The Magnus Archives - MAG 3 Across The Street

Episode Date: March 27, 2016

Case #0070107Statement of Amy Patel, regarding the alleged disappearance of her acquaintance Graham Folger.…For the duration of launch we will be releasing three episodes a week instead of our normal weekly release schedule. We hope you enjoy the extra terror…Be sure to subscribe using your podcast software of choice to get every episode automatically downloaded to your device. It’s more convenient for you and really helps us out. Even better, leave us a review. The more reviews we get, the more people listen and the more we can make!Like what you’re hearing? Let us know.Find ad-free episodes and bonus content on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rustyquillCheck out our merchandise available in our official stores:RedbubbleTeepublicCrowdmadeYou can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice.Please 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: @therustyquillTHREADS: @rustyquillukINSTAGRAM: @rustyquillukEMAIL: [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.

The Magnus Archives Episode 3 Across the Street The End Institute, London. Statement begins. I first met Graham two years ago, more or less. It's hard to say exactly when we first met or even started talking, as we were taking a class together at the time. I'm sure there was plenty of discussion or interaction before we learned each other's names, but I started my course in September of 2005, so yeah, about two years. I decided to take a criminology course at Birkbeck University as a way of getting out of the rut with my office job. I'm an associate compliance analyst at Deloitte, and if you think that sounds boring, well, yeah, it is. I knew a night course in criminology wasn't going to go anywhere, of course, even if I'd finished it.

I just had to do something to find a bit of interest in my life. And it was either that or become an alcoholic, so... Sorry, I'm going off topic. I initially found Graham a bit off-putting, to be honest. He was a chain smoker and wore far too much deodorant to try and cover the smell. He was a bit older than me, maybe ten years or so. I never asked his age, I mean, we weren't that close, but he was starting to grey at the edges of his hair, and you could see that the tiredness on his face wasn't just from missing a single night's sleep. That's not to say he was bad looking, he had a round, open sort of face and quite deep blue eyes, but very much not my type. He was well-spoken in group work, at least when he did speak, and I think it

came up once that he'd been to Oxford, though I don't know what college. I'd noticed earlier that during lectures, he always seemed to be scribbling furiously in a notebook, even when the lecturer wasn't speaking. At first, I just thought he was thorough, but I swear I watched him fill a whole A5 notebook in one lecture. I remember it was a talk on youth in the justice system where the speaker was so slow that it wouldn't have filled that book even if Graham had been writing down literally every word. Not to mention, I asked to borrow his notes once for an essay, and he gave me this weird look and said he didn't take any notes.

So yeah, point is, I wouldn't have called him a friend, but we got on alright. So yeah, point is, I wouldn't have called him a friend, but we got on alright. It was about four months into my course that I first encountered Graham outside of the university. I was riding the night bus home, having gone for a couple of drinks and missed the regular service. I live in Clapham, so there's a pretty regular night bus service headed there. Of course, regular also means drunken angry vomitors, so yeah, I generally try to be unobtrusive, sitting in a seat at the back of the top floor. It was there that I saw Graham. He was sat right at the front, staring out of the window. People-watching is one of my guilty pleasures, so I decided not to say hello, at least not right away. I wasn't disappointed either. He was stranger alone than he had ever been during class.

It was the middle of winter at this point, so the windows were solid with condensation, but he almost obsessively wiped it away from the one in front of him the moment it started to obscure his view. He seemed to be intently scanning the street for something, except that at times he would crane his neck to stare at the roofs of the buildings passing by. He seemed nervous as well, and was breathing way faster than normal, which fogged up his window even more. It was slightly alarming to watch, to be honest, and I finally made up my mind to tell him I was there. He jumped a bit when I greeted him, and I asked him if he was alright. He told me he didn't usually stay out so late, and found night-time public transport unsettling.

I sat next to him, and he seemed to get much more relaxed, so I didn't push the issue. We talked for a while about nothing in particular until the bus started to approach my stop. stop. As I rose, I noticed that Graham had stood up at the exact same time as I had, and I realised with some discomfort that we must live at the same stop. I liked the guy fine, don't get me wrong, but I still didn't really feel okay with him knowing where I lived. But yeah, it was obvious that I'd gotten up to get off the bus, so I couldn't really ride on to the next stop, and it wasn't even that I felt unsafe with Graham, I'm just a private person. I decided to just walk back with him as far as necessary and make sure he didn't see what building I went into. Maybe we weren't even walking in the same

direction. Yeah, we were walking in exactly the same direction. We even seemed to be heading to the same street. It was at that point I felt a hand grab my shoulder and throw me into the road. I don't know how else to describe it. One moment I was walking along, the next I was flying towards the ground. It can't have been Graham. He was in front of me at the time, and I would have sworn there was nobody else on the street. There weren't any cars coming, but I hit my head hard. I think I must have been unconscious for a few seconds, because the next thing I remember is a panicky Graham on the phone to an ambulance. I tried to tell him I was alright, but didn't really manage to get the words out, which, yeah, probably meant I wasn't alright.

The ambulance arrived in pretty good time, considering it was London on a Friday night, and the paramedics gave me a look-over. I was told that the injury itself wasn't serious apparently head wounds always bleed that much and it's nothing to panic about, but that I did have quite a nasty concussion and shouldn't be left alone for the next few hours. Even though we were within sight of my door, I had for some reason settled upon the idea of Graham never knowing where I lived. In retrospect, this was likely the concussion talking,

but the upshot was I agreed to go back to Graham's flat to recover. He was quite awkward about the whole thing and took great pains to assure me that there was nothing untoward about the situation. Apparently he was gay, which I'll admit did actually reassure me a bit. Still, it was clear this wasn't how either of us had hoped to be ending our nights. As it turned out, Graham's flat was directly across the street from mine, just a couple of floors lower. I wondered if I could see my window from his, and I remember I had the odd thought that if I had to look out, I'd need to be careful of his window box, as I could see the hooks attaching it to the frame. I asked him what he grew, and he gave

me a look as though my concussion had stopped me making sense again. I mean, maybe it had, because when I looked back at the window, the hooks were gone, and there was no sign of any window box. At the time I put it down to my head wound, and even now I'm not sure. The flat itself was a simple affair, quite big by London standards. It had only a few pieces of furniture and a lot of bookshelves, each covered with rows and rows of identical notebooks, with no apparent marking system or indication of contents. I started to ask about them, but my head throbbed and I didn't feel up to any answer that might have been forthcoming. Graham led me to the sofa and disappeared to fetch me an ice pack and a mug of sugary tea. I graciously accepted both, though

I wasn't in much of a mood to talk. Graham clearly felt awkward enough with the silence to do the talking for both of us, and I learned more about him over the next hour than I'd ever had a desire to know. Apparently his parents had died in a car accident a few years previously, and had left a great deal of money and ownership of this flat. He didn't need to work anymore, and so had found himself somewhat adrift, taking night college courses to pass the time and broaden his mind, his words, not mine. He said he was trying to figure out what to actually do with his life. He talked on like this for a while, but I stopped listening about that point as I'd become enraptured by the table on which he'd placed my tea. It was an ornate wooden thing with a snaking pattern of lines weaving their way around towards the centre. The pattern was hypnotic and

shifted as I watched it like an optical illusion. I found my eyes following the lines towards the middle of the table, where there was nothing but a small square hole. Graham noticed me staring and told me that interesting antique furniture was one of his few true passions. Apparently he'd found the table in a second-hand shop during his student days and fallen in love with it. It had been in pretty bad shape, but he'd spent a long time and a lot of money restoring it, though he'd never been able to figure out

what was supposed to go in the centre. He assumed it was a separate piece and couldn't track it down. And yeah, like most of his conversation, I'd have found it dull even if I wasn't concussed, but by this time I was beginning to feel well enough to leave and started to make my excuses to Graham. He expressed his concern, said it hadn't been long enough as the medic suggested, but if I had to...

Well, you get the picture. In the end I did leave, as I kept getting lost in the lines of the table, and the pipes outside of the window made such a weird noise that I didn't think staying was actually going to help me recover. I went straight home, making sure Graham couldn't see me from his window, and spent a few hours watching TV until I recovered enough to go to sleep. By the time I woke up the next morning I was feeling more or less okay, though I kept a plaster on the cut on my forehead and tried not to think too much about the previous night. One evening, a few days later though, I found myself staring out of my window, the one that

faced the street, and I remembered how close Graham lived. I looked to see if I could figure out which window was his, and yeah, sure enough, there it was. It was actually a remarkably clear view of his flat, and I could see him sat on the sofa, reading one of the notebooks from his bookshelves. I realised that if I could see him so clearly, he could likely see me just as well if he chose to look up, and with some remnant of my apprehension from that Friday,

I decided to turn off the light in my flat, so he wouldn't see me if he looked up. And then I went back to watching him. Yeah, I know, that sounds creepy. It really wasn't meant to be. I said earlier that I really enjoy people watching, and regardless of how boring he may have been to speak to, Graham was weirdly compelling to watch. So that's just what I did. And not just that night, either. Yeah, there's no non-sinister way to say that watching Graham became my hobby.

It was strange, I'll admit it, but I just couldn't stop myself. I reasoned it wasn't watching him with any purpose or malice in mind. It was purely out of a detached interest in his life. And in my defence, I would have stopped a lot sooner if it hadn't been for the bizarre things he would do. He would constantly reorder his journals, without any apparent system of organisation, most of the time without even opening them. Sometimes he would grab an apparently random notebook from the shelves and start scribbling in it, even though I could see that the page was already covered in writing. Once, and I swear this is true, I saw him take one of his notebooks and start to tear out the pages one at a time. And then, slowly

and deliberately, he ate them. It must have taken him three hours to get through the whole book, but he didn't stop or pause. He just kept going. Even when he wasn't doing anything with the notebooks, there was an odd energy to him. From what I could see, he was constantly on edge and jumped every time any loud noise passed on the street below. A police siren, a breaking bottle... Hell, I even saw him freak out over an ice cream truck once. Each time he'd leap to his feet, run to the window and start looking out, wildly craning his neck from side to side. Sometimes he'd look up, but I'd learnt his patterns well enough to avoid being spotted.

Then, all at once, he'd decide that there was no problem and go back to whatever he was doing before. And by whatever he was doing before, yeah, I mean nothing. He apparently didn't have a television or a computer, the only books he seemed to own were his own notebooks, and I only ever saw him eat takeaway food. I don't know how many times I watched him eat the same pizza, pepperoni with jalapeno peppers and anchovies. Yeah, I know. But the rest of the time he just sat there, smoking, sometimes looking into space, sometimes staring at that wooden table of his. And yeah, I remembered the pattern was kind of hypnotic, and

I spent more than a couple of minutes staring at it myself when I was there, but... He did almost nothing else. Who knows? Perhaps he had a rich and fulfilling life outside of the flat. He certainly left it regularly enough, and yeah, I wasn't so far gone as to actually follow him. In fact, I always waited a good long while before leaving my own building to make sure I didn't bump into him. I still didn't want him to know where I lived, although now for very different reasons. In the end though, it was a hobby, not an obsession, and often days would pass when I wouldn't see Graham at all. Maybe there was stuff I missed that would have explained his behaviour.

I just wish I'd missed what happened on April 7th. Then maybe I'd have just thought he'd moved on, or... I don't know. I just wish I hadn't seen it. Work had been intense for a couple of months, with so many late nights I'd had to drop out of my course. It was just as well, really, as I hadn't actually spoken to Graham since the night I suffered my head injury. I think he still felt awkward about it, and I'd seen him do so many weird things alone in his flat that I think I'd have struggled to have a normal conversation with him. Anyway, this week I'd barely had time to eat, let alone do much in the way of Graham watching, so when I got home at about half ten at night, my first thought was just to fall into bed. But it was Friday and I'd drunk a

huge amount of coffee to keep going at work so yeah I was wired and looking forward to a long lie in the next day. So when I saw Graham's light was still on I decided to spend a relaxing few minutes checking in on him. His light may have been on but I couldn't see him and I wondered if perhaps he'd gone to bed and simply forgot to turn it off. More likely he was just in the bathroom, so I decided to wait a while longer. As I stared at that window, I realised there was something... I don't know, off about it. It looked different somehow, but I couldn't figure out what it was.

Then I noticed it. but I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I noticed it. At first, I'd just taken it to be a water pipe running down the side of the building, attached just below Graham's open window. The light from the street lamps didn't reach up to his fourth-floor flat, and the window ledge cast a shadow that stopped the light from the room illuminating it. But it was long, straight, dark, and from what I could see it just looked like a pipe. Except, I'd

been watching that window for months now, and would have sworn that there had never been a pipe there before. And as I stared at it, it moved. It started to bend, slowly. I realised I was looking at an arm. A long, thin arm. As it bent the joint close to where the arm ended, I think I saw another joint further down also moving and bending what I could only assume were elbows. It hooked the end of the limb over through the window. When I say moved, that's not quite right. It shifted. Like when you stare at one of those old magic eye paintings and you change from seeing one picture into seeing another. I never saw anything I could actually call a hand, but still it pulled

itself through his window. It took less than a second, and I didn't get a good look at what it was. I just saw these arms, legs, at least four of them, but there might have been more. They kind of folded themselves through the window in a flash of mottled grey. I think that was the colour. It was mostly a silhouette. If there was a body or head, it shifted inside faster than I could see it. The moment it was inside, the light in Graham's flat went out, and the window slammed down behind it. So, yeah, I just kind of stood there for a long time, trying to process what I'd just seen. I could make out some vague movements from inside Graham's flat, but couldn't see anything clearly. I finally decided I had to phone the police, though I

didn't have any idea what to tell them. In the end, I simply said I'd seen someone suspicious climbing in through a fourth floor window at his address and hung up before they could ask me who was calling. Then I waited and watched the dark and flat opposite. I couldn't look away. I was convinced that if I stopped staring, that whatever the hell it was would fold itself back out, reach over and step into my home. Nothing came out.

About ten minutes later, I saw a police car driving up the street. No sirens, no flashing lights, but they were here and right away I started to feel better. Looking up though, I saw the light had come on in Graham's flat. There was no sign of the thing I'd seen climb in, but as the police pressed the buzzer outside his building, I saw someone walking towards the door to let them in. It wasn't Graham. I can't stress enough how much this was not Graham. He looked completely different.

He was maybe a few inches shorter, and had a long, square face topped with curly blonde hair, where Graham's had been dark and cut short. He was dressed in Graham's clothes, though. I recognised the shirt from my months of watching, but he was not Graham. I watched as Not Graham walked to the door and let the two police officers in. They talked for a while, and Not Graham looked concerned, and together they started to search the flat. I watched, waiting for the thing to emerge or for them to find the real Graham, but they didn't.

At one point, I saw one of the police pick up a dark red shape that I recognised as a passport. My heart beat faster as I saw her open it and look at Not Graham, clearly comparing, waiting for the moment when she detected the imposter. But instead, she just laughed, shook Not Graham's hand, and they left. Instead she just laughed, shook not Graham's hand and they left. I watched the police car drive away, feeling a sense of helplessness. When I looked up, he was standing at Graham's window, looking back at me. I stood there frozen as his wide, staring eyes met mine and a cold, toothy smile spread across his face. Then in one swift motion

he drew the curtains and was gone. I didn't sleep that night, and I never saw Graham again. I saw this new person, though, all the time. For the next week I'd see him taking out large, heavy-looking rubbish bags several times a day. It took me a while to realise he was disposing of Graham's old notebooks. But soon enough the flat was empty of them. I think he did other redecorating, but I never got a good look, as the only time he had his curtains open was when he was staring intently at my flat, which he now did every night. I tried to find evidence of the old Graham,

but anything I could find online with a picture, it was always a picture of this new person. I even asked some of my old classmates, but none of them seemed to remember him at all. Eventually I moved. I really liked my old place in Clapham, but, yeah, it just got too much. The last straw was when I was leaving for

work one morning and didn't realise until too late that not Graham had left his building at the same time. He greeted me by name. His voice was nothing like it should have been. I started to make my excuses and hurry away, but he just stared at me and smiled. Isn't it funny, Amy, how you can live so near and never notice? I'll need to return the visit someday. I moved out a week later, and I never saw him again. Statement ends. I'd be tempted to dismiss this as hallucination resulting from long-term head trauma complications, but Tim came through with this one and managed to get hold of Ms Patel's medical records. God knows how he got them, but he better not be using institute funds to woo filing clerks again.

The records just don't support the idea she was suffering those sort of problems. Not to mention I usually trust co-worker testimony as far as I can burn it, but her job really doesn't seem like the sort you could do with a compromised sense of reality. Ms Patel has refused our request for a follow-up interview and seems to be trying to distance herself from these events. Graham Folger definitely existed and appears to match up with her story. According to coroner's records, Desmond and Samantha Folger, his parents, died on the M1 near Sheffield on August 4th 2001, and Graham Folger's name appears on the register of several

colleges and universities in and around London over the next few years. The flat she mentioned did belong to Mr. Folger, but was sold through an agency in early 2007. All the photographs we've been able to source seem to match the description of this not-Graham that Ms. Patel described, except for a few Polaroids enclosed, which appear to be from the late 80s, and show the two parents along a dark-haired teenager who doesn't match the later photos at all. There doesn't seem to be much more to be done here. Ms. Patel, like so many of our subjects, seems to have been more interested in giving her statement as a form

of personal closure, rather than as the start of a serious investigation. She wasn't even interested when Sasha told her we'd managed to locate what we believed to be one of Graham Folger's journals. Doubt it would have done much good. It just says the same thing on every page. The words, keep watching, over and over again. Recording ends. The Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by RustyQuill.com and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike International License. Today's episode was written and performed by Jonathan Sims. It was produced and directed by Alexander J. Newell. To comment on episodes, make donations and view links links, images, videos, and show notes,

visit RustyQuill.com. Rate and review us on iTunes, visit us on Facebook, tweet us on Twitter at TheRustyQuill, or email us at mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening. To be continued... Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchart from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks, so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a classic whodunit, and sometimes you want to get wrapped up in a twisted new mystery where the tension is high and you just can't stop listening until you find out what happens next. Audible can take you places

only you can imagine and whenever you want. On a run, doing errands, commuting or just relaxing at home. And it's not just audiobooks. Audible also gives you binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive originals

with thousands of included titles you can listen to all you want and more get added every week so if you're into secrets and suspense or you want to explore any other genre remember there's more to imagine when you listen on audible your first audiobook is absolutely free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.ca this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnababon 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.