The Magnus Archives - MAG 196 - This Old House

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Case ########-36A statement on Reality recorded by Martin K Blackwood, recorded at Hilltop Road.Content warnings:ManipulationAltered realitySpidersHeights / vertigo (inc. SFX)Mentions of: death, blackmail, war, knives, human remains, paranoia, body horror, live burial, children in peril, arsonSFX: harsh static, insectsTranscripts:PDF - https://cutt.ly/DlEuvpjDOC - https://cutt.ly/ClEuYa8Thanks to this week's Patrons:If you'd like to join them, visit www.patreon.com/rustyquill.Edited this week by Nico Vettese, Elizabeth Moffatt, Brock Winstead, Jeffrey Nils Gardner & Alexander J NewallWritten by Jonathan Sims and directed by Alexander J NewallProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesPerformances:- "Martin Blackwood" - Alexander J Newall- "Annabelle Cane" - Chioma NwaliobaSound effects this week by 14GPanskaHonc_Petr, aarom, aunrea, baryy, BeeProductive, cmusounddesign, DWOBoyle, f-r-a-g-i-l-e, Fission9, freakinbehemoth, giddster, Huggy13ear, InspectorJ, j1987, jlozano, mmarkb, MichelleGrobler, MTJohnson, muses212, Native_Cell, nomenclatures, o_ciz, OGsoundFX, Ornitorrinco, patchytherat, PeteBarry, PMarcy, qubodup, RogerBoyX69, rsellick, Rudmer_Rotteveel, Sheyvan, SteveMannella, sturmankin, Timmeh515, Veridiansunrise, xtrgamr & previously credited artists via freesound.org.Additional sound effect from Little Robot Sound Factory via Zapsplat.comCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop & https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill.You 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 fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence 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 for the small coffee, all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Rusty Quill Presents The Magnus Archives Episode 196 This Old House I'm sorry. Are you going to walk this slow the whole way? Are you going to stay silent the whole way?

Perhaps that's because you didn't seem to like what I had to say. No, it's because you weren't really saying anything, were you? It was all just ominous foreshadowing again. Perhaps I was just trying to make things feel... familiar. Perhaps the whole answer a question with a question thing is wearing a bit thin. Besides which, it's a bit late to play coy.

You promised me an actual straight answer. You'd have it a lot more quickly if you didn't keep stopping. Hey, this is your magic bubble. You're the one making it so that we're, like, actually walking, walking all the way to Oxford. So sorry I've got to sit down occasionally like a human. And the book breaks? It's not like you're

entertaining company. And it's nothing to do with the fact that any lost souls in our area also get a break from their torment? Hmm? So what if it does? Is that a problem? Actually, I find it very reassuring. Great, because I'm still going to need to rest. Some of these houses have actual beds, and I haven't slept on a mattress since so... Problem? Problem?

Did he suffer? Did who suffer? Just answer the question. No. I did it in his sleep. He'd always been accommodating, so... I wanted to honour his wishes. That's a shame. Is it? I mean, he seemed nice. To us, at least. And what of his victims? The people whose lives he destroyed? I can't speak Did I? No, you didn't.

Is it much further? Less so than last time you asked. Could you just try answering her question properly? Just once. We're close now. Just a few more streets. Thank you. Oh, er... Oh, come on, Martin.

You didn't really expect him to find us before we got here, did you? No. We have a sizeable lead, and the camera too, don't forget. Besides, even if he did ride to your rescue, what then? Would you explain to him that you're here of your own free will? I mean, that's a pretty generous way to describe being blackmailed. Oh, it's blackmail, is it? Offering you a way out of all this? You said if I told John or waited, then you'd leave and I'd never know.

And you believed me, which was very gracious of you. I shouldn't have. Why not? I didn't lie to you. I do have another option for you. One that means neither of you need to die or be consumed by any dark power. Oh, but you can't just tell me. Or John. Oh, no, no.

That would be far too straightforward. I could. But it's much better if you see it for yourselves. And he would not have come willingly. He needs to think he's coming for you. He can see literally everything. I'm sure he probably knows it already. In a way, perhaps.

But I guarantee that being here in person is something very different. Come on. Hey, is that... You told me not to bring a tape recorder. No. I said we wouldn't need one. We have plenty of tapes. But that... We're here. This is it? Ah, I forget. You've never actually been here before, have you? Well, what do you think?

It's, I mean, it's, um... Just a house? Well, yeah. What were you expecting? I don't know, like, something a bit more dramatic, I guess. We'll see what we can do step into my Do take a seat. So, what now? I've written you a statement.

I would like for you to read it. And if I don't? Then we sit here in silence until the archivist arrives. But I would suggest you do read it. I believe you find it illuminating. Screw it. Fine. Fine. Once, there was a house. A building that, for all it might have looked like those around it, was not the same. Stop. No. It didn't start with the house.

It was here long before any might have thought of it as a home. Once there was a patch of land, not quite as firm in this reality as that which surrounded it. Stop. No. It's not about the land. Mud and soil has no part in what is there. Once there was a point in space that did not quite obey all those petty rules that decide what can be allowed to happen in a world. Stop, no. It's not a point in space. The earth spins and hurtles through the darkness, but it still carries it along. Let us simply say that once there was a place, a place where the universe had cracked.

None of us remember what had caused the crack, not even those things beyond time who might measure a generation in the echoes of their screams. It had been there as long as they have, if not longer. It's not a large crack, and to walk by it, even through it, you never pause to notice. Perhaps the air around it is slightly thinner, lights slightly dimmer. In the summer there may be the slightest chill, in the winter a warmth that is almost unsettling. The fungus that grows in the damp there is somehow more vibrant in its whiteness,

while flowers remain duller than those that neighbour them. But these changes are slight, and none have dwelt on them long enough to call the place cursed. Indeed, few have ever thought much of it at all. Perhaps there are many such places across the earth. Perhaps it is unique. Certainly, no one has known either way. The first to build a home upon that spot was named Eoa. He was a Saxon and a coward, who had fled the field against the Mercian king and sought to find his peace there. His squalid little hut was far removed from those of his once kinsmen. Nonetheless, there he lived and worked,

and tried hopelessly to forget the stench of blood and rot and the feel of a saax knife in the wound he carried to the end of his life. Did his terror call to him with the drumbeat voice of carnage? Did it sing to him with the squirming melody of decay? Could any have told you the difference? squirming melody of decay. Could any have told you the difference? It is strange that a name, a face, a taste of fear should linger through the centuries, and yet I cannot be sure which of them it was that ate so well.

Some fears are eternal, but within them lie a hundred titles, whispered in the secret places of every era, of every corner of our world. Who can say if any of them are true? Whichever it might have been, they knew Eo as Terra's well. Until he was no longer there. Until he awoke in a place that was a place, but somewhere else. Somewhere the Mercians had pushed further, had taken more. For all his dread of a violent death, his end was quick and clean, and none of his kinsmen ever knew his fate.

His hut, left unattended, quickly fell to disrepair, then to collapse. No one used the wood. The grain was warped. Many lived in that spot across the following years, some in peace, some in misery, a few in strangled fear. But none tied their sorrows to the land or the dwelling they might have erected upon it.

The village slowly grew and became a more populous town, though not ever a remarkable one. That said, perhaps sometimes, in the quiet, those who tried to make it their home might have felt a whisper, an echo of some other place, some place not quite their own, but it never disturbed their sleep. So what does it mean for a place to be haunted? own, but it never disturbed their sleep. So what does it mean for a place to be haunted? A place can be haunted by someone, some poor soul whose bones lie restless in the shallow soil. It can be haunted by something, some

crime or atrocity that indelibly marked itself upon the soul of a spot. But can it be haunted by somewhere? An echo of worlds that are not our own, alien pasts that draw to unknown presence, leaking through the smallest, narrowest crack at the very edge of existence. The closest anyone ever came to knowing was a man named Geoffrey Neckham, a scholar from the university. He bought the house that then sat there from a bow-legged milliner whose name he never bothered to learn, seeking some peace and removal from his more raucous colleagues. He was a man of God, of course, but also a keen master of natural philosophy, a study he put to use when he first felt the oddities that pervaded his new home. The strange drafts

that shifted his candle flame, the gentle murmur that almost sounded like voices. Once he even found a new room, though he very wisely did not enter it. His investigations were crude, of course, convinced as he was that it was some working of his god, an unseen passage to a heavenly sphere, perhaps, or, as he more often feared, an infernal one. That said, his observations were surprisingly astute, and his rubric of belief closer to the truth than you might imagine. But Geoffrey Neckham had neither the words to talk of dimensions,

nor a mind able to meaningfully conceive of worlds beyond the one within which he lived, and its requisite afterlives of course. And so, as a result, all his mediations and his intellect ultimately led him nowhere. They were not, however, entirely in vain, because you see, Geoffrey Neckham lived in fear. There was a reason he chose to live apart from his peers, why he cooked his own paltry meals in privacy and avoided academic meetings. He was certain that his scholastic rivals were somehow plotting against him, weaving intricate schemes to ruin his reputation and cost him his position, even take his life. It was this obsession that first brought him to the attention of Mother of Puppets, the Great Spider, and how we became aware of what this place was, what it might mean.

Eventually, the long-awaited Knife in the Dark did indeed find its way into the belly of Geoffrey Neckham, but by then his only meaningful work was done, and another, altogether grander plan was now in motion. It was no easy task, keeping the place closed through the ages, working all the while to weaken that crack, luring in the servants of other powers and so, in the resulting clash, pressing ever harder against the edges of our reality. pressing ever harder against the edges of our reality. For a while, it belonged to a sculptor of puppets, who made his strings from the tendons of those he felt did not appreciate his art, and he would dance them around in a mocking effigy.

He was, in time, slain by a crusading hunter of the Reformation, who would let no heresy go unanswered. He was bisected with his own wood-saw. Once there lived there a writer of anonymous letters, who could not have told you where his secrets came from, only that he knew the darkest desires of many souls, and had the wit to use them to their best effect. He was deemed a civil war traitor, and buried alive deep beneath the house in which he had drawn his schemes,

by a man whose teeth were always stained with mud. So many schemers and spiders and full-throated monsters, twisting manipulators and furtive liars, each meeting a violent, grotesque end, each widening the crack just a little, until finally a man named Raymond Fielding, a smiling pillar of the community who fostered children into food for his grotesque arachnid god, was murdered by flame, immolated by the Chosen of the Ravening Burn. The House of the Time was destroyed along with him, reduced to ashes, and with that, the crack finally became a gap. A hole around which time, dimension, and reality began to bend, shudder, and leak. An opening into, we believe, other worlds than this tired old thing.

It was not wide enough to allow true passage, not yet, save for the odd accident. But it was wide enough for what we now intended. Okay, so, a crack in reality? Oh, it's so much more than a crack now. It's an aching hole. A gaping wound in the very fabric of our world. And a gateway to other dimensions? Not quite yet. Okay.

Dramatic enough for you. So this is what you wanted me to see? Annabelle? It's a real shame, you know. I was so looking forward to filling you with spiders. Excuse me? They would have hollowed you out and worn you like a cheery jumper. Right, but since you're telling me, I can assume you're not going to now, right? That's the thing about webs. People get so caught up on how intricate they are, how perfectly constructed, they never consider how flexible they can be. The sort of storm they need to weather.

You can't be precious about a single strand. Right, yeah, but again, because you didn't really answer me, filling me with spiders isn't a strand of your web now, right? I just want us to be absolutely clear on this. Annabelle? No. Not anymore. Right, thanks. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt.

Just checking. It's such a shame. There's a time when I was certain you had what it takes to join us. What? Because I like spiders? Well, used to. Because you always managed to get what you wanted through smiles and shrugs and stammerings that weren't nearly as awkward as they seemed. Point taken. But I didn't foresee how deep you'd fall into the lonely.

Or how far the archivist would go to get you back. It made things... awkward. Why are you telling me all this? Because explaining things, giving answers like this, it's not what I am. It's difficult against my nature.

And I'm trying to practice. Why? Why do you think? Sorry. Okay, let's try a different question. What was your plan? I was going to snatch you away, lure you both into this web and then take you. Drive him to despair so that when you return to him,

bulging and talking in a thousand tiny voices, it will drive him to a final push. And now? Your bond is too complicated. I couldn't drive that kind of risk between you now. I've considered every angle, examined every cause and effect, and I've finally come to the conclusion that I... I need to tell you the truth.

To explain things. Yeah, but why? Because if I do... You do as I ask. Oh, will we? Yes. He's nearly here. John? Let's make the setting a little more appropriate, shall we?

Hey, just, uh, ha, put the camera down, okay? You said you wanted something more dramatic, right? What? No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Shit, that's a long way down. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Further than you can possibly imagine. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, what? What are you? Oh, what is this? What do you think?

It's for your safety. So you don't do anything... unpredictable. Oh. I'd hate for you to fall. When John gets here, he's going to kill you. As long as he listens to me first, it won't matter. So just listen. Listen, Martin. You should know.

Now listen to me, Martin. Listen. Wait. Wait. The tapes. A fine material to spin a web with, don't you think? What? All this time, through all of this... It was just you spying on us! Oh, Martin. You have no idea who's listening, do you? To be continued... Today's episode was written by Jonathan Sims, produced by Laurie-Anne Davis, and directed by Alexander J. Newell.

It featured Alexander J. Newell as Martin Blackwood, and Chioma Nwaleoba as Annabelle Kane. To subscribe, buy merchandise, or join our Patreon, visit RustyQuill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us via mail at RustyQuill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook or email us via mail at RustyQuill.com. Join our community on the Discord via the website or on Reddit at r slash The Magnus Archives. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Joan Flyvolm Jordan Graham Caitlin Cottrell Cale Cleffie Lisa Stafford

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