The Magnus Archives - Rusty Fears 7 - Clunk by Nairis Santini

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

This week’s short horror story, Clunk, inspired by the prompt "Deep Space", is written by Nairis Santini and read by Shahan HamzaThe author would like to dedicate it to Serafino, "who read my stories when I was little and inspired me to continue writing."Content Notes:- Family arguements- Thalassophobia- Loss of Time- Loss of SpaceDirected and Produced by April SumnerWritten by Nairis SantiniExecutive Producers Alexander J Newall & April SumnerFeaturing Shahan Hamza as NarratorEdited by Lowri Ann Davies and Nico VetteseMusic by Nico Vettese and Sam JonesMastering by Catherine RinellaArt by April SumnerSupport Rusty Quill directly by joining our new membership platform at members.rustyquill.com or on Patreon at patreon.com/rustyquillCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop and https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quillSupport Rusty Quill by purchasing from our Affiliates; DriveThruRPG – DriveThruRPG.comJoin our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillX: @therustyquillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Protocol is a derivative product of the Magnus Archives, created by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share alike 4.0 International Licence. For ad-free episodes, bonus content and more, join members.rustyquill.com or our Patreon.Pre-order The Magnus Archives Mysteries: rustyquill.com/mysteries.Pre-order FROM THE LIBRARY OF JURGEN LEITNER, a Magnus novel: rustyquill.com/novelBuy tickets to a Magnus Archives Live Show in Sheffield, UK in July 2026: https://crossedwires.live/podcast/the-magnus-archives Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi there, Billy Hindle here, the voice of Alice Dyer in the Magnus Protocol. As part of the Magnus Archives 10th anniversary, Rusty Quill is hosting a special Magnus Live show at the upcoming Crossed Wires podcast festival in Sheffield. Join co-creators Jonathan Sims and Alexander J. Newell on the 5th of July for a new iteration of our live show Statement Begins, where you can hear fan favourite statements, such as anglerfish, read live, and gain exclusive insights into the creation.

and history of the show straight from the creators themselves. You can buy your tickets now, including limited numbers of meat and greet tickets, from crossedwires. Live, or the link in the description of this episode. Hi everyone, Alex here, founder of Rusty Quill and Nightmare in Chief for the Magnus Protocol. I'm just taking a moment to introduce this latest installment in our Rusty Fears series. We once again challenged our fans to write short horror stories based on seven prompts and selected winners in each category to have their stories given the full Magnus. Protocol Treatment.

Each story is read by a different cast member, directed by our producer April Sumner, and edited by our very own in-house editing team. This series begins our fortnightly release schedule leading up to the premiere of the Magnus Protocol Season 2, Part 3, which returns on Thursday, July 16th, or two days early on Tuesday, July 14th, for our early access supporters.

That's all for now, so thanks for listening, and we hope you find this as horrific as our judges did, in a good way. I do not tell this story often. It always feels like speaking it out loud might make it happen again, like describing the shape of a doorway no one else can see and then finding it waiting for you, open and patient. Recently, though, it has been pressing at me from the inside,

and I found myself needing to lay it out piece by piece. It begins with the pier. When I was a child, my whole world was bounded by the sea, stretching beyond our house. Between them, the beach stretched like a lick of paint on a canvas, full of rock pools, dry, knotted seaweed, and shell fragments that cut my bare feet. The pier jutted out from the centre of it,

an old wooden thing with rusted railings and gaps between the boards that fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. It was technically condemned, or so my mother claimed, but no one had ever come with tape or barriers, so it just stayed there. It was old, and it was ugly, and it was dangerous, and it was mine. The planks had their own language. Some thudded solidly beneath my weight. Others gave a subtle, complaining creak.

One board near the end of the pier rocked underfoot, with a soft, hollow, clunk, as though it was missing a few nails entirely. and held on out of spite. On clear nights, if I stayed out longer than I was supposed to, I would be able to see the stars reflected in the water like shimmering splotches of bright paint. The town was small enough that the streetlights failed to drown them completely. On rare occasions, the clouds stayed away

and the wind flattened the sea into a dark, glossy sheet. The sky below would almost match the sky above. The pier would become a thin, hesitant line between them, and I would feel strange and light, as if all I had to do to fall forever was dive in. While looking above, I would shuffle back to the loose board, listen for its clunk, and know I was safe and away from the edge. Years went by, the pier rotted further. I grew taller, less easily impressed by vague reflections, more easily irritated by the people I lived with.

My father had left when I was nine. My mother remarried when I was 11. By 15, the house had become a place of thin walls and careful silences. My stepfather's presence was like a piece of mismatched furniture shoved into the middle of a familiar room. My mum constantly tried to adjust everything else to make it fit, and I was forever bruising myself at the edges of him. My mother echoed his complaints and tiredness, and suddenly every door in the house seemed to close louder than it had before. When she told me we were moving, it felt like every last boundary of my world had been quietly redrawn without my consent.

A better job for him, she said. A bigger flat, closer to the city, a better score for you. She spoke as if she was rescuing us from something, from the damp, the wind, the rust. All I could see was the beach disappearing behind us like a tide that had decided to never return. The night before the move, the argument that had been building up like water behind a paper dam finally came. It doesn't matter anymore now, exactly what was said. I just remember it followed the usual shape. Raise voices that were not supposed to be raised, my mother's face tightening with every word I threw at her, his heavy steps in the hallway.

It built and built until I couldn't breathe in that room, in that house anymore. I grabbed my jacket and ran. Outside, the world had blurred at the edges. A thick fog had rolled in from the sea while we had been turning on one another. It swallowed the streetlights, leaving halos of damp, weak gold, and a chill that seeped under flimsy clothes. I couldn't even see the outlines of the neighbouring houses, just the vague verticals of fences and poles. But I knew the beach like the back of my hand. I could have headed down there blindfold.

The salty smell growing stronger with each step. The sound of the waves was strangely distant, even when I stepped on the beach, as if the sloshing of water was happening somewhere else. The pier rose out of the whiteness ahead of me, more a suggestion than a structure, its railings lost in the grey. I climbed onto the rickety steps and began to walk. The planks welcomed me with their familiar voices. Wood, wood, creek, wood, creek, hollow, jump, wood again. My mind, still buzzing from the argument, fixated on them as if their song could drown the rage that kept me warm. They told me that at least something in my life was predictable, measurable, known.

My footsteps fell into a rhythm. Wood, Creek, wood, wood, creek, wood, creek, wood. The fog beaded on my eyelashes and her. I couldn't see the beach behind me anymore, but that was almost a relief. I focused on the planks appearing beneath my feet, a faint shift of weight in my ankles, and clunk. My stomach tightened with anticipation as the boards changed tone underfoot. I'm close. I realized, almost there.

I looked forward to the end approaching. The way you feel when you reach the last step of the staircase, I got ready to feel for the edge with my foot, to kneel and sit at the end. I took another step. Wood. Another. Wood. Another. Creek. Wood. The pier didn't end.

My next step landed on another plank. Then another. The song continued beneath me as if nothing had changed. I frowned, slowed, stopped. The fog pressed in close. The light from the beach almost gone. My phone was in my pocket and my fingers closed around it with the kind of desperate gratitude you reserve for ordinary objects that feel suddenly

life-saving. I turned on the torch. The light scattered and instead of carving a beam of light in front of me, me, the dark became just grey, but still impenetrable. Everything was swallowed by the fog, both behind and ahead of me. I couldn't see the end or the beginning, just the pier. I walked slowly forward, listening to a familiar song. Maybe it had just been another board that had come loose.

Maybe the pier was just longer than I remembered it. Wood, wood, creek, wood, creek, hollow. I stopped and almost fell. My heartbeat sped up, a stuttering drum in my throat. I jumped and started walking faster now, searching, waiting anxiously for the edge to appear. Wood, creek, wood, wood, creek, wood, clunk. I looked down. I recognised that board.

The rotten edges and the scars of barnacles on the underside were it curved up. upwards, just slightly. Now I was at the end. I breathed with relief and pointed the light ahead to see the edge. Nothing. Just more rotting wood and metal, vanishing in the grey. I tried to force logic into the situation. Fog distorts perception.

Distances feel longer when you're anxious. The pier was not that long. If I kept moving in one direction, I would hit the end. end eventually. These were sensible thoughts, rational and clean. I turned back and move quickly over the boards. Wood, creak, wood, wood, creek, wood, creek, wood, jump, creek, wood, and clunk. The first clunk I'd heard. Almost there. The cold soaked up from the boards into the soles of my feet. My breath became a steady rasp in the silence, louder than the barely there hush of the waves. The beam of my phone showed me the same pattern of warped wood and flaking

paint. Wood. Creek. Wood. Creek. Wood. Jump. Creek. Wood. Creek. Wood. Creek. Wood. I reached the point I should have stepped back onto the beach, transition from hard wood to the soft crunch of sand and clunk. My knees almost gave way. It was impossible. Even accounting for panic, for the fog, for my memory playing tricks, there was no possible way I could have circled back to the same point on a straight pier and yet the board, Underneath my foot, looked exactly the same, the same rot, the same war, the same clunk.

I broke into a sprint. I ran until my legs ached. I was certain that if I could reach the end, reach the beach and stand on steady land, something inside me would still. I ran and ran and jumped over holes and clunk. I froze. I looked up, hoping for anything. A light, sand, or even the dark edge of the pier welcoming me to its end. Instead, the pier still continued ahead, straight and endless, its outlines fading into a blurred, grey, nothing. I continued walking. After a long stretch of identical boards, I had. I heard the loose plank again, under my feet, familiar and wrong.

As I looked up, I realized I could tell I was nowhere near the end, because the fog was lifting. Suddenly the beam of light illuminated a dozen boards either way, then more. The fog had started to finally thin. I stood, turned 90 degrees and stared into the distance off the side of the pier. The grey scraped away from underneath as though a curtain was slowly lifting before a show. Above me, the same thing was happening. The fog was fraying, unraveling, revealing something beyond. I recognised the pinpricks appearing in the darkness with a sigh of relief.

Stars. The sky cleared from the top. down, the last scraps of fog dissolving into the kind of perfect, endless night that rarely exists near houses in civilization. It was so clear, it almost felt indecent. Every star was sharp, uncaring, ancient. Constellations sat in their habitual positions, familiar patterns that should have been comforting. I looked down. The sea had impossibly stilled to glass. There were no waves, no ripples, no visible movement. It lay there in absolute, impossible calm. And it held the sky. Not a reflection of it, not a trembling, distorted mess

of lights, broken and scattered by movement. It was the same, identical. I couldn't see where the horizon was because the sky just seemed to continue in all directions. The pier existed between them, like a single uninterrupted line, continuing endlessly in both directions until it faded in the darkness. My house, the beach, they were all just gone. Vertigo closed around my throat, for one a horrible, weightless moment. I couldn't tell which way gravity was pulling. My knees locked, my body swayed. I knew with absolute animal certainty that if I took a wrong step I would not have fallen

into the shallow water, but instead into the unfathomable gap between stars. And I would never stop falling. Upwards, downwards, sideways, directions all felt like lies. I was only away. I tried to reach for the reassuring kiss of the sea, to feel something cold and ordinary on my skin. I lay flat on the pier and stretched my arm down between the board until my shoulder burned. My fingers grasped at empty air. The water should have been right there.

It was high tide and yet my hand stayed dry. I rolled on my back, panting. The stars did not flicker. They looked back with all the indifference of things too large to notice me. The more I stared, the more the world reoriented itself around the vastness. The pier under my body felt thinner, less real, as if it were only sketched there, a suggestion someone might raise in a moment by mistake. I became acutely, horribly aware of my own size, of the little heat of my body seeping through the wood, of the smallness. of the smallness of my heartbeat, of the finite number of breaths I contained.

The universe below and above did not care for any of my thoughts, worries and hopes. Something in my head whispered I ought to move. To crawl back towards shore, something else told me that there was nothing else but this, ever, in all directions I could move towards, and that the safe thing is. The only thing I could do was stay pressed to the boards, as wide and flat as I could make myself, lest I slipped, and fell upwards and beyond and away. I stayed still, clutching my phone until its beam of light, small and useless and swallowed by starlight, flickered and turned off by itself. At some point, my thoughts stopped forming proper sentences. They thinned and frayed and scattered like the fog had.

Until all that remained was the dizzy, nauseous sense of my own insignificance, basking in the light of stars that had long died and whose light was only now reaching me. I don't remember falling asleep or deciding to close my eyes. The next thing I remember was the moment I woke to the sound of Gauls. The sun was pale and low. I was lying on sand the short distance from the start of the pier someone had thrown a blanket over me

I could hear my mother's voice afraid and angry yet relieved my stepfather had called an ambulance something about hypothermia they said they had found me curled up by the beach just beyond the high tide line fast asleep the peers stood exactly where it had always been

short and stubby and visibly decaying No fog. The sea moved the way seas do. Everything looked heartbreakingly normal. But my jacket hung tangled by the last loose board. We moved house the next day. I watched the sea recede through the car window until it vanished behind the lumpy inland hills. I haven't been back since.

I haven't set foot on a pier again. In the city, the sky is mostly colourless at night, a muted orange haze that hides anything worth seeing. People complain about it, they miss the stars, they say. On the rare nights when the clouds part and a few sharp points of light break through the polluted glow, I keep my head down. I know that if I look for too long into those pinpricks of light again, the ground will remember that it is only pretending to hold me.

The thin line of whatever I'm standing on will narrow and turn to damp, rotten wood. The world will fall away on both sides, and I will hear a familiar hollow clunk. And this time, when I fall, I don't think I will wake up on sand. The Magnus Protocol is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill, and licensed under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial, non-commercial share-a-like 4.4. to subscribe, view associated materials or join our Patreon, visit rusty quill.com. Rate and reviews online, tweet us at the RustyQuil, visit us on Facebook, or email us via mail at rustyquilt.com. Thanks for listening.

Billy Hindle here, the voice of Alice in the Magnus Protocol, and I'm here to tell you about from the library of Jirgen Lightner, an upcoming novel available for pre-order right now at RustyQuil.com forward slash novel. of the Magnus Archives in From the Library of Yergen Lightner, an official prequel novel written by Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora Award-winning author, Primi Muhammad, with the help of the Magnus Archives' own writer and lead voice, Jonathan Simms. From the Library of Yergen Lightner explores an infamous organization from the Magnus Verse for the first time,

the perilous private library of the enigmatic collector, Juergen Lightner, where occult books are guarded and researched at a fatal cost. Lightner's library keeps the dangers of these books in check and there would-be reader safe, or so Lightner claims. For two of Lightner's employees, the risks are worth it. For Hugh Franklin, the library is a place to belong. For Sebastian Everett, the library is an opportunity to indulge arcane ambitions.

Though their ten years at the library were years apart, Hugh and Sebastian's stories unfold in parallel, and their footsteps echo down the same eerie aisles. caught in a web spun long before either ever heard the name, Yergen Leitner. Will they find a way out, or will the library consume them before it's too late? From the library of Yergen Leitner,

will be published on October the 27th, 2026, and is available for pre-order now. Visit RustyQuil.com forward slash novel for more information. That's rustyquill.com forward slash N-O-V-E-L.