The Magnus Archives #3: “Across the Street”

This review was comissioned by @Walker of the Yellow Path


Since I still haven't found the time and brainspace to sit down and write my analysis post for K6BD4, and I also don't want the queue to stagnate for too long while I bounce between longterm projects, I've decided to go ahead and do at least one or two of the Magnus Archives Podcast reviews that are up next. Since these are mostly self-contained short stories aside from the framing device, and tonally very different from anything else I've been doing lately, they should work pretty well as intermissions.

Before starting the next episode, "Across the Street," I will note that in the time between reviewing the first two episodes and getting comissioned to do the next three I was spoiled on where the metaplot eventually goes. However, my understanding is that the continuity doesn't really become important until much further in, and I was only spoiled on generalities, not specifics. So, it shouldn't make much of a difference when it comes to reviewing these early season one episodes on their own merits.

To recap, archivist John Simms is going through many years' worth of a paranormal investigation institute's paranormal investigations and committing them to audio. While the stories, dressed up as case files, have been quite good individually so far, the narrator is what made the strongest impression on me. Very unusually for this genre, Simms is a rational sceptic who knows both that the supernatural really exists, and that most reported incidents of it are still bullshit. Hearing him apply reasonable scrutiny to each account and judge their veracity based on the available evidence really gave me joy, and I hope it will continue to do so.

Anyway, episode three. "Across the Street."


After the spooky violin and drum intro, Simms gets right into the case file, no preamble about the spooky room he's huddled over an audiorecorder in this time. Statement of Amy Patel, from July 2007, concerning the disappearance of her acquaintance Graham Falker.

Two years before the time of recording, Amy was a part-time student studying Criminology, mostly just to distract herself from her mind-numbing office job. Graham was another part-time student, a good bit older than her, with a habit of smoking too many cigarettes and wearing too much deodorant to cover it up. Falker was both withdrawn and odoriferous, so Patel wasn't particularly motivated to interact with him for the first few months' worth of classes. He always appeared to be taking copious notes, even when the lectures were slow and not very information dense, but when Patel asked to copy his notes one time he started acting weirdly defensive and insisted he never took any. Still, despite the weirdness and bad smell, Patel was cordial with him and he with her during their scant interactions.

Toward the end of the semester, Patel ended up taking a different night bus home than her usual one, and found herself seated a few rows away from Falker. He spent the entire ride staring very intently out the window, rubbing winter condensation off the glass as soon as it started forming, his eyes sometimes seeming to catch and fixate on something at rooftop-level as the bus drove passed. After watching for a while, Patel thought that he might have also been hyperventilating. Concern finally outweighed Patel's sense of smell, and she sat next to him to ask if he was alright. He quickly calmed down, assured her that being out later than usual was just making him a bit nervous, and seemed glad for her company after that point.

So far, this just sounds like garden variety paranoia. We'll see how much longer that lasts.

The two of them got off at the same stop, which made Patel nervous. She doesn't like people to know where she lives. Even if it's as general as "somewhere close-ish to this bus stop." She insists that she wasn't afraid of Falker, she just doesn't like people to know that much about her in general, period.

Uh. Huh.

Also, this lady takes Criminology, specifically, out of boredom. On it's own I'd have just thought that an odd choice, but combined with this caginess, and also the generally aversive way she described Falker even while insisting she wasn't that weirded out by him...yeah, he's not the only paranoid one. She might actually be worse, at least in some ways. I wonder how their other classmates would have described her?

She reluctantly, but politely, walks along with him, hoping that their paths will diverge any minute. Their paths do not diverge. She lets him walk ahead of her, to ensure that he isn't following her home, but he isn't. It turns out the two of them live on the same street. Their buildings are almost right across from one another.

...

Okay, this is probably insensitive of me, but the way this totally mundane and innocuous incident is told with a sense of ever-mounting dread and horror is just...I just can't help but find it comical. I know, people with certain anxiety disorders really can experience the world like this. I know, it can be a debilitating, life-ruining thing. I'm sure that the inability to explain their experiences to neurotypicals without said neurotypicals finding them absurd just makes life even more alienating and lonely for these individuals.

But...god, I just can't put myself into her shoes. I can empathize in the very abstract sense of "this is obviously making her feel uncomfortable," but it's not a type of horror I can immerse myself in, and when I try it just seems, well, absurd. I guess it's a failure of imagination and/or empathy on my part, but it's one I'm stuck with.

...

As the two of them neared their apartment buildings, something much more tangibly alarming did happen to Patel. A hand grabbed her from behind and threw her out onto the street, where her head hit the pavement hard enough to cause a concussion.

She knows it wasn't Falker. He was still walking ahead of her and never left her field of vision during the attack. She also very much doubts it was an accomplice of his, because Falker rushed over to her and called an ambulance the second after it happened, and he didn't take the opportunity to steal anything or the like. He didn't see the entity who assaulted Patel, though. According to Falker, by the time he turned around Patel had already hit the concrete and there was nobody else in sight.

Whatever our monster of the week is, it's either invisible or very, very fast.

After a short hospital visit, Patel was discharged and told to take it easy and make sure she has help near at hand for the next little while. Since she has about as many friends as you'd expect a workahaulic paranoiac to have, the only short-notice option this gave her was Falker. So, with great reluctance, she went to his apartment across the street from her own. On the bright side, she never ended up having to reveal to him exactly which building on the street was her own. On the other hand though, while she sat in his living room talking the evening away and nursing her bandaged head, she became haunted by the possibility that her own apartment window might be visible from his own. She was a couple floors higher than him, and a little bit to the side, but still, the possibility. She was stopped from serreptitiously leaning her head out the window when she saw the hooks of a window-box hanging off of the sill, and realized she'd probably stick her face right into his little garden if she tried that.

But then, when she asked him what he was growing, he just got confused. She looked back, and the hooks were gone. She decided the concussion must have caused her to hallucinate.

It did not occur to her that those hooks might have actually been the claws of a wall-climbing monster that likes to throw people against concrete. Were they, in fact, the claws of such an entity? I think so, but I could be wrong.

In the following conversation, she learned some more about Graham Falker. His parents had died a few years ago in an accident, leaving him with their large apartment and seemingly abundant funds. He had promptly quit his job, moved back into their place, and since then has been taking night classes at the university and doing...something? he's evasive on this front...something else during the day. He's also gay, which made her a little bit more comfortable, but only a little.

On a more disquieting note, she noticed the many bookshelves in his apartment living room, all filled with notebooks of the same kind he was always scribbling in in class. Nothing else. Just his notebooks. Seemingly hundreds of them. She also, at a certain point, started having her attention drawn to the wooden table they were drinking tea around. Falker explains that he's an amateur antiquarian of sorts, and this old table was something he spent a good deal of time restoring. The almost hypnotic, spiraling pattern of ornamental grooves that covered its surface were, well, almost hypnotic. There was also a square-shaped hole in the center of the table, like there's a part missing, and the missing part looks like it would connect all the spiralling lines and complete the pattern. According to Falker, he's tried hard to find the missing piece, but without success.

The table, and the spiralling pattern on it, filled Patel's mind for the rest of their conversation. Finally, in the late night, when her head filled a little better and she was getting sleepy, she excused herself back to her own apartment and went to sleep. Still thinking about that table.

Over the next few weeks, Amy Patel discovered a new hobby: watching Graham Falker. She quickly determined which window across the street was his, and from her higher vantage point she could see inside of his living room through it. She always made sure her lights were off when she did this, so that he couldn't spot her back. She also made a point of avoiding him completely, both on their street and (to the best she could without being noticeable impolite) in class. She couldn't let him know where she lived. Couldn't let him know she was watching him.

She stops here to assure the interviewer that she knows this sounds creepy, but no, really, she didn't mean it in a creepy way. She just meant it in a watching him without his knowledge or consent without letting him see or learn a single thing about her in return way. Not creepy. There's a difference. Really, there is.

Falker turned out to be much weirder when he thought he was unobserved than he was in public. Any noise from outside his apartment would startle him and leave him looking around fearfully out his window for some seconds afterward. He often took the notebooks off the shelves and placed them back on in a different order, but never in a way that made it seem like there was a system he was organizing them into. He sometimes picked one, seemingly at random, and sat down to write in it just like he did in class. Which is relatively normal, to be fair. What wasn't normal was the one time she saw him take a notebook, sit down with it, and spend multiple hours slowly tearing out every page one at a time and eating them. When he wasn't doing anything with the notebooks or freaking out because of noises, he just sat on his couch, smoked cigarettes, and stared at the wooden table. At least, she assumes it's the table he was staring at, from the angle and furniture placement.

Patel notes that he did often seem to be out of his apartment, and that for all she knows he might have had a rich and fulfilling life outside doing whatever it was he did. But, when he was at home, he appeared to be quietly, macabrely insane, and she couldn't help but watch him whenever he was home and she didn't have something important to do herself.

...

What I find most bizarre about Amy's behaviour over this time is that, while she describes her work and academics a bit more, and talks at length about Graham and her stalking of him, she never says a word about how the attack effected her. Nothing about her being afraid to walk down the street alone, after it happened (hell, she was willing to cross it by herself later the very same night). Nothing about her warily eyeing other people in her neighborhood and wondering if they were the assailant. It's like that near-death experience that Falker saved her from is just unimportant and forgettable for her.

I was mugged once, and going out on the street after that was hard for me for a little while. If I'd been given a concussion by an unseen person on my own damned doorstep, I'm sure it would have been much worse. Amy Patel is mistrustful and paranoid to begin with. How is this...yeah, there's something REALLY weird going on with her. Even weirder than she's letting on. Probably even weirder than what's going on with Graham.

...

Jump ahead to that fateful Friday in April. Patel had since had to drop out of her night classes, on account of increasing workload, so her only contact with him was one sided through their windows in the evenings. It was a dark night, and the shadows were deep...and the light from his window was being caught on something just below its lower frame. It looked like a drainage pipe, but she'd been watching his window for months at this point, and she knew there hadn't been anything under the frame before.

Then, it moved. Bent at the middle. It was an arm. Only, she was pretty sure it bent at one point, at elbow length from its ending, and then also at another point further down in the darkness. Like it had multiple elbow joints along its length. She saw it reach up and hook its claws onto the sill. Like you might mistake for the hook of a window box, if you saw it out of the corner of your eye while your vision was blurry from a concussion. The way it moved, she said, was...almost hallucinatory. Like its movements were a change in her own focus or perceptions rather than tangible change; she compares it to an optical illusion in one of those trippy picture books. Or, as she notably avoids comparing it too, those spiralling lines on the wooden table that seemed to move without moving when you stared at them. However, unlike those illusionary motions, this thing moved fast. She had a vague impression of a mottled grey color, and of other double-jointed limbs like the first one she'd seen, as it shifted itself over the sill and inside Falker's window in less than a second. Immediately after it slipped inside, Falker's light went out.

She had trouble believing what she'd just seen, for a long moment. Even as indistinct silhouettes moved around in the darkness of Falker's apartment. Even as the movement stopped.

Patel finally called the police, telling them she'd seen someone scale the wall and enter the fourth floor window of that building. She didn't identify herself, and hung up before they could ask any further questions. She calmed down a bit when she saw the police car pull up, but then got even more anxious when the light in Falker's apartment came back on. When the police knocked on the door, a man answered it. The man was wearing the same clothes that Falker wore before the creature came inside, but he wasn't Falker. He was taller. He had a different build. Different hair colour. Different complexion. He looked nothing like Graham Falker.

The man in Falker's clothes seemed baffled by the police visit. He helped them search the apartment. Nothing suspicious seemed to get found. Patel started to feel a glimmer of hope when she saw a cop pick up an ID card and compare it to the imposter's face, only for it to turn to horror when the police were apparently satisfied with the resemblance and left the apartment. As soon as they were gone, the imposter walked up to the window, looked up at Patel's own window, met her gaze, and smiled.

For the next week, Patel saw him systematically moving garbage bags full of Graham's notebooks out of the apartment. Every night, he stood at his window, staring at hers.

She looked up Graham Falker online, and the only photos she found were of the new man, not the one she remembered. None of her old Criminology classmates remembered Graham at all at this point; he was, after all, not terribly outgoing or memorable. She started looking into moving somewhere else. She massively accelerated those plans when he approached her on the street one day, and said the sentence "Isn't it funny how you can live so close without noticing, Amy? I'll have to return the visit someday." And smiled.

She moved halfway across the city that same week, and hasn't gone back to her old neighborhood since. So far, she hasn't seen him - or it, as the case may truly be - again. End of Amy Patel's statement.

In the wrapup, narrator John Simms says that under ordinary circumstances he'd throw this document in the trash and never think about it again. Textbook example of the kind of story to not believe. However, there is absolutely no indication that Patel is mentally unbalanced enough to have hallucinated all this, and the job she holds down would not be doable for someone that detached from reality. It could still have been a hoax, but the witness' mental health status led the Magnus Institute to do a little bit of follow-up investigation, and what they found was...well, for one thing Graham Falker was indeed declared a missing person not long after her last meeting with the imposter. For another, the post-2000 or so photos of Graham Falker match, but they dug up some old family polaroids, and the child or teenager in those looks completely different. The recent photos (all of which are stored digitally somewhere or other) match Patel's description of the imposter. The old polaroids look like a younger version of how she said Graham was supposed to look.

They also got ahold of what they think was one of Graham's old notebooks. It was filled entirely, every line of every page, with the words "Keep watching."


I forgot how good The Magnus Archives is.

This story surprisingly ended up hitting me much closer to home than "Anglerfish" or "Do Not Open." Even despite me finding the protagonist unrelatable and unpleasant.

I don't know if this story is intentionally about information age alienation, but it's hard for me to interpret it as anything besides that. At the risk of this coming across as a boomer rant, I remember that when I was a kid we knew our neighbours. My parents knew the neighbour kids' parents. My parents even knew the neighbours who didn't have kids. I only barely know most of mine. There are some I don't know at all. And, when I've occasionally gotten self-conscious about this and tried to change it, I found that trying to do so was like pulling teeth. It's gotten a bit better once our kid got old enough to start making playground friends and giving us and the other local parents a reason to interact, but it's still not the same.

The idea that something horrific could happen in a densely populated urban neighbourhood, and no one in it would know anyone else in it well enough to even communicate that it was happening...well, twenty years ago that would sound like a Kafkaesque fever dream, but nowadays it just seems realistic. Amy Patel, uncomfortable with real life interaction, hiding behind anonymity, preferring to interact with the world through a rectangular screen. People with her set of issues have a much easier time of it nowadays than they used to in the past. Or at least, they feel like they have a good excuse to not try to work on themselves. Feeling safer this way, right up until something happens that the darkness and window panes can't protect Patel from. And then she has no idea how to even start dealing with it.

There's even the detail of how the digital photos have all been corrupted by the monster, leaving the old pre-internet polaroids alone as an anchor to the real world outside of its control.

Textually, this story is a lot like the Anglerfish one, with a predatory imposter-monster that's impossible to pin down. The biggest difference is that the anglerfish seemed like it could potentially have just been a hungry animal, whereas this many-elbowed shapeshifter is unquestionably intelligent and malicious. And also much better equipped to fool cameras, at least while in its assumed human guise. The big question this story leaves one with is who was the creature's real target; Falker, or Patel? It seemed like Graham was the one who knew too much and had to be removed. But then, at the same time, it physically attacked Amy first, and the way it only started stalking Graham once Amy was already in place to see it and feel helpless and terrified about it makes it seem like it was just using him to get to her.

Or...hmm. Actually. The way that Amy developed this kind of fixation on Graham after the attack. Did it infect her, in some weird way? Did Graham have a way of repelling it (possibly involving that table, or those notebooks) that made it need a human stalker to act as a kind of conduit for itself?

As with the anglerfish, I feel like getting the answers to any of these questions might ruin the story. Tantalizing though they are.

On a production note; I noticed this in the previous stories too to a lesser degree, but the way Simms emotes during these readings feels off. Like, he reads Amy's account with an approximation of what she'd be feeling, speeding up when she should be nervous, slowing down when reading a part that might be painful to think about, etc. It feels out of character for someone with Simms' personality to be doing this kind of dramatic read. It makes the stories much more engaging to listen to, of course, but well...the fact that it needs to do this betrays an inherent problem in combining this format with this medium. I'm not pointing this out at length because it's a huge problem (it's really a pretty minor one), but it's an instructive flaw that I think can be learned from.


I'll do the next Magnus Archives story after getting a bit further into Metal Gear Rising.