworth...doesn't express any regret over this. Or even seem to acknowledge wrongdoing.

There's a real theme of complacency emerging in this story. And also of, well. "Thrown away." Things being tossed out and forgotten about, with no further consideration of how that reflects on the one doing the discarding.

So, the company hired a new driver to fill out their crew, and the crew kept doing its work. Then, about a month after Allen's firing, Woodworth was woken up at 2 AM by a text message from Allen. He hadn't talked to the guy since he'd been let go. None of their group had bothered to, what with how unapproachable he'd let himself become. But now, Allen was getting a text from him, consisting only of the words "Found him." Woodworth texted him back, asking if he was talking about the man who left the bags on Lancaster. There was no response.

He waited, then texted again. Nothing.

He sent Allen yet another text, asking him if he was okay. Nothing.

Late night turned into predawn. Woodworth tried calling instead of texting. No one picked up.

Half asleep, not at his sharpest, Woodworth did what seemed to him the only thing he could do. He went to Lancaster Lane to see if he could find out what happened to Allen.

Failed the Will save this time? Maybe.

Lancaster Lane was within walking distance of where Woodworth lived, so he was able to get there on foot, arriving just as sunlight was starting to appear over the eastern rooftops. There was no sign of Allen. Just a black garbage bag, tied up at the top, left on the pavement beside that dumpster. It was packed full of foam packaging peanuts, and also a life-sized copper model of a human heart. The heart was ice cold to the touch, so much so that it almost stuck to Woodworth's fingers. Carved into the side of the copper heart, with machine-like stenciled precision, was Allen's full name.

For some reason, instead of going to the police with the text and the bag, or even just leaving the bag there and calling in sick that day, Woodworth took the heart with him. He brought it to a friend of his who worked in the related medical waste disposal industry, and got access to a high-grade incinerator for long enough to throw the heart inside. Hopefully that would destroy it. He wasn't sure anything else would.

Um...okay? Why is Woodworth doing these things, exactly? To stick to the "thrown away" theme, obviously, but I mean in character. Is this supposed to be some weird way of burying his guilt for letting Allen keep getting sucked further and further in? Maybe? Heh, maybe the story is making a cheeky allusion to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" if that's meant to be the takeaway.

Woodworth is still a trashman in the same town. He gave his statement to the Magnus Institute some months after Allen was declared a missing person, and there's been no weird events or mysterious garbage bags since then. He just tries not to think about what happened, but ended up going to the Institute to help get it fully off of his chest. End statement.

Simms remarks that this is an unusually well-documented case, as the Institute was able to arrange subsequent interviews of the other two garbage men who'd been there for the first three bags and who had witnessed Allen's decline, as well as corroboration from the police. Apparently, the local PD had indeed made a follow-up investigation, and staked out Lancaster Lane for some time after the teeth were found, but they'd found nothing and given up on the stakeout some time before the night Allen disappeared.

They also got the police coroner's report about those teeth. They were all in different stages of decay, and none of them were placeable with the existing dental records. They were also, all two and a half thousand of them, the exact same tooth. Like they'd been collected over a long period of time from thousands of perfect clones. Or, perhaps, taken over and over again from a person who kept growing them back.

Simms informs us that since recording the statement, he's had the Institute reach out to Woodworth for another interview. He's still a garbage man, apparently. Woodworth has no new information. In fact, he himself no longer believes that he went to Lancaster Lane and found the heart; he thinks that he must have dreamed it, including the medical incineration, after falling asleep while worrying over Allen's radio silence. Considering what was discovered about the teeth, though, Simms doesn't believe him. Or rather, he doesn't believe the new claim that it was a dream. He's pretty sure Woodworth was telling them a true story in his initial interview.


Heh, I think we've gotten the thing I was wondering about last time. A mean-quality Magnus Archives episode. This one sits riiiiiiight in the middle of the other four I've heard.

Fittingly, this episode also feels like...almost an amalgamation of all the others. The night-time streets and police forensics - digital and physical - from "Anglerfish." The containers that one dreads to open, and the growing sleeplessness, from "Do Not Open." The voyeurism and transgression that leaves the watcher themselves exposed and vulnerable from "Across the Street." The eldritch script, implied dismemberments, and subtle agency-stealing magic from "Page Turner." It's a stew of themes and visuals from everything that preceded it, both for better and for worse.

I was a little surprised that Simms didn't suspect a Leitner connection after all, what with the Latin script that looked like it had been held up to a candle. I wonder if the writers intended for this to be an oversight of his, or if they themselves didn't realize they'd trodden a little too close to the same material.

Where this episode was at its best, I think, was in its embrace of mystery and ambiguity. What WAS all that stuff in the bags? Were they each the remains of a victim who'd been transformed (partially or entirely) into some kind of inanimate object? What was the significance of the teeth and the repeated prayer verses all being identical, but the doll heads each being different? Was this all a trap to lure in the garbage men, with Allen being the only one to succumb to their hypnotic effect, or was the rip that revealed the doll heads genuinely accidental and Allen's obsession entirely a malfunction of his own brain? What's out there, and what was going on? It's bad, it's dangerous, but we have no idea what or why or even really where.

It also had a nice, mmm...I wouldn't say "karmic" exactly, but it managed some social commentary about the danger of apathy and forgetfulness. Not thinking about what's "thrown away" or forgotten.

Where the episode was at its worst was when the characters were ambiguously under mind control. Mind control of the incredibly convenient kind that acts exactly like author fiat forcing the characters to do things to make the plot work, rather than their actions stemming from their own motives or even those of any apparent in-universe antagonist. It has that in common with "Page Turner," but fortunately less pervasively, and it has other stuff going on that works much better.

So, that's another three installments of "The Magnus Archives." On balance, very, very good show. I'm still a little worried about what might happen as more continuity emerges and the metaplot becomes more prominent, but as a horror story anthology it's excellent.