The Magnus Archives - MAG 100.3 - Lucid (Rusty Fears Competition Winner)

Episode Date: April 25, 2018

Our first ever competition, Rusty Fears, spawned an incredible amount of great entries. After hours of reading and deliberation in Rusty Towers, Alex, Jonny & Anil announced the winners. This week's episode is the first of TWO winning stories written by fans like you and produced by us here at Rusty Quill.Without further ado: "Lucid" is written by Elizabeth Richardson and read by Jonathan Sims. Listen in next week (and then keep listening of course) to catch the next winning story!Note: this is a stand-alone piece of fiction and not part of the Magnus canon.Content Warnings for this episode are at the end of the show notes.Thanks to this week's Patrons: Ja-Ying Teresa Yu, Mikkel Knudsen, Velma, Laura F., Christopher Bloom, Andrew Dicks, Brianna Johnson, Christopher Dunn, Shannon Callahan, April NashIf you'd like to support us, head to www.patreon.com/rustyquillEdited by Elizabeth Moffatt, Brock Winstead & Alexander J Newall.Check out our merchandise at https://www.redbubble.com/people/rustyquill/collections/708982-the-magnus-archives-s1You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fearContent Warning for:Altered RealitySleep DisordersBody Horror Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. Hi everyone, Ben here. I'd just like to take a

moment to thank some of our patrons. Jiaying Teresa Yu, Mikkel Knudsen, Velma, Laura F, Christopher Bloom, Andrew Dix, Brianna Johnson, Christopher Dunn, Shannon Callaghan, April Nash. Thank you all. We really appreciate your support. If you'd like to join them, go to www.patreon.com forward slash rusty quill and take a look at our rewards. Hi everyone, Alex here with a quick introduction to today's episode. This is the first of our two writing competition winners. The second story will be played next week. Also, please be aware that this story is a standalone work and shouldn't be considered part of the Magnus Archives canon. That's all for now. We hope you enjoy the episode. Rusty Quill Presents

Lucid by Elizabeth Richardson The moment comes slowly and with a sharpness, when a mundane dream focuses into lucidity. It's an awareness that must be cupped lightly, like water in the palm, or else my mind jolts itself awake. The dream world fades then, becoming impossible to grasp. I recall it distantly, like a past visit to somewhere far away. It is difficult, afterwards, to describe those memories of my own sleeping world to anyone else. My dreams are more than fragments of sight or sound, there is a pulsing sense of continuing life about them. There are patterns which have reappeared for years, the roads and neighbourhoods of my hometown, childhood landmarks which my mind revisits, mirrored or shifted, north into south, city into field.

The streets and buildings become merged, mixed with larger, distant cities as I travel in my waking life. Accumulated impressions of places build into an inner world. Then there are the landmarks which live only in my dreams, repeated and familiar. Then there are the landmarks which live only in my dreams, repeated and familiar. They might return months apart when I find myself lucid among their walls and doorways. I immediately recognise their surprisingly unchanged details. The shuttered, abandoned petrol station where in reality there are only friendly suburban houses. The small brown house with carpeted hallways and cellar tunnels crushingly tight, where normally a bright ice cream shop sits next to a school.

At some point, becoming lucid, for me, was no longer about the excitement or the rewriting of dream plots. Moments I became lucid were opportunities to explore these places which existed only in my dreams, could only be visited in that half-waking vision. Upon actually waking, I would fill my dream journal with sketches and notes, trying to understand what these places, which seemed so important and real to me, might mean. I assumed they were some aspect of my psyche, some flavor of my soul that would help me better understand myself. When I encountered the otherness, it was not in these places, but in a watchful pair of eyes.

A man was standing quietly outside my dream city hall. There were many people walking the sidewalks, and the plot of my dream was comfortingly usual. I was late to an appointment, or maybe I was on my way to go shopping. I was only slightly aware that I really explore. Still, I was moving slowly and feeling curious when I realized the man was looking at me. I stopped. His posture seemed friendly and normal. Gazing into his eyes, however, I felt the hazy sluggishness of everything burn off and knowledge became clear I was dreaming. I was lucid dreaming and there was a thing in my dream. Looking out of eyes which I'd imagined, my idea of a businessman in a suit. The man and the suit were part of my dream world, they were familiar, but there was a presence behind his eyes that was not of me or my world. The wrongness I couldn't explain to myself any more than I could adequately explain my dreams to another person.

I turned to run and woke up instantly. It was still hours until dawn. I feared that if I went back to sleep I'd see whatever it was again, looking through those eyes with an awareness I'd never before encountered in any of my many dreams. So I unlocked my phone, wasted a few hours online until I felt exhausted, until the dream felt distant enough to be written off as a weird nightmare. I was able to sleep again, fitfully, and without dreaming.

As much as this unfamiliar presence had disturbed me, I couldn't hold on to the fear in the morning light. How many times had I stumbled across strange buildings or distorted scenery that I'd never known until I found them while lucid dreaming. Often those places could be unsettling and creepy, and while they felt real and solid when I walked among them, I'd always accepted they were crafted by some remote part of myself. They became familiar with repeated visits, and there were still times I'd make new discoveries. My dreams had a way of surprising me, the way the world seemed to build itself. Couldn't there be parts so distant from my consciousness that I would perceive them as anomalies? When it returned to my dream world weeks later, the otherness rose inside her body with long spindle legs that bent at many joints.

It rocked and lurched as it slowly moved towards me, as if it were unsure of how to move those impossible limbs. limbs. The figure was still a recognizable human shell, still wore a business suit. I would even claim the warped body as another creation of my own mind. But whatever sat invisibly inside the distorted form repulsed me beyond explanation. I ran upstairs and down industrial alleyways. I ran faster than the crawling thing with those awkward legs could run. I was only awake enough to know that I could run, even fly away. No matter how many city blocks I put between myself and the sense of it, no matter how high I tried to float away towards rooftops and safety, I felt it pressing on me.

I didn't need to see into its eyes anymore to know it was not created by me or my subconscious. Its presence had an alien friction that was prowling my dreamscape. I had a sense of those legs growing longer and more jointed as the presence pursued me. Eventually, I became too lucid to hold the terrifying hunt in my mind. I startled awake at 4am. It was enough to stay awake to let an early shower chase away the lingering, crawling sensations. Whatever my visitor was it had dissipated. It was beyond my understanding and wandering in a place that felt so distant from my waking life that it was easier to let it go and avoid dwelling on it.

In the nights that followed, I remembered little of my dreams. Those dreams which I could recall, I was barely lucid, caught in fuzzy and chaotic dramas that had no logic or structure. When I finally stumbled onto the otherness again, it wasn't moving at all. I dreamt I was near an industrial factory I'd never seen before, an ordinary kind of nonsense dream perhaps, nothing that was tied to my repeated lucid dreamscape. A path led towards two doors, side by side. A great line of people were following each other, single file into the door on the left. Everything about the factory and the doors was rusted and dirty, but it felt strangely safe and calm.

I wanted to follow the crowd inside, but before I could enter the left doorway, I felt a scratch upon the lucid part of my mind. I went to the door on the right instead. It was solid metal, heavy and imposing. Suddenly the calm was gone. The factory before me felt terrible and wrong. Still, I had to explore. I had to understand why. I had to know where it led. I wanted to know what it could mean.

I opened the door slowly, waiting for a darkness to jump out and take me. darkness to jump out and take me. Instead, I found myself at the top of a long metal staircase, built of grated iron, flush against one wall and leading steeply down. The room's details became clearer, enough that I knew I would soon wake up. At the bottom of the metal stairs was an immense, empty warehouse, like a great cabin plunging down in front of me and to my right. To my left was only solid wall. All of the walls were covered in bolted steel plates between a few tall, darkened glass windows. High above me, a single bright lightbulb rocked slightly Hanging from a long thin wire Extending out of the darkness of a vaulted ceiling

I walked a little way down the stairs Then leaned over the railings to look at what was below The warehouse was empty But for a simple metal folding chair at the bottom, propped open on a cracked concrete floor and set directly below the light. An empty warehouse, but for the chair and the space above the chair, so clearly filled with an unseen otherness that I screamed, so clearly filled with an unseen otherness that I screamed,

a loud shout that died quickly into an oppressive silence. The intrusion into my mind was overwhelming, crushing, paralyzing. I felt frozen, still high above on the staircase, as the light began to flicker off and on, over and over, while the room became sharper and more real. I waited for my mind to be jolted out of the dream, to be forced awake. I was certain I was dreaming. I could feel the corroded iron banister cut into my palms. I could feel the breath and pulse of my dream body. I could feel the weight of gravity as I leaned over the edge, unable to move back, unable to move at all. In the moments of darkness, I couldn't see the chair.

When the light flicked back on, I braced myself, expecting it to be filled with visible proof of the immense presence I knew was there, a presence watching me and waiting. But the chair remained empty and distant below me. Hours passed as I was tossed between the darkness and the harsh light. Whatever had been inside the businessman and the creature, it was now free from any mask or shell Waiting invisibly upon the chair

Paralysed and still hoping for the dream to end I could feel the presence welling up like a spring It filled the warehouse Went past the bolted steel and glass Down pathways, through carpeted halls Past every shuttered window down every street and alleyway. Distantly, I still wondered if whatever this was, this living presence which I had stumbled upon in my curiosity,

could ever be called a part of my mind. If so, it was from such depths that I couldn't lay any claim of control over the being now flooding my dreamscape. When my morning alarm sent me reeling back into my bedroom, it was only habit that led my hand to the pen on my nightstand. Habit to open my dream journal. Nothing had dissipated with the morning light filtering through my curtains, and as the ink moved on the page, the words and drawings were not my own. What belongs to my mind and what does not has fragmented beyond my recognition. Here in my bedroom reality is turning,

slowly yet sharply. There is an itching sense in the air of a lens slowly turning into focus. of a lens slowly turning into focus. Something is waking up within the dreaming world. This episode is distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial share alike 4.0 international license. Thanks for listening. Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchart from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible.

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